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Yeah stuff that is trite to us now is only trite because someone at some point in history worked it out from first principles and then it became the bedrock of what every generation learned from then on until it became so ingrained that you can't study that subject without immediately coming across those points. Sun Tzu is also incredibly trite stuff, but it's some of literally some of the oldest writings on 'how to do a war' that there are and there are thousands of years of examples from after him where amateurs lead armies into the field and get the fundamentals wrong with disastrous effect.
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Apr 18, 2019 19:33
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Even that “flow around obstacles like water around a rock” but up above that was made fun of is a good example of that. Don’t need to take that insane stronghold to reach your objective? loving go around it and don’t waste your men’s lives and your boss’s resources. How many idiotic, pointless assaults can we name that violate that basic idea?
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Apr 18, 2019 19:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:loving go around it And avoid a glorious battle? Sounds like you're suffering from a lack of elan.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:06
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Cessna posted:The USMC went through a serious Sun Tzu phase when I was in. gen gray had just had 'fmfm1 warfighting' created and published in 1989. ostensibly, it is a sun tzu infuenced document but(and im just parroting someone here) it is more clausewitz-ian in nature. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/usmc/fmfm/1/fmfm1.pdf in general, the marine officers that influenced how the usmc fought in the 80s/90s were fascinated with stormtrooper tactics/ww2 german army tactics to inform how we would fight a maneuver war.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:22
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Ensign Expendable posted:And avoid a glorious battle? Sounds like you're suffering from a lack of elan. As well as cran.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:31
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vains posted:'fmfm1 warfighting' Don’t doxx my pornhub search history
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Apr 18, 2019 20:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:Don’t doxx my pornhub search history I would've figured you more for the let's plays of non-porn games that get posted there. EDIT: What's the plural of Flottengesetz? I think it's Flottengesetze, right? Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Apr 18, 2019 |
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Apr 18, 2019 20:47
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https://twitter.com/aliceavizandum/status/1118957338935869440?s=21
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Apr 18, 2019 20:51
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bewbies posted:Almost entirely PLA publications...the big ones open source ones are Science of Campaigns, Infantry Unit Tactics, and Army Combined Operation Tactics Under Conditions of Informationization. As for western analysis type stuff I'm a big fan of Dennis Blasko and Benjamin Lai's most recent books. These look interesting, thank you! Have you had a chance to read the new M. Taylor Fravel book yet? The later chapters look interesting.
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Apr 18, 2019 21:20
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vains posted:in general, the marine officers that influenced how the usmc fought in the 80s/90s were fascinated with stormtrooper tactics/ww2 german army tactics to inform how we would fight a maneuver war. The heady smell of "maneuver warfare" hung in the air in those days. I liked Grey, but he gave a speech to our unit during Desert Shield that really fell flat. It took a little of the shine off.
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Apr 18, 2019 21:29
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Cessna posted:The heady smell of " 
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Apr 18, 2019 21:38
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I've never read Clauswitz as I instinctively shrink from anything that smells too much of Hegel but I feel like I must have absorbed a lot of his ideas through osmosis. Looking at wikipedia apparently both Mao and Lenin were heavily influenced by him and his ideas contributed a lot to concepts of people's war and class struggle that have been so important in political history and counter-insurgency.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:06
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Squalid posted:I've never read Clauswitz as I instinctively shrink from anything that smells too much of Hegel RUDE, i took a shower this morning
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Apr 18, 2019 22:12
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HEY GUNS posted:RUDE, i took a shower this morning I don't even really remember why I avoid Hegel stuff anymore besides hating the dialectic. I think I did start reading Clauswitz once but found it boring and forgot about it. The real reason Sun Tzu gets quoted so much is probably because his book is frickin SHORT and pithy, so even lazy non readers can finish it. I think the copy I read was at least two-thirds footnotes and commentary by 1000 year old Ming scholars.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:19
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Many of the Chinese popular editions just pad it out with the 36 Stratagems just to add space.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:31
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Squalid posted:I don't even really remember why I avoid Hegel stuff anymore besides hating the dialectic.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:38
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Are you saying that Karl Marx anime lied to me?
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Apr 18, 2019 22:40
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I just opened the presentation copy i got for christmas at random and found some sound advice:quote:There are not more than five cardinal tastes, (sout, acrid, salt, sweet and bitter), yet combinations of them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted Most of the paragraphs for want of a better word could fit in a tweet.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:40
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HEY GUNS posted:he, kant, and heidegger are difficult to read. heidegger is at least difficult to read and pretty. nietzsche is easy to read and pretty I have read some Heidegger and I hate him for wasting my time! For more on my opinion on this see the Heidegger thread in DnD (now deceased, but still on the second page). I admit I have some unorthodox expectations of philosophers though, since I think being entertaining is maybe their most important job. I give Karl Popper a pass on this front though because I basically have to apply his ideas.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:58
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Squalid posted:I don't even really remember why I avoid Hegel stuff anymore besides hating the dialectic. 
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Apr 18, 2019 22:59
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Squalid posted:I don't even really remember why I avoid Hegel stuff anymore besides hating the dialectic. I think I did start reading Clauswitz once but found it boring and forgot about it. The real reason Sun Tzu gets quoted so much is probably because his book is frickin SHORT and pithy, so even lazy non readers can finish it. I think the copy I read was at least two-thirds footnotes and commentary by 1000 year old Ming scholars. Sun Tzu is also popular because it's basically just a collection of the sort of  truisms that fill pop history in general.
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Apr 18, 2019 23:44
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If armies flow like water, what is AirLand battle? Someone is throwing rocks at water while punching its flow with the other hand?
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Apr 18, 2019 23:47
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Nenonen posted:If armies flow like water, what is AirLand battle? Someone is throwing rocks at water while punching its flow with the other hand? Standing in the stream while pissing into it? 
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Apr 19, 2019 00:13
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Polyakov posted:Most of the paragraphs for want of a better word could fit in a tweet. You could fit most of the chapter into a tweet. That whole sentence you posted is only a few characters: "味不过五，五味之变，不可胜尝也". Classical Chinese is really terse. Most words are a single syllable and you can drop parts of speech constantly.
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Apr 19, 2019 01:31
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Nenonen posted:If armies flow like water, what is AirLand battle? Someone is throwing rocks at water while punching its flow with the other hand? Emptying a monsoon bucket on someone.
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Apr 19, 2019 01:38
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So my wife has been way into family geneology stuff lately and was digging around some old Civil War records. She found "amnesty papers" for her great-great-great-great grandpa and was all excited. Me considering myself a quasi Civil War expert, immediately said "he almost certainly didn't need amnesty papers, this makes no sense, you're looking at something else." Turns out, she was right, and found quite an amusing character. He...did indeed require amnesty, as you'll see in a second. So in a letter dated Sept 6, 1865, a Mr. RL Stanford, Treasurer of the state of Tennessee, wrote the governor, the right honorable William G. "Parson" Brownlow (a noted anti slavery advocate, after having been a noted pro slavery advocate), about an incident involving my wife's g-g-g-g grandpa, Mr. William Childress. The letter is as follows: Having information that William Childress applies for pardon, I will speak a few words concerning him. He was one of a very large company who mounted their horses and made diligent (?) for Rev. William Millburn and my self declaring they would kill us on sight. This was in July 1861. He and his crowd did not get to do this intended deed of violence on me but did get Millburn and put him in prison bounds for a very long time. He was a very bad man during the rebellion and I only escaped the wrath of such men by leaving the country and he like Burdwell (no idea who this is) should be pardoned only between the heavens and the earth at the end of a six or eight foot hemp rope. Jacob and Benjamin Birdwell may put in their applications for pardons. They are also desperate men, and should be dealt with by union men in their own neighborhoods. Who will pardon them................ The facts are they should every one of them be hung by union men who have suffered terribly in consequence of their devilish and inhuman deeds. Most Respectfully RL Stanford State Treasurer Childress was pardoned, and Stanford got caught embezzling money from a school the next year and would die of a suicidal laudanum overdose the year after.
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Apr 19, 2019 02:00
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Military records records are fantastic for family history because the smallest details can survive indefinitely, they are fantastic for fleshing out detail about a person who would otherwise be just a birth, marriage and death certificate. Your story reminds me, I need to piece together how my Great-grandfather, a bombardier in the NZ field artillery, got arrested at leicester square tube station three days before the 1918 armstice. It appears that his offence way saying "You're not going to allow us to be turfed out by this b****y rubbish" to a engineer officer during an altercation between some colonial soldiers and a guards lieutenant on his way home. He seems to have been acquitted because of disagreement between the three officer witnesses as to his precise words.
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Apr 19, 2019 04:43
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They didn't call them heroic laudanum doses back then
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Apr 19, 2019 05:24
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Apparently paratroopers in WW2 was a pretty awful job with relatively high casualty rates. What are some of the worst botched up uses of them during the war?
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Apr 19, 2019 08:38
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buglord posted:Apparently paratroopers in WW2 was a pretty awful job with relatively high casualty rates. What are some Airborne operations in WW2 were a series of disappointments, especially large scale airborne ops. Wonderful highlights include von der Heydte's attempt at the Battle of the Bulge, where extremely inexperienced Ju52 pilots try to conduct a drop in weather that left the Allies grounded, or Soviet airborne operations in general. Everybody came into the war thinking airborne troops would revolutionize warfare but the technology wasn't there. That didn't stop them.
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Apr 19, 2019 10:07
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buglord posted:Apparently paratroopers in WW2 was a pretty awful job with relatively high casualty rates. What are some Crete.
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Apr 19, 2019 11:29
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Basically every time they were used as an operational asset rather than as special forces/coup-de-main then they took appalling losses for marginal benefit.
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Apr 19, 2019 12:41
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buglord posted:Apparently paratroopers in WW2 was a pretty awful job with relatively high casualty rates. What are some non botched parachute operations: Eben Emael Palembang and honestly those are more coup-de-main with small units I'll throw my hat in the ring for Operation Varsity as a dark horse contender for most stupid use of paratroops during the war. Proportionally more casualties than Market Garden for absolutely no strategic purpose.
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Apr 19, 2019 13:01
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:non botched parachute operations: So based on Wikipedia’s OOB that operation had Allied paratroopers facing the 7th Parachute Division. While noting that this late in the war “Fallschirmjäger” was probably mostly a morale title than something denoting training (much less actual experience) in airborne operations: are there other instances like this? Schadenboner fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Apr 19, 2019 |
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Apr 19, 2019 13:14
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Eh, the drop on Normandy was a shitshow, but on the American side at least they still accomplished many of their objectives and contributed greatly to the total lack of resistance to the landing on Utah.
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Apr 19, 2019 13:16
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OH HELLO FRIEND WELCOME TO THE WILD WORLD OF HERMANN GOERING You are correct that by this point in the war Fallschirmjäger did not drop anymore. They stopped dropping after Crete in part because Crete was a loving poo poo show and in part because they didn't have the transport aircraft to do division-sized drops, and those transport aircraft were desperately needed for other purposes. Side note: the Nazis were almost always transport aircraft constrained because a) they lost a bunch and b) production rates were laughable. After Crete, they served as leg infantry. Fallschirmjäger were actually Luftwaffe formations. So they had their own supply chain, procurement, own uniforms, and some of their own weapons. This clever arrangement pretty well persisted through the end of the war. The Luftwaffe was responsible for raising and training the divisions. Hermann Goering was responsible at some level for where the units got assigned and fought bitterly with operational commanders when he thought that his elite Large Aryan Boys were not being used correctly. So - Fallschirmjäger was in part a morale title but also an actual functional title that denoted Luftwaffe infantry. As the war progressed, every thrown-together Luftwaffe formation got called Fallschirmjäger so higher numbered divisions were pretty much just mechanics and airfield security personnel given rifles and put in to the line. The 7th was one of these.
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Apr 19, 2019 13:25
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Eh, the drop on Normandy was a shitshow, but on the American side at least they still accomplished many of their objectives and contributed greatly to the total lack of resistance to the landing on Utah. I'm not really convinced. Utah was relatively easy because the beach terrain was more favorable, the beach was less well defended in the first place, and the preliminary bombardment was more successful. The Germans were slow to react, but at Utah they didn't really have the resources to effectively counterattack even if they acted decisively.
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Apr 19, 2019 13:31
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:OH HELLO FRIEND WELCOME TO THE WILD WORLD OF HERMANN GOERING Oh yeah, I forgot they just renamed all the field divisions “Fallschirmjäger” late in the war. 
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Apr 19, 2019 13:32
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:OH HELLO FRIEND WELCOME TO THE WILD WORLD OF HERMANN GOERING So much powder blue plus sized uniforms, silver tassels and pilot goggles
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Apr 19, 2019 13:43
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Luftwaffe Field Divisions: “What if Waffen SS but with even less of an excuse to exist?” (the Luftwaffe was always  as gently caress, versus the army which was only mostly as gently caress and more than willing to follow the Nazis until it stopped looking good for them), but with all the waste and parallelism that the Waffen SS entailed.
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Apr 19, 2019 13:48
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