Hot Blood & Cold Steel

Category: Iraq Wars

  • Undeniable Victory – offside report [Megagame]

    Undeniable Victory – offside report [Megagame]

    Today I played in Undeniable Victory, Ben Moore’s megagame of the Iran Iraq War. I was an Iranian Radical and a member of the Council, starting off as the Procurement Minister responsible for buying military kit. Undeniable Victory I was a late entrant to Undeniable Victory, getting a place because someone else couldn’t make it.…

  • Book Review – Zero Six Bravo by Damien Lewis

    Zero Six Bravo: 60 Special Forces. 100,000 Enemy. The Explosive True Story by Damien Lewis My rating: 4 of 5 stars I make a point of reading first hand accounts of special forces operations. I started with world war two tales of the SAS and have worked up to the present time. Since the Bravo…

  • 2D Morale Chart

    Further to the previous post Faith in Morale I’ve tried to synthesize the varioius readings on military psychology into a set of morale rules that might give a realistic ebb and flow to an engagement. I’ve not had a chance to test these yet, but here’s what the chart looks like. Reading through the various…

  • Book Review – Bullets and Brains by Leo Murray

    Brains and Bullets: How Psychology Wins Wars by Leo Murray My rating: 5 of 5 stars Brains and Bullets is an excellent and very readable book which tries to put some hard numbers on a variety of psychological tactics that can be used to persuade your own troops to fight and the enemy to give up.…

  • Games on COIN

    This post is prompted by an excellent post by the guys at On Violence. You should read Capturing Australia! COIN is Boring Pt.3 to which this was my belated comment. My apologies for coming late to this one, I’ve been on leave for a couple of weeks now and being spending time with the family. I’ve…

  • Condor Blues – British soldiers at war

    A very interesting book about the British Army experience from the point of view of two platoons embedded in training the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC) in the aftermath of the invasion (so the first half of 2004 approximately). Both platoons belonged to the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, but one was on secondment from the…

  • The Defense of Jisr Al-Doreaa

    This is an excellent update of an old classic. Two books in one, the author’s have brought Swinton’s Duffer’s Drift and re-written it for the modern conflicts (which bear more than a passing resemblance to the Boer War). Swinton’s book is in the second half of the volume.  The basis for Duffer”s Drift (if you…