It sounds like you were heading in the right direction, though. You mention tracking cohesion and leadership - some of the operational layers I've seen for other games went as far as to track artillery rounds, supplies, etc. They usually fell apart from lack of enthusiasm for tracking all that stuff on multiple spreadsheets, as well as the herding cats aspect of keeping multiple players engaged over a period of weeks and months as the operational layer resolved itself. The ones with role playing elements were interesting but tended to emulate the Stanford Prison Experiment quickly - i.e. Russian and German commanders tended to go dark fast, sacking their subordinates after a single poor showing in the tactical layer, threatening to shoot people, etc.....