On Reconnaissance and Battlefield Intelligence in Valkyria Chronicles (Operation Cloudburst/Battle of the Bridge)

For today’s post, I’m going to take a trip down memory lane and talk about Valkyria Chronicles, a game I used to play — or to be strictly correct, one I mostly used to watch while other people played, though I played a fair amount of it myself. I’m choosing it because some of those gaming sessions sparked interesting discussions about military science and its representation in popular culture, and none more so than the fourth chapter in the game (titled Operation Cloudburst, with the actual combat mission being named Battle for the Bridge). And I’m not even going to discuss the entire chapter or mission here — one scene from the briefing alone should give us plenty of material to go by.

Let’s start with a little background information. The player takes the role of Welkin Gunther, a lieutenant in the militia forces of a fictional country called Gallia. For the most part Welkin commands Squad 7 of Captain Eleanor Varrot’s 3rd Militia Regiment. Readers with some familiarity might notice something odd here; why is a lieutenant commanding a squad, and why is he directly under the command of the regimental headquarters with several levels of command (most notably the platoon and the company, probably also the battalion) missing in between? On the other hand, what is a captain doing at the head of an entire regiment when it’s a command normally assigned to a much higher rank? I think some of the nuances involved might have been lost in translation from the original Japanese version of the game, and in practice it’s much easier to treat Welkin as a platoon leader (and his “squad” as more of an understrength platoon than a real squad) while Captain Varrot’s actual role in the game slots much more neatly into the billet of a company commander, which happens to be a good fit for her actual rank too.

At this point in the story, Gallia had been invaded by the neighbouring Empire, and the Imperial troops had seized large portions of Gallian territory in their drive towards the Gallian capital of Randgriz. The major Gallian city of Vasel lies along one of the principal avenues of approach towards Randgriz, and the Imperial invasion force had seized the Great Bridge of Vasel linking the two halves of the city before a counterattack by Squad 7 (in the previous chapter/mission) stopped them from expanding their bridgehead on the near bank. Now Squad 7 has been ordered to seize this momentum and launch a counterattack to retake the bridge. During the orders group with Captain Varrot, Lieutenant Faldio Landzaat — leader of Squad 1, Squad 7’s sister platoon in the “Regiment” — correctly remarks that the mission is suicidal since there’s no way that Welkin’s platoon would have enough mass to accomplish the task on its own. This then leads to the following exchange between Welkin and Varrot:

Well, then, what’s so weird about it? Let’s go over it one aspect at a time.

First, if I had been in Captain Varrot’s place, I would have had a very different reaction to Welkin’s request. My response would have been more along the lines of “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU LITTLE GIT YOU HAVEN’T DONE YOUR RECCE ALREADY –“

Ahem. Well, to put it more calmly, I would have been just as surprised that Welkin was asking the question at all, but for an almost diametrically opposite reason. The thing is, Welkin’s platoon has been in position along the riverbank for at least a few hours since the previous mission, possibly an entire day, so I would have expected him to have already conducted some kind of limited reconnaissance around his platoon’s position, and maybe even sent out a patrol or two or established a couple of observation points within his sector (or both). The fact that he’s asking now implies that he hasn’t done any of this, and in turn it inadvertently implies a lack of energy and initiative on his part — quite the opposite to his characterisation in the game.

On the other hand, if Varrot was supposed to be a good company commander, she should have been proactively nagging her immediate subordinates (Welkin and Faldio in this case) to do their recce all along. Indeed, if I had written this scene, I would probably have had her start the mission briefing by asking the two for their intelligence reports, whether from personal observation or from their platoon’s patrols and OPs. It’s also very likely that she would have deployed company-level resources for further reconnaissance work. This might be as simple as sending out some of the spare enlisted personnel from the company HQ to conduct a patrol or establish an OP in a sector the subordinate platoons couldn’t cover — preferably snipers/sharpshooters if the company had any, since they’d be trained in such duties anyway, but in the absence of such resources it wouldn’t be strange for the duty to fall upon otherwise unassigned personnel such as messengers or orderlies. And if the company headquarters was lacking in resources, she would still have had the option of borrowing a few people from the subordinate platoons to use as company scouts.

(As an aside, this is why many tactical problems presented in training exercises would state that the officer in charge has just arrived in the theatre of combat and rejoined their unit: this forces the student to start their troop-leading procedures from square one, including creating a reconnaissance plan from scratch. Otherwise the student might be able to cheat by stating that they had performed reconnaissance beforehand in the process of consolidating their unit’s current position, and the umpires would then have to work harder to figure out how much information this reconnaissance could have realistically produced.)

And that brings us to one of the possible alternative interpretations of the scene. Up to this point we had been working on an assumption that the Gallian Militia expected considerable initiative from their company and platoon leaders, but nothing in the game unambiguously established that this was the case. What if the company and platoon levels of command were really just there to execute plans from higher up, and the authority and initiative to perform many of the basic small-unit duties we usually take for granted (such as reconnaissance) were concentrated at higher levels, such as the battalion (probably with the glorified title “Brigade” given that Varrot’s company is given the inflated title “Regiment”), the division, or the field army? This might seem absurd from the perspective of NATO forces or close allies that operate in a similar fashion (such as Japan or South Korea), but some real-world armies actually work in this kind of very top-heavy manner, most notably the major Arab armies during the Cold War (i.e. Iraqi, Syrian, and Egyptian), where the political leaders of the state were reluctant to delegate authority to junior officers since these lower officer ranks were the breeding ground of coups and mutinies — I’d recommend Kenneth Pollack’s book Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness (2018) for further reading on this. This kind of arrangement might mean that the higher-level headquarters would be responsible for conducting the relevant reconnaissance and then pushing the information down the chain of command together with the orders they issue to the subordinate units. But in practice the higher headquarters would often assume that the subordinate units didn’t really need to know a great deal about the situation anyway; theirs is but to do and die.

Of course, by this point we’re veering hard into the realm of speculation, where the game itself no longer provides enough of the information we need to conclusively prove or refute our ideas. Coming back to the original scenario, Welkin’s idea to observe the river would lead to him discovering a ford that allowed Squad 7 to cross the river during the night in greater force than the enemy would expect, and then seize the bridge the following day by attacking from the far bank. Suffice to say that in a more “realistic” situation where Welkin and Varrot alike had carried out their reconnaissance duties responsibly, they would probably have discovered the ford much earlier (most likely even before they had disrupted the Imperial bridgehead if they had pushed their recce really hard) and would already be discussing it — how to confirm the depth, how to check whether it’s heavily guarded by the Imperials, indeed how to make sure that the Imperials weren’t already using it to infiltrate past the Gallian defences at the bridge, etc. — during the mission briefing.

Now that brings up yet another issue: areas of operation/responsibility. We’ve been discussing Varrot’s company as if it was the only force disposed around the bridge. But in reality, of course, there’d be neighbouring companies, each with its own sector. The problem here is that we don’t know how far away the ford is from the bridge, and thus whether Welkin would have had to cross into a neighbouring company’s sector to make use of it. Some armies historically frowned upon this; for instance, the US Army in World War II relied heavily on such lateral boundaries to control the problem of friendly fire and didn’t like friendly units intruding into their neighbours’ sectors, while the Germans believed in more fluid operations and were quite happy to let units cross their lateral boundaries to exploit the flanks of an enemy fixed by a friendly unit to their front. Of course all of these were very broad generalities and there were many exceptions made on an ad hoc basis in the field. There’s also the pretty obvious possibility of fiddling with formal boundaries to make them reflect the reality in the field far more closely, though this obviously would take time and a considerable amount of coordination with higher authorities. All in all, I believe it’s perfectly reasonable that the game doesn’t represent this aspect in detail.

Which leads to the ultimate conclusion: I can understand the need to fiddle with “realistic” tactics, techniques, and procedures for the sake of the plot, and at the end of the day I was still able to suspend my belief enough to enjoy playing this mission in the game. One of the most important factors is that I’ve also had the misfortune of running across the manga (Japanese comic book) adaptation of this very same mission, and that adaptation handled this situation really, really badly. While the game still gave a nod to the need to “observe” the river bank, the manga version of Welkin just wandered anxiously through the streets of Vasel after the briefing until he ran into a random journalist who informed him about the ford. And then he just believed that information and based his entire “brilliant” plan (to attack the bridge from the far bank) on it. Not a single mention of him trying to verify the information in the field, or feeling suspicious that the journalist might be an enemy agent planted to lure him into a trap — nothing that even hints at an effective intelligence process. It’s easy to see how the original version of Welkin in the game looks like a paragon of military competence compared to that.

Huh. That wasn’t exactly the most systematically structured post I’ve written lately. But anyway, I hope that has provided food for thought on the pitfalls and difficulties involved in writing about reconnaissance in military fiction. Be sure to check the index of articles on military science for fiction writing and worldbuilding if you’re looking for more.