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Cyrano4747 posted:Off the tip of my head the only one which really gets to the root of the question behind the question you’re asking would be gotz ally’s Wages of destruction. It’s a look at how the third Reich’s economy worked and pretty much the preeminent work on that subject. Wages of Destruction is a fascinating read to understand the Reich's economy ; but as a clarification, it was written by Adam Tooze, not Gotz Ally.
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Jun 4, 2018 05:18
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Cyrano4747 posted:Off the tip of my head the only one which really gets to the root of the question behind the question you’re asking would be gotz ally’s Wages of destruction. It’s a look at how the third Reich’s economy worked and pretty much the preeminent work on that subject.  Added to the stack, my man.
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Jun 4, 2018 05:20
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mlmp08 posted:Only if you never compare the usaf with any other US military branch.  And the idea that the USAF never gives people unclear direction, insufficient training, or puts them in needlessly dangerous situations...
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Jun 4, 2018 05:21
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But compared to the Navy?
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Jun 4, 2018 05:25
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"Mildly less lovely than the Navy" is a *slightly* lower bar than, quote:Their training programs are terrific. All pilots are groomed to meet high standards for knowledge and professionalism. Their aircraft are top-notch and extremely well maintained. Their facilities are excellent... No matter where you go, you'll know what to expect, what is expected of you, and you'll be given the training & tools you need to meet those expectations. And maybe there's some extremely cush flying squadron out there that I haven't heard of, but none of my peers were "home for most important family events." Let me tell you about my friend who was asked to move his wedding which had been on the books for nine months and cancel his honeymoon because the alternative was the wing having a deployment shortfall, which would make the commander look bad.
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Jun 4, 2018 05:38
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Oh, hey, are we talking about service dysfunction? 'Cause I got some stories about the Army!
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Jun 4, 2018 06:01
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Captain Log posted:Can anyone recommend a good book about the fall of the Luftwaffe? While I know what happened in general, I don't know poo poo about the details. People have hit on the Luftwaffe's dysfunction, but a giant factor as well was that the USAAF changed tactics. Initially, the strategic bombing campaign focused on taking out industrial targets, and fighter escorts were strictly ordered to stay with the bombers to protect them. When Jimmy Doolittle took over the 8th Air Force, however, he changed the focus of the escorts from protecting the bombers to eradicating the Luftwaffe-which meant allowing the escorts to pursue German fighters after they broke off their attacks, sending escorts to perform wide sweeps for German fighters ahead of the bombers, and allowing aircraft destroyed on the ground to be counted as kills, which encouraged pilots to directly attack and strafe German air bases. Together with the widespread adoption of high-performance, long-range, drop-tank equipped fighters like the P-47 and the P-51, the new tactics completely broke the back of the Luftwaffe to the point that they were only able to send up two aircraft to contest the invasion on D-Day, a far cry from the heavy resistance they'd been putting up only a year earlier.
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Jun 4, 2018 06:19
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Seems like any dysfunction in the US military is pretty minor stuff compared to our adversaries though. Obviously we should try to do better...
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Jun 4, 2018 06:27
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Acebuckeye13 posted:People have hit on the Luftwaffe's dysfunction, but a giant factor as well was that the USAAF changed tactics. Initially, the strategic bombing campaign focused on taking out industrial targets, and fighter escorts were strictly ordered to stay with the bombers to protect them. When Jimmy Doolittle took over the 8th Air Force, however, he changed the focus of the escorts from protecting the bombers to eradicating the Luftwaffe-which meant allowing the escorts to pursue German fighters after they broke off their attacks, sending escorts to perform wide sweeps for German fighters ahead of the bombers, and allowing aircraft destroyed on the ground to be counted as kills, which encouraged pilots to directly attack and strafe German air bases. Together with the widespread adoption of high-performance, long-range, drop-tank equipped fighters like the P-47 and the P-51, the new tactics completely broke the back of the Luftwaffe to the point that they were only able to send up two aircraft to contest the invasion on D-Day, a far cry from the heavy resistance they'd been putting up only a year earlier. I remember seeing an interesting special about the two D-Day pilots and might need to toss something like that into the reading stack. This is intensely interesting and likely going to be a subject I pursue whenever I go grab another PhD. My great grandfather was an intelligence officer who worked on the girojet or gyrojet targeting system in the spitfires. It's way, way classified for someone who can't go in person to the war archives at the moment. But I really want to know what the hell he did. All I have is a stack of Crown market intelligence reports. They all say SECRET and TOP SECRET in hysterical font. I also know he was a photographer at the liberation of Bergen Belsen. (One report mentions UFOs and goes into a breakdown of the four types commonly saw. Of course, that was stolen out of my work desk at the university I worked. The christian university.) I appreciate the info! It's cool knowing about the specific ways the US helped win the war.
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Jun 4, 2018 06:28
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Smiling Jack posted:Edit: the M1 tank named Shai Hulud during Iraq 2: Quagmire Boogaloo also owned Pics or it didn't happen 
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Jun 4, 2018 06:53
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A few years ago I vaguely recall seeing a gif of some guy in maybe Iraq who'd put together an ied testing it by jumping up and down on it - turns out it works and there's a huge explosion. Does anyone else remember that? Was it a fake?
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Jun 4, 2018 11:02
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I’ve seen multiple videos like that Edit: real
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Jun 4, 2018 11:23
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Dead Reckoning posted:"Mildly less lovely than the Navy" is a *slightly* lower bar than, It's a joke letter made to make the Air Force seem like a bunch of effete professionals compared to the 2 fisted bare knuckle life of a Naval Aviator, I wouldn't take it too seriously. It's just saying the Air Force generally has nicer bases and easier flying conditions than the Navy, and then at the end acknowledges that Army Aviation is basically the only branch to fly nearly all of it's missions within range of small arms fire and land outside the wire.
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Jun 4, 2018 12:30
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A nice read, thanks. quote:"As an aside, he was also the one who discovered the semi-mythical lost machine shop on USS Enterprise. "  Seems like it's a total urban (naval?) legend and I'm gullible for even entertaining the idea, nonetheless Here's a few more legends that turned up when I was looking around, there's some light-hearted stuff: quote:A book in the plant was hidden, and nukes on watch started a list of reasons they hated the place. Reason number 807 was "This place sucks" and it stuck... Also heard of a guy at nuke school who whigged out and began driving a pretend motorcycle everywhere he went, noises and all. He got a psych release, rode the motorcycle outside the gate, put the kickstand down, and walked away LOL but then: quote:One of my classmates flunked out and went to the surface fleet as a conventional EM and was in the wrong turret on the Iowa. That was a bit of a shock to us at the time. 
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Jun 4, 2018 13:13
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Captain Log posted:Can anyone recommend a good book about the fall of the Luftwaffe? While I know what happened in general, I don't know poo poo about the details. If you want "poo poo falls apart", I recommend The Last Year of the Luftwaffe by Alfred Price. If you want a overview, I read German Air Force, 1933-1945: An Anatomy of Failure by Matthew Cooper (note, I got that one out of a library and it is pretty old (1981), maybe there's a more modern overview book out there.) If you feel like understanding the economy of the Third Reich, gotta echo Cyrano's recommendation of The Wages of Destruction, it is great.
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Jun 4, 2018 13:30
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I spend my days these days poring through company level reports on the PLA and by god if you want dysfunctional i can give you dysfunctional “"A major difference between joint operations and the traditional pattern of operations is the difference in the way of thinking. The thinking of joint operations is the most insufficient and also the most difficult in the training of command and staff organ." Currently, training for the command and staff organ is not consistently conducted in an effective way and does not follow the same standards, with efforts being relaxed sometimes; lopsided stress is laid on hardware, and inadequate attention is paid to software; there still exists a substantial disparity in people's thoughts. To deal with these problems, the Central Theater Air Force decided to recommend more than 100 books as compulsory and optional readers in joint campaign training, so as to strengthen the normalized study of military theory, consolidate the theoretical foundation for joint operations through updating and applying knowledge, gradually set up the joint operation knowledge system in the command and staff organ.” well that'll solve that problem
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Jun 4, 2018 14:13
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Ok, what does that mean? They have to read "Combined Arms for Dummies" or what?
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Jun 4, 2018 15:17
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JcDent posted:Ok, what does that mean? They have to read "Combined Arms for Dummies" or what? Volumes 1-100!
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Jun 4, 2018 15:29
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It's pretty funny that they suck at joint operations despite technically only having one service. Edit: Although to be fair China was turning wars into multi-generational bureaucratic clusterfucks when everyone in Europe was still banging rocks together. So there's precedent. Rent-A-Cop fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 16:48
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Reposting a question from the Alas, Babylon thread just in case y'all can correct me/add something. It's very, very cold war.Proper Kerni ng posted:I wonder when the last time was in American history that "evacuate the target cities" was in any way a realistic possibility on a scale of less than a week to ten days. WWI, maybe? Certainly by mid WWII, if a mayor or governor ordered a general evacuation of any city bigger than a hundred thousand because the Luftwaffe was on its way, all it would mean was streets clogged with victims when the anthrax bombs or zombie ape paratroopers or whatever landed. Nowadays the total evacuation of Tokyo even into prepared underground shelters was the least realistic part of Pacific Rim Uprising. The Cold War thread, a few years ago talked about this. There's a 1950s training film on youtube called "A Day Called X", a full dress rehearsal evacuation of - Portland, Or? A city on the West Coast. Anyway, by the video's account anyway, the evacuation was successful. Even people in hospitals and such were evacuated to designated areas - the entire municipal government also had a nuclear hardened shelter in under a mountain to coordinate, with several officials having the full-time job of evacuation planning. As part of the planning, they also evacuated all the city's utility trucks to help in disaster relief and reconnection of services. This whole thing took four hours of course, and I'll let you and other readers ITT decide if that's remotely plausible. In the early/mid 1950s, the weapons were intercontinental bombers which would drop one or two massive multi-megaton bombs. Four hours was really a worst case scenerio - likely warning would have been even longer than that. What's more, you had additional things playing in your favor: Air defense with NORAD had a realistic chance of knocking down a fair number of attackers, and bombs can of course be mis-aimed, making even an actual realized attack less effective. Two things changed about this 'rosy' scenario: ICBMs and the consequent miniaturizing of nuclear weapons. (This is why nuclear bomb research post 1960 switches from 'bigger bombs' to 'smaller bombs, both in yield and size.') Now, your warning shrinks to...well, it depends, Half an hour seems the norm, though a percentage of missiles were kept on 15 minute alert. Certain scenarios (like a 'decapitation strike') have an 8 minute warning? Even the president is getting killed by that one unless he's on an idling AF1 ready for takeoff. Also as ICBMs carried more warheads and the numbers of weapons went up to the thousands, every city and target of value is getting plastered with warheads; accurate targeting and the number of warheads on a given city means that everybody is gettin' killed as it turns out 6-8 near simultaneous strikes is much more efficient at putting people in the 'pray for swift death' zone of the blast then 15 megatons liberally applied. If you look up Life magazine in Google books, you'll see that in the early 1960s, people are still scheming for civil defense plans (and just FYI, I think a lot of the illustrations they used ended up influencing the original Fallout artists/designers.) Knowing what we know now, it's clear that the people making these plans really only expect something like 10-15% of the people properly sheltered to survive. And this was in the early 60s.
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Jun 4, 2018 19:57
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These NSA motivational posters are more Cold War than AIRPOWER, but pretty great nonetheless- https://news.avclub.com/these-recently-declassified-nsa-posters-make-our-author-1826541382 full .pdf of all the declassified posters: http://www.governmentattic.org/28docs/NSAsecurityPosters_1950s-60s.pdf 
Veritek83 fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 22:11
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Veritek83 posted:These NSA motivational posters are more Cold War than AIRPOWER, but pretty great nonetheless- https://news.avclub.com/these-recently-declassified-nsa-posters-make-our-author-1826541382 Without a doubt the single most embarrassing / awful thing the NSA has ever done.
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Jun 4, 2018 22:18
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"Yeah man, I got a good idea. You know what's hip? John Travolta. Saturday Night Fever. Disco." - A Ghost
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Jun 4, 2018 22:19
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Captain Log posted:"Yeah man, I got a good idea. You know what's hip? John Travolta. Saturday Night Fever. Disco." - A Ghost Its in a batch of posters from the 50s and 60s making it extra spooky!
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Jun 4, 2018 22:22
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movax posted:Without a doubt the single most embarrassing / awful thing the NSA has ever done. The posters are said to be from the 50s and 60s..... Wasnt disco a 70s thing?
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Jun 4, 2018 22:23
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Veritek83 posted:These NSA motivational posters are more Cold War than AIRPOWER, but pretty great nonetheless- https://news.avclub.com/these-recently-declassified-nsa-posters-make-our-author-1826541382 I'm really digging this particular bit of historical irony 
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Jun 4, 2018 22:33
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Cat Army 
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LingcodKilla posted:The posters are said to be from the 50s and 60s..... Wasnt disco a 70s thing? Certainly yes. Here is a little something nobody has ever heard of that was once featured in a SomethingAwful front page article. I present to you, the genre of Itali-Disco! This is Kano, dancing in a glorious fashion, with two moms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJqunoEVDRk
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Jun 4, 2018 22:35
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Bourricot posted:Wages of Destruction is a fascinating read to understand the Reich's economy ; but as a clarification, it was written by Adam Tooze, not Gotz Ally. Doh. That's what I get for phone positing right before bed. (Ally wrote Hitler's Beneficiaries which is ALSO a great book in a kind of economics way. More about how you get people to go along with expropriating the jews than the actual economy, though_
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Jun 4, 2018 23:09
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Thyre be dragons:    
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Jun 4, 2018 23:55
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Wow that STATE one is not half creepy.
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Jun 5, 2018 01:29
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yeah honestly not sure if that one was supposed to be "lol commies" or "#GOALS"
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Jun 5, 2018 01:34
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Kesper North posted:Wow that STATE one is not half creepy. I could easily see than being cribbed from a Soviet poster. Eerie.
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Jun 5, 2018 01:36
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*nods approvingly
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Jun 5, 2018 02:04
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The point of the State one is that the Godless commies are bad, right? Even one letter off, my phone refuses to offer "Godless" as a suggestion.
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Jun 5, 2018 02:21
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I think the notion is that the Communists intend to outlaw individual belief and make individual rights subordinate to the whims of the state.
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Jun 5, 2018 02:45
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Just watched the 2006 episode of Nova about the JSF competition between Boeing and Lockheed. They keep saying the whole JSF program will be $200 billion. Hahahaha maybe the crayon eating Marine hovering version is $200 billion. The whole program over its lifetime is now going to cost in excess of a trillion loving dollars. That’s crazy. And it’s a complete poo poo show that can’t fuse its sensors for poo poo so you can either have a RADAR lock, an IR lock, or an EO lock but not any combination of the three at any one given time. The sensors aren’t handing tracks off to each other at all. Plus they haven’t unfucked the poo poo show that is the JHMCS or any derivative of it. It’s all contractor buzz words, the jets are flying, the poo poo doesn’t fuse. That was kind of critical and core to the 5th generation fighter development but goddamn, the LM wizards have completely hosed this hog show up. It’ll be great when it’s fixed but it’s far the gently caress off from fixed for all the loving money we’ve spent.
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Jun 5, 2018 10:53
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Nebakenezzer posted:Half an hour seems the norm, though a percentage of missiles were kept on 15 minute alert. Certain scenarios (like a 'decapitation strike') have an 8 minute warning? Even the president is getting killed by that one unless he's on an idling AF1 ready for takeoff. Lucky America. The UK would have had about 3 minutes' warning under any nuclear exchange scenario with the USSR. 
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Jun 5, 2018 12:30
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LtCol J. Krusinski posted:Just watched the 2006 episode of Nova about the JSF competition between Boeing and Lockheed. They keep saying the whole JSF program will be $200 billion. Hahahaha maybe the crayon eating Marine hovering version is $200 billion. The whole program over its lifetime is now going to cost in excess of a trillion loving dollars. That’s crazy. And it’s a complete poo poo show that can’t fuse its sensors for poo poo so you can either have a RADAR lock, an IR lock, or an EO lock but not any combination of the three at any one given time. The sensors aren’t handing tracks off to each other at all. Plus they haven’t unfucked the poo poo show that is the JHMCS or any derivative of it. It’s all contractor buzz words, the jets are flying, the poo poo doesn’t fuse. That was kind of critical and core to the 5th generation fighter development but goddamn, the LM wizards have completely hosed this hog show up. It’ll be great when it’s fixed but it’s far the gently caress off from fixed for all the loving money we’ve spent. wow god drat have you told anyone about this
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Jun 5, 2018 14:10
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feedmegin posted:Lucky America. The UK would have had about 3 minutes' warning under any nuclear exchange scenario with the USSR. Vulcan pre-flight*: open fuel valves, boost pumps on, igniters on, throttles to full military, hit cartridge starters, 80%N1 release brakes. Steps 1-5 should take about 5 seconds. Ground crew will have kicked tyres for you. *: I made this up, but if anyone knows what they did do I'd like to know. Even if it's "Preflight the aircraft with a crew sitting in it on the ground ready to go for 2 hours, then rotate crew and do another preflight". IPCRESS fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 5, 2018 14:32
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bewbies posted:wow god drat have you told anyone about this 
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