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Vincent Van Goatse posted:It's pretty simple. Vincennes's captain was convinced the airliner was an Iranian warplane broadcasting a false transponder code and ordered the shootdown over a bunch of other people's "err wait a minute"s. Turns out it was exactly what its transponder said it was, and subsequently the US government bent over backwards to avoid admitting the mistake. If that's what he meant by intentional, no problem. But I thought he meant "intentional" as opposed to "fuckup."
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Mar 29, 2017 03:05
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Acebuckeye13 posted:To this day my mom, who was working at RCA when they developed Aegis, is insistent that the system worked fine, it was the crew that hosed up. Is "AEGIS thought this passenger airliner was actually an F14" the official story?
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Mar 29, 2017 03:12
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Throatwarbler posted:Is "AEGIS thought this passenger airliner was actually an F14" the official story? I'm pretty sure the official story is, in fact, that the system worked fine, it was the crew that hosed up
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Mar 29, 2017 03:34
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Acebuckeye13 posted:To this day my mom, who was working at RCA when they developed Aegis, is insistent that the system worked fine, it was the crew that hosed up. I mean she is substantively right on that point, the system worked fine and told the operators accurate information except for the picking up of an F14 transponder on the same bearing as the civillian plane. However from that point onwards it was on the crew and the captain to interpret the facts that the system then proceeded to tell them, no electronic emissions, persistant civillian IFF, the lack of F14 anti shipping capability, target altitude and course and other really solid signs that at least something was up. The commander of the USS Sides reached the conclusion that it was not a threat and he was receiving substantially the same information. There are reasons for why it happened, the Vicennes captain was more focused on a surface battle nearby, the flight was delayed from schedule and so on, but it was fundamentally a gently caress up by the crew of the Vincennes not their equipment.
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Mar 29, 2017 03:46
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How did Mao manage to win the civil war against Chiang?
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Mar 29, 2017 04:08
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Solaris 2.0 posted:I consider myself a bit of military history junkie and I had never heard of Operation Praying Mantis (reallllyy shows my ignorance, and many Americans, of the while Iran-Iraq war era). I read up the wikipedia page and holy poo poo The incident that lead to Operation Praying Mantis involves an impressive display of damage control. My favorite bit is using heavy duty tie-downs to keep the ship intact. (more or less)
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Mar 29, 2017 04:15
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, you were not kidding.
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Grouchio posted:How did Mao manage to win the civil war against Chiang? After the end of WW2, Chiang basically disbanded his army because he didn't, or couldn't pay them. Cut them loose with no pay and nothing but the clothes on their back and the weapons on their shoulders and all their other military gear. And what do you know, the commies were hiring. Chiang decided to rely on the warlords for his military, and they were fairly corrupt, the US provided military gear and weapons and the warlords turned around and sold them to the highest bidder... which in many cases were the Communists.
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Mar 29, 2017 04:35
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Grouchio posted:How did Mao manage to win the civil war against Chiang? I'm not an expert on the subject but Chiang's forces were badly mauled in World War Two so he wasn't coming into the conflict in a position of strength and Chiang himself lost a lot of credibility among the Chinese for being the face of a modern China at a particular low point in China's history. Mao was able to use the time when Chiang was fighting the Japanese to strengthen his following and prepare it for a rapid expansion in post-war China. Mao was aided in this because it was easy for the communists to point to the (many) failings of the Kuomintang even though, let's be honest, no one could have reasonably been expected to solve these problems - let alone a party riddled with corruption such as the KMT. The Kuomintang were not at all interested in spreading a Westernized liberal democracy so their appeal to most of the Chinese people was rather limited and it was no secret that the KMT had engaged in its own brutality during the war to keep dissent suppressed. It didn't help that the KMT were guilty of destroying the Yellow River dams and killing hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants in a vain attempt to slow the Japanese, in traditional Chinese culture destroying dams is considered a particularly heinous crime.
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Mar 29, 2017 04:40
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Acebuckeye13 posted:To this day my mom, who was working at RCA when they developed Aegis, is insistent that the system worked fine, it was the crew that hosed up. Yeah, that's basically what happened.
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Mar 29, 2017 04:43
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Grouchio posted:How did Mao manage to win the civil war against Chiang? It's a fairly interesting military campaign; at the start of Round 2 of hostilities between the Chinese Red Army and the Republican forces based on a couple of different military history books I've read at my University's library the KMT had around 4.5 million men and the Red Army had around 500,000; wikipedia has different estiments, but I'm pretty sure the disparity was fairly large. The general gist of it is that the Red Army took positions in Manchuria behind the Soviet Army as Marshal Malinovsky was slowly withdrawing from Manchuria and the Red Army was able to acquire large stocks of Imperial Japanese armaments left by the Japanese. When hostilities resumed the KMT Army marched north in order to pursue the Red Army which gradually withdrew working to preserve their strength and engage the KMT's weaker points; gradually gaining strength from defecting KMT formations. As the KMT lost large numbers of troops and the Red Army's grew eventually the balance shifted against the KMT and the Red Army could counter attack, encircling large KMT formations and swiftly marched south; between promises of land distribution and KMT corruption, brutality, and general incompetence the Red Army could further swell its ranks from volunteers. The logistics corps and the KMT command was thoroughly infiltrated by CPC agents and any order or directive was quickly passed on to the Red Army, so they also pretty much knew every move the KMT made before the KMT's frontline forces could get those orders; and pretty much large amounts of American aid and equipment would fall into the hands of the Red Army. Gradually it would be the Red Army would have around 4 million men+ and the KMT would be in full headlong retreat to the South/Taiwan. The KMT were basically just really bad.
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Mar 29, 2017 07:03
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Wasn't there some deal with the AEGIS system having two different cursors and an operator was confused as to which one he was moving, giving him somehow a readout on the altitude and ID of a tomcat somewhere else and the range and bearing of the airliner?
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Mar 29, 2017 07:17
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In regards to British Army Regiments The Armoured Chavalry I think takes the cake on that list, now I am picturing a bunch of Ali G dudes driving tanks and can't stop laughing.
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Mar 29, 2017 07:18
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gohuskies posted:Cognac is only cognac if it's from the Cognac region of France. All other "cognac" is just brandy. Like with champagne, where all of it from anywhere but Champagne is supposed to be called sparkling wine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArArAt_(brandy) Wikipedia posted:In the Russian-speaking countries of the former Soviet Union the Armenian brandy is marketed as cognac (Russian: армянский коньяк, tr. armjanskij konjak). This is because in 1900, the brandy won the Grand-prix award in Paris and the company so impressed the French that they have been allowed to legally call the product "cognac". The term "brandy" has never really caught on in the region.
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Mar 29, 2017 07:19
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Acebuckeye13 posted:I'm pretty sure the official story is, in fact, that the system worked fine, it was the crew that hosed up Yeah. Even though at the time the crew didn't get in any trouble IIRC.
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Mar 29, 2017 11:34
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SeanBeansShako posted:A list of British Army regimental nicknames through the ages.... Based purely on the names, which of these regiments would you least like to fight? I'm going to go with the 'Donkey Wallopers'.
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Mar 29, 2017 12:09
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Raenir Salazar posted:It's a fairly interesting military campaign; at the start of Round 2 of hostilities between the Chinese Red Army and the Republican forces based on a couple of different military history books I've read at my University's library the KMT had around 4.5 million men and the Red Army had around 500,000; wikipedia has different estiments, but I'm pretty sure the disparity was fairly large. Mao was also probably the best guerilla commander of the century alongside Castro and Luis Carlos Prestes, too bad this didn't translate very well into rulership itself.
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Mar 29, 2017 12:10
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re: CCP vs KMT I've also read that the communists were WAY better at dealing with the populations of areas they moved through. This isn't to say that bad poo poo didn't happen, but you can read a lot of histories where villagers basically say "Yeah, so the KMT came through and raped my mom and stole the pigs and then the CCP rolled through two days later and offered us what medical aid they could and some food, which is why I joined up with the communists a bit later."
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Mar 29, 2017 12:46
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Mao was and still is incredibly popular amongst the rural citizenry, which is interesting considering how much he pretty much screwed them over.
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Mar 29, 2017 13:00
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Cyrano4747 posted:re: CCP vs KMT I've also read that the communists were WAY better at dealing with the populations of areas they moved through. This isn't to say that bad poo poo didn't happen, but you can read a lot of histories where villagers basically say "Yeah, so the KMT came through and raped my mom and stole the pigs and then the CCP rolled through two days later and offered us what medical aid they could and some food, which is why I joined up with the communists a bit later." There's some people in the China threads on this forum whose families have the exact opposite anecdotes, so I wouldn't generalize too much. There's also going to be a selection bias in which histories get published. Communist tax reforms were definitely very popular. Especially early on when reform meant implementing progressive taxation and exempting the poorest, as opposed to later when it became arbitrarily designating anyone with two pigs as a landlord and kicking them to death.
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Mar 29, 2017 14:18
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P-Mack posted:There's some people in the China threads on this forum whose families have the exact opposite anecdotes, so I wouldn't generalize too much. There's also going to be a selection bias in which histories get published. If you look at the set of people who fled China during the period (and were financially able to), you will also certainly have a selective set of experiences.
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Mar 29, 2017 14:36
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Fangz posted:If you look at the set of people who fled China during the period (and were financially able to), you will also certainly have a selective set of experiences. See also Cuban exiles in Florida. Not only is the demographic leaving more likely to be anti-Communist in the first place, they're going to be embittered by the whole act of leaving and therefore losing all their stuff. J Random Peasant isn't going anywhere and might well be better off under Maoism, at least at first, because it's not like warlord-era China was a non-lovely time to be a peasant.
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Mar 29, 2017 14:54
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The policy the Red Army implemented in the Philip Short biography of Mao I read was something like "When we go through a Village and the KMT is chasing us take only half the food and pay something for it if we can; because the KMT will steal everything else and the people will hate them instead of us."
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Mar 29, 2017 15:03
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P-Mack posted:There's some people in the China threads on this forum whose families have the exact opposite anecdotes, so I wouldn't generalize too much. There's also going to be a selection bias in which histories get published. People in the China threads have a huge hateboner for Mao and the CCP and they're probably gonna pay more attention to stuff that reinforces that than stuff that contradicts it. Not to say what's said is necessarily inaccurate, but they're probably not reading too critically into things so I'd take it all with a mountain of salt.
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Mar 29, 2017 15:13
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The Lone Badger posted:Based purely on the names, which of these regiments would you least like to fight? THEM. They have an endless supply of black eye censor bars and every bloke in the corner of every British Legion knows somebody who was part of THEM. I'd put up a good fight against a Chelsea Pensioner though!
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Mar 29, 2017 15:26
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The Lone Badger posted:Based purely on the names, which of these regiments would you least like to fight? Something something 3rd Foot and Mouth.
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Mar 29, 2017 15:30
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Koramei posted:People in the China threads have a huge hateboner for Mao and the CCP and they're probably gonna pay more attention to stuff that reinforces that than stuff that contradicts it. Not to say what's said is necessarily inaccurate, but they're probably not reading too critically into things so I'd take it all with a mountain of salt. It's also worth noting that these are Civil Wars, and with that comes all the complexities of a Civil War. The fact that it involves something as globally / politically charged as COMMUNISM makes it even more convoluted, especially to westerners. I got a good dose of this when dating my now-fiance who was born in Vietnam but emigrated here in the 2000s. Her Grandfather fought in the ARVN, spent 10+ years in labor camp and promptly fled to the US once released, along with several of his family including my fiance. Naturally, her family's experiences during the war, along with many Southern Vietnamese, means they have a less than stellar opinion of the current ruling Communist Party. However there are many Vietnamese, especially those in the north, who view the party positively especially when compared to the previous French/US backed regimes. Essentially, poo poo's complicated. Solaris 2.0 fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 15:31
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There was also a complete collapse of the economy and runaway inflation in postwar Natty China.
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Mar 29, 2017 15:32
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I thought the British army was usually like three dudes, who did they attach all those nicknames to??
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Mar 29, 2017 15:40
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aphid_licker posted:I thought the British army was usually like three dudes, who did they attach all those nicknames to?? A regiment isn't a person. This ain't the anime sub forum my friend.
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Mar 29, 2017 15:41
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The Lone Badger posted:Based purely on the names, which of these regiments would you least like to fight? I'm a boring person and got a chuckle out of "first of track"
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Mar 29, 2017 15:49
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FAUXTON posted:I'm a boring person and got a chuckle out of "first of track" The wordplay ones are the best really, I do like a bit of dry wit.
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Mar 29, 2017 15:52
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SeanBeansShako posted:The wordplay ones are the best really, I do like a bit of dry wit. This one's good too, imagine being the poor bastard who got immortalized this way: The Forty-Tens – 2nd Battalion Prince of Wales's Leinster Regiment (from an incident in India where the men were 'numbering', or calling out their position in the ranks: after they reached 'forty-nine' the next man called out 'forty-ten'.) E: ok I just hit a string of backronyms and every one is gold. The Peacemakers – Bedfordshire Regiment (The regiment had no battle honours until 1882, when it was belatedly given those for the War of the Spanish Succession 170 years earlier; the regimental motto was misquoted as 'Thou Shalt not Kill') Man they must have hated that. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 16:00
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Maybe he's just using base-forty numerical system.
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Mar 29, 2017 16:05
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HAM radio came up in the PYF Obsolete/Failed Technology thread, and a wrote up a Dad anecdote, which I may or may not have posted before, figured I'd crosspost here anyway:Delivery McGee posted:... In more relevant discussion, Dad served basically the same function as the standard-bearers of the pre-radio days --  Was "draft-dodging via enlisting, at least you get to pick your job" a widespread thing, and if so, when did it start? I could see people volunteering to be an REMF in the World Wars (Dad gamed the system by going for high risk/short contract, the people who signed up for truck driver or mechanic sometimes get ... bad times). When I was in high school JROTC in the late '90s, we were told that in the Army, you were guaranteed the MOS of your choice when you signed up, not so much for the other branches -- IIRC the USAF let you pick three and invariably puts you in your last choice, according to open positions, and the Marines and Navy are even worse, but that may just be because I was in Army class. Re: Unit nicknames: Well, in the US, there's the Fighting 69th: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85Pz195yyPk whose regimental song (an old Irish tune, because they were Irish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNwu8qRllJ0 is better known as a cavalry anthem because it was later Custer's regiment's song. The7th Cav "Garryowen", now part of 1CAV division (y'know, the helicopter troopers in Apocalypse Now, but nowadays they're armored because what mechanized forces constitute "cavalry" is faintly amusing and subject to change, depending on the person in charge's definition of "cavalry"), has since made up for their past failure, though. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 16:12
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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I remember there was a story about calling in a ship's guns instead of smaller artillery by accident, was that the same guy?
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Mar 29, 2017 16:15
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Ensign Expendable posted:I remember there was a story about calling in a ship's guns instead of smaller artillery by accident, was that the same guy? Since the "first five minutes of Patton" has been called out as possibly apocryphal, I must have a disclaimer: well, it was more calling in any artillery and then going "wait, what?OH poo poo" when the "confirm danger close" blast radius/actual craters were a lot bigger than he expected, but yeah, that's from my pa. He may well have got BB-62 as a firebase when he asked for "any heavy guns available RIGHT THE gently caress NOW" (of course, this is from war stories he told me when I was a child -- he clammed up when I threatened to/asked him to write a book -- but it at least probably happened to some radio guy calling for help in Vietnam.) OTOH, he was in-country while New Jersey was there, so it's plausible. The telling (I wish I'd had a video camera back when he told me his war stories) involved some back-and-forth over the auth codes because the Navy didn't have the Army codes handy, and it was probably a bit embellished in the telling ~25 years after the fact. He did have the authority, as a lowly E-5, to call in the heavies, no questions asked -- the three Arc Lights he asked for and got are the highlight of his short military career. Three-star generals in the Pentagon had to get approval for that poo poo, Dad could just say "yo, I need a three-ship of B-52s, expedite," and shortly thereafter the world as he knew it exploded. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 16:51
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Delivery McGee posted:Was "draft-dodging via enlisting, at least you get to pick your job" a widespread thing, and if so, when did it start? I could see people volunteering to be an REMF in the World Wars (Dad gamed the system by going for high risk/short contract, the people who signed up for truck driver or mechanic sometimes get ... bad times). WWI was fought for a long time by the British entirely by volunteers - conscription didn't come in for a few years due to the sheer number of volunteers that came through in the first years of the war. Most would end up as infantry, but one of the perks was that if you volunteered you could fight with your hometown mates in the form of the "Pals Battalions", each formed from a cohort of guys from the same town. WWII, for the US at least, was driven mostly by conscription I believe. However you could get additional pay by volunteering for more dangerous duty like paratrooper who were paid double the normal infantry rate. Vietnam was driven a lot more by volunteers than conscription and people definitely did "enlist to avoid conscription" as the reality was that if you enlisted you would almost certainly end up as infantry. Off the top of my head the ratio was something like 2/3rds volunteers to 1/3rd conscripts at the height of US conscription.
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Mar 29, 2017 17:02
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MikeCrotch posted:WWI was fought for a long time by the British entirely by volunteers - conscription didn't come in for a few years due to the sheer number of volunteers that came through in the first years of the war. Most would end up as infantry, but one of the perks was that if you volunteered you could fight with your hometown mates in the form of the "Pals Battalions", each formed from a cohort of guys from the same town. Wasn't this ended pretty early by the British? I remember hearing on Dan Carlin's podcast how a whole village would have their entire under-20 something population wiped out in a single battle. Plus the added psychological horror of seeing your literal childhood friends blown to bits right in front of you.
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Mar 29, 2017 17:11
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MikeCrotch posted:WWI was fought for a long time by the British entirely by volunteers - conscription didn't come in for a few years due to the sheer number of volunteers that came through in the first years of the war. Most would end up as infantry, but one of the perks was that if you volunteered you could fight with your hometown mates in the form of the "Pals Battalions", each formed from a cohort of guys from the same town.  (efb on that point) And yeah, British WWI was all people volunteering because Britain was in danger and such. I guess the thing I was getting at was common in the ACW -- back then you responded to a newspaper ad for somebody looking to raise a volunteer regiment, promising better pay/conditions than conscription.quote:Vietnam was driven a lot more by volunteers than conscription and people definitely did "enlist to avoid conscription" as the reality was that if you enlisted you would almost certainly end up as infantry. Off the top of my head the ratio was something like 2/3rds volunteers to 1/3rd conscripts at the height of US conscription.
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Mar 29, 2017 17:14
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MikeCrotch posted:WWII, for the US at least, was driven mostly by conscription I believe. However you could get additional pay by volunteering for more dangerous duty like paratrooper who were paid double the normal infantry rate. Kinda: this was deliberate. After Pearl Harbor there were far more volunteers than there were things for people to do, so the government basically ended volunteering and went to strictly conscription. This avoided problems like "all the healthy farm workers and factory hands joined up so, now what" and "no one wants to be an infantryman", and slowed down things enough for industry to get itself warmed up.
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Mar 29, 2017 17:16
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