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PittTheElder posted:Also doesn't the US Army have all sorts of career staff sergeants and warrant officers and such? Army has up or out as well, But the year requirements are rather lenient. Considering you can retire after 20 years, Staff sergeant (e6) is eligible to be a retirement rank depending on the speed of your promotions. What Army needs is to get rid of every E-rank above E-7 and just make them pvt* with a golden prestige pin and re-bootcamp. There are WAY too many commands sergeants major that have no reason to exist. Also Army needs to allow people to stay at lower ranks, there are plenty of soldiers that make awesome specialists but have no justification to take on a leader role, no matter their 2-mile run time. There is always open spots for soldier ranks so having career tank loader or two per company hurts absolutely nobody.
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May 21, 2021 16:23
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To be fair the Caesar Salad was named after Caeser Cardini, Mexican restauranteur not Julius Caesar, Roman dictator.
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May 21, 2021 16:24
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Cessna posted:* I met Clancy once when I was a curator, we were at the same Naval History conference. He was an embarrassment. There's nothing like watching an insurance salesman who was never in the military, but who read Jane's Fighting Ships, lecture a room full of admirals and PhD historians about how the navy really works.[/i] lmao
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May 21, 2021 16:26
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:To be fair the Caesar Salad was named after Caeser Cardini, Mexican restauranteur not Julius Caesar, Roman dictator.  Iskender kebab is also named after some Turkish guy named Iskender (Alexander). BUT at the same time, these cooks were named so after their namesakes. If Julius Caesar had died in Alesia there wouldn't be a food named Caesar salad. And that is the kind of influence that might be called 'greatness'.
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May 21, 2021 16:35
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Cessna posted:
I think we have gotten better at it these days. Whenever I see the yearly maradmin for enlisted to officer program selection i think it’s probably about 40ish people. And that wouldn’t include those who EAS and then do a commissioning program like PLC. There’s also a program for enlisted marines to apply to medical school as well which I think is cool.
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May 21, 2021 16:36
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FastestGunAlive posted:I think we have gotten better at it these days. Whenever I see the yearly maradmin for enlisted to officer program selection i think it’s probably about 40ish people. And that wouldn’t include those who EAS and then do a commissioning program like PLC. There’s also a program for enlisted marines to apply to medical school as well which I think is cool. I'm sure it varies over time. After the end of the Cold War they were downsizing rapidly, especially armor. But Clancy was writing about when I was in, and - just LOL. Edit: I take it back, we had one officer who was former enlisted, but he's EASed and gone back to college on his own dime.
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May 21, 2021 16:41
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FastestGunAlive posted:I think we have gotten better at it these days. Whenever I see the yearly maradmin for enlisted to officer program selection i think it’s probably about 40ish people. And that wouldn’t include those who EAS and then do a commissioning program like PLC. There’s also a program for enlisted marines to apply to medical school as well which I think is cool. what's eas and plc?
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May 21, 2021 16:41
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ChubbyChecker posted:what's eas and plc? End of Active Service (you got out) Platoon Leader's Course (you got a commission)
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May 21, 2021 16:43
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Cessna posted:End of Active Service (you got out) 
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May 21, 2021 16:43
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One of George Marshall's hobby horses in the leadup to WW2 for the US was cashiering the old guys near the end of their careers since he considered them to be dead weight. There were quite a few of them, and he was right.
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May 21, 2021 16:52
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Tomn posted:You know, promotion talk got me thinking of a silly pop culture question - I remember when I was very young in one of the Tom Clancy books there's a scene where an American officer (probably ubermensch Jack Ryan) runs across this highly efficient British sergeant and thinks "drat, what a waste. If he was in the US military he'd have been promoted to officer. Instead he's stuck in the British Army as a NCO for the rest of his career." Was that an accurate representation of promotion patterns in the two countries at the time (I assume around the '80s-'90s)? If it was, do we know why their patterns diverged, and how it impacted overall effectiveness, if it did? In the British context this is historically a simple and ironclad class issue. Until the Second World War the situation is one that Sharpe would have recognised, in which about two people a year are commissioned from the ranks, and they are inevitably quarter-blokes who are going to become logistics officers; as one does eventually need the occasional competent man to make sure the pipe-tobacco and cigarettes keep arriving on time. After the Second World War, the general spirit of relative egalitarianism allows people doing National Service to be selected from the ranks for officer training, and it's found that wearing red trousers and shouting "hurrah!" is not as important as was previously thought. By the 90s, it's just about starting to become an accepted career path for high-flying senior NCOs to take a Late Entry commission. In, say, the Royal Tank Regiment. Good luck trying to do that in the Household Division.
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May 21, 2021 17:18
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The British army is very locale based, correct? Like when you join you're generally assigned to your local brigade or whatever?
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May 21, 2021 17:23
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Trin Tragula posted:By the 90s, it's just about starting to become an accepted career path for high-flying senior NCOs to take a Late Entry commission. There is/was also a thing called LDO (Limited Duty Officer) that was a promotion path for senior technical specialist Warrant Officers, a way to get a (sorta semi) commissioned rank above CWO-4. They'd be promoted to a commissioned rank - Lt, then Captain - but they'd be in a billet that required an officer with a lot more technical experience (i.e., 20+ yeasr) than a regular relatively new commissioned officer of that rank would have. They wouldn't be put in a regular command, like being a Company Commander in a regular grunt unit - instead, they'd be in something like "command of the divisional level optics repair program." This is extremely rare, you might see one of these officers at a higher echelon H&S; they'd never be out on the ramp in a line unit.
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May 21, 2021 17:29
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Scratch Monkey posted:The British army is very locale based, correct? Like when you join you're generally assigned to your local brigade or whatever? Eh, less and less so. There's regiments with strong ties to particular areas and which focus their recruitment efforts geographically, but as the size of the army shrinks there's less scope to be choosy and recruits can pick the regiments they want to apply to. I've seen a few NCOs get selected for a commission but its rare purely by fact that if you are twenty years in and are a WO2 who is highly respected and comfortable at your job then why would you reset your career and take a pay cut to be an officer? e: \/\/ you know I haven't investigated the detail because it's only of incidental interest to me, but I suspect we probably do it the same. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 17:46 on May 21, 2021 |
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May 21, 2021 17:31
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Alchenar posted:I've seen a few NCOs get selected for a commission but its rare purely by fact that if you are twenty years in and are a WO2 who is highly respected and comfortable at your job then why would you reset your career and take a pay cut to be an officer? The US military works it so you don't take a pay cut. Pay is based on a chart, you cross index your rank with your time in service and it shows how much you get paid. But there are also columns/rows for former enlisted junior officers - i.e., "O-2E," an O-2 but "E" - that give enough of a bonus that they don't lose money by taking that LDO Commission I mentioned above.
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May 21, 2021 17:42
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Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great both maintained control over all the land that they conquered for the entirety of their lives, which is honestly the limit to how long a lot of people care about their successes lasting. Both of them also died without leaving an obvious direct heir, but one of them only conquered a couple countries to add onto an already massive centralized empire, and the other conquered a bunch of disparate, disconnected nations, so there was no centralized seat of power for the successors to battle over to take the whole pot and it was easier for them to hold onto their own chunks. Although I don't really know as many details about the succession of Alexander's generals. Napoleon lived to see his conquests mostly dismantled if he was told anything about world events in prison, although I'm not sure what his grand plan was for the future if he didn't eventually get ground down and defeated by his foreverwar. He carved out thrones for him and his family throughout half of Europe, and I guess the other half was supposed to remain theoretically independent, but indefinitely subordinate to France?
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May 21, 2021 17:52
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Thanks for the interesting responses all!Cessna posted:Lol, no. Clancy never spent a day in the military and it shows.* Yeesh. Last time I read Clancy was in high school and I don't think I realized how much of a hack he was then. Trin Tragula posted:In, say, the Royal Tank Regiment. Good luck trying to do that in the Household Division. Say, on that note, one thing I'm kinda curious about in the British context. So far as I'm aware, the British Army is called that instead of the "Royal Army" because of a British distrust of monarchy and unwillingness to let the king get his hands on too many soldiers (whereas the Royal Navy is a pure and unsullied representation of the will of the British people and also they can't really storm the country in a coup). All right, fair enough, symbols matter, fine. Why is it though that there's so many units with some kind of royal title? King's Own Light Infantry, Royal Tank Regiment, This Or That Royal Scion's Own Rifles, etc. etc. Was it just that regiments were considered sufficiently unimportant that they could get away with that, or the honors considered sufficiently honorary and meaningless, or that the trend for giving out such names only started after the position of the monarchy relative to Parliament was safe enough that nobody thought it'd be a big deal anymore? Edit: SlothfulCobra posted:Napoleon lived to see his conquests mostly dismantled if he was told anything about world events in prison, although I'm not sure what his grand plan was for the future if he didn't eventually get ground down and defeated by his foreverwar. He carved out thrones for him and his family throughout half of Europe, and I guess the other half was supposed to remain theoretically independent, but indefinitely subordinate to France? I've read at least one biography (don't have it with me or I'd check the details) that suggested that part of the problem was him declaring himself Emperor - as Consul he has a shaky but theoretical right to rule from the people, but as Emperor he doesn't have traditional divine right or bloodline claims and he doesn't have democratic backing so all he has left for legitimacy is glorie, and battle was the only way he felt he could rely on to get that. Thus, fighting wars constantly to maintain prestige on the home front, and reacting with war whenever anything happened that might damage that prestige, which was ultimately unsustainable and not terribly well-planned ahead of time. Mind, I don't recall if the author notes that maintaining glorie was a real political problem or if Napoleon simply thought it was. It's possible France would have been happy with just letting him be Emperor as long as they could be at peace, but Napoleon was too insecure among the crowned heads of Europe to believe that. Which is all to say "He might not have had a plan and was reacting purely based on short-term political imperatives" Tomn fucked around with this message at 18:06 on May 21, 2021 |
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May 21, 2021 17:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great both maintained control over all the land that they conquered for the entirety of their lives, which is honestly the limit to how long a lot of people care about their successes lasting. Both of them also died without leaving an obvious direct heir,
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May 21, 2021 18:02
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Tomn posted:Say, on that note, one thing I'm kinda curious about in the British context. So far as I'm aware, the British Army is called that instead of the "Royal Army" because of a British distrust of monarchy and unwillingness to let the king get his hands on too many soldiers (whereas the Royal Navy is a pure and unsullied representation of the will of the British people and also they can't really storm the country in a coup). All right, fair enough, symbols matter, fine. Why is it though that there's so many units with some kind of royal title? King's Own Light Infantry, Royal Tank Regiment, This Or That Royal Scion's Own Rifles, etc. etc. Was it just that regiments were considered sufficiently unimportant that they could get away with that, or the honors considered sufficiently honorary and meaningless, or that the trend for giving out such names only started after the position of the monarchy relative to Parliament was safe enough that nobody thought it'd be a big deal anymore? It was just political branding. The New Model Army was disbanded on the restoration of Charles II on account of having launched a military coup but everyone agrees some sort of army is needed. A 'Royal' army will rile up parliament, an 'English' army will rile up Ireland and Scotland, so the British Army it was. As time passed (for some less time than for others) and it became clear that the new constitutional arrangement was settled and working well, association with a Royal patron became a good thing that Regiments would vie for and didn't threaten anyone.
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May 21, 2021 18:11
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Alchenar posted:It was just political branding. The New Model Army was disbanded on the restoration of Charles II on account of having launched a military coup Uhhhh that is a VERY weird way to refer to multiple civil wars (in which they fought o the side of the body elected to represent the country) and a decade of an English Republic. Also, in 1660, I'm not sure we had a standing army at all to speak of but it would have been English. No Act of Union yet. Also thats not totally accurate. The Coldstream Guards are a surviving regiment of the New Model. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 19:00 on May 21, 2021 |
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May 21, 2021 18:58
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Count Roland posted:I'm getting towards the end of the Aubrey-Maturain series and it's heavily focused on the looming end of the Napoleonic Wars and the resulting lack of ships/career prospects for the sailors. It doesn't sound like the Royal Navy had a mandatory retirement age. The RN didn't have a retirement age until 1864. Before then the only way anyone - rating or officer - could leave the navy was to be discharged or to die. From the rank of (Post) Captain upwards promotion was strictly by seniority - when the Admiral of the Fleet died (or was convinced to resign), everyone below them on the Navy List moved up one space, the Admiral of the Red became the new Admiral of the Fleet, the most senior Vice-Admiral of the Red became the new Admiral of the Red and so on down the flag ranks, while the most senior Post Captain became the most junior Rear-Admiral of the Blue. The exact numbers of officers at each flag rank could change as the size of the navy and the disposition of the fleets and squadrons changed but the seniority remained absolute. Since this inevitably led to the situation of the ranks becoming top-heavy with surplus and aged admirals, in the 1740s the concept of the 'Yellow Admiral' was introduced, whereby flag officers could be re-assigned or promoted into 'ranks without distinction of squadron' which meant that they were not active sea-going posts and were either effectively a retirement with a pension (your 'pay' as an admiral without a squadron) or a shore-based administrative post. There was also the rank of 'Rear-Admiral without Distinction' into which old or ineffective Post Captains could be moved to free up space below them on the list for younger and more promising officers. In 1864 it was finally made possible for naval officers to retire by the creation of the Retired List. Since it was not yet legally possible for an officer to voluntarily resign his commission, retired officers had to stay on the navy's books but no longer clogged up the top of the Navy List (now officially the Active List) and no longer drew pay. An exception was made for officers who commanded a ship during the Napoleonic Wars, who would be retained on the Active List on full pay, which caused issues when Admiral of the Fleet Sir Provo Wallis, who had commanded HMS Shannon for six days during the War of 1812, lived to the age of 100, causing a backlog of promotions at the top of the Active List in 1880s and 1890s. On the matter of commissioning from the ranks - the Royal Navy has done this since 1912 when the Mate Scheme (later the more evocative Upper Yardman Scheme) was introduced by Admiral Louis of Battenburg. It was originally intended primarily for engineering and technical ratings to be able to advance to officer ranks, carrying their training and experience with them rather than (horror!) requiring gentlemen to learn a trade. These days commissioning from the lower deck goes two ways - if you're under 25 you go on the 'Commission & Warrant' Scheme, whereby you join a standard new-entry officer cohort but commission as Sub-Lieutenant rather than a Midshipman. If you're over 35 you become a Senior Upper Yardman and carry over your seniority in your specialisation ,but not your rank. I believe there's also now a special version of the UYS for warrant officers to encourage them to commission rather than serve out the rest of their career as SNCOs. About a third of the new officer intake each year in the RN is through the UYS.
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May 21, 2021 18:59
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Request for a book review: The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, A Temptation, And The Longest Night Of The Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell Given the author I'm guessing it is poo poo
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May 21, 2021 19:03
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BalloonFish posted:I believe there's also now a special version of the UYS for warrant officers to encourage them to commission rather than serve out the rest of their career as SNCOs. Huh. In the US, SNCOs, Warrant Officers, and Commissioned officers are different categories entirely. Once you get your Warrant you are no longer an SNCO.
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May 21, 2021 19:04
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Nebakenezzer posted:Request for a book review: The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, A Temptation, And The Longest Night Of The Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell There's a zero percent chance it isn't trash
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May 21, 2021 19:06
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Nebakenezzer posted:Request for a book review: The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, A Temptation, And The Longest Night Of The Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell You literally couldn't pay me enough to read Gladwell's book, but here's a review
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May 21, 2021 19:18
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quote:Rear-Admiral without Distinction Congrats! You're been promoted to rank of "didn't do anything impressive"!
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May 21, 2021 19:20
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Milo and POTUS posted:Isn't a 30mm firmly in the autocannon territory I double checked, and it's actually a grenade launcher. The machine gun is 7.62mm. It's basically a very upgunned river boat. Cessna posted:
I met him a couple of times at book signings as a pre-teen, and he was a huge dick. You'd wait in line, put your book in a pile, he would do a generic signature to books and you'd pick up a copy from the pile of signed books. We were warned to not interact with him. When I was older, I did my retail time working in bookstores. And not one of the authors I did a signing with was remotely near that level of dick. Even the ones who were going hard on the stereotype of being very introverted generally made an effort to be social.
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May 21, 2021 19:21
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feedmegin posted:Uhhhh that is a VERY weird way to refer to multiple civil wars (in which they fought o the side of the body elected to represent the country) and a decade of an English Republic. Also, in 1660, I'm not sure we had a standing army at all to speak of but it would have been English. No Act of Union yet. *that* is an extremely weird way to describe the decade of the Commonwealth.
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May 21, 2021 19:27
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Anybody know a podcast or a shortish book on the WW2 North Africa campaign? It's a blind spot for me since I don't really know what happened out there other than mostly the names of the major figures and battles.
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May 21, 2021 19:31
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Alchenar posted:*that* is an extremely weird way to describe the decade of the Commonwealth. Oh it didn't stay that way but the New Model wasn't founded to fight for the Protectorate. 'Military coup' is still laughably inaccurate as is your reasoning for the British Army being named that after the Restoration (it wasn't). Literally second paragraph https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army feedmegin fucked around with this message at 19:51 on May 21, 2021 |
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May 21, 2021 19:44
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feedmegin posted:Uhhhh that is a VERY weird way to refer to multiple civil wars (in which they fought o the side of the body elected to represent the country) and a decade of an English Republic. Also, in 1660, I'm not sure we had a standing army at all to speak of but it would have been English. No Act of Union yet. I think you missed the part after the civil war where Cromwell, much like so many other revolutionary leaders, disbanded parliament and ruled as military dictator.
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May 21, 2021 19:48
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Fangz posted:I think you missed the part after the civil war where Cromwell, much like so many other revolutionary leaders, disbanded parliament and ruled as military dictator. See my previous post. No i did not 'miss that part' thank you.
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May 21, 2021 19:50
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skooma512 posted:Anybody know a podcast or a shortish book on the WW2 North Africa campaign? It's a blind spot for me since I don't really know what happened out there other than mostly the names of the major figures and battles. It's medium/long-ish not shortish but An Army At Dawn by Rick Atkinson is an excellent history of the US portion of the North African campaign, from Operation Torch on. It's well written enough to be enjoyable to read and it doesn't feel as long as it is, unlike some military history.
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May 21, 2021 19:51
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feedmegin posted:See my previous post. No i did not 'miss that part' thank you. I think if you've got armed soldiers marching into parliament, removing it from power, and replacing it with a barebones committee of people hand picked by the army, which was later replaced with giving Cromwell total authority, that is at least *somewhat* military coup-adjacent.
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May 21, 2021 19:55
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Fangz posted:I think if you've got armed soldiers marching into parliament, removing it from power, and replacing it with a barebones committee of people hand picked by the army, which was later replaced with giving Cromwell total authority, that is at least *somewhat* military coup-adjacent. There is juuuust a little more going on in that period than Pride's Purge and I don't think that's exactly the reason the New Model got disbanded. Also, a technicality, Parliament wasn't 'removed from power' at that point, it was, well, purged down to the Rump. Praisegod Barebones and his mates come later. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 20:01 on May 21, 2021 |
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May 21, 2021 19:59
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feedmegin posted:There is juuuust a little more going on in that period than Pride's Purge and I don't think that's exactly the reason the New Model got disbanded. Also, a technicality, Parliament wasn't 'removed from power' at that point, it was, well, purged down to the Rump. Praisegod Barebones and his mates come later. I'm referring to the dissolution of the Rump parliament.
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May 21, 2021 20:37
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Fangz posted:I'm referring to the dissolution of the Rump parliament. Again not why the New Model got dissolved (it would have happened if the Long Parliament had stayed around) and just part of a very complicated 20 years. Reducing the entire Interregnum to 'a military coup' is just not good history and looking for technicalities to justify that descripfion doesn't work.
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May 21, 2021 20:48
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Cessna posted:* I met Clancy once when I was a curator, we were at the same Naval History conference. He was an embarrassment. There's nothing like watching an insurance salesman who was never in the military, but who read Jane's Fighting Ships, lecture a room full of admirals and PhD historians about how the navy really works.[/i] Cruising with Patrick O'Brian - The Man and the Myth posted:After the other guests departed, we settled into a series of brandies by the fire and I discovered: 1) his capacity for serious drinking greatly exceeded my own; 2) his reserve only eased very slightly in the presence of this unknown American (me) and; 3) his knowledge of the practical aspects of sailing seemed, amazingly, almost nil.
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May 21, 2021 21:56
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How dare Tom Perkins Belvedere publish slanderous lies such as that, it's quite clearly not true.
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May 21, 2021 22:01
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SubG posted:Not quite the same thing, but apparently Patrick O'Brian was a complete stumblebum on a ship. Some rich fan invited him aboard his yacht and discovered that O'Brian couldn't be trusted at the helm: he was 81 at the time so perhaps that explains it e: googled the guy who wrote that and this was on his wiki article: Criticism for "Kristallnacht" comment In January 2014, the Wall Street Journal published a letter from Perkins[18] that compared the "progressive war on the American one percent" of wealthiest Americans and the Occupy movement's "demonization of the rich" to the Kristallnacht and anti-semitism in Nazi Germany: Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on the "one percent", namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich." The letter was widely criticized and condemned in The Atlantic,[19] The Independent,[20] among bloggers, Twitter users, and "his own colleagues in Silicon Valley".[21] Perkins subsequently apologized for making the comparisons with Nazi Germany, but otherwise stood by his letter, saying, "In the Nazi era it was racial demonization, now it's class demonization."[21] A month after publication of the letter in the Wall Street Journal, Perkins stated in a Commonwealth Club interview (which can be seen on YouTube)[22] when asked at the ending for his 60-minute "Plan to Save the World" he said that he believed elections should be set up such that the number of votes a person can cast would be proportional to the amount of taxes that the person pays. Both Perkins, the moderator and the audience were laughing. In an interview afterwards, Perkins said "I intended to be outrageous, and it was."[23] ChubbyChecker fucked around with this message at 22:27 on May 21, 2021 |
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May 21, 2021 22:15
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