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cheerfullydrab posted:You can't imagine a scenario where a thousand cheaply-made drones overwhelm somebody's SAM defenses? Well it depends if you are asking the question in terms of today or in terms of 'near to medium future'.
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May 14, 2014 10:37
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cheerfullydrab posted:Tom Clancy-esque question: how would drones be used in a "conventional" war in 2014? What the heck *is* a conventional war in 2014, any more?
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May 14, 2014 11:06
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Fangz posted:What the heck *is* a conventional war in 2014, any more? Experts all agree that nobody really knows.
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May 14, 2014 12:17
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But it's probably very good that we won't find out soon.
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May 14, 2014 12:56
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Don Gato posted:Slightly off topic, but the land where the local high school is now on used to be a mustering ground/field hospital for a lot(all?) of the Vermont regiments during the Civil War, and at the cemetery there's a memorial for the dead from the war. For such a small state, that list is huge Just to address this further, there's another reason for some towns having such high casualty rates during the ACW: regiments were often made up of people from the same geographic location. So all the able-bodied men from Nowhere, VT would sign up and get put into the 7th Vermont regiment. If their number got called to lead the charge into the Confederate line one day, there goes a significant portion of Nowhere's men. The US military specifically changed the policy post-war as several locales actually were completely depopulated following the civil war.
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May 14, 2014 14:28
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cheerfullydrab posted:Tom Clancy-esque question: how would drones be used in a "conventional" war in 2014? Lots and lots and lots of ways. I'll kind of break this down by "phase of conflict"; assume that the belligerents are the US and a peer or near-peer competitor. As far as the definition of "drone" I'll assume that we're talking about remotely piloted vehicles or unmanned aerial systems (UAS), which doesn't include mostly autonomous things like cruise missiles. During the buildup to hostilities, both sides will use drones pretty extensively for both tactical and strategic surveillance. This includes everything from taking pictures of things to collecting electronic intelligence of all kinds. Both sides have pretty extensive manned airborne ELINT capabilities, but the ability to send long-legged UAS out seriously increases the scope of collection which is pretty important when you're talking about the massive geographic areas that we'd likely be looking at in this kind of scenario. The ultimate objective of this sort of thing is to pinpoint locations of key targets (SAM sites, carriers, force generation platforms, etc) and to get clear assessments of opponent capabilities. At a tactical level, forces flowing into the theater will be using tactical UAS to do similar missions at their level; depending on the proximity of the forces they could be even competing for the same airspace long before any shots are fired. When hostilities kick off the first big role UAS will have is participating in the SEAD campaign. UAS like the Harop are projected to play huge roles in locating and destroying SAM systems (and just about every other big RF emitter). The RSTA role will remain; UAS will be used to locate targets and then assess effects just like forward observers (directing ballistic missile and cruise missile fires against the carriers is a HUGE task for obvious reasons). At a tactical level, UAS are doing tactical RSTA, attack (either by delivering ordnance or as munitions themselves), as well as doing less obvious roles like being aerial network/communications nodes. Both sides also have the capability to use UAS in a defensive counter-air role at the tactical level as well, which basically means hunting hostile UAS and other tactical airspace users (helicopters). After high intensity conflict is over and you've moved onto peacekeeping/stability operations, UAS will have a big role in providing wide area surveillance and some attack stuff. Assuming there are still some hostile irregular forces, they'd use UAS to do things like control indirect fires, which likely means that the tactical UAS fight is still going on to some degree.
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May 14, 2014 14:45
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Thwomp posted:Just to address this further, there's another reason for some towns having such high casualty rates during the ACW: regiments were often made up of people from the same geographic location. You sure about that policy changing post-ACW? I know that a lot of bad press following some high profile, highly reported mass kill-offs in individual families led to changes in military regs to forbid siblings from serving together. See: The Sullivan Brothers. There's also the issue of the national guard formations that were incorporated into the regular army during WW2. I forget the details, but there's the one famous example of Bedford, Virginia, which was a town of ~3000 that lost 20 men on D-Day due to their all being in the same couple of regiments within the 29th Infantry Division. This plus a few things I've read about raising volunteer regiments early in the US's involvement in WW1 make me suspect that we might have really started mixing things up in the late 40s.
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May 14, 2014 15:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:You sure about that policy changing post-ACW? I know that a lot of bad press following some high profile, highly reported mass kill-offs in individual families led to changes in military regs to forbid siblings from serving together. See: The Sullivan Brothers. Yeah it wasn't until 1957 that the regimental system was finally replaced. Geographically aligned regiments made up a lot of the forces that fought in Korea, for example.
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May 14, 2014 16:07
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Cyrano4747 posted:You sure about that policy changing post-ACW? I know that a lot of bad press following some high profile, highly reported mass kill-offs in individual families led to changes in military regs to forbid siblings from serving together. See: The Sullivan Brothers. Weren't the Sullivan Brothers a massive exception at the time? I read somewhere that a lot of higher ups in the Navy didn't want to let them all serve on the same ship precisely because it would have been a massive tragedy if, say, the ship sank with all of them aboard and they died. But the propaganda value of all 5 brothers choosing to serve together was deemed more important than the potential tragedy and whelp we know what happened.
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May 14, 2014 17:05
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There were also the Pal's Battalions raised by the British during WWI. It was a great way to get entire villages killed or wounded and to make sure the remaining fighting men from that village knew all their friends were dead.
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May 14, 2014 17:12
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Cyrano4747 posted:There's also the issue of the national guard formations that were incorporated into the regular army during WW2. I forget the details, but there's the one famous example of Bedford, Virginia, which was a town of ~3000 that lost 20 men on D-Day due to their all being in the same couple of regiments within the 29th Infantry Division. Yep, the Bedford Boys, aka the reason the national D-Day Memorial is in the middle of nowhere in southwestern Virginia. It's really nice though.
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May 14, 2014 17:26
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Don Gato posted:Weren't the Sullivan Brothers a massive exception at the time? I read somewhere that a lot of higher ups in the Navy didn't want to let them all serve on the same ship precisely because it would have been a massive tragedy if, say, the ship sank with all of them aboard and they died. But the propaganda value of all 5 brothers choosing to serve together was deemed more important than the potential tragedy and whelp we know what happened. The navy had an internal policy but it was loosely enforced. The five brothers really wanted to serve together and requested an exception as a group and the Navy went along. It was an exception but not really a massive one - think more along the lines of getting a substance abuse waver during enlistment today over some recreational pot use as a teenager than any kind of really hard core exception. The Sole Survivor Policy and making same-unit siblings a massive no-no only happened post-WW2. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 19:04 on May 14, 2014 |
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May 14, 2014 18:59
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Cyrano4747 posted:You sure about that policy changing post-ACW? bewbies posted:Yeah it wasn't until 1957 that the regimental system was finally replaced. Geographically aligned regiments made up a lot of the forces that fought in Korea, for example. Well, it has been a while since my last The Civil War watch.
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May 14, 2014 19:04
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Arquinsiel posted:There were also the Pal's Battalions raised by the British during WWI. It was a great way to get entire villages killed or wounded and to make sure the remaining fighting men from that village knew all their friends were dead. Well, the logic isn't entirely bankrupt from an early 19th century perspective where you're as concerned with desertion and units holding formation in battle as you are with losses. The thought back ca. Napoleon was that if everyone in a unit knew each other they would be more likely to hold under fire for fear of people they'd known their whole lives (and who they could expect to live with the rest of their lives) seeing them turn and run. By the same token, knowing that you'd never be able to go home again because everyone would know you were a deserter was supposed to be a good way to keep people from ducking into the countryside and hiding out for the duration. I don't know if it worked as intended in those regards or not, but fast forward 100 years and as everyone else has noted you get some pretty unfortunate mass-kills of entire age cohorts within single towns. edit: for the 19th century infantryman there was also the added comfort of knowing that if you died chances were way higher that you would be identified and your relatives properly notified.
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May 14, 2014 19:05
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"This logic would totally work if we didn't have all this new tech" is kind of the Western Front in a nutshell for WWI though.
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May 14, 2014 19:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:Well, the logic isn't entirely bankrupt from an early 19th century perspective where you're as concerned with desertion and units holding formation in battle as you are with losses. The thought back ca. Napoleon was that if everyone in a unit knew each other they would be more likely to hold under fire for fear of people they'd known their whole lives (and who they could expect to live with the rest of their lives) seeing them turn and run. By the same token, knowing that you'd never be able to go home again because everyone would know you were a deserter was supposed to be a good way to keep people from ducking into the countryside and hiding out for the duration. Yeah I was just thinking that myself. Whatever lessons that were learned at the tactical level prior to the great war didn't necessarily seem to trickle up to the strategic level and there didn't seem to be enough appreciation given to the technological advances in firepower. Hell, I bet they had great morale... prior to every friend you ever knew getting shelled stupid in a few measly hours.
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May 14, 2014 20:06
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In a similar vein, anyone got anything interesting on the bantam battalions in the first one? Seems to make sense personally, all these hard rear end but tiny coal mining dudes getting excluded from duty simply because they couldn't meet the biometric requirements.
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May 14, 2014 20:13
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Frostwerks posted:Hell, I bet they had great morale... prior to every friend you ever knew getting shelled stupid in a few measly hours. I think it was a French war manual, but there was a thought that it would take about 8 seconds for an enemy soldier to raise a rifle, aim it and hit someone who showed sufficient élan to charge. Turns out that in a defensive position, it takes a lot less time to ready a machine gun to fire and all those dudes with the bright red pants charging were easy targets. And the tight formations made the jobs of German 105mm artillery even easier. Don Gato fucked around with this message at 20:23 on May 14, 2014 |
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May 14, 2014 20:21
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Arquinsiel posted:"This logic would totally work if we didn't have all this new tech" is kind of the Western Front in a nutshell for WWI though.
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May 14, 2014 23:05
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Xlorp posted:How not-simple of an exercise in logic is it to game out the exploitative stunts and idiotically obsolete strategies before you commit a generation of your country's blood? Can it be done or is the problem always too big? Judging the effectiveness of various strategies requires actual experience, and even then it's hard to get a feel for what's actually going to happen, such as if you compare the Russo-Japanese war to WWI.
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May 15, 2014 01:14
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Yeah, as I understand it a lot of the thinking going into WWI was based on the Franco-Prussian War which was basically a fluke where one side was massively superior to the other.
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May 15, 2014 01:21
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StashAugustine posted:Yeah, as I understand it a lot of the thinking going into WWI was based on the Franco-Prussian War which was basically a fluke where one side was massively superior to the other. To point it was almost hilarious, death and destruction of war put aside. "Yeah sure my Emperor, we'll cross the Rhine and invade the German states without any recent large scale maps!"
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May 15, 2014 01:25
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Xlorp posted:How not-simple of an exercise in logic is it to game out the exploitative stunts and idiotically obsolete strategies before you commit a generation of your country's blood? Can it be done or is the problem always too big? For what its worth, Prussian officers invented modern tabletop wargaming as a way of simulating campaigns in the early 1800's, specifically playing a game called "Kriegsspiel", which had been noted as being part of the staff training that enabled them to win the Franco-Prussian War. So, by WWI, the idea of gaming out potential campaigns should have been pretty established, though I have no idea on the specifics or if the rules would have taken into account the major technological advances between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I.
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May 15, 2014 01:32
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The problem with "Kriegsspiel" is that it requires an umpire who would have a lot of judgement calls to make, so the outcome was always subject to bias. I have a vague memory of the Germans in WWII doing a Kriegspiel game of the Normandy landings in which they easily won, but this might be from a movie or something.
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May 15, 2014 01:39
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Frostwerks posted:In a similar vein, anyone got anything interesting on the bantam battalions in the first one? Seems to make sense personally, all these hard rear end but tiny coal mining dudes getting excluded from duty simply because they couldn't meet the biometric requirements. I would've thought coal miners would've been subject to exclusion because they would've been more valuable to the war effort doing their normal jobs. I know that there were quite a few specialist-type jobs that fell under that type of treatment, usually people like shipyard workers or railroad engineers. EDIT: Apparently "reserved occupations" were a World War Two thing based on the problems they had in World War One with skilled workers signing up for the trenches and replacements at home being hard to come by. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 01:59 on May 15, 2014 |
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May 15, 2014 01:54
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So, today in my Revolutionary War class, we learned that the Colonial Militia surprised the British at Concord by preforming a complicated maneuver called the Ring of Fire. How could they have learned this? The militia was poorly trained, so how did they pull this off?
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May 15, 2014 17:37
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I had a question about the traditions around the targeting of officers in the American Civil War. I know that higher up officers would sometimes be in gunfire range (like John Sedgwick), but would enemy snipers always try to shoot the highest ranking officer in range or was that frowned upon? And did officers on the front lines try to disguise their rank, like during the Vietnam War? Related question, would it have been unthinkable for either the Union or CSA to send men to sneak into an enemy encampment to try to assassinate a general? Or plan an ambush of a high ranking officer on his travel route (similar to what happened to Yamamoto?)
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May 15, 2014 17:44
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Xlorp posted:How not-simple of an exercise in logic is it to game out the exploitative stunts and idiotically obsolete strategies before you commit a generation of your country's blood? Can it be done or is the problem always too big? The US spends a lot of man hours and money trying to figure out how THE NEXT WAR will go. It has been a pretty standard thing among first line militaries for a long time now. The biggest problem is that there are so many variables and only one right answer, so like with any bold prediction of the future, some stuff is spot on, but most of it is pretty wrong...and you have no way of knowing which is which until after the fact. Nowadays I think we have a pretty good grasp on the limitations of these things and so tend to limit any conclusions to pretty basic ones like "gotta communicate", which is correct, but also kind of...obvious. Mojo Threepwood posted:I had a question about the traditions around the targeting of officers in the American Civil War. I know that higher up officers would sometimes be in gunfire range (like John Sedgwick), but would enemy snipers always try to shoot the highest ranking officer in range or was that frowned upon? And did officers on the front lines try to disguise their rank, like during the Vietnam War? Senior officers (corps and higher commanders) tended to stay back from firefights and as a result I think that Johnston, McPherson, and Sedgwick were the only corps+ level commanders killed by hostile fire in the war (someone can check my mental math if they want). Regimental officers though were typically right in the middle of things. Unsurprisingly they suffered a disproportionately high casualty rate, especially for the CSA where they were really, really easy to pick out...they were often the only ones from a regiment with a proper uniform. They absolutely were targeted although smoke and the terrible accuracy of the rifles made it pretty hard to hit a single guy even if you were trying to. There were some dedicated attempts to ambush/assassinate generals. Mosby and Forrest are two good examples, both were identified by name as targets and operations were mounted to kill/capture both of them specifically. The CSA was rumored to have deliberately targeted Grant right after he left the western theater; he was in DC largely unescorted prior to taking his new position and they may have tried to have him captured or killed.
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May 15, 2014 20:30
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Off the top of my head, Lieutenant General (CSA) Leonidas Polk, sniped by a cannon.
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May 15, 2014 20:41
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General Reynolds was one of the more famous times when a Corps commander was killed as well.
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May 15, 2014 20:47
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jng2058 posted:Off the top of my head, Lieutenant General (CSA) Leonidas Polk, sniped by a cannon.
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May 15, 2014 20:55
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Artillerists have a long and proud history of blowing up enemy commanders. And sometimes even friendly commanders!
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May 15, 2014 21:21
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jng2058 posted:Off the top of my head, Lieutenant General (CSA) Leonidas Polk, sniped by a cannon. After which his unit promptly surrendered, saying that if they are capable of sniping commanders with artillery, what chance do they have. not remotely true i think
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May 15, 2014 21:28
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bewbies posted:Unsurprisingly they suffered a disproportionately high casualty rate, especially for the CSA where they were really, really easy to pick out...they were often the only ones from a regiment with a proper uniform. Does anyone have more information on CSA uniforms? I think they're fascinating but I don't know much about them. I understand it was common for the South to take Union uniforms and leave them in the sun to turn them grey, because they didn't have much of a textile industry to make new cloth.
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May 15, 2014 21:30
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I always found it ironic the CSA had all that cotton, but not the industry to make new uniforms.
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May 15, 2014 21:49
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Frostwerks posted:After which his unit promptly surrendered, saying that if they are capable of sniping commanders with artillery, what chance do they have. not remotely true i think Heh, no, not remotely. The whole army was somewhat demoralized, though, because having "The Battling Bishop" on their side had made them feel like the Hand of God was on them. Losing Polk, especially to something not entirely dissimilar to a thunderbolt from God, shook their confidence a bit. On the other hand, Polk was a pretty mediocre to bad battlefield commander, so they may have benefited somewhat from the change in commanders. 
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May 15, 2014 21:54
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SeanBeansShako posted:I always found it ironic the CSA had all that cotton, but not the industry to make new uniforms.
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May 15, 2014 22:24
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HEY GAL posted:You make uniforms out of wool. A cotton uniform would not maintain its insulating properties when it got wet. I stand corrected, but still all the cotton and nothing to actually do with it!
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May 15, 2014 22:35
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I bet all the factory owners were feeling smug about that. Until the blockade dried up their raw materials then Sherman Sherman'ed all over their transit hub, but still.
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May 15, 2014 22:36
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Tekopo posted:General Reynolds was one of the more famous times when a Corps commander was killed as well. There was also Nathaniel Lyon at Wilson's Creek, who was pretty much the equivalent of a Corps+ commander since he was in command of the entire Department of the West. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:10 on May 16, 2014 |
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May 16, 2014 00:07
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