1985: Under an Iron Sky – 4^th Echelon

Designer’s Notes by F. Vianello

So, despite my many bold proclamations of “no more reprints!”, here we are at the fourth echelon of 1985: Under an Iron Sky. Yeah…I know.

The 1985 series have grown in scope during time, offering each time new tools and problems to the commanders of both sides: Deadly Northern Lights introduced the strategic lines of communication and the naval warfare; Sacred Oil added worldwide strategic considerations, international events and the chilling tension of a Cold War crisis between superpowers.

This 4^th echelon of Under an Iron Sky is no exception, and adds several new challenges for both NATO and the Warsaw Pact:

• The Tension Phase introduced by Sacred Oil, handled by the Tension Cards.
• The absence of a fixed, predictable reinforcement schedule.
• The critical importance for NATO of the Atlantic line of communication, both at sea and in the sky.
• The complexity of the Warsaw Pact mobilisation.
• The time needed by the armed forces to activate the logistic and support network needed to fight at their maximum capabilities.

Stay Calm, Coordinated, and Mildly Terrified

The Tension Phase and its Event Cards allows both sides to prepare for the upcoming conflict in several different ways.

Except for the “It Started in the Shipyards” scenario, it is Moscow that normally choose the music everybody should dance to, by deciding a date for the execution of Operation Ladoga – The offensive in central and northern Europe.

The date of Operation Ladoga is by far one of the most critical decisions, as it has consequences at every level: An early execution could allow to take NATO by surprise, but the Warsaw Pact armed forces will be also partially unprepared; A late execution will give Warsaw Pact the time to fully mobilise its war machine, at the risk of convincing the Western governments that war is unavoidable and allowing NATO to answer appropriately.

For NATO, the main problem in reacting to Warsaw Pact moves was the need to discuss practically every action among the 15 members, both at civilian and military level. As you may imagine, this process did not particularly encourage bold or dangerous resolutions, and would have continued until the Transfer of Authority to SACEUR, a decision that NATO never took in its whole history.

This political inhibitory mechanism is modelled by restricting NATO’s options according to the current Tension Level and the availability of Tension Points.

NATO’s most important tools for preparing for war are the alert levels (SIMPLE ALERT, AAFCE REINFORCED ALERT, and GENERAL ALERT), alongside the mobilisation of specific member states  (France, United Kingdom, and United States). Each of these actions brings NATO’s armed forces closer to full war readiness, with GENERAL ALERT notably including the Transfer of Authority to SACEUR mentioned earlier.

The biggest and most interesting consequence of the Tension system is that almost nothing is written on stone anymore: Forces on the field, readiness level, expected reinforcements, logistic support will all be the result of how the Tension Phase unfolded.

Your Tanks are Available at Our Pick-Up Point

Another significant change concerns the arrival of reinforcements.

In previous editions of Under an Iron Sky, reinforcements arrived directly in the area of operations. With the introduction of the Lines of Communication (LOCs), the process becomes far more realistic. Reinforcements now arrive at their actual mobilisation points and must make their way to the front lines via any available method: railroads, airlift, sealift, or simply marching out.

For NATO, this change introduces four major problems:   

Aerial Refueling Capacity

Most NATO aircraft deploying from CONUS will require in-flight refueling to reach Europe. The limited number of air tankers becomes a bottleneck, especially in the early days of the war. Even once the full tanker fleet is in position, only a handful of aircraft squadrons can be transferred to the operational theater each day.

Airlift of REFORGER Personnel

The REFORGER units’ equipment may be pre-positioned at POMCUS sites across Europe, but the soldiers are not. Airlifting tens of thousands of troops across the Atlantic requires vast transport capacity. Both military and requisitioned civilian aircraft would have been used, but  in any case SACEUR must face hard decisions about who moves first, and who waits.

Sealift of Equipment

Much of the equipment not already in Germany—particularly transport and attack helicopters—must be shipped by sea. This introduces vulnerability to enemy naval and air attacks, and a further strain on the precious naval transport assets that are also needed to keep ammunition and supply flowing to the European battlefields.

Control of the North Atlantic LOC

All of the above requires to secure the North Atlantic LOC from the constant threat of the Soviet submarines and long-range bombers. Should the enemy gain the upper hand in the battle of the Greenland – Iceland – UK Gap, NATO will be forced to use longer routes to cross the Atlantic, slowing down the flow of reinforcements and risking irreplaceable losses during the transit.

Mind Walking, Comrade?

On the opposite side, the Warsaw Pact faces its own set of challenges.

The mobilisation of a military district involves assembling and moving an enormous volume of personnel, equipment, and supplies of every imaginable type to designated assembly areas, all before the actual transfer to the area of operations can begin. Even Category I units stationed in Eastern Europe — largely already manned and active — must still concentrate, receive additional ammunition and supplies, and complete final preparations before they are combat-ready.

Once forces are gathered in their assembly areas, they must be moved to the front, often hundreds of kilometers away. For example, a Soviet division mobilised in the Belarusian Military District must travel approximately 1,000 km just to reach Berlin… and the front line might still be another 200 km beyond that.

To accomplish this, the Warsaw Pact relies on a not exactly state-of-the-art railroad network and an insufficient number of heavy-lift assets. These too must be mobilised, potentially offering NATO an early warning, before they can be used to bring newly raised formations onto the map and move them from their assembly zones to the battlefield.

While units from distant military districts may attempt to move under their own power, this approach is slower and results in significant attrition, further complicating the Pact’s timetable and operational cohesion.

The Warsaw Pact must address all these challenges using a finite pool of Strategic Transport Points.

The overall transport capacity is shaped by a mix of constraints: availability and condition of the rail assets, differences in rail gauge standards among allied nations, and the patchwork transition from electric to diesel on key lines, all of which affect efficiency and flexibility. To complicate matters further, a significant portion of these transport assets must be reserved for moving ammunition and supplies to frontline units already engaged in combat.

When all these limitations are considered, the mobilisation strategy long theorised by Western analysts begins to make operational sense. Since there are not enough transport assets to move and supply all forces simultaneously, a phased, echelon-based approach offers a practical solution: mobilise forces at regular intervals, reduce the risk of overwhelming the logistical system, and rotate fresh units into the line as worn-out formations are withdrawn.

That said, the Warsaw Pact commander has complete freedom to choose different and more risky mobilisation strategies.

Come As You Are – Or Maybe Not

Mobilising your troops and moving them to their assigned starting positions is only the first step toward combat readiness. To truly prepare for war, a vast and intricate web of logistical enablers must also be activated.

Just to name a few: ammunition must be distributed to dispersed depots; truck-based supply chains need to be deployed and secured; extra fuel, spare parts, and ordnance must be pushed out to forward air bases to sustain the high operational tempo required in wartime.

All of this takes time — days, not hours — and until these tasks are complete, the fighting strength of your forces will remain impaired. This crucial phase is represented by the Disorganisation rules and by specific Event cards, which track the readiness of ground forces, air units, airbases, air defenses, and logistic systems.

These mechanics also introduce some tough strategic choice, particularly for the Warsaw Pact. At one extreme, the Soviet Theatre Commander can take the time to fully prepare, accepting that NATO will likely recognise the logistic buildup as a clear sign of impending attack. At the other, he might choose the dreaded “out-of-barracks” offensive: launching a sudden strike to preserve surprise, but doing so with forces not fully ready and not ideally positioned.

NATO’s choices are somewhat simpler, if no less frustrating. SACEUR must largely wait for the Warsaw Pact to make the first move, hoping that a sufficiently alarming provocation will finally galvanise civilian governments into authorising the deployment of critical logistical enablers.

Once again, the timing of SIMPLE ALERT, REINFORCED ALERT, and GENERAL ALERT orders will be decisive. These steps determine just how ready NATO’s ground, air, and support elements will be when the balloon finally goes up.

Also in the News…

Big news aside, a lot of minor changes and updates have been introduced, most of them as result of the detailed research made during the development of the C3 series. In no particular order, and probably forgetting something:

Operational Maps

• The northeast map covering an important part of Poland and Kaliningrad has now the correct extension and geographic features.
• The terrain west of Strasbourg – Colmar now better represents the Vosges area.
• The Dutch road network has been revised.

Polish OOB

The composition and deployment of the Polish air force has been changed quite drastically. It is now smaller but probably more effective.

French OOB

• The attack helicopter units have been reorganised.
• The strike value for the Mirage 5F air squadrons has been lowered.
• Several Crotale batteries have been added as protection of French air bases.
• The overall EW capability of the French army has been weakened.

British OOB

• The organisation of the attack helicopters squadrons has been changed and better reflect the official British doctrine, with bigger squadrons assigned to each BAOR division and usable as a one-hit punch.
• Several brigades are now motorised instead of armoured, and their combat values have changed.
• The 50^th Royal Artillery SSM battalion has been added.

West German OOB

Each Heimaschutz territorial unit must now arrive in its specific, historical mobilisation area.

Belgian and Dutch OOB

The Belgian and Dutch EW capabilities have been reconsidered and judged as insufficient to have an impact at a grand operational scale. Therefore, the EW units of both armies has been removed from the OOB.

Please note that the original EW units are still present in the counter sheets and could be brought back should some NATO commander cry for the injustice.

Developer’s Notes by A. Morphet

A Truly New Concept

It is very rare that a developer gets to work on a truly new concept. With the development of the UAIS 4th Echelon I believe that has happened to me. In his design notes above Fabrizio has described the new design features incorporated in the game. However I do not think he has stressed strongly enough how ground-breaking these measures are when taken all together.

Since the 1970s I have played many WW3 games and many monsters and in all of them there has been an inevitability to the way the game play unfolds; with a fixed starting line up and a fixed reinforcement schedule the players eventually developed the ideal plan to achieve their aim.

Even if some variation was included by scenarios delaying or accelerating the timetabling of reinforcements or the pre deployment movement allowance of the forces. In the end a chess like system developed that forecast when red does X blue does Y until Z reinforcements arrive at point Q.

As a former NATO planner that struck me as NOT how we expected to have to do things, or even how we trained. The real art to planning and the real craft of great Generals and their staffs was in reacting to the unexpected whilst retaining as much of the pre-planning as possible as a time and resource saver.

Gestation and Birth

Having developed the Tension Phase and the card approach to the pre-war diplomatic period for Sacred Oil it was obvious that if we were eventually to realise the MAD concept we had to apply the same or similar to UAIS.

Similarly, it became clear that deploying reserves or repositioning misallocated forces, whether U.S. troops in CONUS or Soviet forces in the Rodina, required that lines of communication be governed by the same stringent deployment principles pioneered in Deadly Northern Lights and further refined in Sacred Oil.

Discussions were had as to whether a “Northern Front” box was required as well. However this idea was relatively quickly dispatched in line with an early major design decision to keep the game focused entirely on the central front – no mission creep here! With that decision the format was born in outline.

Development 1 – Nato Politics

The initial work gave us the size of card pack we were looking at. We also wanted to have a mean result that approximated to the NATO belief that a Soviet build up would start to be positively identified about 10 days (or 5 turns) out. Thereafter the amount of useable military preparation time available to NATO would depend upon the political decisions taken by the North Atlantic Council.

Our initial results did not have the variation we were looking for and it took several iterations of the cards, all the time tweaking the tension points and other variables to produce something that approximated to our requirements.

Development 2 – Movement and Deployment

Having identified a methodology for producing an almost infinite variation to the NATO political response we then needed to tackle the thorny subjects of movement capability.

I do not believe that anyone has ever looked at the practicalities of both side’s deployment plans. There are many words written about REFORGER or Soviet train timetabling and I have no doubt that the planners in Washington and Moscow at the time worked hard on timetables.

However they did not run full blown exercises in the art of the possible. We did and the results are there for all to see. Fabrizio has hinted at the challenges – better said the frustrations, but my gosh the game is better for it. Planning a manageable stream of reinforcements and matching the operational requirements to the logistic possibilities will be a key skill.

The Final Test

The final play through session provided us both with a real eye opener – there was palpable tension in the tension phase.  The variables provided by NATO political indecision and Soviet mobilisation decisions coupled with the strategic difficulties in deploying the assets available created real and fascinating challenges for both sides.

Many players will have a plethora of knowledge on the war plans of one or both sides. This game will provide them a differing level of challenge in that they will have to try and get to that start point with their plans intact.

The Achievement

This new version has added a rich layer of complexity and depth to the standard Central Front tank and air slugfest. Yet UAIS 4th Echelon has achieved this with a small deck of cards,  a couple of  tables, and three rules paragraphs. It isn’t complicated but it is thought provoking and incredibly dynamic.