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Cythereal posted:Because OO-RAH! The USMC is really good at doing well with comparatively little money (about 4% of the Defense budget)*. They have their own Air Wing, which is more adapted to giving close air support than their Air Force peers. They also have a really flexible organization which allows for the creation of units on an as-needed basis more efficiently than the army (MAGTAFs). There's no doubt that they pretty much do a job that the army could do, but let's not write them off as useless either. Cythereal posted:Also, name an American military procurement fuckup in the last fifty years and odds are good the Marines are partially responsible. Case in point: the F35 debacle. M247 Sgt York, MBT-70... Disclaimer: Yes, I was a Marine myself. Edit: * For comparison, I looked at the 2010 budget. Comparing the $ in the budget to the number of people in each service shows that the USMC spends less than 1/2 (46%) per person compared to the Army. That alone is a pretty compelling case for keeping them around. Dollars - Number in Service - $ per person $2.448E+11 - 566,045 - $432,474.44 $40600000000 - 202,441 - $200,552.25 Cessna fucked around with this message at 22:30 on May 11, 2018 |
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May 11, 2018 22:13
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HEY GUNS posted:change a few details and this is 19th century, in fact half of those flags look 19th century with swastikas added something like old unit crests from unification?
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May 11, 2018 22:36
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SeanBeansShako posted:Yeah a lot of groups in war torn Syria have gotten old school with political or religious banners. "For hundreds of years, armies used flags and banners to communicate, proclaim their victories and announce their alliegances; this gave us such leaders as Gustavus Adolphus, Napoleon and Mustafa Pasha. Now, technology has taken the same role, and what has it given us? Dick graffitti and the anime wallscroll." - Orson Welles
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May 11, 2018 22:50
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FAUXTON posted:something like old unit crests from unification? I am seeing a lot of Prussian symbols on the flags too. How did the non Prussian parts of the German Empire feel about that one state somehow being the favourite?
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May 11, 2018 22:54
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So, I'm doing a little writing at my university about measures to introduce conscription as the basis for the Ottoman Army carried out in the Tanzimat era and the challenges that encountered. Let me tell you, it's kind of a shitshow, between the huge numbers of people exempted from military service, the near impossibility of conducting a proper census in many areas and widespread resistance in the population to doing military service (alot of stemming at discontent over the length of service and potentially being stationed far away from home, often under very deplorable conditions), it's kind of a wonder they even got a kind of system working at all. One of the examples I'm looking at in terms of challanges faced in implementing conscription, Syria (in particular the city of Aleppo as well Druze and Alawite areas) was in a near constant state of revolt and near anarchy about this issue (other factors were also at work such as resistance to direct taxation, but conscription in particularly was abhorred) from 1841, when control was handed back from Mohammed Ali of Egypt (who had also had to deal with revolts and did so with great brutality), to the late 1870s. Anyway if anyone would be interested in this I could probably produce a shorter writeup on this during the coming week. It's fairly milhist.
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May 11, 2018 23:08
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Anything with the Ottomans is welcome my friend.
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May 11, 2018 23:10
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Randarkman posted:Anyway if anyone would be interested in this I could probably produce a shorter writeup on this during the coming week. It's fairly milhist. 
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May 11, 2018 23:12
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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JcDent posted:So why do Marines get to overshadow everyone? The Army was involved in the Pacific from the very beginning, most famously (Or infamously) holding out in the Philippines on the Bataan peninsula until their surrender in March of 1942 (Which was, and still is, the largest surrender of personnel in US military history). After the retreat from the Philippines, however, the majority of the Army's efforts were spent on grueling overland campaigns in New Guinea and elsewhere, which the vast majority of people completely forget about. There just wasn't anything as flashy or as dramatic as the Marines' assault on Tarawa or Iwo Jima, which captured the eye of the public and the press.
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May 11, 2018 23:23
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Speaking of the Ottoman Empire, Russian painters actually produced a number of really cool battle scenes from the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878. Known as the War of '93 in Muslim sources, this war was a complete disaster for the Ottomans and almost ended in the whole edifice going up in smoke. Even though the Ottoman Army at the time was probably the strongest it had been for more than a century, it just wasn't enough. The Ottomans actually had, for the large part, superior weapons to the Russians, modern long-ranged rapid-fire artillery, repeating carbines for the cavalry and a greater proportion of breech-loading rifles. What failed them was that they lacked the infrastructure and economic base to effectively supply and support their armies in the field, especially if they were maneuvring or, God forbid, on the offensive. They also weren't able to conscript enough soldiers (related to my work, yeah!) to maintain field strength and replace losses, not to mention that they weren't able to get them to the front fast enough. Thus, while the Turks could often inflict considerable casualties on the Russians due to their superior firepower (well, if and when they had ammunition), the Russians were nearly always eventually able to overwhelm, exhaust and/or outmaneuver the Turks.  Storming the Fortress of Ardahan by Alexey Kivshenko  Winners by Vasily Vereshchagin  The Battle of Shipka Pass in August 1877 by Alexey Popov  Dragoons of Nizhny Novgorod pursuing the Turks near Kars during the battle of Aladja by Alexey Kivshenko  Fight near Ivanovo Chiflik on 2nd October 1877 by Pavel Kovalevsky  Surrender of the fortress of Nikopol by Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky  Taking of the Grivitsa redoubt by the Russians during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 by Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky  The repulsion of the Bajazet fortress assault June 8, 1877 by Lev Lagorio e: found a couple more.  Bayonet fight of Russian regiments with Turkish infantry on Sistovsky heights by Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky  (from google translate)The last battle near Plevna on November 28, 1877 by Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky  The battle at Plevna August 27, 1877 by Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky Randarkman fucked around with this message at 00:08 on May 12, 2018 |
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May 11, 2018 23:52
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Cythereal posted:They absolutely saw fighting, and lots of it. All-black Army units featured prominently in Japanese propaganda to terrify Japanese civilians, that they were trained war gorillas the Americans taught to use guns and were rewarded by being the first in line to rape Japanese women. Wow they somehow might have out-racisted the Americans of the era
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May 11, 2018 23:58
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I don't know, the 19th century as a whole was pretty racist. Like 'inventing reasons with FAKE SCIENCE' bad.
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May 12, 2018 00:02
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Milo and POTUS posted:Wow they somehow might have out-racisted the Americans of the era American soldiers spread rumors to local populations that black soldiers were basically caged and kept on leashes back home in America.
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May 12, 2018 00:07
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13th KRRC War Diary, 6th May 1918 posted:During the morning and afternoon there was considerable shelling in our area. About 9 a.m. the Divisional Commander paid us a visit which, owing to the shelling, lasted for about 2 hours and a half. In the afternoon arrangements were made for going into the line. All surplus kit such as dixies, suits, etc., were dumped at Battalion Headquarters and sent down by the transport. Appendix B -  13th KRRC War Diary, 7th May 1918 posted:The day passed quietly. At 4 o'clock Companies and Batt. H.Q. details "Stood to" in their Battalion positions which had been selected. Work was done improving the fire steps and clearing the rain of last night out of the trenches. 13th KRRC War Diary, 8th May 1918 posted:A Bosche attack was anticipated today but did not materialize. The R.Bs on our right advanced their line at 2 p.m. and were very successful, taking the Bosche completely by surprise. At 7 p.m. the Bosche, after considerable artillery activity made a counter-attack. During this period we were shelled and under M.G. fire. At night the outpost line was withdrawn to the original position. In the afternoon the advance parties of the 8th Somerset Light Infantry came up to take over. 13th KRRC War Diary, 9th May 1918 posted:The day passed quietly. In the evening guides were sent to meet the incoming Battalion. It was an ideal night for relief and it went off without a hitch, being complete at 12.15 a.m. The Battn. on relief withdrew to trenches and tunners in ESSARTS taking over from the 8th Somerset L.I. Appendix C -  13th KRRC War Diary, 10th May 1918 posted:In the morning an inspection of rifles, swords, S.A.A. and Small Box Respirators was carried out through the Battalion. 13th KRRC War Diary, 11th May 1918 posted:The day passed quietly. The same working parties were found and the men continued cleaning themselves and surroundings. Apologies for batching these entries up at the moment, instead of day-by-day. Real life is getting in the way a bit.
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May 12, 2018 00:08
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Milo and POTUS posted:Wow they somehow might have out-racisted the Americans of the era Japan was, and still is, extremely loving racist. Look up any story about a black person living in Japan. Or a Japanese person born with brown hair rather than black.
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May 12, 2018 00:24
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Cythereal posted:Japan was, and still is, extremely loving racist. Look up any story about a black person living in Japan. Or a Japanese person born with brown hair rather than black. I was in Japan recently and one of our guides, an American who had lived there most of his adult life, basically said they were very racist, but "apologetically so". I don't have any point to make in saying this, just an anecdotal tidbit.
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May 12, 2018 00:51
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Acebuckeye13 posted:There just wasn't anything as flashy or as dramatic as the Marines' assault on Tarawa or Iwo Jima, which captured the eye of the public and the press. The 147th Infantry Regiment was involved in a lot of those assaults, including Guadalcanal, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. The 182nd was at Guadalcanal, the Solomons, and Lyete. The Army contribution was not well publicized, but it was there. The 37th Infantry Division was also heavily involved. Gnoman fucked around with this message at 01:08 on May 12, 2018 |
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May 12, 2018 01:04
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Hunt11 posted:American soldiers spread rumors to local populations that black soldiers were basically caged and kept on leashes back home in America. You should have prefaced this statement with, "Not to be outdone," Cythereal posted:They do basically nothing the Army doesn't anymore, and haven't since about the 19th century. No use at all for marines on Navy boats anymore? Not even keeping a couple fireteams or whatever handy with some boats in case you've got to do some anti-piracy work or do they use more specialized dudes like the SEALs Milo and POTUS fucked around with this message at 01:28 on May 12, 2018 |
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May 12, 2018 01:25
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SeanBeansShako posted:I am seeing a lot of Prussian symbols on the flags too. saxony insisted on being able to pursue its own foreign policy and pick its own military targets during ww1 edit: if i yell at metternich enough he might come in and talk about bavaria during the Second Reich HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 01:53 on May 12, 2018 |
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May 12, 2018 01:28
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Randarkman posted:Anyway if anyone would be interested in this I could probably produce a shorter writeup on this during the coming week. It's fairly milhist.
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May 12, 2018 01:31
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Milo and POTUS posted:No use at all for marines on Navy boats anymore? Not even keeping a couple fireteams or whatever handy with some boats in case you've got to do some anti-piracy work or do they use more specialized dudes like the SEALs It depends. Sometimes marines do that, sometimes it's armed Navy servicemen.
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May 12, 2018 01:48
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Gnoman posted:The 147th Infantry Regiment was involved in a lot of those assaults, including Guadalcanal, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. The 182nd was at Guadalcanal, the Solomons, and Lyete. The Army contribution was not well publicized, but it was there. Sure, I didn't mean to imply that there were no Army troops involved in those operations at all-merely that they were primarily Marine operations, with Army units serving in a supporting role or under overall Marine leadership.
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May 12, 2018 01:50
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I know nothing about US Navy boot camp or training but: what jobs do SEALs come from? I guess I figure Army and Marine training are small unit tactic and other stuff that I think SEALs would do, but do Navy guys learn infantry stuff as a matter of course? Or is it just dudes that can hack SEAL training and happen to also be working on boats decide to go out for it?
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May 12, 2018 02:16
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Randarkman posted:Known as the War of '93 in Muslim sources And so today I learned that there is an Islamic dating system, which in retrospect should have been obvious since they were hardly going to date from Christ.
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May 12, 2018 02:35
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Randarkman posted:Anyway if anyone would be interested in this I could probably produce a shorter writeup on this during the coming week. It's fairly milhist. I'd be especially interested to hear about why the census was so difficult to implement, and how people resisted conscription. Obviously if there's massive civil strife as in the conflict between the Maronites and Druze in 1860 its not going to be possible to run a census but there have to be times when there's not open conflict when the state can collect information right? How did the modernizing state deal with tribal militia and other irregular groups that tend to resist state power?
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May 12, 2018 03:00
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The last i heard, which was the mid 17th century, the Ottoman administration was on top of things. What happened to change that by the mid-19th?
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May 12, 2018 03:15
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Milo and POTUS posted:Wow they somehow might have out-racisted the Americans of the era Imperial Japan was racist and race motivated as hell, they were nearly every bit as bad as Nazi Germany. Unit 731 performing live fire tests and vivisections on Chinese captives, stuff like the rape of Nanking, and even in Japan itself there was stuff like people using shibboleths to try to root out ethnic Koreans so they could murder thousands of them in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake. More benignly, it had a profound effect on Japan's historiography (to this day) and had their historians dramatically understating their historical Chinese and particularly Korean influences and over-inflating Japan's individualism and exceptionalism, because you can't have those continentals having built the better part of our civilization when we're supposed to be better than them.
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May 12, 2018 03:18
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zoux posted:I know nothing about US Navy boot camp or training but: what jobs do SEALs come from? I guess I figure Army and Marine training are small unit tactic and other stuff that I think SEALs would do, but do Navy guys learn infantry stuff as a matter of course? Or is it just dudes that can hack SEAL training and happen to also be working on boats decide to go out for it? You can either join to be a SEAL or transfer over from another MOS. The training covers the infantry stuff. Disclaimer: I was never a SEAL.
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May 12, 2018 04:06
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Randarkman posted:
I like these two next two each other because just looking at the dates lets you know one of the main reasons the Ottomans didn't collapse completely (the second one is actually the second major battle, there was another one two months earlier as well). I was actually really confused by the dates at first because I remembered the siege lasting into December until I realized those are probably using the Julian calendar.
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May 12, 2018 04:24
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There's a neat transcription project of surveys taken by US service members during WWII. After struggling through several records with tiny, poorly photo-copied cursive, this one pops up on my screen and it is... refreshingly direct!
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May 12, 2018 04:30
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Koramei posted:Imperial Japan was racist and race motivated as hell, they were nearly every bit as bad as Nazi Germany. Unit 731 performing live fire tests and vivisections on Chinese captives, stuff like the rape of Nanking, and even in Japan itself there was stuff like people using shibboleths to try to root out ethnic Koreans so they could murder thousands of them in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake. Babibubebo.  Also Hey Metternich, didn't know you were also on board with good beer and Weißwurst club. What kind of mustard do you put on your Leberkaas?
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May 12, 2018 04:38
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And on the topic of black soldiers being treated badly, another frank survey response I just transcribed:quote:I have no liking for any part of the army - especially the Second Army. Transportation in Pickett, in the entire state of Virginia, is bad. Negro soldiers are treated poorly in Blackstone. There isn't even a place for a colored soldier to buy a cup of coffee in Blackstone.
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May 12, 2018 04:52
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Tomn posted:And so today I learned that there is an Islamic dating system, which in retrospect should have been obvious since they were hardly going to date from Christ. 1293 to be exact. It uses Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina (Yathrib at the time) in 622 as year 0, thus years are known as so and so AH (After the Hijra) in English, so it would be 1293 AH. Like the Hebrew calender, the Islamic calender is based on the phases of the Moon rather than the movement of the Sun. It has 12 months like the Gregorian calendear, but unlike the Hebrew calendar does not have a correction month that keeps it kind of of in line with solar calendars, thus a year in the Islamic calendar is consistently about 10 days shorter than a year in the Gregorian calendar. This is why Ramadan keeps arriving earlier year by year, also why the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 end up just being the War of '93 rather than spread out over two years.
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May 12, 2018 05:17
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Koramei posted:even in Japan itself there was stuff like people using shibboleths to try to root out ethnic Koreans so they could murder thousands of them in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake. The Kanto earthquake scene was one of those parts in Wind that rises that really irked me. After the earthquake the movie just goes on. I really hoped that at least one major Japanese media product would touch on what happened, but i guess I was being too optimistic. Mass pogroms and roundups of Koreans and political dissidents.
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May 12, 2018 05:33
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Squalid posted:I'd be especially interested to hear about why the census was so difficult to implement, and how people resisted conscription. I'll have some on this, anyway have to concentrate on writing the actual thing before I write a bit of an overwiew here. Alot of the difficulty with conducting a census came from lack of funding and manpower for the provincial administration, as well as lack of troops to asssit them in tribal regions. Especially in Syria, but also in Eastern Anatolia, Albania and other parts of the empire people simply fled to the mountains or forests when they were warned that officials and troops were coming to conduct a census, collect taxes or conscript their young men. A kind of census, that counted male heads of households was carried out in the 1830s and again in 1844 (with the express objective of enabling conscription), but it left out whole regions and could only give a rough estimate of the population and was probably a pretty significant undercount. HEY GUNS posted:The last i heard, which was the mid 17th century, the Ottoman administration was on top of things. What happened to change that by the mid-19th? It's not the main focus for what I'm writing about, but I can look into this a bit for you as well if you want. Generally speaking though there was a trend that roughly began in the 18th century, carrying on into the 19th century and combatted by the reformers, where local provincial notables amassed more and more power and autonomy for themselves at the expense of the formal authorities both central and provincial. Central personalities in this regard are Ali Pasha of Iannina, Ali Bey el Kabir of Egypt and of course Mohammed Ali among many others actually. Other significant factors concern the decline of the Timar system over the course of the 18th century to almost insignificance, this is maybe even more considerable than the more famous decline of the Janissaries as the Timar system (which handed out plots of land to soldiers to allow them to equip themselves as cavalrymen with the proceeds from that land) was what actually had provided the cavalry backbone of Ottoman armies. During the 18th century you'll see irregular and mercenary forces becoming more and more important in Ottoman armies, indeed often making up the majority of the armies. Especially Albanians, regarded as unruly and prone to revolt, were everywhere. These forces were led by their own commanders who often used command over their forces in order to amass power for themselves (so this is actually closely related to the rise of provincial elites). When demobilized many of these soldiers would simply turn to banditry, IIRC the central government almost completely lost control of Anatolia for a decade or more because of such soldiers, called Levendis, running rampant. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 06:24 on May 12, 2018 |
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May 12, 2018 05:52
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ughhhh posted:The Kanto earthquake scene was one of those parts in Wind that rises that really irked me. After the earthquake the movie just goes on. I really hoped that at least one major Japanese media product would touch on what happened, but i guess I was being too optimistic. Mass pogroms and roundups of Koreans and political dissidents. I feel like it's already incredibly rare for any anime or manga to acknowledge anything about the era of imperial Japan, much less anything even loosely analogous to their crimes against humanity. I think the closest anything ever gets is Golden Kamuy. Miyazaki just wanted to wax nostalgic about pre-industrialized Japan and muse about airplanes.
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May 12, 2018 06:14
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Randarkman posted:When demobilized many of these soldiers would simply turn to banditry.
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May 12, 2018 06:19
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Hargrimm posted:There's a neat transcription project of surveys taken by US service members during WWII. After struggling through several records with tiny, poorly photo-copied cursive, this one pops up on my screen and it is... refreshingly direct! 
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May 12, 2018 06:28
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War is the continuation of banditry by other means
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May 12, 2018 06:35
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GotLag posted:War is the continuation of banditry by other means it's also the continuation of music by other means
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May 12, 2018 06:41
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I just wanted to say you don’t gotta be a freaking SEAL to do a boarding action, they’re just cross trained from regular ratings. My friend did it and he was a sonar tech (code for played video games and rarely boarded his detroyer) Dudes they boarded got as far as drawing on the US Navy one time. Turns out pirates and drug runners rather enjoy being alive.
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May 12, 2018 07:11
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