HEY GUNS posted:

hitler was a murderous racist who wanted to turn western russia, ukraine, and poland into his version of kansas post-native-american-genocide and he was surprised when we didn't attack him over czechoslovakia so we could give him the opportunity

these pacifists are wrong. there have been wars under every economic/social system on earth.

Cessna posted:

I'd hate to tell someone living in Japanese-occupied China "you don't need to go to war" or "no, sanctions will just make them mad" while the Rape of Nanking is going on.

lenoon posted:

You’re thinking of the Second World War from the perspective of summer of 1939. Hitler post czechoslovakia and pre Poland, maybe that’s an inevitable “have to kick hitler in the dick” moment. But there’s hundreds of years - or to be more practical, 20 years of actions and choices that led to there being “no option” but war.

British foreign policy was largely about avoiding war throughout the 20s and 30s, and if that had been consistently applied, perhaps the situation that led to war would not have been generated. Perhaps Arthur Henderson’s policies of isolating Hitler by bringing Mussolini onboard lead to Hitler being wholly alone in europe, or Baldwin’s aggressive rearmament plan succeeds and Western Europe is made into an impregnable fortress, or MacDonald’s government formally supports the Soviet Union and we have a tripartite pact between Britain, the USSR and France, or instead of invading Russia to fight the communists, troops from Britain and France were deployed against the freikorps in Berlin (as if).

There are hundreds of opportunities between 1939 and Versailles alone that, had different choices been made, the war might not have happened. Hitler in 1939, I don’t think there’s many people beyond absolute hardcore pacifists that would argue that war was unjustified. But that doesn’t mean it was wholly unjustified (by which I mean utterly inevitable, sooner or later has to happen) - had the political, social and economic policies pursued been different, there need not have been a war at all. Most pacifists argue that it is the system of politics and economics and the ideology of capitalism that precludes these choices from being made - hard core pacifists would say this makes all war unjustifiable, because an alternative will have existed, even if it was prior to war being on the horizon at all.

quote:

Hunger eventually became a widespread epidemic in the Ottoman military, as rations were small and the nutritional value of food minimal. An active young man needs 2,800 to 3,000 calories a day to function; a soldier in training should consume at least 3,429. Adding weather conditions, the caloric need increases to 4,238 in extreme cold and to 4,738 in hot/tropical conditions. [23] Peacetime daily rations of Ottoman soldiers in training included 900 grams of bread, 600 grams of biscuits, 250 grams of meat, and 150 grams of bulgur plus some butter and salt. These rations more than met the required energy amount.[24] Salim Tamari suggested that for some conscripts, joining the army was a potential escape from sure starvation, especially after famine struck areas in Greater Syria in 1916. Living in army camps, the men entered "into a cycle of disciplined work, and experienced the luxury of three meals a day, consuming meat, buqsumat (army biscuits) and jam."[25] Soldiers, as long as they were stationed in more easily accessible training camps, were fed regular, albeit meager meals. A Turkish reserve officer described the food during training as tea with a few slices of bread and sometimes olives for breakfast; for lunch and dinner cabbage stew or fava bean soup, and once a week green beans with meat. Not fancy meals, but in training no one would starve.[26]

During the war, however, such rations were hardly – if ever – met, and as a general trend rations decreased over time. Bread rations at the Palestine front were officially reduced to 500 and then 400 grams in 1916.[27] On the Caucasus front, food supplies were sparse and “everyone was given 100 grams of flour each day, and that was all.”[28] Under extreme circumstances, soldiers periodically had to survive on less than half rations, at times not exceeding sixty grams of grain a day.[29] Soldiers in some instances "received almost no meat, no butter, no sugar, no vegetables, no fruits" and instead were fed the same thin "flour soup for months after months,"[30] or were forced to bake "flour wetted with snow" into bread.[31] The situation seemed worse for men conscripted into "volunteer labor battalions." Serving to build up supportive infrastructure, members of these "compulsory work gangs" – mainly made up of non-Muslims, peasants, and the poor – often starved to death, while Ottoman officers "stole their rations."

TheFluff posted:

Ensign Expendable posted:

1938 is when the British realized that their army was kind of poo poo, yeah. Lots of tank programs were launched/expedited at that point, and then they all died as soon as they got Shermans.

Cessna posted:

Ha!

Cessna posted:

Ha!

lenoon posted:

It is not an argument for socialism....but one that argues a complete and systematic reorganisation of society is possible that will eliminate the legitimacy of using force to achieve any aim.

Milo and POTUS posted:

This is really neat and I'd love more of them but wouldn't any tank work for this strategy? Why not just buy a bunch of whatever contemporary tanks exist. Were the savings on the S-Tank such that that you could get just that many more of them for a given sum, were they more likely to have better readiness because they were simpler to maintain and operate, or did the Swedes just not want to be dependent on foreign supply chains?

HEY GUNS posted:

The spear predates our species by several hundred thousand years. Force and conflict--whether applied in groups or singly--are older than modern humanity. Whatever you envision would no longer be recognizably human, or even recognizably primate.

pike is the measure of all things

TheFluff posted:

Yeah, that's exactly the point - any tank would work. The key takeaway here - which I maybe failed to articulate properly - is just that the Swedish army planned to use the strv 103 offensively, just like any other tank. It is a very human trait to look for meaning in all things, even in tank design. The strv 103 is an armored folk etymology on tracks, is what I'm saying. It looks weird and different and to some degree it is weird and different, so it's generally assumed that there must be some kind of operational or tactical reason for that weirdness - but there isn't. It's just a tank. The only reason it is so weird is that the designers thought that would let them build a tank that had protection and armament equivalent to or better than that of a Chieftain, but with considerably lower weight and some unique tactical advantages. It gave a better win probability in war games and simulations and was judged more cost effective than buying a Chieftain.

That's all there is to it - it's just a tank like any other tank. It pretty much performed like any other tank of the time too, so it's far less weird than you'd think it is in practice. It sure as hell is interesting from a technical standpoint though - if you're a gigantic nerdlord, that is.

P-Mack posted:

If the turretless tank was a regular tank and tanked just fine, is there a particular reason there were no more turretless tanks after this one?

P-Mack posted:

If the turretless tank was a regular tank and tanked just fine, is there a particular reason there were no more turretless tanks after this one?

P-Mack posted:

If the turretless tank was a regular tank and tanked just fine, is there a particular reason there were no more turretless tanks after this one?

Milo and POTUS posted:

Big turret has a powerful lobbying arm

P-Mack posted:

If the turretless tank was a regular tank and tanked just fine, is there a particular reason there were no more turretless tanks after this one?

lenoon posted:

Weirdly enough I was part of the research team that discovered the earliest evidence of mass violence in the archaeological record - Nataruk, Kenya. So far there’s no clear evidence of interpersonal violence on a “war” scale prior to this, and the Schöningen spears are for throwing and associated with a huge animal kill residue (though this is doubtful and it’s very possible the site is a palimpsest of smaller kills) - but man it was a pretty hellish sight to see regardless. Besides chimps, war is, as far as we know so far, a Homo sapiens thing.

lenoon posted:

Weirdly enough I was part of the research team that discovered the earliest evidence of mass violence in the archaeological record - Nataruk, Kenya. So far there’s no clear evidence of interpersonal violence on a “war” scale prior to this, and the Schöningen spears are for throwing and associated with a huge animal kill residue (though this is doubtful and it’s very possible the site is a palimpsest of smaller kills) - but man it was a pretty hellish sight to see regardless. Besides chimps, war is, as far as we know so far, a Homo sapiens thing.

Nenonen posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT_tank

Stridsvagn-103 served through the cold war and there was no need for a new (read: expensive) domestic design that might have followed on the 103's tracks (hehe) when Soviet Union had fallen and you could buy Leopard 2's off the shelf. Also, I would surmise that gun stabilizer and computer aiming aid development after 1960s had tilted the scales for turreted tanks that now could actually fight from the move, something that is impossible to do with a fixed gun.

lenoon posted:

Weirdly enough I was part of the research team that discovered the earliest evidence of mass violence in the archaeological record - Nataruk, Kenya. So far there’s no clear evidence of interpersonal violence on a “war” scale prior to this, and the Schöningen spears are for throwing and associated with a huge animal kill residue (though this is doubtful and it’s very possible the site is a palimpsest of smaller kills) - but man it was a pretty hellish sight to see regardless. Besides chimps, war is, as far as we know so far, a Homo sapiens thing.

TheFluff posted:

It's worth keeping in mind though that almost all of the above also applies to other tanks of the strv 103's generation. The Leopard 1, AMX 30, M60 and Chieftain all lacked protection against 120mm APFSDS. Some of them had ballistic computers retrofitted though, but in most cases the fire control never became nearly as good as on the newer generation tanks.

CommunityEdition posted:

On the subject, how on the ball was Zack Twamley’s July Crisis podcast special?

LatwPIAT posted:

Though this is of course a bit counterfactual: if I'm going all-out in fantasy tank development I might as well get the Europanzer Chieftain with French HEAT rounds, an American engine, and German optics. :P

Cyrano4747 posted:

The big problem with the inevitability narrative is that it removes agency from the only people who actually had some when it comes to national level decision making. Removing agency also absolves people of blame which is a HUGE deal in how we look at WW1 as a historical event.

Like, think of how many times you’ve heard the phrase “after this event war was inevitable” in relation to any conflict you care to name. The problem is that no, it wasn’t. There is always another option. It might be unpalatable I’m the extreme (surrendering to Hitler) or just inconvenient (challenging domino theory) but you always have to make a conscious choice.

What’s more those choices usually involve a ton of competing factors and interests. Tuchman points to the time tables as why everyone HAS to mobilize before everyone else but ask yourself this: if you’re Germany why are you mobilizing in the first place to help Austria-Hungary kick Serbia’s teeth in. What is at stake that you’re willing to go to war on two fronts over someone else’s dead nobility? The people who made those decisions had some very specific goals that they thought they could achieve via a nice, tidy European war. They miscalculated like WHOA but none of that was inevitable.

Or take England. Why is Belgium’s neutrality worth getting into a continental war over? It’s not as simple as “we signed this paper we HAVE to do it.” What are the political calculations that lead to that decision. Hint: it has less to do with Belgium than the “empire” part of British Empire and unease about Germany’s overseas and Naval ambitions.

You can do this with everyone. Why are the Russians so willing to go to bat for Serbia? Sticking up for their fellow Slavs doesn’t answer it as neatly as a lot of people claim. Why can’t A-H accept Serbia’s apology and various attempts to make it clear that the assassin was just a random loon? Why does France go so hard in the direction of supporting Russia?

The point is that it’s not inevitable and every step along the way was consciously made by people who knew exactly what they were doing, thought they knew what they were risking, and knew what they hoped to gain.

bewbies posted:

In a more macro sense, while no war is inevitable in the "meteor heading directly for earth" sense, I think that a major conflict between major powers was about as inevitable as such things can be by 1900. There were too much colonial wealth and too many unresolved issues from previous wars and too much gung ho militarism and too much faith in war as a useful means of diplomacy. The guys at the wheel in the early part of the 20th century were sitting on top of a century old machine built from the ground up to carefully balance power...but as soon as that balance failed, to transition to a state of war as quickly as possible. Most of those guys had little to do with the building of this machine, they just inherited the wheel.

quote:

In a more micro sense, this could be me not being as sophisticated at historiography as the rest of you, but it seems almost like we're putting the norms of early 21st century liberal democracies into the brains of late 19th century nobility and or autocrats. We might find things like personal honor and nobility and nationalism and so on silly, but they were real for these guys, and it mattered in the context of international politics as much as anything else. Of COURSE someone along the line could have said "no war"...but that wasn't what their social upbringing, education, professional development, government policy, and personal beliefs told them to do.

LatwPIAT posted:

With the exception of the early Chieftains, those tanks all had ballistic computers. Ballistic computers based on 1950s technology, but ballistic computers nonetheless. The difference between upgraded versions of them and newer generation tanks is also often pretty faint. The M60A3's M21 ballistic computer and the M1 Abrams' M21 ballistic computer were designed to give the same performance, and the West German Leopard 1A5 was basically fitted with the Leopard 2's fire control system. Fire control systems is usually one of the easier and faster ways to upgrade an old tank in the 70s and 80s, so you see a lot of hulls from the 50s and 60s fitted with brand new fire control systems.

The lack of a stereoscopic rangefinder and analog ballistic computer is one of the major lacks I'd point to with the Strv 103. Maybe there was a good reason for its absence, but the tank seems eminently suited for it: the accuracy of a stereoscopic rangefinder is limited by magnification and base length, and the Strv 103's hull seems pretty well suited for a wide-based rangefinder.

Though this is of course a bit counterfactual: if I'm going all-out in fantasy tank development I might as well get the Europanzer Chieftain with French HEAT rounds, an American engine, and German optics. :P

Cyrano4747 posted:

OK, but what you're arguing for is the basic line of argument that said armed conflict between the Soviets and the West was inevitable. Too much militarism, too much faith in war as a means of solving problems, too much ideological baggage between them, etc. In fact, a LOT of preparations made by both sides actively assumed as much, especially at the military level. There's a complex political and diplomatic history at the core of why that didn't happen, much like there's a complex political and diplomatic history at the core of why things did kick off in the summer of 1914.

quote:

I don't think ti's as much an issue of not believing that those things were important to those people. Quite the opposite, I think most people who argue for WW1 being contingent on a lot of different factors recognize that and are trying to put that back in the forefront. Once you bow to inevitability those motivations go out the window. It's not just about arguing that the war shouldn't have happened, it's about understanding why it happened. Pointing to train timetables and saying that once things got warm it had to go full hot because mobilization is a race (as Tuchman does) ignores all that and bypasses why, exactly, the Germans were so eager to write the Austro-Hungarians a blank check or why the Russians were so quick on the draw to support a not-even third tier power against an empire.

Davin Valkri posted:

If that's, to use the joke structure, a "tank made in heaven", what would a "tank made in hell" look like? I imagine it'd use Soviet crew ergonomics and German (Leo 1's) armor, but what else would it have?

bewbies posted:

Maybe your complaint is more that Tuchman's narrative is insufficiently narrow in scope? Sleepwalkers and George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm, and Dreadnought all get deep into that deep web of diplomacy that led to all of this and I think they do it pretty well but...they are also all really long and really dense.

TheFluff posted:

Stereoscopic and coincidence rangefinders were not really useful below 2000m with 1960's and newer ammunition (and combat distances greater than that were rare in Scandinavia and Western Europe in general). The ballistics were good enough to be rather forgiving of ranging errors. The strv 103 was more accurate at or below 2000m without a rangefinder than the M60A1 AOS with a coincidence rangefinder in comparative trials in the US.

TheFluff posted:

The first Leopard 1A5 was delivered in 1987. That's almost 20 years after it (and the strv 103) were first taken into service. The upgrade was made because without it the tank was effectively obsolete, just like the strv 103 (which was replaced by the Leopard 2 a few years later). The Swedish army was very keen on a new tank around 1985 too, but there was no budget at that time.

PittTheElder posted:

Speaking of WWI, how long does it take for the German distaste for Versailles to actually make it's way into politics? Is it something that's always there, or just trumpeted by the far-right prior to the depression?

LatwPIAT posted:

It's hard to get much worse than early production Panzer 68s, which famously activated the turret drive randomly when the radio was used on full power and fired the gun when the cabin heater was turned on. It's basically an AMX-30 but worse in all respects. Though you could probably get a bit further by making it use a British engine and giving it the 152 mm gun from the M551 Sheridan. That way you have a tank that can't drive anywhere, can't survive being shot at, is actively dangerous to the crew and everyone around you, and has a worthless gun.

If you want to get into comical ineptitude, switch the loader and gunner so the loader is to the right of the gun and trying to shove 22 kg shells into the breach with their left arm. I also recommend getting rid of the commander's machine gun, because you obviously don't need an AA MG in this day and age!

TheFluff posted:

The first Leopard 1A5 was delivered in 1987. That's almost 20 years after it (and the strv 103) were first taken into service. The upgrade was made because without it the tank was effectively obsolete, just like the strv 103 (which was replaced by the Leopard 2 a few years later). The Swedish army was very keen on a new tank around 1985 too, but there was no budget at that time.

FrangibleCover posted:

The Ikv 91 with its cool Bofors FCS entered service in 1975 and the system was subsequently put on Centurions.

LatwPIAT posted:

It's unclear to me whether those actually are related. I suspect that Bofors was going to make an FCS for the Centurions, it seems likely they'd have developed the Ikv 91's FCS, but I've never gotten confirmation. For all I know they could have bought a Nahal Oz from Elbit.