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Xander77 posted:Oddly enough this contemporary poster was more popular, and retained the wonky eyes. What was the situation like with radio at the time? Did they have trench phonelines to tell someone by the big guns that they were being overun at X and Y?
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Mar 19, 2016 14:37
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From the Bones of Rednecks Rose Trump
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Mar 19, 2016 15:11
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Fulchrum posted:From what I heard it's relatively apolitical. It doesn't assign blame or talk about any stand down orders or anything, it's just using Benghazi as an excuse to make a siege movie. No, a "stand down order" is definitely a part of the Bay movie's story. It also depicts the security contractors at Benghazi as True American manly-man heroes, while the civilian State Department employees (including those four guys whose bloody shirts keep getting waved in this thread) are a bunch of pencil-neck geeks. anyway, cartoons!  
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Mar 19, 2016 15:39
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Isn't it already kind of like that but with Canadian tourists instead of American ones? Yes.
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Mar 19, 2016 15:39
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Mar 19, 2016 15:49
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It's pretty sad when mercenaries can be flipped to "American Heroes".
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Mar 19, 2016 16:16
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Xander77 posted:Meh. This is more of a mil-history thread debate, but: Given that you seem to know what you're talking about and I'm going off things I remember hearing once or twice, I will defer to you in this matter. But I think the point of "if you go to war, odds of coming back are not in your favor" was right, yes? LingcodKilla posted:It's pretty sad when mercenaries can be flipped to "American Heroes". Especially galling because the first to cheer on the mercenaries are the usual SUPPORT ARE TROOPS crowd.
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Mar 19, 2016 16:22
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LingcodKilla posted:It's pretty sad when mercenaries can be flipped to "American Heroes". I remember the outrage from conservatives over those Blackwater dudes getting killed in Baghdad and hung from a bridge in like 05 or 06 I think. This was shortly before or after the other Blackwater dudes went on a drive by spree through the city and shot 17 people and conservatives of course hand waved that away. They've always loved mercs, as long as they were our mercs.
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Mar 19, 2016 16:24
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I looked up the study and Bill Gates posted:One criticism of the book is that it doesn’t look at subject-matter learning. But I think most people would agree that skills like critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing—the things the test does measure—are pretty important. Beyond the top-line results, the authors gathered thousands of data points, different variables that you would hope might explain why learning is so limited. Unfortunately, most variables don’t seem to make much difference. The book nevertheless analyzes many of them, making it a hard statistical slog at times. Once again the headline fails the content. F+ Tinsley at least you cited it.
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Mar 19, 2016 16:25
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MechaCrash posted:Especially galling because the first to cheer on the mercenaries are the usual SUPPORT ARE TROOPS crowd. Public sentiment cares nothing for reality and other sad lessons learned by the late, great, Saint Kyle and fellow Navy veteran Jessee "The Son of a Bitch" Ventura.
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Mar 19, 2016 16:26
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Wulfolme posted:What was the situation like with radio at the time? Did they have trench phonelines to tell someone by the big guns that they were being overun at X and Y? Field telephones did exist, but generally required a wire. which was easily cut during the saturation style bombardments that preceded and accompanied an attack or the counter-bombardments that served to break them up. As memory serves, flares were often used as emergency signals, but even the front line trenches were usually joined to the second and third line defenses by communication trenches-- a steady stream of wounded and messengers would keep commanders in the rear areas more or less aware of what was happening. Runners were still very much a thing. Someone mentioned earlier that artillery was far more decisive than machine guns and generally this is true, though I think it is worth noting that by the later stages of the war heavy machine guns were used as potent area denial weapons. They'd basically be dialed in onto targets during daylight (mainly muster areas, trench intersections and the like) and then fired blind at night if an attack was suspected. Similarly, they were used as indirect fire weapons in the same manner as trench mortars, but instead of dropping explosive shells from a high angle, they rained bullets. Fearless fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Mar 19, 2016 |
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Mar 19, 2016 16:28
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MechaCrash posted:Especially galling because the first to cheer on the mercenaries are the usual SUPPORT ARE TROOPS crowd. Mercenaries are pretty much the guys they fantasize about being. They don't want to be rank and file soldiers held down by red tape and orders from a long chain of command. They want to be the badass lone wolf who plays by his own rules and gets poo poo done. Mercenary groups match their power fantasy a lot better.
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Mar 19, 2016 16:30
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God, go gently caress yourself Rall. I hope your lawsuit buries you.
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Mar 19, 2016 16:31
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FronzelNeekburm posted:The line i keep hearing is, "The Constitution says Congress has to consent to a judge's appointment, so Obama's ignoring their lack of consent by nominating someone!" I would have thought they'd learn their lesson after blaming the government shutdown on Obama because he unilaterally refused to cave to their ultimatum went over like a lead balloon, but I guess the general public HAS forgotten that by now
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Mar 19, 2016 17:07
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Wulfolme posted:What was the situation like with radio at the time? Did they have trench phonelines to tell someone by the big guns that they were being overun at X and Y? MechaCrash posted:Given that you seem to know what you're talking about and I'm going off things I remember hearing once or twice, I will defer to you in this matter. But I think the point of "if you go to war, odds of coming back are not in your favor" was right, yes?
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Mar 19, 2016 17:07
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Stinky_Pete posted:I looked up the study and Wait. So Tinsley has actually made a strip saying kids these days don't take enough 'useless' liberal arts classes?
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Mar 19, 2016 18:10
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 Guardian:  "Martin Rowson on George Osborne and the budget – George Osborne has revealed a failure of respect for basic fairness, and this time some exceptionally vulnerable people are being asked to pay the price" Telegraph:  The i paper:  Refugees will be sent back across Aegean in EU-Turkey deal Times:  Mail: Mac on... The continuing fallout over Theresa May's budget bonanza  Stephen Collins: 
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Mar 19, 2016 18:36
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Mar 19, 2016 18:44
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Hallelujah, it's raining men
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Mar 19, 2016 19:20
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Mar 19, 2016 19:25
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MechaCrash posted:Given that you seem to know what you're talking about and I'm going off things I remember hearing once or twice, I will defer to you in this matter. But I think the point of "if you go to war, odds of coming back are not in your favor" was right, yes? On the grand scale, an individual has a generally decent chance of returning from a war (though not necessarily uninjured/unharmed). Those odds become significantly longer if one is engaged in certain battles or in certain military formations, or even if one is from a particular geographic area. The U-Boat arm of the WW2 Kriegsmarine sustained heinous casualties over the war; something around 80%. British naval aviation was also quite a killer (though much of that came from the primitive technology of the time that went into landing an airplane on a carrier). The Battle of the Somme in 1916 inflicted 90% or higher casualty rates on some British battalions involved. The Great War also had an acutely harsh impact on places like Scotland and Newfoundland as units drawn from those areas of the British Empire were engaged in some of the heaviest fighting of the Great War. Historically, disease killed far more soldiers than arms did and this is true well into the 20th century. Even so, while it can be said that the experience of war is far from pleasant, it isn't usually invariably fatal.
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Mar 19, 2016 19:45
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It's hard to really grasp the sheer apocalyptic scale of artillery used in ww1. I can't remember the numbers right now but shells fired eclipses all other wars. It and the American civil war are really interesting in how the sides tried to adapt with changing tech. Also the crazy characters that show up on every side.
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Mar 19, 2016 19:52
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So what the gently caress kind of point is Lester trying to make here?
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Mar 19, 2016 20:02
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fade5 posted:So what the gently caress kind of point is Lester trying to make here? Arab Muslims are perpetrating White Genocide. Rahowa.
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Mar 19, 2016 20:03
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The umbrella is whisky sours. The blather is a carefree whistle. The falling people are Lester, McCoy, Branco, Ramirez, Rall, et al. The man waiting to pick John Kerry up at the airport is me.
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Mar 19, 2016 20:13
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loquacius posted:I would have thought they'd learn their lesson after blaming the government shutdown on Obama because he unilaterally refused to cave to their ultimatum went over like a lead balloon, but I guess the general public HAS forgotten that by now He couldn't! The POTUS can not unilaterally repeal laws!
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Mar 19, 2016 20:16
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Fearless posted:British naval aviation was also quite a killer (though much of that came from the primitive technology of the time that went into landing an airplane on a carrier). Interesting writeup on this from Cracked, of all places quote:You don't have to be a pilot to guess that landing on an aircraft carrier is really loving hard. It's a tiny little landing strip crowded with other planes, bobbing up and down in the waves. Keep in mind, this is with a whole host of instruments, computers and signals to help guide planes in. The early planes didn't even have that. http://www.cracked.com/article_19623_6-small-math-errors-that-caused-huge-disasters.html
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Mar 19, 2016 20:26
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Mar 19, 2016 20:38
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fade5 posted:So what the gently caress kind of point is Lester trying to make here? John Kerry doesn't  enough about Christians being killed in the Middle East, except when he does and even then it's still not enough because he also mentioned Muslims.
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Mar 19, 2016 20:45
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I love that Allie is quite obviously writing and drawing Prickly City now and still getting zero credit for it.
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Mar 19, 2016 20:51
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Abyssal Squid posted:Arab Muslims are perpetrating White Genocide. Rahowa. If only these Christians would come to America... where'd they'd probably killed in hate crimes because they're Arabs.
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Mar 19, 2016 20:57
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colonel_korn posted:I love that Allie is quite obviously writing and drawing Prickly City now and still getting zero credit for it. If you wrote and drew Prickly City would you want your name on it?
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Mar 19, 2016 21:02
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Titus Sardonicus posted:If only these Christians would come to America... where'd they'd probably killed in hate crimes because they're Arabs. If they were real Christians, they wouldn't have the audacity to be brown. Checkmate. 
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Mar 19, 2016 21:03
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Classy.
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Mar 19, 2016 21:19
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Cat Mattress posted:Classy. https://twitter.com/miamottelson/status/708999578671030272
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Mar 19, 2016 21:33
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Xander77 posted:Portable radios, like the type you see next to a squad commander in every WWII movie weren't around yet, so it was mostly easily disrupted phone wires (carried by a guy who could be killed, and could possible be cut by exactly the sort of artillery reaction that an attack would provoke). Radio signals were also easily intercepted, even when encoded (something the Russian command learned fairly slowly over the course of 1914, not bothering to encode their messages for months). Also, those radio sets that did exist still used morse code, not voice transmission, meaning that messages had to be written out, encoded, transmitted, received, written back out, decoded, and then handed to whomever they were intended. Not the quickest of processes, and why the Grand Fleet and High Seas Fleet reverted to using flag signals during Jutland for tactical maneuvering. And not to continue this derail too much, but prior to Tannenburg the Germans were transmitting en clair as well, as each side was gambling that the other didn't have time/resources to scan empty air for signals. Hindenburg mostly just got luckier than Rennenkampf and Samsonov. quote:I'd have to dig up statistics on this one, but a guesstimate would state otherwise. There are very few wars in which most, or even the majority of participants on one side end up dead. Things like France after the Napoleonic wars (still not the majority, but a major impact on the total population rates) or the USSR in 1941 are outliers rather than the norm. There were of course specific times and places where your chances of survival were minuscule - your really did not want to be on the attacking side at the Somme - but overall, I'd hazard that you'd have at least even chances of surviving the war without being killed or maimed, even as a common frontline soldier. Maybe not as a common junior officer though. I don't have the statistics to hand either, but I recall Keagan arguing in his book on the Great War that the mutinies/breaking of armies in the latter stages of the war came when soldiers (here being the French after Verdun, Russians in 1917, Italians after Caporetto, and Central Power armies generally in late 1918) did the mental arithmetic and decided, rightly or wrongly, that they had better chances of dying than living if they kept fighting on in the same old way
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Mar 19, 2016 21:37
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Xander77 posted:I'd have to dig up statistics on this one, but a guesstimate would state otherwise. There are very few wars in which most, or even the majority of participants on one side end up dead. Things like France after the Napoleonic wars (still not the majority, but a major impact on the total population rates) or the USSR in 1941 are outliers rather than the norm. There were of course specific times and places where your chances of survival were minuscule - your really did not want to be on the attacking side at the Somme - but overall, I'd hazard that you'd have at least even chances of surviving the war without being killed or maimed, even as a common frontline soldier. Maybe not as a common junior officer though. I don't know that anybody has ever really done a thorough study on this, but in the Civil War era in the US Army at least the ratio was typically one support soldier for every ten combat soldiers. By the end of World War 2 the ratio had completely flipped and then some, for every one combat soldier there was something like 20 support soldiers. World War 1 is probably in the middle ground somewhere in terms of combat to support ration. Even though you start to see these increasingly massive engagements in terms of raw numbers, the actual people engaged in combat and who bear an overwhelming proportion of the casualties is an increasingly smaller percentage. My guess is that casualty rates among combat units have remained largely static over the past 300 years or so. In this context though, conscription is particularly vicious. The early enlistment drive at the beginning of the war generally fills up all the needs the military has for staff and support roles. Since those guys have very low casualty rates they typically keep those positions throughout the war. If you enlisted in 1914 and were sent to the quartermaster, you had a pretty good chance of making it home unscathed. Conscription is generally used to refill the ranks of the combat units. So if you were drafted in 1916, you were most likely going to the infantry and had a real good chance of ending up dead in a ditch somewhere. Best case scenario is an artillery shell blew off a foot and you got to go home. The problem is that you have these battles with a casualty rates I'm guessing in the 25-30% range, and the more of the them you fight in, it becomes incredibly statistically unlikely that you are going to get through unscathed. A World War 2 example is that Easy Company of Band of Brothers fame had a casualty rate from June 1944-May 1945 of 130%.
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Mar 19, 2016 21:41
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The American bombing campaign was statistically impossible to survive your tour during certain months.
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Mar 19, 2016 21:53
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It may not be poo. He's expressing his anal glands.
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Mar 19, 2016 22:03
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I really, really hate the word "casualty". We could even keep it for military usage, as "someone who is no longer in fighting shape, for whatever reason", as long as we eliminate it from casual usage as "someone who died". Or the other way around, whatever, just not the stupid lack of clarity. ... Anyways, you probably won't fight for 4 years in a row without a few stays in the hospital, or being promoted / transferred to another position.
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Mar 19, 2016 22:06
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