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Don Gato posted:Not regular history, but PSYCHOHISTORY totally is predictive. We just need more people because right now the sample size is too small. Psychohistory is bullshit, thanks for playing. Anyhow, I went on Twitter, and I found this: https://twitter.com/vonclausewint/status/849077144315727872
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Aug 2, 2018 03:58
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Ensign Expendable posted:If only we could set up some kind of organization, a foundation even, to work on this sort of thing? Two of them, even, in case the first one gets off the rails.
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Aug 2, 2018 04:16
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Psychohistory is bullshit, thanks for playing. Jeez, you slip up and miss the ONE TIME humanity develops psychic powers to break out of your system of predicting all reality, and you never hear the end of it.
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Aug 2, 2018 05:15
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Thanks for the dress down. I was driven crazy by being forced to focus only on practical ways history helps explain and predict current events. It's not a real excuse but that's why I thought the way I did. I'd ask more meaningful questions here but it seems you guys have that covered. Sorry for the inconveniences
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Aug 2, 2018 07:25
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Grouchio posted:Thanks for the dress down. I was driven crazy by being forced to focus only on practical ways history helps explain and predict current events. It's not a real excuse but that's why I thought the way I did. I'd ask more meaningful questions here but it seems you guys have that covered. Sorry for the inconveniences Well, history helps explain and in some cases predict, but it's usually the near history rather than what happened 3000 years ago.
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Aug 2, 2018 07:38
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I thought mercenaries were useful in that it helped avoid the need for a standing army, and it's a lot more reasonable from a nation standpoint to put mercenaries in a dangerous position than your own citizens who will hate you later on
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Aug 2, 2018 07:56
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HEY GUNS posted:and as i can tell you from firsthand experience, Mercenaries Are Useless. Hasn't stopped me from researching them And yet they still exist and are making bank, we just call them "PMCs" now. The land-based ones are still kinda warcrimey, the ones protecting offshore oil rigs/tankers from modern pirates are all but Letters of Marque. Hell, the modern US Army, especially SF, are basically mercenaries for NATO. Plausible deniability/CIA sheep-dipping and all. Though I guess both ride the line by only working for friends, rather than the highest bidder. Cf The Lafayette Escadrille in WWI and Chennault's Flying Tigers in WWII -- they were what would be considered a PMC nowadays. They were fighting for the people their home country would eventually get in a war on the side of, I guess technically proper mercs fight for whoever pays best, even if it's the enemy of their home state. Semi-related secret-squirrel anecdote: Dad and his coworkers wore locally-made fatigues with no patches in the field. "This 6' white guy the NVA just shot is ttly a South Vietnamese regular. "
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Aug 2, 2018 10:44
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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I'm *pretty sure* PMCs are not doing privateering these days.
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Aug 2, 2018 10:51
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Fangz posted:I'm *pretty sure* PMCs are not doing privateering these days. ...yet! 
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Aug 2, 2018 10:57
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Psychohistory is bullshit, thanks for playing. Wrong psychohistory. They're talking about Asimov's sci-fi one which, hilariously enough, makes more sense than the pseudoscience that stole its name years later.
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Aug 2, 2018 11:10
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Fangz posted:I'm *pretty sure* PMCs are not doing privateering these days. Yeah, I guess it's a small but important difference if the pirates come to you and you shoot them in self-defense, as opposed to you actively hunting them. What's the current law? I know no state has issued letters of marque in a few hundred years, but could the RN still recruit privateers if they needed to, under international law? Pirates are still treated like horse thieves in Texas, right? Could I get a Q-ship and hang out in the Indian ocean? Also I'm rewatching Black Hawk Down. One of the grittiest of war movies. Two posthunous MoHs in that fight, and a fuckton of Purple Hearts. But the "Irene" scene is cool, the modern equivalent of Die Valkerie in Apocalypse Now.
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Aug 2, 2018 11:23
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Foreign volunteers are not the same thing as a PMC
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Aug 2, 2018 11:27
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Chillbro Baggins posted:Hell, the modern US Army, especially SF, are basically mercenaries for NATO. Plausible deniability/CIA sheep-dipping and all. This is uh certainly one hell of a take
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Aug 2, 2018 11:46
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feedmegin posted:This is uh certainly one hell of a take So was the one about Flying Tigers. They didn’t work for a private company getting rich, they were Allied Air Crews in all but name. Little green men in Donbass aren’t the same as Wagner’s mercenaries, either.
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Aug 2, 2018 12:15
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Please Chillbro, favour us with your opinion on the French Foreign Legion, I can't wait 
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Aug 2, 2018 12:44
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One of the commanders of the Special Operations Unit was a French Foreign Legionary. There's a pretty steady global circulation of membership among special forces, "our other army"-ies, prestige units, PMCs, totally-not-paramilitaries, totally-not-mercenaries, and totally-not-gangs.
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Aug 2, 2018 13:04
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Fangz posted:I'm *pretty sure* PMCs are not doing privateering these days. Depends how wide your definition of "privateering" is. There are absolutely cyberwar "privateers" out there, and plenty of land-based ones too.
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Aug 2, 2018 13:15
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Foreign volunteers are not the same thing as a PMC Yeah pretty much. The Napoleonic British army got a tonne of dudes from Germany because well Napoleon sort of occupied their home state and our King was also their King so really it was a good deal for both parties now. The British Army needed some continental professional experience and the Hanover gents needed a couch to crash on.
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Aug 2, 2018 13:21
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Grenrow posted:You can't even help yourself by not posting dumb poo poo, how do you expect to help people who have actual problems?
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Aug 2, 2018 13:47
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Chillbro Baggins posted:Yeah, I guess it's a small but important difference if the pirates come to you and you shoot them in self-defense, as opposed to you actively hunting them. What's the current law? I know no state has issued letters of marque in a few hundred years, but could the RN still recruit privateers if they needed to, under international law? Pirates are still treated like horse thieves in Texas, right? The Constitution gives Congress the power to grant letters of marque. It just hasn't done so since the War of 1812. But more to the point, the reason you wanted a letter of marque was because then you could go out and capture enemy ships and keep them/loot them/sell them. There's no point to doing that with Somalian pirates because it's not like they're out engaging in piracy in dhows that are full of pieces of eight and fine silk from the furthest reaches of the Orient. Vahakyla posted:So was the one about Flying Tigers. They didn’t work for a private company getting rich, they were Allied Air Crews in all but name. The Flying Tigers are very plausibly mercenaries under current definition. quote:Additional Protocol I defines a mercenary as a person who: The Flying Tigers definitely check a, b, and d. As for c, they did enjoy pay *hugely* in excess of what they'd have been making doing the same job for the US military, and were promised bounties on aircraft they shot down. Hell, many of them were being paid more than 3-stars. D is also a check. As for f, they were not sent by the US on official duty as a member of the US military; obviously that was a subterfuge and they absolutely were sent, but the convention doesn't take that sort of 'wink wink nudge nudge' thing into account. They were discharged from the US military and employed by a contractor and so f is a check. The only questionable one is e; they were officially part of the Chinese air force but their paychecks came from CAMCO and they weren't really part of the Chinese air force for purposes of chain of command, etc. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Aug 2, 2018 |
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Aug 2, 2018 14:26
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Phanatic posted:The Constitution gives Congress the power to grant letters of marque. It just hasn't done so since the War of 1812. they are really just ransoming the ship/cargo/crew, right?
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Aug 2, 2018 14:31
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French partisans were mercenaries working for Roosevelt!
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Aug 2, 2018 15:04
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https://twitter.com/ArtyomTonoyan/status/1025018926550458368 https://twitter.com/cavidaga/status/1025022701436657665 What's the verdict on the efficacy of paratroopers? Also, I really only know about paratrooper operations on D-Day, how did the Germans use them on the Eastern Front? zoux fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Aug 2, 2018 |
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Aug 2, 2018 15:29
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/ArtyomTonoyan/status/1025018926550458368 The layman version is all I know: Crete was the end of large-scale drops and afterwards, the Falshirm became "just" elite infantry, same as Paras in every other army. Dunno if they saw action on Eastern Front. I think Soviet Paras had it even worse, to the point where nerd game players don't even bother with them.
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Aug 2, 2018 15:38
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Glantz has a book. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...nchuria&f=false
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Aug 2, 2018 15:46
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zoux posted:What's the verdict on the efficacy of paratroopers? Also, I really only know about paratrooper operations on D-Day, how did the Germans use them on the Eastern Front? Hitler forbid large scale operations after the bloodshed on Crete. Soviets attempted to use them to break German lines in Vyazma in the winter of 1942, with about as much success as Market Garden except in freezing temperatures.
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Aug 2, 2018 15:47
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This has lead me to check on the existence of German paratroopers in the Eastern Front lists of Bolt Action (well know, totally accurate historical choice) and I ended up reading the Wiki page for German penal units, which sound just like the stereotype Soviet penal units, maybe sans "machineguns at the back". Apparently, Stalin modeled his after the Germans, so yeah, fukken Wehraboos.
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Aug 2, 2018 15:49
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Vahakyla posted:So was the one about Flying Tigers. They didn’t work for a private company getting rich, they were Allied Air Crews in all but name.  That "all but" is important for politics. They were all but the USAAF, but technically not that at the time.
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Aug 2, 2018 15:50
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Fangz posted:Glantz has a book. Look here pal I read this thread so I don't have to read books
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Aug 2, 2018 15:52
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zoux posted:What's the verdict on the efficacy of paratroopers? Also, I really only know about paratrooper operations on D-Day, how did the Germans use them on the Eastern Front? I mean, when they work they really work.
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Aug 2, 2018 15:52
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_R%C3%B6sselsprung_(1944)
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Aug 2, 2018 15:52
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/ArtyomTonoyan/status/1025018926550458368 As ground troops. The Nazi paratrooper corps suffered big casulties taking Crete, and Hitler sorta concluded "welp, that's it for that tactic." I imagine there were lots of glider drop/paratroop drops after this, but on a much smaller scale
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Aug 2, 2018 16:00
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I'll give em this: fallschirmjager is a cool word
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Aug 2, 2018 16:02
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quote:Ultimately, according to intelligence historian Ralph Bennett, "The long-term significance of the Drvar raid was simply that it failed." Hah, brutal!
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Aug 2, 2018 16:06
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The Soviet Airborne Experience is my tankie dream pop band.
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Aug 2, 2018 16:18
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Reading wikipedia, the conclusion seems to be that paratroopers aren't as good as helicopters and furthermore there have only been a handful of combat drops since WWII. The last US combat jump was in 2003. How many troops go to jump school in the US every year? Are paratroopers part of near-peer war planning anymore?
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Aug 2, 2018 16:19
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And that combat drop in 2003 was the result of a breakdown in political negotiations with Turkey and arguably was dumb or at the very least massively exaggerated in importance by those who commanded the jumps. Now for special missions and such, airborne insertions can be super useful.
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Aug 2, 2018 16:25
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zoux posted:Reading wikipedia, the conclusion seems to be that paratroopers aren't as good as helicopters and furthermore there have only been a handful of combat drops since WWII. The last US combat jump was in 2003. How many troops go to jump school in the US every year? Are paratroopers part of near-peer war planning anymore? Any sort of major behind-the-lines airborne operation against an even marginally capable opponent would be a massacre, either in the air or on the ground. I don't have any idea how many folks go through airborne school nowadays but whatever it is, it is way too many. The useful capability the 82nd has to offer is its very short deployment timeline. The PLAGF uses their airborne forces the same way.
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Aug 2, 2018 16:35
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The French made a bunch of large-ish combat drops in Indochina. I haven't been able to find a good account of them, though, just that they happened.
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Aug 2, 2018 16:36
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bewbies posted:Any sort of major behind-the-lines airborne operation against an even marginally capable opponent would be a massacre, either in the air or on the ground. I don't have any idea how many folks go through airborne school nowadays but whatever it is, it is way too many. Does that have anything to do with parachuting or is it that they are set up as a fast response unit?
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Aug 2, 2018 16:36
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