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gettysburg is 6 hours of cinematic bliss how dare you sir
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Apr 14, 2016 14:05
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Don't go throwing any shade on Col. Chamberlain, son. His qualifications had basically no relationship to his quality, though. Sometimes those guys turn out great, sometimes underqualified dudes put their unit swinging in the wind in a peach orchard. JcDent posted:Deutchland uber alles is such a weak song, I would quit Nazi party on the spot. Now, the Soviet anthem is where it gets good. Auferstanden aus Ruinen is an absolutely great song too, although I can see why Deutschland is pretty appropriate to pick when reunifying. Shame.
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Apr 14, 2016 14:19
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The issue of officer recruitment/training in conscript armies really hasn't ever been satisfactorily solved, I don't think at least. It was worse during the 19th century and the ACW in particular because a lot of times your position as a regiment commander was by virtue of your status in the community and or your ability to pay for the regiment. Basically, when your pool of military professionals is both small and unimpressive, what DO you do? I'm not sure I have a better solution than what they came up with.
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Apr 14, 2016 14:36
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Out of curiosity, are amateur volunteer/conscript officers still viable on a modern battlefield? It kinda feels like modern warfare has gotten complicated enough that it isn't possible to achieve a minimum functioning level of competence without training anymore, but I'm interested to see what the thinking is nowadays.
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Apr 14, 2016 14:43
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Am I the only one who things Little Mac to be perhaps the most adorable nickname a soldier can give to his commander now?
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Apr 14, 2016 15:20
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bewbies posted:The issue of officer recruitment/training in conscript armies really hasn't ever been satisfactorily solved, I don't think at least. It was worse during the 19th century and the ACW in particular because a lot of times your position as a regiment commander was by virtue of your status in the community and or your ability to pay for the regiment. Oh, were totally a thing for the entire 19th century? Well.
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Apr 14, 2016 15:38
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feedmegin posted:The NVA had paratroopers? For a second I forgot who we were talking about and thought you meant East Germany. Those guys did have paratroopers and I've even seen their weird helmets! 
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Apr 14, 2016 15:51
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feedmegin posted:The NVA had paratroopers? Hell, the Vietnam People's Air Force kicked Yankee rear end all over the place.
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Apr 14, 2016 15:56
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Tomn posted:Out of curiosity, are amateur volunteer/conscript officers still viable on a modern battlefield? It kinda feels like modern warfare has gotten complicated enough that it isn't possible to achieve a minimum functioning level of competence without training anymore, but I'm interested to see what the thinking is nowadays. A bunch of countries that have conscription have an officer corps that come out of the conscript pool. That's how you get reserve officers, at least in Finland and Norway.
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Apr 14, 2016 16:04
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Xander77 posted:Hell, the Vietnam People's Air Force kicked Yankee rear end all over the place. This is...not really true.
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Apr 14, 2016 16:06
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Thomamelas posted:The evolutionary replacement cartridge for the .38 LC is the .38 Special. Which later on cops would claim lacked the stopping power needed to put down criminals. I suspect that the biggest issue the .38 LC and the .38 Special faced is that shooting in a stress situation is hard. And it's likely in a lot of cases with the troops facing the Moro or the cops, they likely just missed a lot and assumed they hit. Having qualified on numberous weapon systems including pistols, I can attest that pistols very quickly lose accuracy. Esp if you're firing under stress? If I were ever in that situation, I wouldn't trust myself to hit a target beyond, say, 5-10 feet.
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Apr 14, 2016 16:17
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chitoryu12 posted:While the M4 Carbine didn't exist in 1993, the Colt Commando/CAR-15 series of carbine AR-15s had been around since the 1960s and they saw common usage with special forces like the Rangers and Delta Force. Delta and Ranger operators are even recorded as having used Aimpoint 500 reflex sights during the operation. Would that have even been an issue in Mogadishu? Long-range rifles are kinda unneeded in an urban enviroment, carbines are preferable, I think.
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Apr 14, 2016 16:19
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Xander77 posted:North Vietnam had an actual army, with Chinese and USSR advisers. Fighting guerrillas in the jungle was actually a relatively minor part of that war. I'm aware of that. What it did not have is the sort of command of the air where you can drop people in parachutes. And, uh, as bewbies noted, it would be a wildly different war if North Vietnam actually did have air superiority!
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Apr 14, 2016 16:50
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Paratroops just means people trained as paratroopers. In many militaries during many conflicts (Soviets in WWII is a big example) they aren't actually used in that role, but instead find themselves deployed as a sort of elite reserve force. Somewhat analogously, you can wonder what proportion of time the US marines spend doing amphibious operations these days. Probably not a lot. Fangz fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Apr 14, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 16:55
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bewbies posted:This is...not really true.
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Apr 14, 2016 17:12
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Wasn't some of pilots fighting for North Vietnam actually Soviet?
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Apr 14, 2016 17:23
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Xander77 posted:I'm not saying they had air superiority, if that's what you mean. I'm saying that with the limited resources they had (first establishing a fighting pilot force after war had already started, and fighting an enemy that massively outnumbered by every conceivable criteria), they kicked shitloads of Yankee rear end. What metrics are you using here? None that I'm familiar with support this position.
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Apr 14, 2016 17:28
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bewbies posted:What metrics are you using here? None that I'm familiar with support this position. ETA: poo poo like this. USAF Fixed-Wing Losses To Hostile Action: 1737. NVAF: 198. Although granted, now you're going to point out that most of those losses were due to NVA SAMs than NVAF planes. darthbob88 fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Apr 14, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 17:39
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feedmegin posted:The NVA had paratroopers? Here is the part I was remembering from the book. There's an account of a bunch of camouflaged NVA basically jumping out of the bushes like ninjas at a recon team, one wrestling a CAR-15 away from an American and shooting him dead. They appeared to be attempting to capture at least one American alive, and what was left of the team broke contact, got a radio call off and were extracted after a chase. "Four months earlier--about as long as it would have taken for a new unit to travel down the trail--Ho Chi Minh had attended a ceremony in Son Tay, 30 miles West of Hanoi, to congratulate the first graduates of a unique new school. This date, 19 March 1967, conincides with that cited by postwar North Vietnamese publications as the organization date for 'Special Operations Forces in the Vietnamese people's war.' And it's the same date that North Vietnam's only paratroop unit, the 305th Airborne Brigade, (which by no small coincidence was based at the same town, Son Tay), was disbanded. Clearly, the North Vietnamese had converted their Soviet-trained parachute unit into a new, special-ioperations organization. <snip> More than half the 305th Brigade's paratroops became "sappers," the suicidal night infiltrators renowned for penetrating American base camps, wearing only shorts and carrying satchel charges. Sappers were respected and feared throughout South Vietnam. Unknown to American intelligence, another 305th Brigade element became counter-recon units, whose mission it was to hunt down and kill SOG teams."
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Apr 14, 2016 17:42
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bewbies posted:What metrics are you using here? None that I'm familiar with support this position. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post–World_War_II_air-to-air_combat_losses You can probably argue that the Vietnamese did a lot better vs the US and their allies than pretty much anyone else managed after WWII.
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Apr 14, 2016 17:49
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Fangz posted:Paratroops just means people trained as paratroopers. In many militaries during many conflicts (Soviets in WWII is a big example) they aren't actually used in that role, but instead find themselves deployed as a sort of elite reserve force. They actually did use their paratroopers in air drop operations. One such example I can find, but nothing online so the source is questionable, is an action at Okorovovo on 17 February 1942
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Apr 14, 2016 17:49
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Jobbo_Fett posted:They actually did use their paratroopers in air drop operations. One such example I can find, but nothing online so the source is questionable, is an action at Okorovovo on 17 February 1942 Yeah but the point is that it's generally early war, pretty rare, and usually ineffective.
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Apr 14, 2016 17:50
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Jobbo_Fett posted:They actually did use their paratroopers in air drop operations. One such example I can find, but nothing online so the source is questionable, is an action at Okorovovo on 17 February 1942 There's also paratrooper drops in the Dnieper operation, which are what really got them to stop dropping because it was a titanic fuckup that even Arnhem can use for reassurance that it wasn't that bad. It was late, slow, and piecemeal, and in many cases dripped right onto enemy forces on both an operational and tactical level (IE Germans beating the first waves badly and quickly enough they could get their orders and be waiting for subsequent drops).
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Apr 14, 2016 18:05
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Fangz posted:Yeah but the point is that it's generally early war, pretty rare, and usually ineffective. Looks cool as hell though
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Apr 14, 2016 18:08
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darthbob88 posted:
Most of them were probably due to conventional AAA artillery. Looking at the number of planes shot down by ground fire as a metric of NVAF performance is pretty weak. I could bring up air-to-air kill ratios, but that's an equally weak way of looking at it. You have air superiority when you get get to operate how you want at a particular place and time and your enemy's air force can't stop you from doing it. Equally, if you can use your air force to prevent the enemy from operating how he wants to at a particular place and time, you have denied him air superiority. There's no point in the war where the NVAF had air superiority.
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Apr 14, 2016 18:22
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Given the differential of resources, it is pretty much impossible to say one air force outperformed the other in the Vietnam War.
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Apr 14, 2016 18:44
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The ballistics gel seems to explode when it recompresses, is that because of adiabatic heating? And then it expels some gas out of the entry hole, is that hot powderized ballistics gel?
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Apr 14, 2016 18:49
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Thalantos posted:Would that have even been an issue in Mogadishu? Long-range rifles are kinda unneeded in an urban enviroment, carbines are preferable, I think. In fact, the US military is gradually removing the larger M16s from general infantry service in favor of M4s, with M16s relegated to reserve and specific long-range environments like mountains. I think the distance at which the M4 loses effectiveness is more like several hundred yards (not 100 yards), but it's definitely as effective as a larger M16 in close quarters and is much easier to carry around. Most of the problems faced in Mogadishu were unrelated to the weaponry and signifiers of general overconfidence (like soldiers removing "extraneous" gear like armor plates and night vision equipment because they were expecting it to be a simple snatch-and-grab) or the result of poor communication and decisions.
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Apr 14, 2016 18:55
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Chamale posted:The ballistics gel seems to explode when it recompresses, is that because of adiabatic heating? And then it expels some gas out of the entry hole, is that hot powderized ballistics gel? The blurb taken from the video quote:The best explanation I have seen is that the hot bullet vaporizes some of the gel (which is flammable) and between the friction, heat of the bullet, and air being sucked into the temporary stretch cavity, as the TSX collapses it acts like a diesel engine and compresses the mixture of heated gel vapor and air until it explodes. You can see the exhaust gas exiting the entrance hole.
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Apr 14, 2016 18:56
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darthbob88 posted:I remember seeing, admittedly in a Cracked article, that the NVAF "beat" the USAF by punching well above their weight, scoring surprisingly high KD ratios and bloodying American noses. Even if they didn't actually win the air war, they gave the Americans a good enough fight that they actually had to rethink doctrine and technology for future conflicts. Ceteris paribus, a big determinant of your number of aircraft losses is the number of aircraft you have, and the number of sorties you put in the air.
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Apr 14, 2016 19:12
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chitoryu12 posted:In fact, the US military is gradually removing the larger M16s from general infantry service in favor of M4s, with M16s relegated to reserve and specific long-range environments like mountains. I think the distance at which the M4 loses effectiveness is more like several hundred yards (not 100 yards), but it's definitely as effective as a larger M16 in close quarters and is much easier to carry around. The FM lists maximum effective range as 500 yards, but that doesn't take into account the terminal ballistics of the bullet. Good paper: http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA512331 quote:Combat in Afghanistan has shown several trends. The enemy takes advantage of the terrain and engages patrols or convoys from high ground. He also combines this advantage with heavy weapons systems and mortars from a distance, typically beyond 300 meters.6 From the infantryman’s perspective, he attempts to fix the enemy, since his equipment limits his ability to maneuver, and attempts to kill the enemy through close air support (CAS), close combat attack, (CCA) or indirect fire. Goes into some detail on training and doctrine and is worth a read.
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Apr 14, 2016 19:12
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darthbob88 posted:I remember seeing, admittedly in a Cracked article, that the NVAF "beat" the USAF by punching well above their weight, scoring surprisingly high KD ratios and bloodying American noses. Even if they didn't actually win the air war, they gave the Americans a good enough fight that they actually had to rethink doctrine and technology for future conflicts. Those numbers really aren't very useful in my opinion. Loss rate is a much better metric to measure attrition, and the loss rate in Vietnam was a fraction of what we saw in WWII and Korea despite a much higher concentration of sorties. And, as you noted, the vast majority of American losses were to ground-based systems, not aircraft. That being said, loss rates still aren't a great metric to use in assessing a counter-air campaign. The ultimate point of an air campaign is to influence operations on the ground, and the ultimate point of a counter-air campaign is to disrupt that effort. Through that lens, the VPAF really didn't have any significant successes... at no point did the US seriously modify its approach to either heavy or attack operations in Vietnam due to the VPAF. This was in major contrast to Korea, where the Chinese managed to outright halt heavy bomber operations and dramatically curtail attack operations (especially by piston engine aircraft). Of course you're correct that it gave the US plenty to think about with regard to gear and books but every conflict is like that, regardless of outcome.
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Apr 14, 2016 19:21
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Tias posted:Wallensteinsyndrom
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Apr 14, 2016 20:01
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You know who also has mental disorders and killed people in war? Caro. Hey guys I might get to fly a B-17 and B-24 if I do I will report back here with pictures and comments.
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Apr 14, 2016 20:16
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SeanBeansShako posted:Am I the only one who things Little Mac to be perhaps the most adorable nickname a soldier can give to his commander now?
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Apr 14, 2016 20:26
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100 Years Ago, Now With Brucie Bonus Right then. It's the 10th of April. Last time we checked in with Edward Mousley, he was rather taciturn. Today we find out why. If you like animals a lot, you should probably just search for "Battle of Verdun". For everyone else, it's time for Mousley to say goodbye to his best, closest friend in the garrison. And it's not Cockie. Also there are some musings about stories that make me angry, and stories that make me miserable. Anyway. At Verdun, General Petain scores a propaganda triumph and a combat stalemate. General Baratov in Persia is headed off at the pass; Grigoris Balakian continues looking out for his fellows even as he plans to save himself; Louis Barthas seems to get a very fair hearing from Colonel Douce about his lost corporal's stripes and insults the commandant's horse-riding into the bargain; E.S. Thompson prepares to rejoin his unit; Robert Pelissier is inspected by President Poincare (again) and General d'Esperey, who's moving up in the world; and Maximilian Mugge is trying to make his bed to the Army's satisfaction, which he claims is considerably more daunting than drill.
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Apr 14, 2016 20:41
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chitoryu12 posted:While the M4 Carbine didn't exist in 1993, the Colt Commando/CAR-15 series of carbine AR-15s had been around since the 1960s and they saw common usage with special forces like the Rangers and Delta Force. Delta and Ranger operators are even recorded as having used Aimpoint 500 reflex sights during the operation.
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Apr 14, 2016 21:56
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chitoryu12 posted:In fact, the US military is gradually removing the larger M16s from general infantry service in favor of M4s, with M16s relegated to reserve and specific long-range environments like mountains. I think the distance at which the M4 loses effectiveness is more like several hundred yards (not 100 yards), but it's definitely as effective as a larger M16 in close quarters and is much easier to carry around. lol, oh, I know! I had an M-4 when I deployed. Considering how cramped humvees can get, i was glad for any kit that was smaller. The battle of Mogadishu's a great training moment. Every time I was doing PCCs and I was tempted to not check on something/bring something, I would think of that scene and go "nope! takin' all my stuff."
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Apr 14, 2016 22:21
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Trin Tragula posted:(Mousley story) Jesus Christ, Trin
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Apr 14, 2016 23:18
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago, Now With Brucie Bonus I knew this was coming as soon as I noticed Mousley's occasional references to Don Juan and now that it has it's still so rough. 
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Apr 14, 2016 23:30
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