Binocular icon - what's up with that? ...

[JDR Dragoon]

What bothers me more is that neither of my SpetsNaz subunits nor units is recon capable; that denies most of my best knowledge of the subject.

Probably an oversight. When I revised the scenario I pretty much left the WAPA OOB "as is", since my primary goal was to actually make the scenario work for PBEM. That being said, having the Spetznaz, the polish or those East German special forces in the M113s as Recon capable is not really likely to add a lot of extra recon capability, since these units are infantry and thus have to go into travel mode in order to travel very far and thus render themselves vulnerable and each WAPA division has its own and much more capable reconnaisance battalion for this type of work anyway. The only practical use would be if yo used them Deployed, unmasking from a concealing piece of terrain, using the Recon Capability to scout the newly revealed hexes.

I know that some of them are either motorized or mechanized vanguards to perform a force recon, acting as a tip of the spear in front of the advancing main force columns

That would not be their doctrinal role. A role as the one described above would be filled by the divisional recon battalion (or the army level one in the more lavishly equipped soviet formations). Spetznaz or other special forces might be used ahead of the column in order to seize key terrain in surprise assaults and such or secure landing zones for airlanding troops to use. The deep recon role is more about localizing enemy HQs, FARPs, long range (nuclear capable) artillery systems, doing bomb-damage assassment and such. That being side, Spetznaz were used as souped up infantry during the Afghanistan conflict, due to a lack of infantry.

That being said, the number of WAPA (and NATO for that matter) Deception units are way too high in this scenario, because units are used here whose likely war mission was actually elsewhere. The baltic navy Spetznaz was much more likely to be used against the naval minelayers currently in port and minedepots of the german and danish navies or for scouting/securing beach and airheads for the invasion of the danish islands east of the Great Belt. This is ditto for the polish special forces, who we know for certain had the mission of storming the danish costal artillery position at Stevns prior to the naval landings proper. The gimmicky East German 40. Diversion Battalion with its M113s and M48s never actually existed (another one of the defector Suvorovs lies). On the other hand, each East German and Polish Army had a long range reconnaisance/raiding company, which is not currently in the stock game. So what we are looking at should propably 2-4 WAPA Army Level Deception units instead of the current 7.

This goes for NATO as well. The only Deception capable units here would probably be those inserted by the danish army, since the Bundeswehr did not have this type of unit in the LandJut Corps sector. So in all likely hood we are looking at 1-2 counters at best, instead of the current 7 (which includes 6 Deception capable belgian commando units).

I trust yo are playing it with both Explicit Supply and Artillery Setup Optional Rules in effect as NATO pro-balancing measures? Playing with Manual Defensive Fire might achieve the same effect I suspect, but I haven´t playtested this.