Biffmotron posted:

Heyo, I know this one! World War 1, with the immense expansion of the American Army. John Carson is the definitive guy, either in his book The Measure of Merit or the Army specific article version, Army Alpha, Army Brass, and the Search for Army Intelligence. The idea was to promote smart people instead of idiots. It wasn't great, but possibly better than nothing, and the ASVAB is it's modern descendant. Keep in mind that psychiatry during this time was more eager to see things in terms of general mental deficiency than we are today, so depression, anxiety, hallucinations, would all be symptoms of an underlying 'feeblemindedness', rather than disorders largely independent of cognitive ability.

Short version is that with the declaration of war, the US Army had to expand from 6,000 officers and 200,000 enlisted, to an ultimate size of 3.5 million men. Prewar, the Army had been a quiet, dusty, semi-colonial service, still patrolling Indian reservations in the West and occasionally oppressing the Philippines and Latin America. World War 1 required a much bigger, much more aggressive army. A couple of psychologists, Lewis Terman and Roger Yerkes, convinced the Army that they had a fast and reliable test that could take the vast mass of enlistees and sort them out into officer-candidates, sergeants, corporals, and privates without the time consuming mess of individually assessing each man. They developed two tests, Army Alpha for literate men, and Army Beta for illiterate men, and managed to set up a testing apparatus that could administer 300,000 tests a month.

The Army Alpha had a bunch of interesting side effects. First, it was the largest deployment of intelligence testing yet, and Carson argues that it reoriented that US Army's ideas of what made a good soldier away from personal bearing and character towards intelligence and adaptability. Post-war, Yerkes, Terman, and their acolytes would go on to do intelligence testing in a variety of educational and corporate contexts through the 20s and 30s. Unsurprisingly, the test was fairly poorly designed; many of the questions were based on WASPy knowledge, and poorly administered in noisy drafty barracks. The enlisted population did poorly, and immigrants did even worse, leading to handwringing through the 30s that the mental age of the American soldier was 13, and that Southern and Eastern European immigrants were destroying American culture and productivity with their low intelligence.

Now, as for psychological testing more broadly, on personality types and suitability for command, probably during WW2, when there was more institutional experience with social scientists, and a more technological war demanded more expertise. Somebody who knows how nuclear weapons officers are evaluated for psychological stability might be able to saw more.

khwarezm posted:

Quick question, I know pitched battles have generally been given too much emphasis in popular history (especially compared to sieges), but in what periods in history would people think they might have assumed maximum importance and why? Napoleonic Era maybe? Alexandrian conquests and the subsequent Hellenistic wars perhaps?

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

Honestly the Russo-Japanese War was lost on land before Tsushima. Kuropatkin's immense caution combined with Stessel's terrible mismanagement of Port Arthur's defence meant that a lot of the wrong lessons were taken away by observers (such as the continued belief in the effectiveness of frontal assault and elan) which is part of how the First World War starts out as such a mess.

Still want to pick up a copy of Pleshakov, ofc. I have Brusilov's "A Soldier's Note-Book" and need a complementary Imperial naval volume.

Phobophilia posted:

so what you're saying is that japan is responsible for killing even more white people than just the russians

xthetenth posted:

After the hit they may not have actually done anything wrong, and I tend to agree they didn't. What I very seriously contest is the notion that a single bomb being able to put an aircraft carrier in a state of "pack it up guys, this isn't getting fixed" is a state that you get in without very severe, embarassing flaws in the design phase. USN design made a better showing, the Yorktown and Hornet took a beating and the absolute cataclysmic worst case happened to one of their carriers with the Franklin taking two bombs in the middle of actively warming up aircraft and in the process of fueling, with the added bonus of a nice rack of 14,000 pounds of rockets on it to cook off. Unlike a great many ships that suffered serious damage, the Franklin's hull was in perfectly good shape, even after the hangar deck was a hellish cataclysm.


Yeah, I'm pretty sure that oh gee guys we lost a ship to a hit our enemies would survive in the worst possible case and laugh off and be back in the fight in under an hour most likely is a pretty major embarrassment and sign that there's some real systemic failures.

xthetenth posted:

Well, it's more that the 1942 campaign was much more destructive to the Japanese than Yellow Sea, and left them in a very bad position for a much larger second force. And if we weren't talking about Japanese planning for WWII I'd worry I was torturing the metaphor. But more accurately they fought the battles of 1942 as something like their idea of initial sparring between carriers and light forces, and didn't realize it was a prelude to the decisive battle, it was the decisive campaign, and they needed to outright win it.

(Also the Japanese crewing issues are discussed in Kaigun as well, which is pretty fantastic and I need to finish Sunburst).


I believe it was, and if I remember right it was pretty key in getting one of the bomber squadrons through. Overall, the US had a lot of things go very right at Midway. A lot of its top pilots turned in great performances, the brunt of their end of the fight fell on their veteran carrier, and continual pressure resulted in things eventually going right (it's all right Nautilus, all your effort came through in a big way).

Panzeh posted:

The funny thing about Midway was that it made for a year and a half or so of very tepid, abortive carrier operations on both sides that made the war distinctly not a carrier war.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

Agree with you completely that it's a systemic embarrassment. I just don't think that the crew did anything particularly wrong, and the minute that bomb was released Akagi was hosed no matter what.

Panzeh posted:

The funny thing about Midway was that it made for a year and a half or so of very tepid, abortive carrier operations on both sides that made the war distinctly not a carrier war.

sullat posted:

I suppose the ultimate lesson from Midway was that if you can't poo poo out 3 or 4 fully formed & upgraded carrier task forces within two or three years, you really are at a major strategic disadvantage.

HEY GAL posted:

18th to mid-19th century, I think. According to this guy it took the importance of a trial by combat writ large, while those people are much less reluctant than my guys to give a set-piece battle, since it's less costly for them.

This reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves, which is modern people judging 17th century commanders by 18th/19th century criteria. Count the later--or even 20th century--assumptions in this excerpt from a review of a good Osprey book on Luetzen:


I should do a series of effortposts on Luetzen when the anniversary comes around next month, I think it's my favorite battle. Ideally, I should get a Gustavus Adolphus fanboy to do it in tandem with me to avoid bias.

khwarezm posted:

Interesting, so was the increasingly large scale of armies and ability to rapidly pull up reinforcements and replacements for losses as state apparatus became more sophisticated playing a role here? The usual reasoning for the rarity of pitched battles I've heard is the extreme risk they entailed, but if you can replace losses more easily that would be less of an issue.

HEY GAL posted:

I should do a series of effortposts on Luetzen when the anniversary comes around next month, I think it's my favorite battle.

Panzeh posted:

The funny thing about Midway was that it made for a year and a half or so of very tepid, abortive carrier operations on both sides that made the war distinctly not a carrier war.

HEY GAL posted:

define middle ages. are you talking my dudes? rodrigo diaz's dudes?

HEY GAL posted:

The second one, plus the part that everyone assumes the common soldiers are there of their own free will. (Yes, so are 18th or 19th century common soldiers, but they're more...organized) Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus are taking for granted the fact that if either of them loses heavily, the survivors stand a good chance of simply dispersing. It's a huge expensive hassle to raise another army after that.

Meanwhile, considering fights are so rare, a bunch of things follow. Like how a successful early 17th century commander is not necessarily someone who wins fights, it's someone who can raise armies and keep them together. Ernst von Mansfeld lost I think all pitched battles he was involved in, but he kept getting hired because of that. That and he appears to have been good at asymmetrical warfare and retreats.

TheFluff posted:

No sane commander in the 30YW wanted a battle.

my dad posted:

Shut the gently caress up, Keldoclock

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

Agree with you completely that it's a systemic embarrassment. I just don't think that the crew did anything particularly wrong, and the minute that bomb was released Akagi was hosed no matter what.

Cythereal posted:

Well that and if the IJN's leadership had been intellectually honest and the entire Imperial leadership not terminally dysfunctional Midway would never have happened because the entire strategic plan that Midway was a part of was a fool's errand and the wargaming in preparation for the operation revealed critical flaws in the Japanese plans that Yamamoto and company simply ignored.

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Sorry to bring this up from a couple pages ago, but what did "Army Beta" entail? I'm guessing a test for illiterates had lower expectations, so what was the upper range for people who took the Beta? Sergeant?

Frostwerks posted:

This is weird too because it seems that at least on the Internet the IJN is often perceived as being the competent branch of the empire of Japan's armed forces, at least when it came to fighting capable foes and not running roughshod over poorly disciplined/equipped/supplied locals and isolated garrisons.

Biffmotron posted:

Biffmotron posted:

The questions were some pretty ticky-tacky bullshit.

Tomn posted:

Question 12 seems like "All of the above" would have been a reasonably legitimate answer to a lot of people at the time.

And question 16 seems like it's begging for a write-in.

HEY GAL posted:

my dudes know what's up with question 1

Tomn posted:

Question 12 seems like "All of the above" would have been a reasonably legitimate answer to a lot of people at the time.

And question 16 seems like it's begging for a write-in.

Nebakenezzer posted:

As the LSAT says, it's not about getting the actual correct best answer, its about providing the best answer in the technical sense of the question

BurningStone posted:

That's an interesting test, because it's not measuring what we'd call intelligence today. It looks more like it's intended to screen out those who are clueless or not taking it seriously than to find geniuses.

Slavvy posted:

So I'm guessing that book leaves out all the whores and gambling?