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Pornographic Memory posted:I'm pretty sure Churchill just loved random naval/amphibious sideshow operations for their own sake. Churchill probably never saw a stretch of coastline he didn't want to land some soldiers on. To be fair, I see nothing in that wiki entry indicating he wanted to land any troops. Just a naval operation, which isn't necessarily that unreasonable; it's not like the Germans or the at-the-time-hostile Soviets had huge naval forces in the Baltic.
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Sep 27, 2014 10:48
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Slavvy posted:Ask Us About Military History: Yes, Nazis actually were bad. To this day, and after one horrible world war my mind truly boggles people believe otherwise.
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Sep 27, 2014 13:39
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago Please never stop posting these (until the war ends, anyways)!
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Sep 27, 2014 13:47
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Was there actually world peace between the two great wars or was it just slightly less war-like?
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Sep 27, 2014 13:57
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SeanBeansShako posted:To this day, and after one horrible world war my mind truly boggles people believe otherwise. Long story short, thank the Cold War. Between it, the inter-war socialism scares, and the pre-WW1 socialist/anarchist scares we've had ~100 years of the government flipping out and insisting that anyone who holds one economic theory is basically Satan incarnate. Meanwhile fascism was a credible third way for, what, ~20 years if we're being really charitable? Specifically German fascism for maybe 15? And it's not even like all the people the Nazis hated were Americans. gently caress, unless your family came over from Germany recently enough that you still kept in touch with people back home, how much did the average American in 1935 really give a poo poo if some guy on the other end of the planet had a hard on for blaming poo poo on the Jews? Now ask the same guy about unions and organizing labor and how much say workers should have in how the factory is run, and he probably has a pretty strong opinion. Then add to that ~40 years of living in a world where the whole world sits under the omnipresent threat of the US/USSR nuking the gently caress out of each other. Growing up firm in the belief that there is a not insignificant threat that you will die violently due to the decisions of a man in Moscow does a lot to color things like the Eastern Front in a different light. On top of all of THAT throw in the fact that the Holocaust and all the anti-Jewish poo poo wasn't really a big thing that the general public concentrated on when you discussed "Nazi War Crimes" until NBC did a loving miniseries about it in the late 70s and you get people in Kansas daydreaming about being a totally kickass Panzer tank ace driving around Russia in your god-mode Tiger tank blowing up commies. edit: space race and friendly German scientists doing broadcast TV events helps also. Look up some of von Braun's old stuff on Youtube. Seriously, Disney gave him the full Walt treatment with his videos explaining how we were going to get people up on the moon. edit x2: the W. German government also spent a loving LOT of time and money engaging on what can only be called a multi-front PR campaign in the 40s-70s. They really leaned into it when it came to student exchange programs in general, and just funded the bejesus out of anyone who wanted to go there and study or research. To this day the amount of funding for scholarly research given out by cold-war era organizations like the DAAD is just loving staggering when compared to what other European governments spend on funding foreigners to come over. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Sep 27, 2014 |
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Sep 27, 2014 14:10
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Well, depends on what you consider war like. Domestically the US had some little war like spats pop up around the same time the government said "no booze fer yous".
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Sep 27, 2014 14:11
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Cyrano4747 posted:Long story short, thank the Cold War. So in the end, our short term memories and general cynical attitudes blind people to the true hardcore facts that could lead to a nasty repeat down the road  .I need to read about a Polsih Bear that stacks ammo crates now .
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Sep 27, 2014 14:16
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SocketWrench posted:Well, depends on what you consider war like. Domestically the US had some little war like spats pop up around the same time the government said "no booze fer yous". Plus all the poo poo Japan was doing. Being Chinese in the 30s kind of really sucked. Plus the opening stages of the Chinese Civil War, before the Japanese even get involved in mainland Asia outside of Korea. Then there's all that Freikorps bullshit in the early 20s, and E. Europe in general being a low-medium intensity war zone from about 1918 to ~the mid 20s. I know Mexico also had a few attempted revolutions in the 20s that had to be put down with military force, but I don't know if those count as wars. There were also a few wars in S. America in the early-mid 30s. God only knows what's going on on the colonialism front. Something, somewhere, certainly. I think France might have put out a bush fire or two in Indochina.
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Sep 27, 2014 14:20
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SeanBeansShako posted:So in the end, our short term memories and general cynical attitudes blind people to the true hardcore facts that could lead to a nasty repeat down the road Well, other big factors were the Marshall Plan, NATO and the EU. We've had decades of "Germans are our FRIENDS now" blaring at us, so it's easy to forget. The original purpose of NATO and the EU was to create strongly interlinked allies out of countries that had just fought two of the bloodiest wars in history against each other within 25 years. Everybody hating the Germans forever wasn't going to have a good result in the long run.
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Sep 27, 2014 14:31
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SocketWrench posted:Given the fact that pretty much all of them were locked in battle to keep Grant from advancing, that's a never gonna happen situation that would eventually spell doom for whatever unit tried it. Lee burned out his chances for doing anything of such nature permanently at Gettysburg. With the Mississippi gone and Federal armies moving into the deep south combined with Grant deciding there would be no retreats, only advance, the South simply couldn't make up the man power needed to check all that, let alone send anything to support some crapshoot invasion of DC, provided the thin garrisons still in DC didn't dwindle the numbers as they attacked to make it totally unfeasible. Every officer knew it, it's part of the reason Grant did pull troops from garrison knowing that such an attempt would be a suicidal and pointless attack of any unit that would just grind up men that couldn't afford to be lost on something so pointless. I'm not sure what you mean by "combat troops arriving from the front" being a "never gonna happen situation," since Wright's VI Corps absolutely did get hustled up to DC by steamship, arriving at the same time Early did on 11 July. There certainly wasn't universal belief that having enemy troops in your capital was a "shrug, oh well, strategically irrelevant" situation. Having Frederick held hostage, the B&O broken, Baltimore panicking, and the military and civilian bureaucracy running around in a gormless tizzy doesn't justify the blase attitude of hindsight. It wasn't so much an attempt at attracting foreign recognition, that ship having largely sailed, but an attempt to embarrass the government and provide for Republican defeat in the election of 1864. Could Early's corps have held DC even briefly? No, not after Monocacy. But breaching a sadly undermanned fort belt and creating humiliating headlines was within their grasp. Hardly pointless, and certainly not impossible. The Merry Marauder fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Sep 27, 2014 |
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Sep 27, 2014 14:55
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Cyrano4747 posted:Plus all the poo poo Japan was doing. Being Chinese in the 30s kind of really sucked. Plus the Russian Civil War, Italian colonial efforts (lol) in Africa, plus Turkey/the Balkans trying to settle what the post Ottoman borders would look like, plus various complaints about the mandates in the levant.
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Sep 27, 2014 15:32
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the JJ posted:Plus the Russian Civil War, Italian colonial efforts (lol) in Africa, plus Turkey/the Balkans trying to settle what the post Ottoman borders would look like, plus various complaints about the mandates in the levant. And somehow all those Armenians ended up lost in the shuffle. Odd, that.
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Sep 27, 2014 15:50
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the JJ posted:Plus the Russian Civil War, Italian colonial efforts (lol) in Africa, plus Turkey/the Balkans trying to settle what the post Ottoman borders would look like, plus various complaints about the mandates in the levant. Forget the inter-war years, can anyone come up with a single year - defined here as 365 consecutive days, regardless of when in the calendar year they begin - that we actually had full world peace? For the sake of argument ignore civil unrest, internal conflicts, post-occupation colonial "peace keeping" etc. Is there a single year in reliably documented human history that we have what at least appears to be complete international peace? As in no wars between separate nations? I honestly don't think so, but it's neat to think about.
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Sep 27, 2014 15:51
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There's a timeline I've seen that shows that US has had only like 5 years of not fighting someone since the declaration of independance, with only two years being consecutive though it did include all the Indian Wars.
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Sep 27, 2014 16:12
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As a species, we are extraordinarily good at finding reasons to fight each other. Anyone who talks about any peaceful period in human history is just ignoring the rest of the world.
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Sep 27, 2014 16:55
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feedmegin posted:To be fair, I see nothing in that wiki entry indicating he wanted to land any troops. Just a naval operation, which isn't necessarily that unreasonable; it's not like the Germans or the at-the-time-hostile Soviets had huge naval forces in the Baltic. Even if the Germans didn't have a surface fleet, any British incursion into the Baltic would have to run a Luftwaffe-laden gauntlet across shallow and tight waters. Raskolnikov38 posted:There's a timeline I've seen that shows that US has had only like 5 years of not fighting someone since the declaration of independance, with only two years being consecutive though it did include all the Indian Wars. By goon VideoTapir: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiqH16wH7lX1dDdNUFNhSkk5S3IwRmprb2VQVnpEMnc&usp=sharing Since 1861, there have only been two years in the history of the US that the country was not involved in military action of some kind - 1977 and 1979.
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Sep 27, 2014 16:55
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Cyrano4747 posted:Forget the inter-war years, can anyone come up with a single year - defined here as 365 consecutive days, regardless of when in the calendar year they begin - that we actually had full world peace? For the sake of argument ignore civil unrest, internal conflicts, post-occupation colonial "peace keeping" etc. Is there a single year in reliably documented human history that we have what at least appears to be complete international peace? As in no wars between separate nations? I picked up War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning today and the introduction mentions that "the historian Will Durant" made it twenty-nine years in all of history. No source though.
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Sep 27, 2014 17:14
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The Merry Marauder posted:I'm afraid this isn't true throughout the war - it was largely the DC fort garrisons that reinforced Grant to make up the tremendous losses in the Overland Campaign, to the extent that Early's Raid was a serious threat to at least enter the city, given the scratch force of invalids and clerks that manned the defenses until combat troops could arrive from the front in Virginia. Early's raid was never a serious threat to anything. The AoP corps that moved back from the front were in position two full days before Early in position to do anything remotely threatening the city. Grant knew perfectly well that he could quickly move units back to DC from Virginia if it was required as CSA would be moving through hostile territory on foot and he had access to plenty of ships and rail.
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Sep 27, 2014 17:30
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bewbies posted:Early's raid was never a serious threat to anything. The AoP corps that moved back from the front were in position two full days before Early in position to do anything remotely threatening the city. Grant knew perfectly well that he could quickly move units back to DC from Virginia if it was required as CSA would be moving through hostile territory on foot and he had access to plenty of ships and rail. Grant was so sanguine he sent a division of VI Corps to get rolled at Monocacy, along with some militia and supply guards, and sacked Lew Wallace after the loss. Only then did he load up additional reinforcements, not "two full days" before Early arrived. In any event, it wasn't the "hostile territory" that slowed down Early, though there was certainly skirmishing, so much as a series of debauched pillagings of supply depots and overrun positions. The point here is to correct the misconception that the line of forts was teeming with a field army's worth of troops throughout the war. From May '64 on, it was not.
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Sep 27, 2014 17:59
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The Merry Marauder posted:Grant was so sanguine he sent a division of VI Corps to get rolled at Monocacy, along with some militia and supply guards, and sacked Lew Wallace after the loss. Only then did he load up additional reinforcements, not "two full days" before Early arrived. Another way to put this would be that Early's corps was operating in enemy territory and had no source of supply, so could survive only by pillaging Union depots. This forced repeated delays. There's no reason to believe he could have made his corps move any faster than it did, unless you think troops march better with no provisions. Even with those pauses his troops were often hungry and exhausted, and Early stated that he was unable to capitalize on his victory at Monocacy because his corps was blown and the Union forces had reformed in his rear. This is why he retreated after probing the fortifications.
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Sep 27, 2014 19:15
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The tone of the narratives I've seen sound as though Early's commanders were unable to keep discipline, extending the, as you rightly point out, necessary resupply delays, and causing straggling, hungover and otherwise. Considering Early's Manstein-esque writing after the war, I think we're forced to take his personal exculpatory statements with several grains of salt. I know a Grant quote exists, but cannot search for a cite for it at the moment, regarding the day gained by Monocacy as critical. Whether this was a harmless way to apologize to Wallace is an open question, I suppose. There's not a whole lot of commanders I'd rather have re-forming behind me rather than David Hunter, but it's hard to ignore.
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Sep 27, 2014 19:40
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I'm surprised no one mentioned the Spanish Civil War. 
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Sep 27, 2014 20:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:Long story short, thank the Cold War. Plus, there's also the fact that the German attitude towards western Europeans was infinitely better than towards their eastern counterparts, earning them many, many collaborators in those areas of the continent. Those societies were, when compared to the countries now on the other side of the Iron Curtain, scarred and traumatised to a much larger degree by their complicity in the German crimes, and to a smaller degree by the occupation. Meanwhile, communist crimes were done by the hands of the Soviets and of the eastern Europeans that were now no longer a concern of western democracies.
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Sep 27, 2014 21:17
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This isn't from my own research, but it is an interesting thing that happened to a dude we know. Night of 8/9 November, 1620, outside Prague. A young lieutenant-colonel named Pappenheim has managed to get himself wounded during the Battle of White Mountain, which is somewhat of a feat considering that his side suffered only about 700 casualties. He'd be freezing to death right now if he weren't lying next to his dying horse. He's trying to figure out where he is. He knows he's dead, but he's feeling too little joy for Heaven and too little pain for Hell. He decides he's in Purgatory, when along comes a Walloon cavalryman, one of the loyalist kinds of Dutch. "Who're you, bro?" he says, without apparent malice. "You've got nice pants, so you've got to die." In the original German, this line is hilariously laconic: "Kerl, wer bist? Du hast gute hosen, du must sterben." Pappenheim manages to tell the man that he's Gottfried Heinrich Graf zu Pappenheim, which may have been difficult in his weakened state, and immediately the Lowlander's tone changes: "Your grace isn't an enemy, you're a friend." ("Ihr gnaden seynd kein feind, sie seynd freund."). He still doesn't want to leave the battlefield, so Pappenheim promises him a thousand Thalers if he gets him to Prague. The Walloon manages to get Pappenheim onto his horse, and with great difficulty manages to make it clear to a passing troop of Croats that the wounded officer is an ally. Down they go to Prague, where Pappenheim is treated by the same surgeon who treated one of the victims of the Defenestration. (Catholic/Imperial sympathizers in the capitol of Bohemia are a small world, although getting bigger in comparison by the minute.) Turns out he had been shot three times and had his skull split open by a dagger; the two halves of the split "stood two fingers broad apart from each other." He recovers. While he's recovering, he learns that his baby daughter has died. He also meets an enemy officer who is trying to scrape up the thousand Gulden for his ransom, and who remembered Pappenheim from the battle. Pappenheim bargains the sum downward by more than half and pays it. He's sure he'll never see the money again, but years later he finds out it's been payed back. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Sep 28, 2014 |
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Sep 27, 2014 23:12
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100 Years Ago The fighting south of the Somme slacks off. Now, stop me if you've heard this before; but, once again, troops on both sides are heading rapidly northwards for a flanking operation. I wonder what the next occurrence in this saga will be??? North of the river, the French succeed in holding the line of the River Ancre, one of the You-Know-What's tributaries, and some extremely vigorous fighting occurs around the town of Maricourt. Meanwhile, over by the Meuse, the French are pushing the Germans slowly back, but the German engineers are working frantically and every time their infantry falls back, it's to a stronger position. St Mihiel itself also comes under attack; since the Germans are all now well-installed on the heights, this goes as well as you'd expect. In the East, at Przemyśl, the Russian commander decided that he couldn't be bothered waiting for some promised siege artillery to turn up, and has spent the last three days bashing his blokes' heads against brick walls, trees, barbed wire, concrete emplacements, and a rather unhealthy dose of bullets. 40,000 casualties later, he is forced to break off the attack and send men north; the Germans are moving in the general direction of Warsaw, and he needs a screening force against the possibility of being rudely interrupted. This also works in favour of a large number of approaching Austrian reinforcements, who can now be sure of reaching the fortress without being too badly harassed. Right, let's talk about railways, shall we? They were of course vitally important things, and the reasoning behind more than one major offensive boiled down to "CAPTURE THAT SODDING RAILHEAD WHERE THEY KEEP REINFORCING FROM". The French railway network was stretched far past any limits that its designers or builders could possibly think of. So, what was it like to travel on? The first concern was the capacity of an individual train. Your average express passenger train of the period would probably have space for somewhere between 300 and 800 passengers, not enough to carry a battalion. Additionally, passenger coaches are very inflexible; they can only really be used to carry people about, and the luggage space is usually less than is necessary to haul about all the crap that a battalion needs to take with it in order to make war, tea and paperwork (aside from anything else, even an infantry battalion brings some horses with them). And then the rolling stock has to be sorted and marshalled and coupled and uncoupled, and you have to have blokes to do it, and so on and so forth. Fortunately, those Frenchmen with responsibility for planning such things had applied themselves to the problem and come up with a simple solution. If, they reasoned, one could have a train that would serve equally well hauling blokes, animals, or supplies around, this would save a great deal of unnecessary faffing about. Enter the humble goods wagon (yes, this is a German picture, they were thinking along the same lines). The standard train consisted of about forty wagons, into which were crammed some combination of farting soldiers, incontinent horses, ammunition, rum, letters from home, and anything else that needed to be moved from Point A to Point B. There were also added a few passenger coaches (for officers) and some flat open trucks (for anything too large to shove through a goods wagon door), for a total average tonnage of "really really really loving heavy". As you might expect, this had a detrimental effect on the top speed of such a train. The theoretical speed limit was twenty miles per hour, a spectacularly optimistic estimate; their actual speeds were generally reckoned at somewhere between four and seven miles per hour (or about 100 yards per minute), and with so many trains on the line, unexplained random halts were a regular and unavoidable fact of life. Anyone who got bored, or whose nose couldn't stand it any more (I believe that the term "pongo", being a British equivalent to "grunt" dates back to about now-ish, and these trains were excellent at demonstrating the maxim "where the Army goes, the pong goes"), and who was in reasonable physical shape, could therefore quite easily get out of a moving train, run off down the track, spend five or ten agreeable minutes sitting under a tree, or by a stream, or inspecting some other point of mild geographical interest, get up, rejoin the train near the back, have a short rest, and then run forward again to where he was supposed to be. (Hope you enjoy run-on sentences!) It was also not unknown for the thirsty to send a mildly fast runner up to the engine-driver with a large dixie can, which would then be filled with boiling water and returned to the train at just the right temperature for a nice cup of tea (if the occupants were British) or coffee (if French); nor was it for the hungry soldier to refresh himself with a few minutes' scrumping in an apple orchard. Meanwhile, in the officers' carriages, we find the story of some subalterns of the 15th Brigade RFA who, finding themselves trapped in an old coach with no internal corridors (only compartments), were forced to climb along the outside of the train (which was, quite exceptionally, achieving about twelve miles an hour down a gentle gradient with a clear line ahead) in order to reach the compartment which contained both their senior officers and the luncheon basket (not to mention the port and brandy). And, of course, it was almost required by King's Regulations for a unit whose men found themselves shoved into something that looked (and smelled) suspiciously like a cattle truck to amuse themselves by moo-ing or baa-ing loudly whenever they passed through a town, or anywhere else that had civilians hanging around. The arrangement of lots of wagons and a few coaches also proved extremely useful when the trains were not being used to ferry battalions about the place; if anyone needed to get from point A to point B behind the lines and wasn't in a massive amount of hurry about how it was done (for instance, when going on leave), it was a simple matter of going to the nearest railway station and getting on the first supply train with a spare seat that was heading in vaguely the right direction. The railways worked miracles on a daily basis to get poo poo where it needed to go, and with the large number of trainspotters in the world, I'm mildly surprised that nobody yet appears to have written anything substantial and accessible about them.
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Sep 28, 2014 00:09
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The Merry Marauder posted:I'm not sure what you mean by "combat troops arriving from the front" being a "never gonna happen situation," since Wright's VI Corps absolutely did get hustled up to DC by steamship, arriving at the same time Early did on 11 July. Sorry, misread that as the Confederates getting support in a conquest quote:
No, it wasn't irrelevant, it was for headlines. That's it. It would have no real effect on anything except get people to yell at Grant and militia to form in response. And, as stated above, there were already troops there threatening early off any idea he should continue I don't see where anyone made the statement that the forts were teaming with full garrisons. But the idea that they were so undermanned that DC was vulnerable to some Confederate attack is obviously a wash too. SocketWrench fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Sep 28, 2014 |
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Sep 28, 2014 01:54
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The Merry Marauder posted:The tone of the narratives I've seen sound as though Early's commanders were unable to keep discipline, extending the, as you rightly point out, necessary resupply delays, and causing straggling, hungover and otherwise. One of the common threads throughout the 1864 campaign is how the Confederate armies in general tended to hemorrhage troops from desertion, because of the privations involved and the southern drafts. It doesn't surprise me that this would be a problem with Early's army.
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Sep 28, 2014 02:16
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So when did the US first try launching combat drones off carriers? Apparently WW2.
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Sep 28, 2014 04:36
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Pretty much. I was just at the Eglin AFB Armaments Museum, and they have a drone aircraft from 1947 or so. Mostly for being a target, but it could also bomb poo poo. The modern discourse on drones is stupid as gently caress, the discussion should be about the extra-legal killings; whether the bomb was delivered by drone or by F-15 doesn't really matter.
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Sep 28, 2014 08:53
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago I don't know about elsewhere, but the "Trip to Paris" wagon photo is, for some reason, in every single history textbook published in Poland.
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Sep 28, 2014 09:20
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PittTheElder posted:Pretty much. I was just at the Eglin AFB Armaments Museum, and they have a drone aircraft from 1947 or so. Mostly for being a target, but it could also bomb poo poo. I think at least part of it is that drones allow war without any real risk, the individual drone is cheap enough that losing it doesn't really matter, and the pilots are safe in the US. That massively lowers the political cost of going to war, making it far easier to decide to do so.
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Sep 28, 2014 13:31
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ArchangeI posted:I think at least part of it is that drones allow war without any real risk, the individual drone is cheap enough that losing it doesn't really matter, and the pilots are safe in the US. That massively lowers the political cost of going to war, making it far easier to decide to do so. The same can be said of... well anything. I mean it's a fair point "We have got the Maxim gun and they have not" but I'm kinda imagining Roman citizens chanting "say no to the scuta."
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Sep 28, 2014 16:08
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ArchangeI posted:I think at least part of it is that drones allow war without any real risk, the individual drone is cheap enough that losing it doesn't really matter, and the pilots are safe in the US. That massively lowers the political cost of going to war, making it far easier to decide to do so. But for all the wars engaged in by the US in the last 20 years, that is effectively equally true for the F-15. Drones can only operate effectively in highly permissive airspaces, and if you can't shoot down the drones effectively you're not going to be taking out jet aircraft. How many jet fighters/bombers has the US lost to enemy fire since the beginning of the First Gulf War? Is it even 10?
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Sep 28, 2014 16:42
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PittTheElder posted:But for all the wars engaged in by the US in the last 20 years, that is effectively equally true for the F-15. Drones can only operate effectively in highly permissive airspaces, and if you can't shoot down the drones effectively you're not going to be taking out jet aircraft. How many jet fighters/bombers has the US lost to enemy fire since the beginning of the First Gulf War? Is it even 10? Way more than that. If you ignore contractors (god knows the media ignores contractor casualties) and filter out the ones that were lost on the ground due to enemy action so that you're only looking at shoot-downs or mechanical failures during combat operations it's 31 fixed wing, 121 rotary wing in Afghanistan and 24 fixed wing, 133 rotary wing in Iraq. That includes all coalition forces because I'm too lazy to go through and subtract the French, Brits, Germans, etc. but the majority of those are Americans. Between GW1 and GW2 we had 3 aircraft lost to enemy fire: Scott O'Grady's little adventure, the F117, and an F16C a couple months after the Nighthawk. More importantly than the raw numbers, however, even having just a couple pilots killed, captured, or just put in danger can be a massive media shitshow. O'Grady was a fuckup in a lot of ways, but just look how much media attention his little saga got. gently caress, in the case of something like the F117 just having the shoot down happen is borderline catastrophic because of how much it challenges the narrative of invincible American super-tech. Either way, shooting down an American airplane can be a pretty big loving deal. Having video of Serbians dancing on the burning wing of a stealth fighter causes some pretty significant blow-back, and I don't think there's too many people in the military who don't still shudder a bit at the reaction to the video of the bodies of those helicopter pilots being drug through the streets of Mogadishu by their heels. Having American wreckage and American bodies out there for photo-ops is something to be avoided. Drones though? Regardless of the reality the idea is out there pretty firmly that they're cheap and disposable. To the average American they're somewhere between "cruise missile" and "beater used car" in terms of disposability. Hearing that one gets shot down is a complete non-story. gently caress, even claims that the Iranians hacked a few and brought them down intact were met with more or less a resounding "meh." The things could be 10x the cost to field and employ as a manned airplane but the idea that they're cheap and trivially replaced expendable items that are 100% safe to operate (at least as far as American lives go) is so entrenched in the public view that most people don't object to them at all. The only ones who do are the sort of people who give a poo poo about the President killing random foreigners on a whim, which is sadly a really loving tiny percentage of the population. The American anti-war stance has almost always been based squarely in squeamishness over our own casualties, rather than guilt over what we inflict on others. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Sep 28, 2014 |
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Sep 28, 2014 17:32
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Well, an F-15 which is rather dated still goes for 28-30 mil a piece while the current Reaper drone is 16 mil. I'm pretty sure the maintenance and fuel for a twin engined jet ranges far above a prop driven mostly electronics glider. I think what makes the government love it the most is adaptability, safety, and can be used in almost any setting by any of the modern generation brought up on 'vidya games' and be used over every branch of the armed forces along with other government agencies including Homeland security and NASA. I mean this is a system that can be changed and adapted on a whim and is cheap to do, doesn't risk the lives of the pilot right up to the point it's some dude in the field with the unit that needs it, and can be launched in much worse and compact conditions than a modern fighter with exception to the Harrier and a few others. Sure a drone isn't gonna go win a dogfight with some manned plane, but honestly how often do we go up against anything with serious air power?
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Sep 28, 2014 19:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:The only ones who do are the sort of people who give a poo poo about killing random foreigners on a whim, which is sadly a really loving tiny percentage of the population. The anti-war stance has almost always been based squarely in squeamishness over our own casualties, rather than guilt over what we inflict on others. Let's be fair, as much as I've no love for America, this is a matter of human nature.
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Sep 28, 2014 20:53
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Tollymain posted:Let's be fair, as much as I've no love for America, this is a matter of human nature. Oh yeah, no question about that. You want to see a total intolerance for military casualties look at Europe. Admittedly their protesters seem to care a bit more about civilian casualties and collateral damage on the other side, but jesus loving christ the coverage when a couple career military officers get blown up doing a job that they've trained 20+ years for.
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Sep 28, 2014 21:18
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EOD?
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Sep 28, 2014 21:37
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I wonder how long EOD's had a dedicated role?
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Sep 28, 2014 21:38
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Tollymain posted:EOD? No, I was just vaguely generalizing based on the coverage I remember from a few incidents of Bundeswehr officers getting IED'd the last time I was going through Germany. I probably should have been a lot more specific. Still, the larger point is that friendly casualties are really, really loving toxic from any kind of domestic political angle for Americans, arguably even more toxic in the European context, and no one really seems to give even half as much of a poo poo about casualties (combatant or not) on the other side, hence why drones are so favored when they can be employed.
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Sep 28, 2014 21:50
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