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Disinterested posted:
Another one: take your average homophobic YouTube insult and compare it to the allegations that Caesar might have been hosed (VERY specifically as the receptive partner) and break them down. Turns out there is a lot of cultural context that gives things meaning to the people saying them. Edit: poo poo just think of the cultural implications for the various religious shifts in Europe between the Age of Crassus and the Era of Trump Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Aug 22, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 17:41
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To put it another way: when von Ranke said 'we're all equidistant from eternity' he wasn't trying to say 'we're all the same', except for saying 'we're all equally awash in a huge sea'.
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Aug 22, 2016 17:44
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we shouldn't veer over into the other extreme, which is assuming we can never understand members of a different culture or that they're literally alien to us
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Aug 22, 2016 17:53
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HEY GAL posted:we shouldn't veer over into the other extreme, which is assuming we can never understand members of a different culture or that they're literally alien to us Absolutely 100% agree. I think it has to come from the realization that if you'd been brought up in the same way as your subjects, however alien or abhorrent their behavior may seem, you'd likely be no different.
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Aug 22, 2016 17:57
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Deptfordx posted:The fire support was just an example, it's easy to think of a situation where there's friendly infantry between the autocannon vehicle using sabot rounds and the enemy. An enemy vehicle suddenly popping up on a flank is an obvious one. I guess either they use HE for fear of conking someone, or they reason the odds of hitting someone are fairly low and there's little KE* to them and let rip. I wouldn't know which. *I assume there's far less force imparted on the sabot of a 25-30mm gun compared to one four to five times the size.
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Aug 22, 2016 17:58
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Disinterested posted:Absolutely 100% agree. I think it has to come from the realization that if you'd been brought up in the same way as your subjects, however alien or abhorrent their behavior may seem, you'd likely be no different.
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Aug 22, 2016 17:59
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HEY GAL posted:we shouldn't veer over into the other extreme, which is assuming we can never understand members of a different culture or that they're literally alien to us Certainly.
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Aug 22, 2016 18:02
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HEY GAL posted:step 1: dressing like that is an end in itself me rn 
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Aug 22, 2016 18:04
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HEY GAL posted:we shouldn't veer over into the other extreme, which is assuming we can never understand members of a different culture or that they're literally alien to us I thought about this today when I did yardwork (i.e. ate plums from a tree and smoked half a pack of marlboros), and I think that to understand people in history, we need to have a greater appreciation of the circumstances people were in. Ericsson is one of those historians I always return to, and it's bizarre to think about how violent pre-modern society was, and how much society is driven by concepts that are now fairly alien to most of us, like external honor. A post-estates era society is also one where at least on some level, people from all classes are judged along the same general lines, which makes it hard to understand how an early modern society was one where soldiers, peasants, nobles and miners all had their own codes of conduct/morality. Which leads back to identity being an external factor for the individual, thus, I will use Lacanian theory on my dudes and they should like it.
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Aug 22, 2016 18:06
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Having a slow evening, so I went and did some digging. Found this declassified Marine Corps range safety PDF from 2012. http://www.quantico.marines.mil/Portals/147/Docs/Range%20Management%20Branch/PubsInfo/PAM%20386-63%20Dated%2030%20Jan%202012.pdf According to this (pg 90), the Aluminium base from the Bradley 25mm are potentially dangerous up to 400m out over a 15 degree arc. But, there's also Plastic bits from the Sabot, which while only dangerous for about 100m are far less predictable with a 120 degree danger zone. What it doesn't say is the danger of the hit. Will it bruise, wound or kill. Obviously it depends on the circumstances, I can't imagine anyone hit by the Aluminium base at 50m range is going to have a good day. But I can't find anywhere a good baseline for the relative danger. Tl:dr. It's probably a bad idea to be anywhere in the line of fire when an autocannon is firing Sabot at it's target.
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Aug 22, 2016 18:30
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This discussion on projecting back into the past has got me wandering through the memory lane of my undergrad, when I was your pretty typical post-modern-Marxist-archaeologist trying to make sense of the past using 20th century derivations of 19th century economics in an increasingly 21st century world. I went to a pretty (post)modern faculty, but looming over everything and everyone was "Processualism". Modern archaeology, scientific archaeology, epitomised by Papa Binford. Some great and sensible theoretical leaps and accompanying practical improvements in how we actually do the science. But the great and infuriating thing that will endlessly drive me mad is the key underlying assumption that every human being ever is and was a perfectly resource accumulating rational actor, or basically exactly the same as a white male American anthropologist living in the 70s.
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Aug 22, 2016 18:56
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lenoon posted:a perfectly resource accumulating rational actor edit: ugly graph part 3, or "nobody cares about dragoons" 
HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Aug 22, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 19:04
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I guess my perception is based entirely on anecdote but I really dunno if I agree that cultural similarity of all humans through time/ across cultures etc is an idea that needs discouraging- I've seen Cyrano post this quite a few times so I guess it's something he has to regularly dispel in his students, but I've always figured the general astonishment you hear from an average, not historically inclined person, when they hear about all the penises in Pompeii, or Sumerian fart jokes etc is quite telling. I mean obviously a middle ground understanding would be better, but those are in general apparently impossible for us as a species to grasp. And if we're gonna go for one side of the spectrum I think the one that lets us find common ground with people in history and other cultures (and therefore not dehumanize them) is the better one. On a personal level I've been dealing with a program for North Korean defectors lately and this is something- "wow, they're human after all, just like me! not just a mindless automaton" that keeps coming back again and again. I imagine the same is true for refugees from the Middle East etc. When you give people cultural touchstones it makes them a lot more willing to engage with, and maybe even befriend, these people that they'd otherwise totally ignore and dismiss.
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Aug 22, 2016 19:20
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Mines from 1967 to 1991. I left out the smaller conflicts from my post last time just because I thought that Korea and Vietnam tied together quite nicely in a single post, this is pretty much going to be a clean-up post about other areas in the 20th century. 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the 1971 Yom Kippur war. The 1967 war or the six day war was largely too short for mines to really be effective, but nonetheless we saw the mining of the Suez Canal by both Egypt and Israel, Egypt employing a mixture of Soviet supplied contact, magnetic and acoustic mines, and Israel indigenous and US supplied contact and pressure mines, these was employed alongside blockships (ships deliberately sunk to obstruct traffic) and closed the Suez canal to all traffic. What is genuinely interesting is that as a result of these actions the Suez Canal was closed to all shipping from 1967 through to 1975. This is the origin of the Yellow Fleet, ships which were in the Great Bitter Lake at anchor when the canal was closed that were trapped there for 8 years, an interesting story in of itself but not one I can cover. As a result of this mine blockade the Egyptian navy had to send its ships out and around the Cape of Good Hope in order to get to their Red Sea bases. Israel lacked both minesweepers and minesweeping expertise and hence were very vulnerable to mines, the Egyptians laid defensive minefields which protected the Bala’eem oil fields and other areas around the Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba, south of the Suez Canal, and also to cut off traffic to the Israeli port of Eilat in the northern Gulf of Aqaba. Military operations were not significantly impeded by these minefields, trade and resupply was, though the increase in air haulage capacity was a significant part in countering this and enabling Israel to keep fighting through the longer 1973 war, operation Nickel Grass in the Yom Kippur war being an example of this.  Eventually the mines laid around the south end of the Suez canal were swept by the USN at the request of Egypt, their own sweeping capacity being insufficient. Gadaffi and the mining of the red sea – 1984. Gadaffi was a strong supporter of Iran in its war with Iraq, and Iran was at this point an international pariah, they had been making themselves generally unpopular with everybody, Egypt had been on the side of Iraq and as had Saudi Arabia giving assistance in the form of loans and expertise. A Soviet tanker struck a mine in the Red Sea in August 1984, followed by 13 other ships, the area of the sea was especially busy at this time because large numbers of Muslims were taking the boat to Mecca and Medina for the Hajj. It was never proven but it seems very likely that with the timing of the minelaying that it was intended to catch one of these boats carrying pilgrims and cause massive loss of life. Indeed the pilgrimage to Mecca was to be targeted again by the Iranians in 1987 where Iran send a large group of agents undercover as pilgrims to launch a bloody attack against the crowds of Mecca and were gunned down by the Saudi security forces. Of the 16 ships struck none of them were sunk, but the Egyptian government immediately requested help from the RN, USN and the French Navy to sweep the Red Sea, the RN recovered one of the mines which had soviet export markings, upon quizzing the Russians about this they condemned the minelaying but didn’t help further in finding who exactly they exported it too, however strong circumstantial evidence pointed to the Libyan regime. A Libyan ship, the Ghat, entered the canal, travelled to Ethiopia then turned and returned, it took 15 days to complete this trip rather than the usual 8 days, and also reports from Egyptian intelligence that the ship changed crews at Tripoli, taking aboard the head of the Libyan minelaying division, seem to point to Gadaffi. The Soviets had also sold mines to Libya in the past. The reason the mines did not cause any sinking’s was that they only had a quarter of their designed explosive charge for this day unknown reasons. This event caused the Egyptians to beef up their mine warfare branch, twice they had to request help from the West in clearing their shores and their most important national asset, this was probably the start of the concept of terrorist mining, mines are an excellent terror weapon because of their stealthy nature, cheapness and simplicity and the incredible damage they can inflict on large targets. While a rouge group of extremists in Iran claimed responsibility, though later to be castigated for it by the Ayatollah, Iran was watching and saw the effect that the Libyan actions had and took it to heart. Iran-Iraq and operation Earnest Will. Iranian development of capabilities, and the withering of US capabilities. The Iranian war in the straits of Hormuz was described as a Guerrilla war at sea, their main weapons were fast attack boats, known as Boghammers, armed with recoilless rifles and heavy machine guns and sometimes missile racks were used to attack tanker traffic quickly, causing damage and casualties then running before enemy forces could respond, they also employed mines laid from Dhows an converted civilian ships, (the most infamous being a converted landing craft called the Iran Ajr). The US did consider mining Bandar Abbas, which would certainly have had the same effect as it did at Haiphong, Iran stood no chance of acquiring the necessary equipment or expertise to clear the sophisticated US mines and so would have been subjected to a 100% naval blockade, however the US laid no mines in the war. The context for this mine offensive was that neutral shipping was being hit by both Iran and Iraq in the Persian gulf, so the Kuwaiti government reflagged its transports as American and requested US naval escort to keep their trade open, this was what was known as Operation Earnest Will, so the US made a major naval commitment to escort these ships in and out of the Gulf.  Iran Ajr, mines visible port side. The Iranians had laid mines in the gulf from 1986, mainly hitting Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil tankers, causing little damage due to the massive bulk of the ships in question. These incidents however were scattered and minor. The original Iranian plan involved using silkworm missiles bought from China, but the US delivered an ultimatum about their use near the straits of Hormuz, while they did not respond not a single missile was fired into the Straits, the Straits were so important because they were the only sea route out of the Persian gulf for oil tankers to take, it was also right next to the major Iranian naval base at Bandar Abbas. While I don’t have any direct evidence for this its my belief that robbed of the ability to use the Silkworms the Iranians took a route which was more deniable and in their estimation less likely to provoke a massive US response in starting to mine the straits, after all the Libyans suffered no overt retaliation for their mining of international waters, why should Iran?  The US had let their mine warfare branch wither away again and they did not take the threat of Iranian mines seriously, a briefing delivered shortly before the start of Earnest Will in 1987 read as follows, “We do not believe that Iran possesses a major mine threat at this time, they are capable of small scale minelaying but do not have the capability to lay and maintain systematic minefields. They lack the training and dedicated equipment necessary to lay minefields and so are limited to small scale imprecise mining operations.” This briefing forgot the lesson of Wonsan, where the North Koreans laid a 3000 mine minefield using wooden barges and fishing vessels. In 1981 Iran bought a number of mines from North Korea, they bought a small 44 pound charge mine called the Myam, and a larger one called the M-08, or the M 1908 mine to give it its full name, a mine designed in 1908 for the Tsar’s navy to fight japan a simple hertz horn detonated moored mine, still as effective in 1988 as they were 80 years previous when they sunk two Japanese battleships. And the Straits of Hormuz were ideally shallow which allowed for the laying of these devices. The Iranians reverse engineered these mines and by 1985 were producing around 30 mines a week from a dedicated plant north of Tehran. They planned to stockpile 3000 of these mines.  Russian M - 08 mine from which the Iranians derived their design.  Iranian mines on the deck of the Iran Ajr. First actions of the mine Campaign. In 1986 the Special Boat Service of the Iranian Marines started mining the shallows of the Iraqi coast, soon they were joined by the Revolutionary Guards and working from small speedboats they shut down shipping to Iraqs main port of Umm Qasr. They started to develop a plan known as Ghadir, named for a significant event in the Qur’an, which was to completely close the straits of Hormuz to all but Iranian bound traffic and to subject any mine clearing efforts by the US to vigorous attack from their small boats. Somehow in defiance of intelligence estimates the Iranian navy went from a small number of imported mines in 1985 to a credible capability to close one of the most vital waterways in the world in 1987 without anyone noticing. The first time this was really brought to the attention of the world was when two dhows left Iran and mingled with civilian traffic and mined the entrance of the Kuwaiti harbour Mina al-Ahmadi. The first ship to hit a mine was a Soviet tanker, the Marshal Chuikov, an eight by six meter hole was blown in her flank and she required months of repair, three more ships met the same fate at the hands of the fourteen mines the Iranians laid. This was an effort to intimidate the Emir of Kuwait into reversing his decision to flag his countries tankers as American. US minesweeping helicopters were flown in and they retrieved a mine and confirmed it with intelligence gathered by MI6 that it had been manufactured in Iran by its serial number. Nobody wanted to believe the Iranians would act any more aggressively than this and it was considered that the US helicopter teams should be sent home to avoid offending the Kuwaitis. Nobody was taking the threat of Iranian mines seriously despite the reams of historical evidence saying that you take the threats of mines seriously or you will end up deeply embarrassed or possibly dead. First casualty under US protection – SS Bridgeton. Emboldened by the success of this the Iranians decided that covert mining could inflict enough casualties on the US to drive them out of the gulf, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered that covert mining take place but that direct contact be avoided, (This order chafed on the Revolutionary Guard who were notoriously much more zealous than the Iranian navy and prone to going off half cocked). The first convoy passed Farsi Island early on the 24th of July, the previous night using small fiberglass bots a line of 20 mines had been laid in its path. The tanker Bridgeton struck a mine and started to flood, but due to its large construction and natural subdivision of the empty cargo bays it was in no danger of sinking despite the 9m long hole in its flank. This caused the escorting US warships to assume formation behind the Bridgeton as if one of them hit a mine they would certainly suffer casualties and heavy damage. This quite naturally was a source of embarrassment for the USN as the ships assigned to guard the tanker had to be guarded by it and was the cause of a significant amount of ribald headlines at the time.  The US considered retaliation but eventually concluded that the last thing they wanted to do was galvanise the Iranian population to continue the war by bombing the Iranian homeland. (War weariness was starting to bite hard by 1987-88). The speaker of Iran’s parliament remarked after the fact, “Gods angels descended and did what was necessary”, with the prime minister saying, “The US schemes were foiled by invisible hands. It was proved how vulnerable the Americans are despite their huge and unprecedented military operation.” They were right, the US was negligently unprepared for the Iranian campaign and it was bloody fortunate that nobody was killed in the first mining attack. It also showed how the Iranians were trying to retain the fig leaf of plausible deniability, everybody knew it was them but they just couldn’t quite prove it enough. For the second time in the 20th century the most powerful navy ever to float had been stopped by wooden boats dropping mines developed at the turn of the last century. US Scrambles to respond. The first action that was taken was to attempt to find a way to sweep the mines, the helicopters of Mine Countermeasure Squadron 14 lacked an airbase to operate from and there were no USN minesweeping vessels in the area, indeed the US had barely any minesweeping capability at all, it had been delegated to specialist units elsewhere in NATO and the US MCM capability had withered away to nothing once more. Admiral Crowe sought help first from the Saudis, who had 4 minesweepers, but after fighting their bureaucratic obstruction they eventually sent one vessel, who steamed around and went nowhere near a mine before returning home. The Saudis did not want to be seen to be giving help to the US for internal political reasons and so remained largely useless. The Europeans were about as helpful refusing to help with what was termed “A unilateral American Mission,” personally my view is that they were afraid of oil embargo from the Arab states, as happened in 1973. Refusing to assist in what was essentially a humanitarian protection mission with the capability they had developed was an act of moral cowardice, the French offered to sell the US two minehunters but the US had no interest in buying French ships for what would doubtless have been outrageous prices. The eventual US response was to load every mine hunting helicopter they possessed aboard the USS Guadalcanal while the US worked to ready its stock of minesweepers, they had 19 wooden hulled minesweepers with reservist crews but the crews were woefully undertrained, as put by one of the crewmembers, “Our training has been sailing one weekend a month and two weeks a year around the Puget sound dodging logs, why the hell are they sending us off to war?” Indeed the boats they were using were the last boats made of wood in the US navy, (Excluding the USS Constitution). Their passage across the ocean was noticeably unpleasant, 170 foot long and with only enough freshwater for 20 minutes of shower water a day for their 77 crewmen there was an industrial attitude taken to the whole affair, everyone shuffled through to wet themselves, stepped out to lather and then went to the back of the line to rinse and hoped the person in front wasn’t slow. Food consisted almost entirely of spam or canned ravioli.  Aggressive Class MSO's, not a boat i want to sail any ocean in. The first response however was to return to the technology of WW1, two tugs were bought from Bahrain and they were fitted with paravanes, it was not safe work but it was the only countermeasure really available until the arrival of the MSO’s. Iranian Response and escalation. The Iranians on the other hand were delighted, they were emboldened by the lack of serious US response and resolved to try again, but this time it would not go quite so well. The Americans were ready. They divined Iranian intentions to mine the anchorage of Khor Fakkan under the cover of a large military exercise on the 9th of August. The USN diverted its convoy away from the anchorage and were vindicated when on the 10th of August the tanker Texaco Caribbean carrying a load of Iranian crude oil pulled into the anchorage and struck a mine, spilling 2.5 million barrels of crude oil into the sea, a UAE supply vessel was making her rounds four days later when it struck a mine, blowing it to smithereens and causing the first European casualty, its British captain along with the five Arab crewmen. It might be cynical of me but I think the death of a Briton did far more to galvanise European support than any other action taken up until then, but possibly I am being too harsh.  This galvanised European support at last and they send a bevy of minesweepers down, four British minesweepers, two Dutch and Belgian, three Italian minesweepers and three French ones. The British also started escorting UK flagged vessels and the French dispatched the carrier Clemenceau to escort the minesweepers and to join in any US air strikes on the Iranian mainland. Interestingly the Iranians offered the services of their minesweepers while attempting to cast the blame for the mining on the USA, while making veiled threats, saying, “If we intended to plant mines, well it is a different story… This is fully within our means. You can send 27 or 28 ships to the Gulf, each one is a target for us, there used to be four targets, now there are 27.” His meaning however was quite clear, Iran still believed that the US would not react substantively and retaliated by laying more minefields near Farsi Island, set at a shallow depth to target the minesweepers.  Iranians caught red handed – Iran Ajr To counter Iranian small boat warfare the US established a floating base built out of large barges from which they based a team of specialist night-fighting little bird helicopters using the brand new IR equipment along with teams of SEAL’s, their job was to watch Iranian movements especially with a view to minelaying. The Iran Ajr was a logistics ship, converted to a landing ship by the Shah’s navy, then converted to a minelayer by the Islamic Republic, it was leaving Bandar Abbas on September 20th to lay mines in the strait of Hormuz, however intelligence had forewarned the US of this move and they were waiting and watching as during the night of the 21st it deviated from its route and went towards Bahrain. Radio traffic referring to a special unit was filling the Iranian airwaves and hence the ears of US SIGINT. The three helicopters that were shadowing the Iran Ajr observed her starting to roll minelike objects off the side of the ship and immediately attacked, they strafed the ship with minigun and flechette rocket fire setting her ablaze, they returned to rearm and when they returned saw that the Iranians had got the ship underway and were continuing to lay mines, so they attacked again and the Iranians abandoned ship but failed to scuttle it. The USN decided to seize the boat and immediately woke up the SEALs to storm the boat, nobody decided to stay to defend it and the SEALs recovered mines with serial numbers that would match the range used to mine the Samuel B Roberts, a map detaining all of Iran’s covert mining operations and from the dysfunctional and overflowing toilet a hastily concealed code book containing all the Iranian naval codes. This was the moment that the Invisible hand of god so touted by the Iranians was tied to them, they had been caught red handed laying mines in neutral water and no matter how much they denied it nobody would believe them. As a result of this evidence the Iranians would cease mining operations until April 1988, unfortunately they would immediately get results.  The multinational sweeping effort.  Before the next convoy the USN MSO’s finally arrived, and the multinational effort got underway, though I would like to take a moment to credit the fortitude of the US crews, they were in old boats comprised of wood and steel with no air conditioning working in 130 degree heat, no water for showers and poorly functioning refrigerators on their boats. Helicopters flew in ice vests and the Saudis even segregated an area for them to rest at one of their ports, a large step for them at that time. Their job was complicated by the vast amount of litter that the Persian gulf contained, oil drums, old buoys, everything looked like a mine, though especially problematic was the refuse from Australian sheep transports, a fair few sheep died enroute to their destinations in the middle east and the crew just pitched them over the side, unfortunately the corpses floated and tended to roll onto their backs, and the black belly of the sheep and the four legs stuck out in rigor-mortis resembled very closely the Hertz horns of a contact mine. However none of them were struck by the mines laid to catch them and they successfully swept the fields laid by the Iranians, they were somewhat helped by the Iranian habit of laying mines sequentially In serial number order, on several occasions they noticed a skip in the serial numbers of mines found and went back to find a missing mine. The majority of minesweeping was done by a diver going up to the mine and planting an explosive charge or shooting a hole in the casing so it sunk, the fields laid were small so the additional risk of sweep wires were not necessary. The gulf was quiet for the next few months as with the aid of the map recovered from the Iran Ajr they conducted a quick and efficient sweeping campaign. Samuel B. Roberts incident. The Iranians did not sit idle, they were watching the US patterns of convoy routes, and on April 13th 1988 they laid a pair of circular patterns of mines along a US tanker route that had not been used for a while. April the 14th saw the Samuel Roberts sailing through the straits of Hormuz, a watchmen spotted what turned out to be a set of Iranian mines, three of the pattern of 12 that had been laid, the captain ordered the ship to reverse out the way it had come, reasoning that gave him the best chance of evading the field and sounded general quarters. Unfortunately manoeuvring a 4000 ton Perry frigate straight backwards is significantly difficult, and she struck a mine in her stern, blowing a seven meter hole in her stern, rupturing two fuel tanks and exploding a 45 meter tall fireball high into the air.  Hole in the bottom of the USS Roberts.  USS Roberts fighting to stay afloat. Several acts of insane bravery saved the Roberts from sinking, power is essential for a ship to stay afloat, it powers the lights, the communications and the pumps and fire suppression systems, however the mine strike had damaged one engine and stalled the other, Petty Officer Tilley conducted a suicide start of the engine while seated on it, a process which is ram starting an engine by forcing high pressure air into it to start its rotation and get it spinning, similar in principle to a jump start. It’s called a suicide start because if it doesn’t work then the engine had a tendency to explode under the overpressure and shower the room in metal. Support was quick to arrive, first in the form of helicopters and then further US ships and civilian salvage tugs, during the day long battle to save the ship it rather curiously never lost its ability to fight, the CIC remained manned and the forward guns, radar and missile remained serviceable, it’s an excellent example of very competent damage control but I won’t go into it beyond those couple of anecdotes. The attack on the Roberts however was the final straw and it caused the US to launch Operation Praying Mantis, where they systematically took the Iranian navy to pieces, this combined with refreshed Iraqi attacks and the shooting down of the Iran Air 655 by the USS Vincennes spelled the start of the peace process. It would also be remiss of me to not mention that the Iraqis were also laying naval mines along the Iranian coast, however they did not attempt to mine neutral shipping as the Iranians did, it is however also true that due to the fact that all neutral shipping outside Iranian waters was supporting them or their allies that they didn’t need to. As a result of the risks and catastrophes of Operation Enduring Will the USN established and maintains to this day a significant mine warfare presence in the Persian gulf. The last hurrah of mines – Gulf 1. You would think that given only three years had passed since the incidents of the Iran-Iraq war the USN would have learned to take mines seriously and not forgotten it. The Iraqis laid 1300 mines in defence of their coastline using modern multiple influence mines (Mines that detonate under a mixture of magnetic, acoustic or pressure sensors), this scuppered plans for an amphibious assault on Kuwait city by the USMC, indeed the two ships that struck a mine, the USS Princeton, a guided missile cruiser and the USS Tripoli, an Iwo-Jima class assault ship assigned as the flagship of the countermine force, both struck mines and were forced to retire and the amphibious landing was wisely scrapped. This is also the last time that the US has deployed mines in combat, A-6 intruders delivered a large quantity of quickstrike mines to the northern gulf and successfully closed the Iraqi ports in that area. Concluding remarks. The naval mine is one of the weapons that has caused the most ship casualties in the entirety of the 20th century, in terms of tonnage it is a tossup between it and the Torpedo, ultimately it’s a technology that hasn’t really evolved that much, a surprise mining by small boats has remained a potent weapon from 1904 right through to 1991, a single mine can sink a ship, though with modern subdivision and ship design it is less likely, though had Iran and Iraq employed larger mines with bigger payloads it would have been very likely that some of the ships that survived mining would not have done so. The presence of mines mandates that a waterway is shut until they are swept, it is the most potent weapon that weak navies have to fight back against the strong, especially in shallow environments, they remain probably the best way of inflicting a 100% blockade on an enemy port. The best way to stop the enemy leaving port is to make him not want to do so, and a danger that he cannot sea but could still sink and kill him is probably the most effective way of carrying that out.
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Aug 22, 2016 19:20
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Lol at that bit about the sheep.
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Aug 22, 2016 19:36
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Koramei posted:I guess my perception is based entirely on anecdote but I really dunno if I agree that cultural similarity of all humans through time/ across cultures etc is an idea that needs discouraging- I've seen Cyrano post this quite a few times so I guess it's something he has to regularly dispel in his students, but I've always figured the general astonishment you hear from an average, not historically inclined person, when they hear about all the penises in Pompeii, or Sumerian fart jokes etc is quite telling. I mean obviously a middle ground understanding would be better, but those are in general apparently impossible for us as a species to grasp. And if we're gonna go for one side of the spectrum I think the one that lets us find common ground with people in history and other cultures (and therefore not dehumanize them) is the better one. This is all fine and good and I actually agree with you that it's important to realize that they were people. This avoids some of the problems of "perfectly spherical Assyrian in a vacuum" mentioned up thread. The problem is that your average person also starts assigning all of their own moral values and cultural baggage. You can see this most obviously when a snarky 20 year old points out some racist or sexist thing that a famous person did in the 19th century. Yes from our perspective it's hosed up but in many cases they were quite progressive for not thinking even more abhorrent (at least when viewed from our cultural framework) things. The example I like to give of this is the subset of pre- ACW abolitionists who thought that blacks were still intellectually inferior to whites and needed to either be repatriated to Africa or sheltered from those who would take advantage of them To use your own example: It's good to recognize that North Koreans are people but you shouldn't be surprised or offended when they don't act like white middle class Christians educated in a democracy. You see the latter a LOT with people who bemoan how people in Iraq and Afghanistan just don't "get" democracy
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Aug 22, 2016 19:56
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Polyakov posted:April the 14th saw the Samuel Roberts sailing through the straits of Hormuz, a watchmen spotted what turned out to be a set of Iranian mines, three of the pattern of 12 that had been laid, the captain ordered the ship to reverse out the way it had come, reasoning that gave him the best chance of evading the field and sounded general quarters. Unfortunately manoeuvring a 4000 ton Perry frigate straight backwards is significantly difficult, and she struck a mine in her stern, blowing a seven meter hole in her stern, rupturing two fuel tanks and exploding a 45 meter tall fireball high into the air. One of the scenarios during Battle Stations, the Navy boot camp graduation exercise, was based on evacuating the magazine on the Samuel B Roberts after the mine strike. It might have been the one where you move heavy things while water is spraying on you or else one of the ones where water sprays on you while you move heavy things. hogmartin fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Aug 22, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 20:01
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FAUXTON posted:Depends on muzzle velocity but maybe a minute? More like two. Just a purely naive calculation ignoring air resistance and using the parent gun's muzzle velocity and using a 45-degree firing angle gets you the round landing 70km downrange after 120 seconds of flight. An addition 6' of muzzle's going to give you a higher velocity, but then you have air to contend with.
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Aug 22, 2016 20:14
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Re: Fury and the end of WWII I am not saying that the death of the men in a war that was only kept alive due to insanity was not a tragedy. However, it did have to happen because Germany was being led by such bastards that to ensure that the peace could last, Nazi Germany had to be crushed. If you want to talk about pointless death in a World War then look at WWI for countless examples of that type of slaughter.
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Aug 22, 2016 20:22
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I was curious about the history of the the "Rule of Three" in organizing modern militaries, and how the XO/CO distinction came about. Roman legions were divided into 10 cohorts, each containing so many centuries of 80 men (I'm guessing it used to be centuries of 100 men). But modern militaries tend to have units consisting mainly of three sub-units. Units company level and above tend to have both an Executive officer (the equivalent on a chief operating officer in a corporation.) and a Commanding officer (the equivalent of a central executive officer in a corporation). How and when did that highly branched structure come about? My impression was that naval ships first had a CO and XO at the top (captain and first officer), presumably because navigating was a full-time job, and maybe the English class-based society had something to do with it, but I can't easily find much about it.
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Aug 22, 2016 21:23
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My boy Berthier was the genius behind the modern staff system (if you're considering S-jobs in modern armies). The Romans had some of what you're talking about developed. In the late Republic: Legatus legionis was the CO, 3-4 year term, heavy authority Tribunus laticlavius was XO, learning from the legatus legionis The praefectus castrorum was third in command and held something like an S4 role with a dash of S3 The tribuni angusticlavii were five junior tribunes supposed to learn from the legatus legionis, probably picked up the other roles as necessary. If cohorts acted independently, they would likely be nominally commanded by a tribune, with the most senior Centurion taking the XO role for the cohort. The commander of the speculatores would hold equivalent S2 and S6 roles As you can see, there was some formal assignment (praefectus castrorum and speculatores commander especially) but a lot of the jobs were assigned ad-hoc by the legatus legionis to the tribunes, who were in theory supposed to be able to fill these roles as needed.
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Aug 22, 2016 22:05
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:My boy Berthier was the genius behind the modern staff system (if you're considering S-jobs in modern armies) unless the good idea is about small cannons and cavalry, in which case...18th century austrians, go figure HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Aug 22, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 22:12
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Horse-drawn artillery of all kinds is neat. Here's a decent-looking translation of some articles about the Superiority of the Austrians: http://www.napoleon-series.org/military/organization/Austria/Artillery/c_Smola.html try like halfway down, seach for Thielemann. There are some interesting comparisons of time to set up etc, and then some interesting points on practical application.
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Aug 22, 2016 22:50
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in general, the AHE is good at cav, like the Imperialists before them--if it's about towing something with a horse or putting someone on a horse, you really want a -sky or -stein
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Aug 22, 2016 22:54
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Disinterested posted:Absolutely 100% agree. I think it has to come from the realization that if you'd been brought up in the same way as your subjects, however alien or abhorrent their behavior may seem, you'd likely be no different. Yeah. I feel like it's important to understand that people have essentially similar faculties, feelings, and needs, and there are different cultural programs for dealing with those. I'd go further than just "this is how they were brought up" i'd say it's because all their/our attitudes and practices taken together (sort of, imperfectly, temporarily, under the circumstances) make sense and work as a way to organize a group of humans.
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Aug 23, 2016 00:41
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Just finished a book about Stilwell by a butthurt Taiwanese historian. He makes the argument that as soon as it became clear that the island hopping campaign was a viable means of getting bombers in range of Japan, China got hind tit as far as Allied strategic priorities and lend lease aid went. The goal was just "keep China in the war" as opposed to "get Japan out of China." Without getting too deep into alternate history, it made me ponder that even if Japan had won the planned crushing victory at Midway and set up their impregnable defensive perimeter in the Pacific, they'd still have no guarantee of safety. Might have just ended up getting bombed/mined from the other direction. #MondayMilhistMusings
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Aug 23, 2016 01:43
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P-Mack posted:Just finished a book about Stilwell by a butthurt Taiwanese historian. He makes the argument that as soon as it became clear that the island hopping campaign was a viable means of getting bombers in range of Japan, China got hind tit as far as Allied strategic priorities and lend lease aid went. The goal was just "keep China in the war" as opposed to "get Japan out of China." Without getting too deep into alternate history, it made me ponder that even if Japan had won the planned crushing victory at Midway and set up their impregnable defensive perimeter in the Pacific, they'd still have no guarantee of safety. Might have just ended up getting bombed/mined from the other direction. I'm having difficulty figuring out if this is even "wrong" from a military perspective assuming his premises are "right". 1. The CPC's and KMT's feuding throughout the 1937-1945 Pacific War was so dysfunctional to the overall war effort that the Americans weren't particularly fond of propping up the Chinese war effort if it meant Chiang mostly sitting on his hands in preparation of fighting the Communists. 2. Japan had something like over a million soldiers in China. The fighting in Burma and the islands was hard enough, why also fight them in China where they had their best troops and best supplied positions? Also those troops weren't going anywhere nor did Japan have the shipping to move them to fight on the Islands. Basically what were the Americans supposed to do? Also they tried to use B-29's to bomb Japan from China, it wasn't working.
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Aug 23, 2016 03:00
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Raenir Salazar posted:I'm having difficulty figuring out if this is even "wrong" from a military perspective assuming his premises are "right". Also, August Storm. The Soviet Union had China well in hand.
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Aug 23, 2016 03:06
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Raenir Salazar posted:I'm having difficulty figuring out if this is even "wrong" from a military perspective assuming his premises are "right". Yeah, I'm not disagreeing at all, and this guy basically accepts that the Americans and British were making the right choices from their own perspectives. He's mostly just upset at China being expected to keep fighting and dying more or less to kill time while the Burmese campaign gets delayed year after year. Basically from this KMT apologist perspective, the Chinese were fighting "the best troops and best supplied positions" like they had been since 1937, then being yelled at for not helping more in Burma while the western allies diverted promised forces to North Africa, then Italy, then Normandy. I'm basically just spitballing that if the better option of the island campaign was off the table for whatever reason, more focus on opening up Burma and eventually getting better/closer airbases in China would still have been an option. Cythereal posted:Also, August Storm. The Soviet Union had China well in hand. But yeah the logistics are such that by the time this would actually get results the war in Europe is already over and the USSR would be involved.
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Aug 23, 2016 03:40
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is all fine and good and I actually agree with you that it's important to realize that they were people. This avoids some of the problems of "perfectly spherical Assyrian in a vacuum" mentioned up thread.
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Aug 23, 2016 08:42
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Cyrano4747 posted:The example I like to give of this is the subset of pre- ACW abolitionists who thought that blacks were still intellectually inferior to whites For values of subset equal to 'virtually all of them, at least the white guys', sadly.
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Aug 23, 2016 09:44
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Phyzzle posted:I was curious about the history of the the "Rule of Three" in organizing modern militaries, and how the XO/CO distinction came about. For the 'rule of three' bit, it's basically that thousands of years combined with scientific study have shown that most humans can best handle 2-5 variables at a given time.
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Aug 23, 2016 10:28
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P-Mack posted:Yeah, I'm not disagreeing at all, and this guy basically accepts that the Americans and British were making the right choices from their own perspectives. He's mostly just upset at China being expected to keep fighting and dying more or less to kill time while the Burmese campaign gets delayed year after year. Basically from this KMT apologist perspective, the Chinese were fighting "the best troops and best supplied positions" like they had been since 1937, then being yelled at for not helping more in Burma while the western allies diverted promised forces to North Africa, then Italy, then Normandy. While I don't think the island campaign could ever have been off the table(most of the large scale gains were made at points where the USN would've had numerical superiority to the IJN even if it had lost every carrier it had at Midway), I also don't think the Allies would have been able to field large forces in China because this was a place that could barely feed the armies that were already there. There'd have to be a huge burma campaign, then an incredible effort to try to supply China without a port or railroad connection. I don't really think there was much more the Allies could do in China that wouldn't basically eat up their entire effort unless, say, the USSR entered the war against Japan early. The most feasible scenario where China receives more aid than it did is probably one where Sheng Shicai doesn't decide to become anti-communist.
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Aug 23, 2016 10:36
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Phyzzle posted:I was curious about the history of the the "Rule of Three" in organizing modern militaries, and how the XO/CO distinction came about. As others have said, much of it comes from the French. In particular, I would point to their experiments and reforms after the Seven Years' War, when you start to see the development of permanent brigades and divisions, which simplifies the task of an army commander, who no longer has to issue orders to every single one of the dozens of regiments he commanded. (They used ad-hoc divisions during the war, but ) Of course, making them work as maneuver units, you also see the development of effective staff and support officers, again to take the commander's mind off of minutiae. There's a decent article by a guy named Steven T. Ross on the subject if you have library access. The rule of three probably comes from the practical experience that, especially when communications are unreliable as they were back then, the best you could manage in combat is between 2 and 4 maneuver elements — with three being the "sweet spot". If you look at the French armies prior to Wagram, they follow this principle closely: the army is divided into corps, each of two or three divisions; each division consists of two or three brigades; each brigade two or three regiments, each regiment two or three battalions. Each battalion, in turn, consisted of four divisions (not to be confused with a division!) and one company of grenadiers; each division of two companies; each company of two sections; each section of two squads. By 1812, however, the armies had swollen to gargantuan sizes, such that even a superior general like Marshal Davout would have a hard time commanding five infantry divisions — which were now about twice the size as before — and a cavalry division without so much as a radio.
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Aug 23, 2016 13:34
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what is a division? what is a corps? is it like what i mean when i say "armada" (a very large armed force collected for a certain aim, whether on land or on the sea, english speakers only remember one of them because we don't have that word in our language)
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Aug 23, 2016 13:49
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Chinse generals on both sides of the rebellions had a thing for organization by fives, because some guy wrote that down in a book a thousand years ago so of course it must be right. The Taiping extended that to civilian life, so everyone was eventually supposed to live in little communes of twenty-five families led by a priest/mayor/sergeant.
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Aug 23, 2016 14:00
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P-Mack posted:Chinse generals on both sides of the rebellions had a thing for organization by fives, because some guy wrote that down in a book a thousand years ago so of course it must be right. 
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Aug 23, 2016 14:05
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HEY GAL posted:In practice, I tend to bring up one side or another depending on what my interlocutor says. If they think "these people were just like us" or the most common thing, "from our point of view they're all either evil or stupid" I bring up anthropology and their different culture; if they say "we can't ever hope to understand them" I bring up the things that are universal about the human condition. Yeah I think I just see more people emphasizing the universality of the human condition. I also see it a lot with people who loudly wonder why the ~~ignorant poor~~ or ~~strange foreigners~~ can't act like the perfectly rational actors that they think educated Americans/Western Europeans are. On China: also remember that the Germany first policy was a thing. I'm sure China could have been better supported if all the men and material of the ETO had been plowed into Burma or wherever but then we would be reading some guy lamenting how the Soviets were left to fight off Hitler alone and how the military policy of the western allies was content to raid channel ports while they did all the real fighting. You know Stalins actual complaints ca 1942. Island hopping was a strategy that worked well with having more naval than army assets available for the theater. Unfortunately for the Chinese they were fighting a land war.
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Aug 23, 2016 14:10
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HEY GAL posted:what is a division? what is a corps? is it like what i mean when i say "armada" (a very large armed force collected for a certain aim, whether on land or on the sea, english speakers only remember one of them because we don't have that word in our language) By the Revolution, both are a formal unit of military organization. The basic tactical unit of the regiment/battalion is the same as for your guys - nominally about 1,000 men for infantry, more like 400 for cavalry, but in practice of course these are more like 600 infantry and 230 cavalry once a campaign begins. The French organized in to Brigades, which is a (set, formal) grouping of 2-5 battalions from the same combat arm, with a brigadier in charge. You can figure on roughly 2,000-5,000 men in an infantry brigade. Brigades could also be split, and short brigades of 2-3 battalions were frequently designated as demi-Brigade later on. I think brigades (brigada) in your era were more integrated combined arms formations that were assembled ad-hoc. From there, multiple brigades are grouped in to a division of roughly 10,000 infantry with some small supporting artillery. There were also pure cavalry divisions of roughly 3,000-4,000. Then you group multiple divisions in to a Corps, roughly 30,000-50,000 men, under the command of a full General, with complete sustainment, staff, and combined arms capability. You can think of it thus for the Revolution: The Army is the strategic maneuver element. Once the Army is big enough (call it 60,000 plus?), maneuver warfare by necessity completely shifts to corps moving separately in coordination (march dispersed, fight concentrated). Once your corps arrive in the correct area of operations, your corps are the operational maneuver elements. The corps commanders are tasked with operational objectives and use the divisions within their corps to accomplish these objectives. I think that the major difference between your "Armada" and a Napoleonic corps would be that the corps is not collected for a specific objective. It's a permanent establishment with its own staff (the individual divisions within the corps may change, but the corps command is independent from the divisional command structure, and the most senior divisional general does not command the corps, for instance).
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Aug 23, 2016 14:22
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I think people are ignoring the political context here. If we are talking 'butthurt taiwanese guy' then the political context is generally with the benefit of hindsight from the cold war, and from an anti-CCP perspective. In which case, if you accept the Chang Kai-Shek argument that a communist takeover of China is actually a greater threat than Imperial Japan, then you can make the case that a strategy that ignores China is one that would win one war faster but lose the next. The argument that yeah, giving more support to China would lead to the RoC ploughing that into fighting commies, and that the Soviets will eventually come in anyway, become actually arguments for the policy, and the symbolic power of western involvement probably shouldn't be ignored. So I'd say that yeah, the Pacific strategy made sense for the US, but Taiwanese guy wants something else - he wants an alternate history where the PRC was nipped in the bud.
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Aug 23, 2016 14:24
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