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Tab8715 posted:Is there such a thing as military without a county? In terms of military law, it is my opinion we are early modern again. The huge amounts of noise people are making about this is because they either don't recognise this or recognize it and think it's immoral.
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Sep 17, 2019 22:58
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:shockingly countries put their own immediate interests above those of their allies I guess, but once a NATO capital gets the 'ol mushroom-print I feel like we're sort of beyond "limited exchange"? Dunno, it just struck me as weird.
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Sep 17, 2019 22:59
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Schadenboner posted:Once you're dusting London and Paris and Berlin is the exchange really tactical anymore (unless "tactical" means "not hitting American cities", obvs.?) It's tactical because you're popping say, Charles de Gaulle airport with a 15kt weapon rather than aiming one 15Mt weapon at les Invalides,
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Sep 17, 2019 23:04
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I guess in theory aircraft could get some of the way to the target without alerting anybody? But these days it's probably (relatively) easier to spy on airbases and report, and receive accurate information in real time.
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Sep 17, 2019 23:09
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's the same as the growth of cities and expansion of other professional trades, isn't it? People go off seeking opportunity and other people are looking for able bodies and have money to pay them. people didn't used to say that, from the 19th century into the mid 20th the usual description was that fighting for money instead of for the "nation state" was immoral
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Sep 18, 2019 00:38
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zoux posted:
This seems to be pretty abstract, otherwise you’d think that Guam would be in for a nuke or two.
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Sep 18, 2019 00:57
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echopapa posted:This seems to be pretty abstract, otherwise you’d think that Guam would be in for a nuke or two. I'd imagine that any B-2 sites would be counterforce targets but they don't seem to be used in the simulated war. I know we're currently using these highly advanced stealth aircraft to bomb various patches of likely dirt in absence of a nuclear war, but I thought the whole purpose they were built stealthy was to defeat Russian AA and drop nukes on the motherland so if they aren't being used in that scenario, what are they for? KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:It's tactical because you're popping say, Charles de Gaulle airport with a 15kt weapon rather than aiming one 15Mt weapon at les Invalides, In an escalation situation, what are the targets in a "limited tactical exchange", it'd be military right? I know this is just an example but I've never really contemplated the goals of a tactical exchange. Intimidation?
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Sep 18, 2019 01:52
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I mean so far as I know, the one common factor in a lot of developments around that time is just a growing population with more people dedicated to things other than agriculture, so I just assumed. And if you're not politically compelled to fight, soldiering is mostly a job. High risks, and a lot of weird romanticization and symbolism, but still a job. You may enjoy your job or think it's necessary, but you wanna get some money for your work. My grandad was all weird about people thanking him for his service, since he never thought of it as like a noble service or love of country thing.
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Sep 18, 2019 02:11
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SlothfulCobra posted:I mean so far as I know, the one common factor in a lot of developments around that time is just a growing population with more people dedicated to things other than agriculture, so I just assumed.
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Sep 18, 2019 02:14
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:a lot going on here and i would like to help you sort of organize it better Sure! 1. Yes, the raids completely eliminated their ability to enrich uranium accomplishing the objective. I’m specifically referring to Gunnerside. 2. The degree of success in meeting a goal but also the effort spent in that accomplishment. In a way, you beat your opponent by spending less than they did. The attack has an enormous impact on the Saudi Arabia economy, exposes their weakness publicly and even threatens the world economy which may be used as political leverage. 3. Terrorism is to inspire fear so that the opposing party hurts themselves usually a smaller party vs. a much larger one while a military is typically connected to a recognized state against another however those two terms do have some overlap such as a state funded terrorism. 4. As another poster said AQ was sort of pre-caliphate, yet just wanted the US out of the Middle East and the US removed as a world power. The Houthis just rebelled or kicked out of their own government and want sovereignty of their country. In a way you could say they’re terrorists but their primary goal isn’t to just inspire fear. They - not trying to be ironic - want their country back. This is my understanding of events which may or may not be correct or incomplete.
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Sep 18, 2019 02:22
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Nessus posted:We kind of have an unusual level of idolatry about our soldiers here in the US, historically speaking. Or so it seems, anyway. Did states like Prussia valorize the common soldier like we sort of do, or was it just the officers/leaders? We’ve spread this to the commonwealth these days, leading to hilarious  facebook shares that have been sloppily edited from country to country. “Australia’s founding fathers died for us at Vimy Ridge. DEPORT ALL MUSLIMS.”
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Sep 18, 2019 02:34
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Tab8715 posted:1. Yes, the raids completely eliminated their ability to enrich uranium accomplishing the objective. I’m specifically referring to Gunnerside. Gunnerside was a very successful raid in the sense that it accomplished its objectives. It did not complete eliminate the Nazis' ability to enrich uranium. Production was restored within a few months, it took bombing to convince the Germans to relocate heavy water production, and in any event if the Allies hadn't done anything at all about the Norsk plant at worst the Germans would have managed to construct a small-scale heavy water reactor. This didn't effect the outcome of the war at all, because the Germans had nowhere near the ability to enrich enough uranium highly enough to build a bomb. Tab8715 posted:The Houthis just rebelled or kicked out of their own government and want sovereignty of their country. In a way you could say they’re terrorists but their primary goal isn’t to just inspire fear. They - not trying to be ironic - want their country back. First, it's not necessary for the *primary* goal to be to inspire fear. By that definition, the IRA weren't terrorists, nor were the Red Army Factions, Baader-Meinhof, etc. If you are using violence or the threat of violence to inspire fear in order to bring about political change, that's a good working definition of terrorism. Second, this is their flag:  The slogans printed on it are "God is Greater, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam." In the event that they get their country back I don't think they're going to say "oh, we were just kidding about that 'Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews' stuff." Phanatic fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Sep 18, 2019 |
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Sep 18, 2019 02:46
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Phanatic posted:Gunnerside was a very successful raid in the sense that it accomplished its objectives. Ah, I didn’t know about the rest but I’m looking at this from micro level not the whole war.
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Sep 18, 2019 02:51
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Something I heard argued five or six years ago: prior to the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia was actually an extremely hard target in the lead-up to World War II for reasons of both terrain and military preparation. Not one that Nazi Germany couldn't overcome, but one that would've put up something of a challenging (or at least protracted) fight and that would've given Poland, France, and Britain more time to prepare. The Munich Agreement concessions destroyed the nation's defensive capabilities by giving up both the terrain advantages and the fortifications that they had spent years constructing there. I'd always heard about the Munich Agreement as being bad more out of a "don't give an inch to the devil" anti-appeasement mindset, but the argument here was that it was an enormously impactful concession on a literal strategic/tactical level. How do military historians look at it? Thanks!
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Sep 18, 2019 04:01
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bewbies posted:Essentially, instead of trying to build a ship or plane that is Everything You Could Possibly Want, instead, take an "agile" approach to both physical and digital engineering. The result, is to come up with a basic engineering solution that is like...80% good, and then count on "agile processes" doing the rest. When you put it like that, I’d rather have a new concurrent development boondoggle.
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Sep 18, 2019 04:04
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16JXmZ0QHMcFAUXTON posted:Wondering how the early modern people cobbled together relatively coherent/disciplined field elements out of, you know, drunken dudes with pointy sticks and guns.  When I can't tell you, that's a question for Rodrigo Diaz or someone who's read a lot about the late middle ages. But even then you see groups of mercenaries who are hired because they are a small, well-organized group of people who know what to do, like crossbowmen from Genoa for instance. The thing is that the "go on march between planting and harvest" people aren't very good at this. How. OK. In the first place i think we should decouple the idea that knowing what to do on the field necessarily means they are sober and controllable off it. Everyone thinks this, I'm not sure when it dates to, and i'm not sure when it's from. In fact my pet theory is that the consciousness early modern soldiers have of themselves as a specific subculture, honorable and worthy of respect, leads to them being more likely to do things that their commanders call "inconvenience," not less. (This is real. The period word used in the military to describe what we would call atrocities or war crimes is Ungelegenheit, "inconvenience.") In the second place, feudal levies still exist into the 17th century, just almost no historians talk about them. It's just that armies have gotten much bigger and they are now too small to count. But in france I have seen nobles show up on the field with "their people;" in Saxony I have seen rolls of local nobles who all club in for the cost of a horseman--a quarter here, an eighth there. That horseman may be a professional but minor Saxon nobles from Goerlitz to the Elbe have paid for him. It's just that getting that many people to pay for a hundred horse is actually bullshit. Wallenstein's camp on the Alte Veste had a hundred thousand men in it, that's more troops that have been seen on European soil since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Moreover, some of the nobles that haven't decided to do something not goddamn bullshit with their lives are now mercenaries themselves. A lot of the same names that were in the Saxon government in the 1400s and 1500s show up leading troops in the 1600s, it's just the not every noble is expected to do this any more--and that people who aren't nobles can rise in military service now, more than will be the case later. The word "mercenary" is a little misleading, it's more like "semi-domestic public-private partnerships." Many Saxon commanders and many Saxon soldiers are Saxon. The map of their origins during the entire war looks like this.  They're also not peasants; more of them come from cities or medium large towns than the general population. By the end of the war the Saxons and the Swedes are both recruiting from this same pool, but the idea that these people have no loyalty beyond cash isn't correct, and even if it were--why should that be immoral? Mercenaries talk about what they do as a form of feudal service, they take seriously the idea that there is a personal relationship between themselves and the head of state who hired them. They say that they have taken "money out of his hand," and they call what they do "Dienst," service. In the case of the Saxon regiment I did my PhD on, that head of state happened to be the King of Spain. For reasons. A more pressing loyalty than the head of state who hired these people, I think, is their company flags. In the 1620s each infantry company--on paper--is 314 fighting men plus women, children, servants, baggage handlers, entourages, and hangers-on. Each infantry regiment is about 3000. In the 1630s and 40s each company on paper is about 200, but by the 40s they are so low that a better number is more like 80. Each company has a flag. When the companies amalgamate into batallions to fight it looks like this.  (artist's representation of White Mountain. Yes this means that because a batallion is several companies all together, each company's pikemen will seperate from that company's musketeers and stand next to everyone else's pikemen to fight. This is normal.) Flags are symbolically extremely important. If your company's flag is taken in combat your company is legally dissolved and it no longer counts as desertion if you run. It's not very clear just how you see who won or lost during close-fought fights and the number of flags you capture versus how many of yours your enemy captures is one way to do it. You can still see Swedish flags hung up in Vienna. And I have heard that Imperial flags are hung around Gustavus Adolphus's tomb, but I wouldn't know. These guys are amazingly loyal to them. When one company in the regiment i did my PhD on mutinied, the flag-bearer ordered another officer to take the flag and talk the mutineers down. They formed a ring around him and told him “Get out of here with the flag or we will shoot you dead.” He replied “This flag is mine and entrusted to me, I will live and die by it and then I will be wrapped in it.” They are also loyal to the idea of themselves as soldiers and the idea that they are governed by military law, which is seperate from civilian law. Regiments have their own legal infrastructure, their own tribunals, and their own trials. Common soldiers can sit on tribunals as well--there is probably more participation of "normal people" in the legal process in the military at this period than outside of it.  Sometimes they signed their names to the trial transcripts. The three bottom blocks, in the curly brackets, are all common soldiers. These people are coherent because they've been living and working together for a long time. Early modern military units are constantly losing people--whether from desertion, sickness, or death--which means they are always recruiting. New guys enter one by one, not in a big cohort, and imo they pick up how to soldier casually and gradually, from the more experienced people. Desertion is far more common in this period than it will be later, but the people who stay may stay for years. Considering how common desertion is (and how devastating to an army when it happens), and how little the authorities can do to stop it, there's an argument to be made that anyone who stays in an army does it at least semi-willingly. There are also families who make it a profession, just like any other profession. You go to war with networks of relatives. Why are they coherent? My argument is they're a subculture. Edit: This also explains collapses like the Saxons at Breitenfeld 1. Breitenfeld was fought in early September (Sept 7/17) and the Saxon regiments on the field had been raised from April to August. They were brand new. Even so they manage to hold things together longer than most historians' descriptions of that battle would suggest. Utterly green troops from a culture with little concept of drill holding up under fire and getting charged is to their credit. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Sep 18, 2019 |
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Sep 18, 2019 04:15
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That effortpost is nice. Now for a meme. 
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Sep 18, 2019 04:17
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the arsenal could pump out a galley a day
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Sep 18, 2019 04:19
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HEY GUNS posted:rad effort post Were the soldiers by that time largely entering service due to a lack of prospects in their cities? Or did most of them bring ideological reasons with them into service? Like your Saxon soldiers fighting for Spain - did they have a sort of longer-term client relationship with the king? Or was it something like they had strong opinions on things and wanted to fight accordingly?
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Sep 18, 2019 04:41
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FAUXTON posted:Were the soldiers by that time largely entering service due to a lack of prospects in their cities? Or did most of them bring ideological reasons with them into service? Like your Saxon soldiers fighting for Spain - did they have a sort of longer-term client relationship with the king? Or was it something like they had strong opinions on things and wanted to fight accordingly? Some fought for ideological reasons, these guys probably didn't since most Saxons were lutheran. If it wasn't the longterm diplomatic relationship between Saxony and Spain since the days of Philip II, it was just that they probably thought it was a decent chance on a job. It turned out not to be but they had no way of knowing that. edit: the colonel of that regiment was not only pro-Imperialist he sympathized with Catholics and converted in 29. The lieutenant colonel was from what is now Belgium and had been fighting with Bucquoy. So in their case it was ideological. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Sep 18, 2019 |
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Sep 18, 2019 04:46
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surf rock posted:I'd always heard about the Munich Agreement as being bad more out of a "don't give an inch to the devil" anti-appeasement mindset, but the argument here was that it was an enormously impactful concession on a literal strategic/tactical level. How do military historians look at it? Thanks! So the reason the Sudetenland is called the Sudetenland is because of the Sudeten mountains, which start in Saxony and extend east into Czechoslovakia. The mountains, along with the neighboring Ore Mounains. make a lot of the border hard to get through....an army crossing the border gets funneled into these mountain passes and valleys, which makes the area easy to defend. Here's a current topographical map of the Czech Republic.  The green is all mountains, and as you can see, they make up most of tthe border. And all that border region is the Sudetenland. On top of that, starting in 1935, worried about militarism in Germany, Hungary, and Poland, Czechoslovakia started building defensive fortifications along the border. They'd continue working on them until 1938 Czechoslovakia was part of an alliance called the Little Entente. This was created by France in 1920, and was an alliance between France, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. This was originally intended as an alliance against Hungary, but it got formalized in the 30s, and if any of the countries were attacked, the rest agreed to go to war against the attacker and coordinate the war effort. The first were intended to defend the border until the army could mobilize and its allies could bring help. The Czechs also had an army of 42 divisions (compared, I think, to the Germans 55), and they were well equipped and modern , with the tanks being on par with, or, arguably better than Germany If it had come down to a war, the Czechs probably could have won.
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Sep 18, 2019 05:31
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HEY GUNS posted:This is real. The period word used in the military to describe what we would call atrocities or war crimes is Ungelegenheit, "inconvenience."
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Sep 18, 2019 05:59
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Friar John posted:Now this has me thinking. How is the word used in context? "The people complain of many inconveniences"? "The soldiers made an Inconvenience there a week ago"?
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Sep 18, 2019 06:02
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Epicurius posted:On top of that, starting in 1935, worried about militarism in Germany, Hungary, and Poland, Czechoslovakia started building defensive fortifications along the border. They'd continue working on them until 1938 Czechoslovakia was part of an alliance called the Little Entente. This was created by France in 1920, and was an alliance between France, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. This was originally intended as an alliance against Hungary, but it got formalized in the 30s, and if any of the countries were attacked, the rest agreed to go to war against the attacker and coordinate the war effort. The first were intended to defend the border until the army could mobilize and its allies could bring help.
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Sep 18, 2019 06:04
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HEY GUNS posted:Both. It's a letters from a general to his recalcitrant colonels kinda word.
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Sep 18, 2019 06:09
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Friar John posted:Do the soldiers themselves have a way of envisioning "going too far", or is it just suggested by descriptions of mayhem and the like?
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Sep 18, 2019 06:18
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Czechoslovakia, lacking any sort of navy, would easily have been blockaded and starved into a losing scenario. They never had a chance.
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Sep 18, 2019 06:19
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Schadenboner posted:I think it needs the term "warfighter" in there (or is that no longer in vogue since it admits we're, you know, fighting wars?) Kinetic Task-Resolution Technician. (each of which is an individual contractor in order to maximise agility and diversity of kill-chain options)
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Sep 18, 2019 07:16
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Phanatic posted:
Technically not a intelligence failure since they knew it was coming but decided to let it happen
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Sep 18, 2019 07:22
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The Lone Badger posted:Kinetic Task-Resolution Technician. 
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Sep 18, 2019 07:25
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Stairmaster posted:Technically not a intelligence failure since they knew it was coming but decided to let it happen I'd still consider it a failure, the IC (especially the NSA and the FBI) knew that something was coming but they didn't share the relevant info with each other. So, for example, the NSA knew certain individuals were planning something big, but there wasn't a mechanism to share it with the then-nacent counter terror team at the FBI, who could have told them yeah, these people are already in the US but if you could send us their names of their associates abroad that would be just swell. Just as one example.
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Sep 18, 2019 07:43
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Don Gato posted:I'd still consider it a failure, the IC (especially the NSA and the FBI) knew that something was coming but they didn't share the relevant info with each other. So, for example, the NSA knew certain individuals were planning something big, but there wasn't a mechanism to share it with the then-nacent counter terror team at the FBI, who could have told them yeah, these people are already in the US but if you could send us their names of their associates abroad that would be just swell. Just as one example. we just don't notice because most of the time catastrophes don't happen and you in fact need a perfect series of multiple factors for one to occur. every disaster report i've ever seen involves multiple chains of fuckups and if even one were different, the disaster would have been prevented
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Sep 18, 2019 07:46
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HEY GUNS posted:...the Saxon regiments on the field had been raised from April to August. Whether the Elector would have gone with the Imperialists again or with the Swedes, he was definitely planning to get back in the war. Or at least to defend himself. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Sep 18, 2019 |
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Sep 18, 2019 08:41
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NASA did this great documentary about the loss of one of the X-31 demonstrators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1E3xpePbmA
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Sep 18, 2019 08:46
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Czechoslovakia, lacking any sort of navy, would easily have been blockaded and starved into a losing scenario. They never had a chance. Czechoslovakia, being landlocked, had about as big a navy as you'd expect it to have. It's situation in regards to trade largely would have depended on its other neighbors. quote:Weren't the Czech tanks so good that the Nazis just basically took 'em and used them with at most a little retooling The LT vz. 38 became the Panzer 38(t) after Czechoslovakia was taken over and Germany continued making them until 1942. I know Germans used the LT vz. 35 after the takeover, but I don't know if they built more. Some had been exported to Romania as the R-2, and they stayed in service, first as tanks and then, a modified version as tank destroyers, until the end of the war.
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Sep 18, 2019 11:46
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FrangibleCover posted:Thinking you have to ascend stairs to get to the first floor of a building? HEY GUNS posted:that you think of mercenary service as a "professional trade" at all means that i (and people who agree with me) are already winning.
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Sep 18, 2019 12:26
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surf rock posted:Something I heard argued five or six years ago: prior to the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia was actually an extremely hard target in the lead-up to World War II for reasons of both terrain and military preparation. Not one that Nazi Germany couldn't overcome, but one that would've put up something of a challenging (or at least protracted) fight and that would've given Poland, France, and Britain more time to prepare. The Munich Agreement concessions destroyed the nation's defensive capabilities by giving up both the terrain advantages and the fortifications that they had spent years constructing there. Based off this, is there any serious work* on Chamberlin's mens rea at the time? Did he accept that war was inevitable and he was trying to delay until armaments production could get brought online or did he actually think peace was a thing which was possible? *: Stuff that isn't either immediately political or fellation of Churchill or post hoc bullshit?
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Sep 18, 2019 14:14
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Epicurius posted:Czechoslovakia, being landlocked, had about as big a navy as you'd expect it to have. It's situation in regards to trade largely would have depended on its other neighbors. The Germans used the LT as a couple different versions of tank destroyers too. Maurder and Hetzer plus a few AA.
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Sep 18, 2019 14:17
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Yeah, the Czechoslovakia arms industry was top notch and kept working for the Germans during the war. The LT vz. 38 light tank was about on par with the German PzIII medium tank, and huge amounts of them were used to first make up for medium tank shortages and then in a regular light tank role.
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Sep 18, 2019 15:22
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https://twitter.com/sovietvisuals/status/1174326332018298885?s=21 I love dark Soviet humor
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Sep 18, 2019 15:25
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