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Rent-A-Cop posted:Which significantly contributed to almost sinking an aircraft carrier. Turns out Composition B doesn't store well in tropical climates. Turns out bombs filled with ooooold Comp B and an aircraft filled with John McCain is a really bad combination.
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Apr 22, 2015 10:31
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LeadSled posted:Turns out bombs filled with ooooold Comp B and an aircraft filled with John McCain is a really bad combination. Eh, if it lasts until he is airborne and well away from anyone else...
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Apr 22, 2015 11:01
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LeadSled posted:Turns out bombs filled with ooooold Comp B and an aircraft filled with John McCain is a really bad combination. John McCain's plane wasn't involved at all. It was an F-4 with a Zuni and the drop tank and bombs on a different A-4.
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Apr 22, 2015 12:22
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago
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Apr 22, 2015 12:35
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Tomn posted:Incidentally, what exactly led to the development of fascism in Italy and Germany? In Germany it's often said that the experience of defeat in WW1 combined with punishing peace terms was what led to the revanchism that allowed the Nazis to rise to power, but Italy and Japan were both on the winning sides of WW1, so that hardly seems to be the same trigger. So I kind of promised an effortpost, but it will have to come in installments because  and there's a limit to how much I can shitpost about fascism at work. So let's make this an intro to fascism, starting with an intro to the Marxist historical explanation for fascism. Hopefully other people can build on what I say.Fascism: Part I The first point I'd like to make is a point about definitions in general. Whenever you're trying to define something, particularly something as large and nebulous as fascism, you are inevitably going to get in to deeper problems around 'what is fascism' that go beyond dictionary definition problems. This is a methology borrowed from Raymond Geuss. When you're dealing with an ideology you're dealing with at least the following: 1. The history of fascism as an idea: that is to say, how the ideology of fascism developed in its context, as something that is historically contingent in its time. This obviously has problems as you still have a difficulty in deciding to include in your studies, but this methodology is necessarily very eclectic. 2. A doctrine of fascism: this is where you attempt to codify a set of some coherent core principles of fascism, rendering the ideology more uniform; it will involve 'that without which' statements. This way is inevitably going to result in cutting out a lot of historical data and historical contingencies. Umberto Eco's ur-fascism is a micro-version of this. Here you are basically searching for the most consistent version of fascism. 3. Fascism as a tradition of thinking: where fascism initiates an intellectual tradition of fascism, in the same way Marx initiates a tradition of Marxism (that is not intended as conflation). 4. Fascism as something that is really just a bundle of different divergent ideas. As you can see, 1, 3 and 4 are somewhat related. 5. Fascism as practice: wherein one studies how fascism actually and concretely functions in the world as a functioning ideology. Here one is engaged in a broader field of study and is not really being a textualist - this includes sociology, architecture, history, art history etc. This is particularly useful as an area of study because there is always a dissonance between ideology as espoused and how it is actualised. In other words, analysed this way we bundle the application of fascism in with its ideals and study it that way. Note that this is necessarily harder to do with fascism than it is with some other ideologies because its point of origin is much more indeterminate than it is for some others, because fascism does not have one germinal or main thinker, or indeed a great one, and is often thought of in the popular imagination primarily by way of 5 - as a form of practice. But thinking in this way may help you realise when you are talking with someone at crossed purposes about fascism, because you're not using the same methodology. Historical Analyses of Fascism Meta-Historical: Marxist Responses to Fascism I borrow this excellent paragraph from Wiki's 'definitions of fascism' page: Georgi Dimitrov posted:"Fascism is an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of the financial capital... Fascism is neither the government beyond classes nor the government of the petty bourgeois or the lumpen-proletariat over the financial capital. Fascism is the government of the financial capital itself. It is an organized massacre of the working class and the revolutionary slice of peasantry and intelligentsia. Fascism in its foreign policy is the most brutal kind of chauvinism, which cultivates zoological hatred against other peoples." This is a response to fascism that one has to get to grips with early, because it is a commonplace description of fascism. This is a typical Marxian response to fascism. Essentially, it sees fascism as capitalism's dialectic response to communism. Fascism is capitalism's final last-gasp response to save capitalism from communism by the use of the state apparatus to destroy the revolutionary potential of the working class by a combination of violent repression, state control of the educational and informational apparatus, etc. as well as the close collaboration between the state and capital in a form of state capitalism. It also works to try to compel the workers to accept new and heightened forms of false consciousness, such as the reactionary conceptions of organic nationalism, conservative religion and so forth. It is possible at this point to really go on for a very long time, but this is the essential, basic, crude Marxist response to fascism. The analysis is much more complicated than this, as this quotation would suggest: quote:As early as 1921 he [Gramsci] saw that it was not merely "reactionary" and that it had complex internal divisions reconciled only in a common fear of, and antipathy towards, the proletariat The far left has probably written more books about fascism than fascists would ever think of writing. I would point you towards, for starters. T. Adorno, Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda T. Adorno, The Authoritarian personality et al. (Adorno wrote a lot about it) H. Marcuse, Technology, War and Fascism L. Trotsky, Fascism: What it is and how to fight it A. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks W. Bejamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction I can't hope to go over all of this in detail, but I will talk about some key themes. This post I'll talk about fascism as a failed revolution: Fascism as failed revolution There is a strong tradition in Marxist thinking that regards the rise of fascist regimes as evidence of a failed revolution, or of a situation where a revolution could have been possible. Trotsky posted:The successes of fascism easily make people lose all perspective, lead them to forget the actual conditions which made the strengthening and the victory of fascism possible. Yet a clear understanding of these conditions is of especial importance to the workers of he United States. We may set it down as a historical law: fascism was able to conquer only in those countries where the conservative labor parties prevented the proletariat from utilizing the revolutionary situation and seizing power.... Zizek, quoting Bejamin posted:...Walter Benjamin's old insight that “every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution”: the rise of Fascism is the Left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, which the Left was not able to mobilize. Adamson, on Gramsci posted:Fascism is not the product of a standoff between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but of the proletariat's outright defeat in a political setting where the bourgeoisie is dominant despite the intrinsic weaknesses of its political institutions. In prison Gramsci will use the concept of hegemony to develop this insight into a highly original theory of fascism as a form of "Caesarism." In fact, Gramsci believed that fascism was a deep form of continued crisis - a revolutionary situation - but also a form of containment for it. Next post I will expand on this a little, and write a section on Marxist thinkers who conceputalised fascism aesthetically - particularly Benjamin. Then I will write about the liberal response to fascism, as well as the right wing libertarian/neo-liberal response embodied by people like Hayek, which is in stark contrast to the Marxist viewpoint. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 12:53 on Apr 22, 2015 |
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Apr 22, 2015 12:51
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gradenko_2000 posted:The USN also tapped WW2 ammo stockpiles in Subic Naval Base for use in South Vietnam during the early part of the Vietnam War. The US was tapping a lot of things, including old APs with inadequate cargo securing gear- the loss of the SS Badger State is a touchstone moment in maritime safety. quote:She was hired under contract with the Military Sea Transportation Service in 1969, she sailed from Naval Weapons Station Bangor around December 12th, 1969 with a full load of 8,900 bombs, rockets, shells and mines bound for Da Nang, South Vietnam. As the ship made its way across the North Pacific she came into heavy weather roughly 550 miles North of Midway Island on the 17th and began to roll heavily in the growing waves and howling winds. As the ship rolled from side to side, the securing bands on her dangerous cargo began to give way threatening to let the bombs come loose onboard, meaning almost certain destruction for ship and her crew. Racing to re-secure the cargo in the midst of a major storm, the crew of the Badger State used everything they could to shore up the dangerous load of bombs; ships mattresses, hatch boards, spare lifejackets, chairs, linen, stores, mooring lines and even frozen meat to keep the bombs from coming loose.
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Apr 22, 2015 12:59
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Mortabis posted:John McCain's plane wasn't involved at all. It was an F-4 with a Zuni and the drop tank and bombs on a different A-4. True, but it was the Skyhawk right next to his. Man had poo poo luck when it came to planes. That being said, it's amazing how much worse the old bombs were when it came to stability. They were supposed to be rated for 10 minutes of fire exposure, but blew after less than two. Plus, they had become 50 percent stronger. Man, the Forrestal fire was a complete mess all around 
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Apr 22, 2015 13:18
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tonberrytoby posted:What did the Germans expect from the Gas attack, if they didn't expect it to make the French vacate their trenches? Oh that's right, that's what I needed to add. Um, so this needs to be taken in context with how the French tried to use tear gas in August 1914, but it was in far too small a quantity to be effective (most of the enemy didn't even notice), and the Germans tried to use a heavy quantity of tear gas a couple of months ago at Bolimow on the Eastern Front, but it was so cold that the gas froze and did gently caress-all. They genuinely had no real sense of how much the gas would or wouldn't dissipate on its way across No Man's Land, and how intense and deadly the concentration would be even miles behind the front. For them it was much more in the nature of a further trial of an experimental weapon that they hoped would make it easier for their men to advance against resistance, with mass deployment for a big push a few months down the line if it succeeded in giving them a modest advance.
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Apr 22, 2015 13:26
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Trin Tragula posted:the Germans tried to use a heavy quantity of tear gas a couple of months ago at Bolimow on the Eastern Front, but it was so cold that the gas froze and did gently caress-all. 
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Apr 22, 2015 13:31
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wars involving russia seem to have a way of somehow being even more miserable than other wars
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Apr 22, 2015 15:38
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golden bubble posted:But what would a war economy look like today if two major powers got into a prolonged, conventional conflict? IE, how would a Call of Duty economy function? First, the likelihood of us ever seeing a full scale war economy such as it was in WWII is pretty remote. Perhaps not impossible, but pretty remote. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the big ones are: - The chances of two nuclear powers fighting a "to the death" conquerer-wins type of war is almost completely nonexistent. As soon as a major population is seriously threatened by a conventional force, nukes will start flying, and there isn't anybody who can deploy and sustain a force of sufficient combat power to overcome a geographically distant dedicated opponent anyway. - Most plausible scenarios wherein two major powers fight one another will most likely require both parties to deploy forces across long distances (eg, conflict over relatively distant friction point). Strategic mobility and sustainment across distance is a fundamental upper limit on the size of the forces that can participate. The US has more strategic lift capacity than the rest of the world put together and is still on a months-long timeline for any major combat operation. For everyone else, this is a massive limitation. That being said, we still might see something like a "war economy", it would just look substantially different from what we saw in WWI and WWII. Duh, but some of the big differences: - Manufacturing in the traditional sense is not going to be a critical factor. Every major power now has the capacity to churn out ludicrous numbers of steel tank hulls or rifle rounds or non-precision artillery rounds in fairly short order: supply chains are incredibly effective, manufacturing processes are agile and efficient, facilities are largely already in place and could easily outproduce even acute needs in a matter of months. The issue is, the need for these things in world war quantities is simply not there. Traditional tanks are little more than targets on a battlefield with precision munitions and persistent multi spectrum ISR; dumb artillery rounds used in traditional massed fire missions are a lot more dangerous to their operators than they are to an opponent (counterfire has gotten very, very good), and so on. - Manufacturing of precision electronic componentry WILL be a critical factor. This kind of manufacturing is very different from the war industry of the past: there are a lot more bottlenecks that aren't easy or sometimes even possible to overcome, such as skilled workers, technologically advanced facilities, and most importantly, very rare raw materials. Practically every scenario has both sides burning through very limited stockpiles of precision munitions very, very quickly, so the ability to scale up production of precision munitions will be huge deal. Availability of low density components, like rare earth metals, will play a big role. I'm not any sort of expert on the details of this, but the people who do know are concerned enough that strategic stockpiles of this stuff are being established by just about everyone with the money to do so. - Cost of this stuff also starts to become a big factor. As an illustration: A P-51D in 1945 cost around $50k, around $700k today. An AIM-120D AAM costs almost three times as much; Patriot MSE or SM-6 interceptors cost several times what an AIM-120D does. Everyone will rack up colossal amounts of war debt of course, but even then cost will be a serious limitation on how much of this stuff can be fielded and in turn will limit the need for a major shift in domestic economy to produce the stuff. This also provides a pretty significant limitation on how many actual shooters can effectively participate in such a conflict. You can send a bunch of conscripts with SKSes in the back of 6x6 trucks to the fight, but they're not going to be able to contribute much to a networked, precision type of fight. In the case of an expeditionary conflict, their movement and sustainment requirements probably make them more a hindrance than anything. - Economies will be attacked, but not kinetically. No one really knows what unrestricted cyber warfare will look like, but just about everyone, myself included, thinks that it will be ugly as all hell. I don't know how many dumb bombs it took for the USAAF and RAF to make a relatively limited dent in the German war economy, but I am pretty confident in saying that a single highly skilled hacker could do as much damage as all of those bombs put together without having to leave his hometown. All sides are going to go to town on this stuff, and it has the potential to be globally disruptive in ways we've never seen before. It is very hard to see a scenario of this type where busting out mothballed/warehoused WWII era weapons makes any sense, both strategically and economically. The current conflicts in the middle east really aren't a good preview of a conflict between heavy peer competitors; aged stuff can and has worked there, but those contestants are fighting a WWII era conflict in a lot of ways, just with cell phones and twitter.
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Apr 22, 2015 16:08
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V. Illych L. posted:wars involving russia seem to have a way of somehow being even more miserable than other wars That's because Russia's strategy usually boils down to: 1. Endure seemly unendurable beating. 2. Wait for General Winter to show what unendurable REALLY means. 3. Take whatever steps are necessary to finish off weakened opponent. This almost never fails except in the case of internal strife and/or Mongol hordes. This is a grotesque summery and should be taken with a grain of salt. E: I forgot the Russo-Japanese war but that was a fairly limited conflict. Klaus88 fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Apr 22, 2015 |
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Apr 22, 2015 16:16
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Klaus88 posted:That's because Russia's strategy usually boils down to: It's a summery that really only applies to the Napoleonic and WW2 invasions, and even then those two events are incredibly different. It's also really unfairly dismissive of a lot of actual strategic thinking that's gone on inside Russia between Kievan Rus and the Russian Federation.
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Apr 22, 2015 16:20
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Something that always bugged about the Forrestal fire: Shattered Sword and this thread always made a big point about how laughable Japanese damage control was compared to the USA in the pacific, which directly caused the loss of a number of ships. I thought that one of the poitns of this was that US ships trained all of their crew as firefighters while the Japanese had dedicated firemen who were often killed, rendering the ship helpless. However one of the major problems of the Forrestal fire was that dedicated firefighters went up to fight the fires on deck but were killed by exploding munitions, making damage control much, much harder. Did something change in Navy damage control between the wars (i'm guessing less emphasis on DC as carriers were not under as much threat) ? Or have I misunderstood the makeup of US damage control during WWII?
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Apr 22, 2015 16:21
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MikeCrotch posted:However one of the major problems of the Forrestal fire was that dedicated firefighters went up to fight the fires on deck but were killed by exploding munitions, making damage control much, much harder. Did something change in Navy damage control between the wars (i'm guessing less emphasis on DC as carriers were not under as much threat) ? Or have I misunderstood the makeup of US damage control during WWII? Welcome to the incredibly fragile nature of institutional knowledge. I'm sure one of our actual Navy gurus will chime in with much better info, but as I recall the Forrestal fire was a huge wake up call to the Navy about how much they'd let their damage control techniques slide in the intervening ~20 years . This is also why it's such a huge deal that the brits are essentially bowing out of the aircraft carrier business. You can mothball all the hulls you want, but there is a whole host of very specific professional knowledge that is handed down through direct training (both formal and on the job) and which never makes it into the various manuals and textbooks, no matter how thoroughly you try to document it.
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Apr 22, 2015 16:29
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's a summery that really only applies to the Napoleonic and WW2 invasions, and even then those two events are incredibly different. I'm sorry if I came across as a  know it all about Russian strategic thinking.Can you actually share a bit about the views that have passed between Kiev and the Russian Federation?
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Apr 22, 2015 16:36
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quote:- Cost of this stuff also starts to become a big factor. As an illustration: A P-51D in 1945 cost around $50k, around $700k today. An AIM-120D AAM costs almost three times as much; Patriot MSE or SM-6 interceptors cost several times what an AIM-120D does. Everyone will rack up colossal amounts of war debt of course, but even then cost will be a serious limitation on how much of this stuff can be fielded and in turn will limit the need for a major shift in domestic economy to produce the stuff. This also provides a pretty significant limitation on how many actual shooters can effectively participate in such a conflict. You can send a bunch of conscripts with SKSes in the back of 6x6 trucks to the fight, but they're not going to be able to contribute much to a networked, precision type of fight. In the case of an expeditionary conflict, their movement and sustainment requirements probably make them more a hindrance than anything. Interestingly this was brought up at the time during WWI. One of the oft forgotten things about the advent of massed indirect artillery fire using modern fuses was that it was, very, very expensive compared to prior weapons and methods. Lloyd George is quoted as complaining that the taxpayer has to cough up £80,000 for a relatively small barrage before an attack that will probably not achieve very much. That's over £7.3 million in today's money.
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Apr 22, 2015 16:40
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Disinterested posted:So I kind of promised an effortpost,... I'm probably grossly misunderstanding the nuances of what you wrote but by the Dimitriov quote and some of the other statements wouldn't that make modern Russia (and to a lesser extent modern China) a Fascist state?
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Apr 22, 2015 16:40
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Murgos posted:I'm probably grossly misunderstanding the nuances of what you wrote but by the Dimitriov quote and some of the other statements wouldn't that make modern Russia (and to a lesser extent modern China) a Fascist state? You're going to have to show your working. The answer seems to me to be not really, since as a matter of fact proletarian identity is at a historic low level in both places and the threat of communism to capitalism in both places is diminishing, rather than growing. But in other respects it is an alliance between the state and capitalism in the interests of protecting both. Marxists think more than just this about fascism, of course: this is more of a causal account, in a meta-historical sense. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Apr 22, 2015 |
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Apr 22, 2015 16:47
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quote:Manufacturing of precision electronic componentry WILL be a critical factor. This kind of manufacturing is very different from the war industry of the past: there are a lot more bottlenecks that aren't easy or sometimes even possible to overcome, such as skilled workers, technologically advanced facilities, and most importantly, very rare raw materials. Practically every scenario has both sides burning through very limited stockpiles of precision munitions very, very quickly, so the ability to scale up production of precision munitions will be huge deal. Availability of low density components, like rare earth metals, will play a big role. I'm not any sort of expert on the details of this, but the people who do know are concerned enough that strategic stockpiles of this stuff are being established by just about everyone with the money to do so. China has the world's balls because of this. They own the rare earths market (95%+) not only in production but more importantly processing and manufacturing. They bought the market leaders and lots of patents decades ago and moved it all to China. Rare earths themselves are barely worth 4 billion but there's a several trillion dollar value chain hanging off the metal.
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Apr 22, 2015 16:57
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At some point, the usage of a nuclear weapon is the lower-cost option when considering the cost of a protracted conventional war. That's not even considering the global economic effects of a war between major powers causing a rapid resolution to the conflict. The outcome of Abrams tanks and T-90 tanks plugging away at each other on the steppes of central Asia requires not one but multiple Gay Black Hitlers.MikeCrotch posted:Interestingly this was brought up at the time during WWI. One of the oft forgotten things about the advent of massed indirect artillery fire using modern fuses was that it was, very, very expensive compared to prior weapons and methods. Lloyd George is quoted as complaining that the taxpayer has to cough up £80,000 for a relatively small barrage before an attack that will probably not achieve very much. That's over £7.3 million in today's money. So did Lloyd George just have personal beef with Jellicoe? Unless I've drastically been misreading Castles of Steel, this pattern of thinking (war as a game to be played conservatively) is kind of how Jellicoe preserved the fleet, and George seemed to really have it out for him. Then again, his major issue was around merchant convoys to protect against submarines, so maybe it was more along the lines of "look we don't have much because our loving economy is being deposited at the bottom of the Atlantic?" FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Apr 22, 2015 |
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Apr 22, 2015 17:03
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FAUXTON posted:So did Lloyd George just have personal beef with Jellicoe? Unless I've drastically been misreading Castles of Steel, this pattern of thinking (war as a game to be played conservatively) is kind of how Jellicoe preserved the fleet, and George seemed to really have it out for him. Then again, his major issue was around merchant convoys to protect against submarines, so maybe it was more along the lines of "look we don't have much because our loving economy is being deposited at the bottom of the Atlantic?" It's worth pointing out that the admiralty was loving useless at protecting shipping and Lloyd George's direct intervention basically caused the convoy system to be introduced and drastically reduced shipping losses. As armaments minister and PM Lloyd George constantly had to override and overturn the demands and orders of military leaders, it wouldn't surprise me if he thought they were all hopeless shitters.
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Apr 22, 2015 17:15
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FAUXTON posted:So did Lloyd George just have personal beef with Jellicoe? Unless I've drastically been misreading Castles of Steel, this pattern of thinking (war as a game to be played conservatively) is kind of how Jellicoe preserved the fleet, and George seemed to really have it out for him. Then again, his major issue was around merchant convoys to protect against submarines, so maybe it was more along the lines of "look we don't have much because our loving economy is being deposited at the bottom of the Atlantic?" Lloyd George didn't have too many dealings with Jellicoe early in the war IIRC - he did have a bunch of beef with Churchill over how much money would be allocated to building new dreadnoughts in addition to the fact that he thought Churchill was a warmongering arsehole. He seems to have turned on Jellicoe during the U-boat crisis due a combination of looking for a scapegoat to further his own aims (Lloyd-George was incredibly power hungry) combined with the fact that most high ranked people in the Admirality thought Jellicoe was not very competent. My quote was referring to the Army's use of artillery - Lloyd George locked heads with the generals on many occasions over their use of artillery, both in terms of cost and when he was Minister of Munitions and responsible for getting the shell supply crisis sorted out. He continued to be confrontational to the generals and particularly Haig (the two famously disliked each other) throughout the war - he was one of the people convinced that the war could not be won on the Western Front and that Britain's lives and money would be best spent elsewhere.
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Apr 22, 2015 17:25
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Disinterested posted:It's worth pointing out that the admiralty was loving useless at protecting shipping and Lloyd George's direct intervention basically caused the convoy system to be introduced and drastically reduced shipping losses. This is very much Lloyd George's view of events. Jellicoe wrote that while he would have liked to introduce convoys earlier, there were no spare destroyers to put this into practice at first, in additions to practical concerns about how dockyards would handle the influx of ships at once and how to control such a large group of merchant ships. The Admiralty version is that they had sorted all this out when Lloyd George told them to adopt convoys, at which point they did (since they were now ready) and he took all the credit while throwing Jellicoe under the bus. Disinterested posted:As armaments minister and PM Lloyd George constantly had to override and overturn the demands and orders of military leaders, it wouldn't surprise me if he thought they were all hopeless shitters. This is definitely true, he viewed the military establishment as unimaginative butchers.
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Apr 22, 2015 17:30
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MikeCrotch posted:This is very much Lloyd George's view of events. Jellicoe wrote that while he would have liked to introduce convoys earlier, there were no spare destroyers to put this into practice at first, in additions to practical concerns about how dockyards would handle the influx of ships at once and how to control such a large group of merchant ships. The Admiralty version is that they had sorted all this out when Lloyd George told them to adopt convoys, at which point they did (since they were now ready) and he took all the credit while throwing Jellicoe under the bus. Is the admiralty's view of events. It's probably somewhere in the middle, but I think the admiralty probably was pretty slow and required a little encouragement.
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Apr 22, 2015 17:33
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Klaus88 posted:Can you actually share a bit about the views that have passed between Kiev and the Russian Federation? Not really, I'm far from an expert on it. I just have the broadest grasp of the outlines - Kutuzov in the Napoleonic period, Svechin, Tukhachevsky, and the development of deep battle doctrine in the 20s-30s and its refinement across WW2, basically all stuff that you can just wikipedia if you're curious about Russian mil hist. I was just giving you poo poo for an overly generalized assessment of an entire national history based almost entirely on a specific stereotype. That sort of thing has been bugging the hell out of me recently, and not just in this thread (frankly, mostly in my non-SA daily work) so I probably came off a bit snarkier than I should have. Still, it's lazy thinking and should be avoided.
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Apr 22, 2015 17:33
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Disinterested posted:So I kind of promised an effortpost, but it will have to come in installments because Thanks! Your effort is appreciated. I have to admit, I've only got fairly cursory knowledge of the Marxist view of history, so this post is actually interesting to me not just for the perspectives on fascism. MikeCrotch posted:combined with the fact that most high ranked people in the Admirality thought Jellicoe was not very competent. So, was he? I'd walked away from my readings with the impression that Jellicoe was competent, but cautious - he understand that the Royal Navy won as long as it didn't lose, and so focused all his efforts on not-losing (at the cost of shying away from potential major victories, which everyone else was expecting of the Royal Navy). Is that accurate?
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Apr 22, 2015 17:51
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Tomn posted:So, was he? I'd walked away from my readings with the impression that Jellicoe was competent, but cautious - he understand that the Royal Navy won as long as it didn't lose, and so focused all his efforts on not-losing (at the cost of shying away from potential major victories, which everyone else was expecting of the Royal Navy). Is that accurate? Jellicoe was really, really competent and pretty much every historian lauds him. He had a bad reputation during the war for 2 big reasons: 1. The public and politicians expected a crushing defeat in the style of Nelson at Trafalgar and thus were hugely disappointed when the Royal Navy didn't go out and sink the entire German navy. Being commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet he copped a lot of flak for this especially when combined with... 2. He wasn't interested in court/playing the political game while being surrounded by others who were hugely concerned with their own image, notably Beatty and Churchill, who heaped scorn on him for being cautious at pretty much every opportunity they got and had the ear of influential people. While people took Beatty and Churchill's side during the war, hindsight has shown that Jellicoe's caution was for a very good reason in pretty much every case, while many of the failures can be laid squarely at the feet of his critics. For example, one of the major reasons that the Goeben escaped to Turkey was due to Churchill's interference, and analysis of the battle of Jutland shows that Beatty got himself into a mess by charging headlong into the High Seas Fleet while failing to relay proper reports to Jellicoe behind him.
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Apr 22, 2015 18:09
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Klaus88 posted:I'm sorry if I came across as a  )One Nazi in the thread is enough, please read The Myth of the Eastern Front and  .
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Apr 22, 2015 18:18
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Disinterested posted:You're going to have to show your working. Like I said, I'm probably grossly misunderstanding, political theory is not anything I have ever really had an interest for. The state sponsored control of capital for the enrichment of those who have control of the capital mostly. And in Russia's case there is a strong element of "Fascism in its foreign policy is the most brutal kind of chauvinism, which cultivates zoological hatred against other peoples." demonstrated by their behavior in former USSR client states. They are, admittedly missing the 'fear of the proletariat' portion, but I would just chalk that up to decades of repression under communism having already beat the proletariat down so far that anything looks better in comparison.
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Apr 22, 2015 18:21
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There's no theory that fits it all. These are just attempts to make sense of the spectacle from the Marxist perspective.
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Apr 22, 2015 18:38
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bewbies posted:- Economies will be attacked, but not kinetically. No one really knows what unrestricted cyber warfare will look like, but just about everyone, myself included, thinks that it will be ugly as all hell. I don't know how many dumb bombs it took for the USAAF and RAF to make a relatively limited dent in the German war economy, but I am pretty confident in saying that a single highly skilled hacker could do as much damage as all of those bombs put together without having to leave his hometown. All sides are going to go to town on this stuff, and it has the potential to be globally disruptive in ways we've never seen before. Speaking as a programmer, this is massive, massive hyperbole. People are (generally) not dumb enough to put the sort of systems that could cause that sort of damage on the internet. If it were that easy to do this kind of thing, people (terrorists) would already be doing it. It's not like say ISIS lacks tech-savvy people, and yet the worst we see out there tends to be websites being defaced and twitter accounts hijacked.
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Apr 22, 2015 18:58
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feedmegin posted:Speaking as a programmer, this is massive, massive hyperbole. People are (generally) not dumb enough to put the sort of systems that could cause that sort of damage on the internet. If it were that easy to do this kind of thing, people (terrorists) would already be doing it. It's not like say ISIS lacks tech-savvy people, and yet the worst we see out there tends to be websites being defaced and twitter accounts hijacked. There's fear of stuff like an improved Stuxnet worm being deployed on a massive scale, though, and internet is far from the only vector of infection.
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Apr 22, 2015 19:02
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Cyrano4747 posted:. We are? We just built two shiny new big ones, and per https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/nato-summit-2014-pm-end-of-summit-press-conference we're even going to actually operate both of them now. Bit short of planes for them for a few years (thanks to America loving up the JSF) but to say that Britain is getting out of the business is just incorrect.
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Apr 22, 2015 19:02
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my dad posted:There's fear of stuff like an improved Stuxnet worm being deployed on a massive scale, though, and internet is far from the only vector of infection. And getting to all these non-internet-connected, separate systems how? Stuxnet involved some guy physically and on site bringing a USB key into a secure facility. That doesn't scale, and doubly so in wartime.
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Apr 22, 2015 19:04
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Disinterested posted:Is the admiralty's view of events. It's probably somewhere in the middle, but I think the admiralty probably was pretty slow and required a little encouragement. It's almost certainly in the middle. The admiralty was probably being deliberate both as is characteristic of Jellicoe and for valid reason - he didn't want to run into any unforeseen complications with merchant convoys and when they proposed a relatively tight convoy formation plan to merchant shippers (the stretched-thin destroyer fleet available for the task needed a small area to cover) they basically told him to gently caress off and cited the low quality of their everything as reason they'd lose more tonnage to collisions than torpedoes. While Jellicoe was trying to figure out how to do more with less, George was lambasting the admiralty's sluggishness due to how dire the country's situation was. Dude wasn't overreacting, either, hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping were being sent to the seabed every month. Once American destroyers arrived, the crisis passed. That isn't to say Jellicoe solved the problem but he had good reasons to not have a solution quickly. George certainly had reason to want action, but it wasn't a problem with Jellicoe unless he could have gotten those US destroyers earlier. There was a neat bit in Castles about how the US commander who showed up with the first destroyers convalesced alongside Jellicoe after they were wounded during action against the Boxers in China some years earlier.
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Apr 22, 2015 19:05
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feedmegin posted:And getting to all these non-internet-connected, separate systems how? Stuxnet involved some guy physically and on site bringing a USB key into a secure facility. That doesn't scale, and doubly so in wartime. You greatly underestimate human stupidity/laziness.
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Apr 22, 2015 19:06
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feedmegin posted:Speaking as a programmer, this is massive, massive hyperbole. People are (generally) not dumb enough to put the sort of systems that could cause that sort of damage on the internet. If it were that easy to do this kind of thing, people (terrorists) would already be doing it. It's not like say ISIS lacks tech-savvy people, and yet the worst we see out there tends to be websites being defaced and twitter accounts hijacked. I don't think I can say much more on an unclassified forum but the US military disagrees very strongly. edit - rereading my post I do agree I hyperbolized on the "guy in basement" characterization; a more realistic depiction of such an operation is a large team of well trained cyber folks that have been organized and enabled by the entirety of the national resources available from the country employing them.
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Apr 22, 2015 19:07
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bewbies posted:I don't think I can say much more on an unclassified forum but the US military disagrees very strongly. That doesn't mean the US military is right.  They're as sensitive to hype as any other organisation.In any case, the only way you can deploy it on a 'massive scale' is by having a massive team of spies in your target country with physical access to masses of sensitive sites that in wartime will be guarded. I don't doubt it would happen to some extent, but it's not like sabotage hasn't always been a thing in wartime. It might be a bit easier to do now but not I suspect in a game-changing kind of way.
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Apr 22, 2015 19:14
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feedmegin posted:That doesn't mean the US military is right. Sure, hardened targets would probably be something only a dedicated team could get into but wouldn't the greater danger be to civilian infrastructure? A combined attack like Stuxnet could do enormous amounts of damage, especially due to the greater interconnectedness typical these days. E.g. mucking with Wallstreet or Comcast or whatever could be a perfect terror attack and thus also tie up government resources. I'm sure there's plenty of low hanging fruit that don't require access to sensitive places.
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Apr 22, 2015 19:56
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