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.

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.

SeanBeansShako posted:

This one of the few reasons why I like that slightly cheese seventies remake of All Quiet On The Western Front. The actors are young or young looking enough to make you believe they just rolled out of education into the horrors of war.

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 ).

JcDent posted:

Did we talk about Hacksaw Ridge? I liked the movie, but the battle scenes are some well-filmed Call of Duty bullshit. Also, Japanese soldiers only ever get shot in threes.

Nenonen posted:

What game is that?

Nenonen posted:

Oh, Steel Panthers you mean. Sounds like bad luck. In theory M9A1 can penetrate T-34's hull but it would have to hit at right angle. I don't recall rifle grenades ever doing anything in SP.

JcDent posted:

I love how shrapnel games go on sales an only knock off like 5 bucks off their super old games.

JcDent posted:

I love how shrapnel games go on sales an only knock off like 5 bucks off their super old games.

Tias posted:

I only play the freebies, but honest to God, they've given me hundreds of hours of fun through the years.

SeanBeansShako posted:

This is a really good way to describe something like that, hats off to you.

OwlFancier posted:

Or possibly someone tried to mount an 88mm flak gun on top of an M113 and it got a bit squashed.

Tias posted:

Since I know we have some military hardware spergs( God bless every one of you!):

I'm wargaming a battle of the Korean war as a Chinese tank commander, and American GIs are having a lot of luck taking out my T34s. The thing is, they camouflage and then destroy the tank with a side or rear hit from M9A1 rifle grenades at ranges up to 150m! I'm not going to pitch a fit over it, but it seems reaching. OTOH, the T-34 is world war 2 tech, perhaps the rifle grenades are just that bit more advanced for the job at hand.

I mean, one tank, sure, but it's three and counting - Does this seem in line with US. Army training and equipment anno the Korean war?

JcDent posted:

The spirit of German kitbashing lives with... whatever this is.

Tias posted:

Since I know we have some military hardware spergs( God bless every one of you!):

I'm wargaming a battle of the Korean war as a Chinese tank commander, and American GIs are having a lot of luck taking out my T34s. The thing is, they camouflage and then destroy the tank with a side or rear hit from M9A1 rifle grenades at ranges up to 150m! I'm not going to pitch a fit over it, but it seems reaching. OTOH, the T-34 is world war 2 tech, perhaps the rifle grenades are just that bit more advanced for the job at hand.

I mean, one tank, sure, but it's three and counting - Does this seem in line with US. Army training and equipment anno the Korean war?

SeanBeansShako posted:

This one of the few reasons why I like that slightly cheese seventies remake of All Quiet On The Western Front. The actors are young or young looking enough to make you believe they just rolled out of education into the horrors of war.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I actually really like that adaptation.

FastestGunAlive posted:

If you were confused about the use of corporate leadership programs in the higher echelons of the DoD, today I saw an infantry bn explain to a two star how they're using Starcraft to practice small unit leadership and decision making.

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4sKSaEG4bg

They try to get that stuff ironed out in training.

PittTheElder posted:

So it's a gun that fires the instant you chamber a round? Why on earth would you want that?

PittTheElder posted:

So it's a gun that fires the instant you chamber a round? Why on earth would you want that?

Jobbo_Fett posted:

FAUXTON posted:

Lol yeah but this is open bolt artillery.

JcDent posted:

let gustavus hit the floor
let gustavus hit the floor
let gustavus hit the
flooooor

Hargrimm posted:

https://zippy.gfycat.com/ThirdFavoriteKouprey.webm

aphid_licker posted:

What's the gizmo the dude is holding on top of the breech there?

aphid_licker posted:

What's the gizmo the dude is holding on top of the breech there?