Acebuckeye13 posted:

Goddammit, I thought we'd banned all the Empire apologists. Mods?

sullat posted:

Maybe you should read other sources than the 'official Imperial histiography'?

Mycroft Holmes posted:

You're also forgetting that a lot of the things you mention are a result of back room dealings by Palpatine in preparation for the eventual coup. He had decades in the Senate to mastermind this stuff. Read The Sleepwalkers: How the Galaxy Went to War in 22 BBY

Panzeh posted:

I got some leaks that Palpatine and Count Dooku were in cahoots, guys.

P-Mack posted:

Everyone poasting "star wars as milhist" owes it to themselves to check out Legend of Galactic Heroes.

Crazycryodude posted:

So what's the thread's opinion on Thrawn? Does the history live up to the popular image?

Cythereal posted:

I've always been a Zsinj man, myself. I don't care that in the popular media he's a complete buffoon, the man got poo poo done and his theatrics were terrific for morale in a hard place. Besides, have you seen the clowns the New Republic has on its payroll? Wraith Squadron was explicitly a PR stunt from the word go, and the Rogues were a traveling circus.

SlothfulCobra posted:

Well, considering Kosovo broke away less than a decade ago, and there's still a lot of unrest about the whole thing, it still is current events, and as such is a lot more complicated than one side just being out of touch angsty bad sports about the whole thing.

Crazycryodude posted:

I mean, there's NO way he can somehow get inside the heads of his opponent just by studying their species' art, right? It's not like every Wookie thinks the same, just because you looked at some paintings doesn't mean you intimately know the enemy's personal quirks and strategies.

SeanBeansShako posted:

Imperial Anti-Napoleon Boner Patrol

OwlFancier posted:

Guys I was playing War In The Outer Rim and, well, I've got some concerns about its commitment to historical accuracy.

Playing as the Empire is literally impossible to win, I know the game isn't really able to handle severe historical divergence because it supposed to be fairly historical but but considering the Empire has about 30 times the production capacity of the Rebellion, you would think it would be at least possible to delay the outcome of the war. But it doesn't really matter what you do, you can win every battle you force with the Rebels but then you get these random losses that wipe out entire fleets and bases? I don't even know if the rebels have to field forces to do it, it just happens. I think they should really consider making things like production capacity and strategic deployment more significant, I know it's not strictly realistic because it didn't have much of an outcome on the war in real life but I still think someone should make a game like that. I'm tired of playing realistic simulator games like Jedi Knight, I wish people would make some games that are fun!

Crazycryodude posted:

I mean, there's NO way he can somehow get inside the heads of his opponent just by studying their species' art, right? It's not like every Wookie thinks the same, just because you looked at some paintings doesn't mean you intimately know the enemy's personal quirks and strategies.

P-Mack posted:

Everyone poasting "star wars as milhist" owes it to themselves to check out Legend of Galactic Heroes.

sullat posted:

I did, thanks to this thread's recommendation! But the references aren't as universal as Star Wars. If I said "Reuenthal did nothing wrong!" only a few nerds would understand, but if I say "Palpatine did nothing wrong!" all of them would.

the JJ posted:

All I'm saying is the Kessel Run is a terrible metric to actually judge a war fighting starship.

Nude Bog Lurker posted:

HEY GAL, what's the craziest thing one of your stormtrooper guys has done?

HEY GAL posted:

there was this one guy who kept shooting his blaster out the window. you'd think this would make him a better shot, right? nope, he was terrible--right next to the archival sources that reveal what happened to the dude after he was found shooting his blaster out the window, there's some letters of his that talk about trying to apprehend a prisoner escaping from the death star and the people trying to break her out. He shoots at them for a billion times from like...a yard away and can't hit dick. It's also interesting from a social history perspective that he has no idea who she is--he only finds out she was Senator Leia after the fact, his unit is frequently kept in the dark about this poo poo, which shows you how much the Empire respected their common soldiers. Always go back to primary sources, my friends.

Nude Bog Lurker posted:

HEY GAL, what's the craziest thing one of your stormtrooper guys has done?

Mycroft Holmes posted:

What's the consensus on the Empires switch from genetically engineered clones to conscripted troops?

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Something actually related to real military matters: last weekend I read the book Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which I thought was pretty good. It made me a bit depressed for a few days because it really reminded me of just how deeply lovely the early 2000's were, but luckily the election happened and gave me a whole new thing to be depressed about.

This weekend, the movie version came out to mixed reviews. Now the story is about a squad of soldiers in Iraq who engage in a firefight that gets caught on news cameras who then become American heroes and are sent home for a PR tour. The whole narrative takes place over one Thanksgiving day football game at the end of this PR tour, with lots of flashbacks filling in the life and service career of its soldier main character.

What upsets me about the movie version is that it's full of the same old poo poo that plagues almost every war movie: actors in their 30's and even late 40's playing characters who were meant to be in their late teens or early 20's. If I'm remembering right, the oldest of the soldiers in the main character's unit was 23. The youngest actor is the one playing the main character, who is supposed to be 19, and he's 25.

Elyv posted:

You mean "Oberstein did nothing wrong", right

sullat posted:

I did, thanks to this thread's recommendation! But the references aren't as universal as Star Wars. If I said "Reuenthal did nothing wrong!" only a few nerds would understand, but if I say "Palpatine did nothing wrong!" all of them would.

SimonCat posted:

I served two tours there as a peacekeeper, I know it's a little more complicated that just bad feelings.

my dad posted:

Clearly you don't.

Ataxerxes posted:

Just finished reading Neptune's Inferno and the whole Guadalcanal naval campaign was just Like one unending knife fight in a phone booth.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

What upsets me about the movie version is that it's full of the same old poo poo that plagues almost every war movie: actors in their 30's and even late 40's playing characters who were meant to be in their late teens or early 20's..

Ensign Expendable posted:

spectralent posted:

As much as Izetta's fallen off the rails, having a dumb pimply teenage kid be one of the secondary protags in the war really helped sell me on it.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Something actually related to real military matters: last weekend I read the book Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which I thought was pretty good. It made me a bit depressed for a few days because it really reminded me of just how deeply lovely the early 2000's were, but luckily the election happened and gave me a whole new thing to be depressed about.

This weekend, the movie version came out to mixed reviews. Now the story is about a squad of soldiers in Iraq who engage in a firefight that gets caught on news cameras who then become American heroes and are sent home for a PR tour. The whole narrative takes place over one Thanksgiving day football game at the end of this PR tour, with lots of flashbacks filling in the life and service career of its soldier main character.

SimonCat posted:

A serious question. When did the US military adopt corporate management practices? All of the higher level Professional Military Education I've taken has been lifted from various business schools. I'm talking about things like Lean 6 Sigma, Project Management Body of Knowledge..

SimonCat posted:

A serious question. When did the US military adopt corporate management practices? All of the higher level Professional Military Education I've taken has been lifted from various business schools. I'm talking about things like Lean 6 Sigma, Project Management Body of Knowledge, and the teachings of the Project Management Institute. It's all corporate speak talking about products and customers and very little of it feels like it's applicable to a military application.

That said, it does explain a lot of the decisions that come out of the Pentagon, and why so many Colonels and Generals end up on the boards of various corporations after they get out.

a kitten posted:

Polyakov posted:

I think Macnamara was the major instigator of change, the Army had allways tried to draw efficient practice from the general business wisdom of the time because on the face of it it makes good sense, managing an army is a bureaucratic and supply problem. When Macnamara came to office he came from a background of being a businessman and the department of Statistics of the USAAF in the second world war, he was good at both of these things and in his initial service in the USAAF really helped to get logistics straightened out for all the relevant areas of the air force, and tried to enforce professional management and business practices on the Pentagon and American military in general, in the sense of he saw inefficiency and thoughgt that the business approach was the way to resolve it.

This sort of got the whole ball rolling on the grounds of professional management and business practices in a major way, and to be fair to him his initial changes were pretty positive in terms of stopping duplication of effort and making the military more efficient. However it was now sort oof instuitutionally accepted that it was the right course of action.

The real bugger with the whole problem comes when you have people who dont really understand what a system is for and whats its strengths are. Lean and six sigma were both incredibly popular in the 90's and early 2000's and literally everybody was attempting to implement it without a care of what the technique was used for and what it was good at, and this rubbed off on the US army. The west in general started to really pay attention to Japanese management practices (where this all came from) after the Japanese car industry beat the stuffing out of the American car industry in the late 70's and early 80's. The problem that i allude to with lean techniques and six sigma techniques is that the entire concept behind a lot of it is eliminating variance in whatever system you are applying it to so that you allways have the system running perfectly, neither technique works well when you have unexpected shocks to the system as the slack in the system has been intentionally removed which would otherwise absorb it (hence the name lean), that slack creates inefficiency but it does mean that the system can keep running. Military logistics is a really bad area to add this to because if there is one thing that should have been learned by now its that nobody really knows how aa war will be fought until they are fighting it, nobody ever gets munitions and spare parts expenditure prediction right and deviations from the predictions create shocks to the system which can cause the entire thing to break down.

A large problem is also that it especially doesnt work that well when you dont have trained people implementing it properly, largely speaking army promotion hierachies are not based on how suited someone is for management, it tends to be based on arbitrary criteria, so you end up with people who are trying to set up these systems who arent interested in the theory of why something works, they know that it does and that it gets them points so they blindly implement it, this leads to an ungodly mess that is implemented poorly. If they try to have civillian consultants fix it it costs a lot of money and they wont tend to get it right either because management structures in the armed forces and the demands on it are quite unlike a lot of things in the civillian world, plus because its governmental budgetting they wont employ the truly talented people who can make the appropriate leaps and make such a system work properly.

The specific technique of Lean Six Sigma that you are talking about really started to emerge in 2001 or so when Mike Carnell published, "leaning into six sigma" which combined the ideas of lean production and the idea of six sigma control, from what i saw the Army tried to start implementing it in 2006, but probably tried to do smaller programs befgore their big LSS roll out.

(I really hate people misusing techniques, you need to understand why it works you imbeciles ).