Benchmarking, the Battle of Qabatiya Junction

This is an attempt to use the wargames benchmarking norms to analyse my BBWW2B Qabatiya Junction scenario. It will give us a good opportunity to look at how practical the benchmarks are to use. It is also interesting that this battle is in the benchmarking report's original database as "Jenin". I used the database to double check my own research which was helpful and lead to a number of changes. The remaining discrepancies are caused by the difference between the scope of the "Jenin" battle and my scenario.

The table below has the pertinent information for both my scenario and the original "Jenin" battle in the benchmarking database. The attacker is Israel the defender is Jordan.

The first table gives the numbers in both my scenario and the benchmarking database. Squads have been left out as that measure appears broken. Weapons have been omitted as that is based on the broken squad count

The width is in km. The original database gives the attacking frontage at the start of the operation. The battle subsequently expanded once the Israelis were through the initial Jordanian defences and when the 37th Brigade made its flanking attack. Thus the frontages are very conservative and will lead to higher force densities.

BBWW2 only represents line infantry as stands, many of the supporting arms are abstracted. This makes extracting troop strengths tricky. What I have done is given an infantry brigade a nominal strength of 5000 and a (fully) armoured brigade a strength of 2500. I have assumed that a battalion has one third these totals. This works lovely for the Israelis who have a strength of 10900 in the database and 10000 in the scenario. Ostensibly it works less well for the Jordanians who have 6160 in the database and 8633 in the scenario. It seems likely that the "Jenin" battle in the database does not include the Jordanian 40th Armoured Brigade's counter attack which would fit the database's numbers and also account for the shorter duration of the battle in the database (12 vs 19 hours)  plus the fact the database only give the Jordanians 40 tanks (one battalion) and my scenario gives them 160 (three battalions).

The number of AA weapons for the Israeli side is much lower in my scenario than from the database. However this is a moot point as the Jordanians have no air-support.

The Close Air Support (CAS) in my scenario is randomly arriving, so the CAS sortie rate is flexible, the average likely rate is given. BBWW2B is somewhat coy as to how many aircraft a model represents. For this analysis I have assumed the same ratio as tanks, 1:10. There is a big discrepancy between my scenario ad the database, but this is accounted for by the fact my scenario covers the Jordanian counter-attack and the original database does not. The Israelis sent many missions against the approaching 40th Armoured Brigade.

There are no losses for my scenario as yet as its not been played. Expect an update when it has.

The advance distance noted for my scenario is based on the need to travel from one corner of the table to the other. Although my scenario is longer its additional length is not proportional to the additional advance required over the historical battle. This hints that the victory conditions may be out of the Israeli's reach and it will be interesting to see the actual results.

The duration is the maximum possible length of my scenario. Its quite possible the battle will fizzle out before the time is up.

One small issue is what to do with light AFVs such as the M3 with 90mm AT gun. Can they reasonably be called tanks or are they AT weapons? If we were analysing a 1973 battle what would we do about the BMP?

The plausibility scores look like this:

On the whole my scenario looks very plausible. We have discussed the lack of Arab airpower and the corresponding lack of Israeli AA and it's historically accurate. The only other place where there is a red box is for the Jordanian armour. It could be argued that as the majority of Jordanian armour has a counter-attack role using a defender benchmark is misleading. As an attacker the 53 tanks per km would be plausible.

The 13.7km advance is plausible though not central so looks like its going to be a stretch.

Once I had sorted a credible way of representing troop strengths using the criteria was straight forward. It gave me pause for though around the Jordanian tank density but I think that has been adequately explained. The mobile nature of this battle illustrates how difficult it is to come up with a reasonable figure for frontage, as it varies throughout the battle. Although the numbers would have made no difference in this case its unclear how to treat light armour.