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I think a better question for the debate would be "What peer conflict had one side win due to superior technology?" It's really easy to list conflicts where one side has repeating rifles and the other side has spears and cowhide shields, but that's a conflict that's basically impossible for the lower tech side to win except for attrition. It's more interesting to think of cases where technology made a different but both sides weren't hundreds of years apart from each other. In that case, I'd think that usually you'd get more luck out of industrial technology. In WW2, the United States had such a developed industrial base that it could basically sprout up factories at will and start churning out equipment and ammo at an obscene pace. Having semi-auto rifles and good tanks helped, but it was more important that they could project such overwhelming force across such vast distances on two fronts. That's definitely an example of a technological gap, albeit not the one people usually think of.
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Mar 18, 2019 16:51
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Raenir Salazar posted:I mean if you're going to nitpick me using 'warsaw pact' as 'PACT' at least point out Mazz said it that way first and I was quoting in response to them. You are partially right, in that the campaign was so well orchestrated that ultimately it didnt matter what weapons Iraq had, their army was cut off from itself and from Iraq itself, any kind of command and control was really effectively devestated by the coalitions strategy. In the situation they were in it wouldnt have mattered one iota what kind of weapons (of the period) they had in the grand scheme of things. The question is more whether the Coalition having soviet export era tech would have been able to carry out their plan as effectively. Im not really an expert on guided munitions of the communist bloc but i imagine they were not up to th standards of the coalitions weapons which would have made things like hitting Iraqs power, communications hubs and so on a lot more difficult and probably would have caused a lot more collateral damage in doing so. So i guess my point is that it wasnt the technilogical edge that mattered, so much as the coalition having a baseline level of technical ability to achieve their war plan that really swung it. If Iraq had the same sort of level of technology it wouldnt have affected the outcome all that much given the utterly overwhelming edge in numbers, training and organisation that the coalition had.
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Mar 18, 2019 16:54
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chitoryu12 posted:I think a better question for the debate would be "What peer conflict had one side win due to superior technology?" It's really easy to list conflicts where one side has repeating rifles and the other side has spears and cowhide shields, but that's a conflict that's basically impossible for the lower tech side to win except for attrition. It's more interesting to think of cases where technology made a different but both sides weren't hundreds of years apart from each other. Isn't there a technological edge in a lot of military conflicts, just not a huge one? I mean the Norman invasion the Normans had more archers for various reasons, and set up a portable castle as an HQ. When Romans fought variously the had a set of doctrines and weapons that were arguably more advanced than a lot of their foes. Or are you just talking about technological devices?
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Mar 18, 2019 17:03
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Cessna posted:The vast majority of their stuff was Soviet or copy-of-Soviet. The majority of their stuff was Soviet or Soviet-derived but enough of it wasn't for "not exclusively Soviet" to be a correct statement.
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Mar 18, 2019 17:05
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Raenir Salazar posted:Saddam also I believe had a mix of gear from multiple sources, I don't recall it being exclusively Soviet kit, and even so, I've heard some back and forth regarding the quality of the export stuff and whether they were using training rounds or not; I think their equipment is only really one aspect of it and it applies both ways. Iraq's army was a truly eclectic mix of British leftovers, captured Iranian equipment, Warsaw Pact, Chinese, Yugoslavian, French, and Brazilian exports, and various domestic upgrade programmes. e: illegal South African exports, captured Kuwaiti tanks... LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 17:10
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chitoryu12 posted:I think a better question for the debate would be "What peer conflict had one side win due to superior technology?" It's really easy to list conflicts where one side has repeating rifles and the other side has spears and cowhide shields, but that's a conflict that's basically impossible for the lower tech side to win except for attrition. It's more interesting to think of cases where technology made a different but both sides weren't hundreds of years apart from each other. if you have superior technology on one side can it really be considered to be a peer conflict?
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Mar 18, 2019 17:12
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:if you have superior technology on one side can it really be considered to be a peer conflict? This it the question I came here to ask. If there's a big gap in technology, it's going to be asymmetric warfare, or not much of a fight.
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Mar 18, 2019 17:15
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it's good to be in the hre https://twitter.com/EmpireRomanHoly/status/1100162646584815618
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Mar 18, 2019 17:22
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FrangibleCover posted:see any wheeled armoured cars with big guns? Big flat-fronted rocket launcher trucks a bit like a Fat HIMARS? No, no Panhards or SAMPs. Edit: No, not SAMPS, they weren't around in the 90's. What are you referring to? FrangibleCover posted:The majority of their stuff was Soviet or Soviet-derived but enough of it wasn't for "not exclusively Soviet" to be a correct statement. I didn't say it was. In fact, I mentioned running into FV432s. Cessna fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 17:28
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LatwPIAT posted:Iraq's army was a truly eclectic mix of British leftovers, captured Iranian equipment, Warsaw Pact, Chinese, Yugoslavian, French, and Brazilian exports, and various domestic upgrade programmes. Let's be blunt, Iraq's army was a junkyard. While, yes, the majority of the tanks or AFVs I ran into were former Soviet it's not like they were crewed by the 3rd Shock Army's finest. I'll never forget rolling up on one knocked out T-55. On the top of the turret next to the MG was a box of loose ammo and a box of links. Think about that for a bit.
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Mar 18, 2019 17:32
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chitoryu12 posted:It's really easy to list conflicts where one side has repeating rifles and the other side has spears and cowhide shields, but that's a conflict that's basically impossible for the lower tech side to win except for attrition. Italy accepted your challenge and went ahead and lost to Ethiopia in the first Ethiopian-Italian war lol.
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Mar 18, 2019 17:40
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Dance Officer posted:I'm interested to hear why you think moving into Belgium was a bad move, though. What Cyrano said, and it's really obvious why the French wanted to fight on Belgian soil this time instead of French soil, of course, so it's understandable. Can't fault the French for wanting to wreck Belgium, that place sucks. The issue was exactly that the plan was based on the Germans doing thing A, and turned out to be an gigantic disadvantage when the Germans didn't play along.
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Mar 18, 2019 17:43
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Hey now! Some of the Ethiopians had rifles too! And then more did.
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Mar 18, 2019 17:43
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Cessna posted:I think technology played far less of a role than disease. Probably worth considering that sailing technology was the reason the Spanish-Aztec war was fought in Mexico and not Spain.
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Mar 18, 2019 17:44
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Nenonen posted:This reminded me of how Germans used concrete bombs, for ~reasons~ which I find hard to fully understand - Luftwaffe didn't engage itself in that intensive bombing campaigns nor are steel bomb shells that difficult to build even in tiny workshops. When a standard 250 kg SC 250 steel bomb contained 130 kg explosive filler, the equivalent SBe 250 concrete bomb had only 49 kg explosive filler. According to German Wikipedia this Ersatz bomb was used from the beginning of WW2, unlike other similar make-do weapons like hand grenades. I would be delighted if someone could expand on this. So if my explosives ordnance book is anything to go by. It won't be covered for like, a month, but the book specifically states that "results were less than satisfactory, due to the concrete being pulverized in the resultant explosion". The concrete would add an extra level of fragmentation, in theory.
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Mar 18, 2019 18:06
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Squalid posted:Probably worth considering that sailing technology was the reason the Spanish-Aztec war was fought in Mexico and not Spain. I see your point, but if the Triple Alliance had landed in Spain they would have died just as quickly from disease, if not faster. (Hm - disease as a form of unintentional technology?)
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Mar 18, 2019 18:07
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Kemper Boyd posted:Italy accepted your challenge and went ahead and lost to Ethiopia in the first Ethiopian-Italian war lol. Well, no, they lost because by that point the Ethiopian army had, in addition to its spears and shields, machineguns and artillery. 'We had the maxim gun and they had not' kinda breaks down at that point.
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Mar 18, 2019 18:14
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Dance Officer posted:And if the French had stayed on their side of the border, would they have been better off? Historically the best and most potent armies of the Franco-British alliance fought a few battles and then were forced to scramble back to France in a panic, before getting encircled and then destroyed by overwhelming force. Not really an economical use of them. In a history where these armies stay in France, and fight a losing war against Germany, the Germans probably take more losses and more time fighting in France, which is probably better for everybody overall. Worse for France though. Squalid posted:Probably worth considering that sailing technology was the reason the Spanish-Aztec war was fought in Mexico and not Spain. Supposing there wasn't disease, colonialism probably doesn't take off anywhere close to the way it did. Mexico probably goes to look more like 17th century India, with European setting up trade posts with the consent of local polities.
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Mar 18, 2019 18:19
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Cessna posted:Let's be blunt, Iraq's army was a junkyard. I don't disagree. They had a lot of stuff, some weird, some neat, and none of it used well. Cessna posted:No, no Panhards or SAMPs. Frang's talking about the Brazilian EE-9 Cascavel and ASTROS-II.
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Mar 18, 2019 18:19
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LatwPIAT posted:Frang's talking about the Brazilian EE-9 Cascavel and ASTROS-II. No, never ran into either of those. Edit: No, that's not true - I saw Astros launchers once, but they were Saudi, not Iraqi.
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Mar 18, 2019 18:24
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Actually, this is something I'm genuinely curious about : What were Iraqi air defence efforts like in the Gulf War? Especially with reference to technological differences between the Coalition and Iraq? Because I was planning to say something about any quality the Iraqi AFVs might have had being completely moot in light of Coalition intelligence and air superiority, because even the best tank in the world can't do anything about a PGM tossed into its dug-in position... but then I realized I had actually no idea why the Iraqi armed forced failed to prevent Coalition airplanes from hunting freely. Cessna posted:Edit: No, that's not true - I saw Astros launchers once, but they were Saudi, not Iraqi. Ooooooh, cool!
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Mar 18, 2019 18:32
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HEY GUNS posted:it's good to be in the hre The Henry thing reminds me of the Monty Python skit where they parodied all Australians being named "Bruce." Or perhaps the Garfield and Friends episode where all the astronauts were named "Buzz."
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Mar 18, 2019 18:46
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:The Henry thing reminds me of the Monty Python skit where they parodied all Australians being named "Bruce." like imagine you and your brothers were all Heinrich and your dad and all his brothers, and so on also there were two branches of that family with different heinrich related conventions HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 18:55
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chitoryu12 posted:I think a better question for the debate would be "What peer conflict had one side win due to superior technology?" It's really easy to list conflicts where one side has repeating rifles and the other side has spears and cowhide shields, but that's a conflict that's basically impossible for the lower tech side to win except for attrition. It's more interesting to think of cases where technology made a different but both sides weren't hundreds of years apart from each other. WW2 in the Pacific. The US had an overwhelming advantage in numbers, sure, but they also had an edge in technology that would have given them the win even at even numbers. Radar-directed anti-aircraft fire with proximity fuses made USN task forces effectively invulnerable to air attack. Radar sets you could fit on airplanes, and the SG radar with a PPI display were game changing technological advancements. A hypothetical 4 Unryu-class CV versus 4 Essex-class CVs with their appropriate escort groups c. 1944 would give the USN a heavy advantage in search and air defense. And by that point they had a CiC in every ship, so coordination of offensive and defense air ops would be much easier.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:12
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LatwPIAT posted:Actually, this is something I'm genuinely curious about : What were Iraqi air defence efforts like in the Gulf War? Especially with reference to technological differences between the Coalition and Iraq? The Iraqi's werent really prepared to fight an airforce of the sophistication of the coalition, they had spent the last decade fighting the Iranian airforce, who were competent in many respects but they didnt have all the tools that were employed against Iraq in desert storm, lacking the ability to do really proper SEAD for any number of reasons. I think its best summed up by the recollection of the chief of staff of the USAF at the time who was involved in the planning and execution of the desert storm attack, they had spent months tracking and categorising targets that had remained largely static in Iraq, and when they launched the first attack they disabled 85 of give or take 100 iraqi major radar sites within the first 4 hours with the majority of the remainder stopping emitting or getting destroyed in the following 4 hours. This pretty much destroyed the ability of Iraq to fire effectively at even medium altitude targets because they had no radar left because it was either hiding or destroyed. From that point onward they pretty much had low level infrared or radar systems left like the Rolands and Strelas that were attached to military units and as such operated independently of their integrated air defence. Its one area really where the fact that the US had been preparing for years to fight exactly this sort of setup paid off, Iraq radar SAM's were largely older soviet models, i think the most effective piece of equipment they had was the SA-6 and they had a lot of older SA-3 and SA-2 missiles, the SA-2 that they had first seen in Vietnam. Like a lot of Iraqs military setup it was very hierachical, this dates back to the Iran Iraq war where the inability of the Iraqi AA systems to stop the Iranians coming and going as they pleased a lot of the time lead to even greater control from the center. The operating and communications system was designed by the French where it was managed from a central facility in Baghdad, it was then split up into major sectors that had a lower hierachy control center which then split down even further in a tree like structure as you might imagine with a lot of functions being further up the hierachy and a lot of it being centered in Baghdad, and so dependent on being able to communicate effectively. Pretty much every critical part of it got hit at once which caused that hierachy and communications between bits of it to break down, they were helped by this because a lot of Iraqs utility system had been designed by foreign companies so they knew pretty precisely where and how to hit it. Most notably Iraqs phone lines and exchanges had been planned out by AT&T and Canada Telecom and as a result their ability to communicate from the front to the rear lines was targeted very well and knocked sideways very very quickly, certainly trying to coordinate defence against very fast moving planes that were going over Iraq at high speeds was impossible.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:14
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chitoryu12 posted:I think a better question for the debate would be "What peer conflict had one side win due to superior technology?" It's really easy to list conflicts where one side has repeating rifles and the other side has spears and cowhide shields, but that's a conflict that's basically impossible for the lower tech side to win except for attrition. It's more interesting to think of cases where technology made a different but both sides weren't hundreds of years apart from each other. The Franco-Prussian War comes to mind. The French had a superior rifle, the Chassepot, but the Prussians had superior artillery, the Krupp 6-pounder. In an ominous bit of foreshadowing to World War I, it turned out that better artillery was a significantly greater advantage than better rifles. Obviously there were other factors in the Prussian victory, but the technological advantage certainly helped.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:19
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:if you have superior technology on one side can it really be considered to be a peer conflict? I think the spirit of the question was not about whether technology matters in a wide gap (like the Zulu Wars or the conquering of the Aztecs), but whether meaningful advances in technology among peers can actually change the course of the war. Like asking if Germany would have done better if they got the StG 44 and Me 262 in 1939.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:19
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LatwPIAT posted:Actually, this is something I'm genuinely curious about : What were Iraqi air defence efforts like in the Gulf War? Especially with reference to technological differences between the Coalition and Iraq? I obviously can't speak to the stuff they had in Baghdad or any other higher-echelon air defense, but in the ground in the areas I was in there were ZU-23-2s - the little two-barreled AAA piece - scattered seemingly everywhere. Given that most of them were on fire or flipped over by the time we got to them I can't help but think they weren't very effective. 
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Mar 18, 2019 19:30
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vyelkin posted:The Franco-Prussian War comes to mind. The French had a superior rifle, the Chassepot, but the Prussians had superior artillery, the Krupp 6-pounder. In an ominous bit of foreshadowing to World War I, it turned out that better artillery was a significantly greater advantage than better rifles.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:31
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chitoryu12 posted:I think the spirit of the question was not about whether technology matters in a wide gap (like the Zulu Wars or the conquering of the Aztecs), but whether meaningful advances in technology among peers can actually change the course of the war. Like asking if Germany would have done better if they got the StG 44 and Me 262 in 1939. I feel like this question is kind of inherently stymied by problem that for us to consider two nations peers, then the differences in technology must necessarily not be meaningful. If one side is meaningfully more advanced then they are no longer peers. Basically you are start by only looking at cases in which technological gaps are small, then we can expect variables to be more important and the impact of tech advances becomes difficult to distinguish amidst all the noise. Slim Jim Pickens posted:Supposing there wasn't disease, colonialism probably doesn't take off anywhere close to the way it did. Mexico probably goes to look more like 17th century India, with European setting up trade posts with the consent of local polities. No doubt disease changed everything. On the other hand there are big difference in the kind of society present in new world regions like Eastern North American or Brazil and Mughal India. Most of the Americas were much less centralized than the big Asian kingdoms and empires. That makes it much harder for leaders to mobilize and organize against foreign invaders, and gives colonizers opportunities to cut deals with regional powers that they didn't have in places like Ming China. This raises an interesting question: to what extent can we consider our government and social systems a form of technology, and what kind of advantages can they give in conflicts? I would argue one of the biggest technological advantages that enabled European colonialism was the invention of modern finance. Guns don't provide much advantage when you can't afford to pay anyone to use them. One of the reasons Ethiopia was able to resist Italian aggression was that they had recently updated their tax system, and this had made it possible to afford all those modern rifles. Squalid fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 19:47
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chitoryu12 posted:I think the spirit of the question was not about whether technology matters in a wide gap (like the Zulu Wars or the conquering of the Aztecs), but whether meaningful advances in technology among peers can actually change the course of the war. Well, if they can't, a lotta countries are gonna look look pretty silly for wasting all that money on R&D in the middle of a world war.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:48
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Military technology is hugely important and it seems like a lot of the smarter historians out there (and posters here) go out of their way to minimize its impact. I get this is probably a reaction to one zillion times asked "if the Germans had more Tiger Tanks would they have won" but it also doesn't really bear out that the Allies would've won the war with Brewster Buffaloes and Mark I tanks. The harder thing to really get a grasp on with historical technology is the integration and application of it. It is very easy to look at the stats of a Zero and think "man that was one hell of a plane" and pretty much leave it at that, without any real understanding of how the Japanese handled its integration. Actually understanding how it was employed, and how the Japanese got so much out of it, is another thing entirely, and is something that is really lost on most casual historians. In fact, it really isn't something you'll find in most academic texts...they seem to focus broadly on either 1) "this division went from here to here on April 12" or 2) the social/political/industrial backdrop of the war. Very seldom do you see any real in depth analysis of how militaries integrated their new gadgets, and if doing so was good, bad, or indifferent, and why. Because it is hellaciously boring and tedious and requires some significant background knowledge about acquisitions and whatnot. Probably. Anyway, Shattered Sword is a fantastic example of how the Japanese integrated both carriers and carrier aircraft, and while it is pretty readable, it isn't really an entry level text.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:20
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mllaneza posted:WW2 in the Pacific. The US had an overwhelming advantage in numbers, sure, but they also had an edge in technology that would have given them the win even at even numbers. By the time the US was clearly ahead of the Japanese technologically speaking, Japan was already beaten and incapable of resisting the US advance.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:20
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Technology is one of several advantages one can have over ones opponent. whoever manages to get the most advantages and/or remove the enemy's advantages tend to be the winner.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:32
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bewbies posted:Military technology is hugely important and it seems like a lot of the smarter historians out there (and posters here) go out of their way to minimize its impact. I get this is probably a reaction to one zillion times asked "if the Germans had more Tiger Tanks would they have won" but it also doesn't really bear out that the Allies would've won the war with Brewster Buffaloes and Mark I tanks. Mind you, this convo started with me replying to someone talking about how the French armored forces had subpar equipment when it came to resisting the Germans. To restate that: the French equipment was roughly on par with the Germans, but the Germans managed to use their more effectively, largely by being where the French weren't. And once the Allied were cut off by the German advance, it doesn't really matter what equipment you roll with, when your strategic situation is so disadvantageous. The fact that a huge number of the German tanks were more or less crap didn't matter that much either, in the situation where they mostly were just continually advancing and facing troops without armor of their own. There of course are situations where tech (and especially integration of said tech) matters: for instance a force that has trained with the old-timey paradigm that indirect fires primarily disrupt, is gonna have a bad day against say, the kind of indirect fire stuff the Russians are fielding. Same goes for anyone without night vision gear against US forces, and so on and so on. But still, most of the time tech is secondary to the general situation going on, what with political, social and strategical dimensions happening.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:44
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HEY GUNS posted:like imagine you and your brothers were all Heinrich I'm going to guess everybody went by their middle names or something like that. (Their middle names were also Heinrich, weren't they?) Kemper Boyd posted:
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Mar 18, 2019 21:18
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https://twitter.com/cspanhistory/status/1105822214815916033 Let's see them brackets. Harrison being on there is BS imo though.
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Mar 18, 2019 21:21
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Why no Andrew Jackson
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Mar 18, 2019 21:24
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its buchanan and it shouldn't be close
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Mar 18, 2019 21:27
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/cspanhistory/status/1105822214815916033 edit: william henry harrison? an incomplete isn't an f
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Mar 18, 2019 21:28
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