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Carillon posted:Are they meant to operate solo? Or is the expectation that there are a few of them operating in concert to land on a beachhead. It depends. The ship will probably be part of a larger task force with other warships. They might be part of an Amphibious Ready Group which will also have an LHA and another LPD or LSD, all of which together will carry a Marine Expeditionary Unit. But they also might be (relatively) alone, schlepping from San Diego to Camp Pendleton on a training exercise, practicing getting grunts wet. It entirely depends on the mission. Carillon posted:And are they mean to be used in opposed landings, or is it more here's a troop compliment and some AFV's quickly, get them on ground first and then fight. Opposed landings are near-suicidal. No one is going to do a D-Day or Iwo Jima style landing these days. But dropping AFVs and grunts onto a beach so they can secure a beachhead and then push inland? Sure. Carillon posted:also it looks kinda dorky, is that on purpose? Probably.
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Oct 9, 2019 21:26
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quote:The Norman-derived equivalent count (from Latin comes) was not introduced following the Norman conquest of England though countess was and is used for the female title. Geoffrey Hughes writes, "It is a likely speculation that the Norman French title 'Count' was abandoned in England in favour of the Germanic 'Earl' […] precisely because of the uncomfortable phonetic proximity to oval office" That's almost a full 1000 years of Englishmen callling each other cunts.
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Oct 9, 2019 21:42
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HEY GUNS posted:how familiar are you with religious wars? if you only looked at iran it would look like islamophobic propaganda but "we" did our share of this poo poo Its certainly not something i think of as unique to Iran (even in the modern day), its not so much a geography thing and more a time scale thing. This is a modern state in 1980, Iran had been a pretty educated and prosperous nation for a while now going into this war. Its a shock to the system when you have university students going out en masse and signing up for the revolutionary guards, I know people who were born in Iran and were alive in this time period. I guess its a mental seperation between the "past" where i expect this to happen and the "present" where i dont. Which i know to be ridiculous intellectually speaking but the little mental tic is still there.
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Oct 9, 2019 21:51
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That "fountain of blood" looks so much like the platonic ideal an extreme pacifist protest, that it feels really strange to see it as official pro-war propaganda.
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Oct 9, 2019 21:52
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feedmegin posted:Texas is a bit of a special case, having actually been it's own country though. it wasn't even the longest-lived independent country that became a state
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Oct 9, 2019 22:18
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:it wasn't even the longest-lived independent country that became a state Deseret/Utah right?
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Oct 9, 2019 22:37
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Randarkman posted:Deseret/Utah right? If I remember correctly, Hawaii.
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Oct 9, 2019 22:45
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Polyakov posted:Its certainly not something i think of as unique to Iran (even in the modern day), its not so much a geography thing and more a time scale thing. This is a modern state in 1980, Iran had been a pretty educated and prosperous nation for a while now going into this war. Its a shock to the system when you have university students going out en masse and signing up for the revolutionary guards, I know people who were born in Iran and were alive in this time period. I guess its a mental seperation between the "past" where i expect this to happen and the "present" where i dont. Which i know to be ridiculous intellectually speaking but the little mental tic is still there. The students from Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and an assortment of other Arab countries that I came across in university were all deeply religious people, which is like 6 years ago now. I've read some books from a Dutch anthropologist who spent several years at a university in Egypt, and he basically comes to the same conclusion. I guess it clashes with our own stereotypes of highly educated people, but belief and scientific method don't seem to be incompatible.
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Oct 9, 2019 22:45
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Polyakov posted:On March 14th the Iraqi armour attacked with the support of significant quantities of chemical weapons. This did less direct damage but Iranian troops were not well prepared to fight with the penalty to vision and endurance from wearing gas masks and were badly disorganized by it. Iraqs troops were far better prepared and their tanks were equipped to deal with contaminated environment and they successfully pushed Iran back into the marshes. Within 8 days Iraq had recaptured all territory lost in this assault and inflicted 30’000 casualties on iran for 11’000 of their own. The losses of AFV’s and helicopters was about even on both sides at around 100 and 12 respectively. What did warfare in a chemical warfare environment actually look like? I've read a lot about how Cold War AFVs were designed to fight in NBC environments and how it was thought that troops should fight in NBC environments, but how did the Iraqi troops actually conduct mechanized warfare on a chemical battlefield? Did they sit about inside their BTRs without dismounting and shooting through the firing ports, was it basically identical to regular mechanized warfare, was it something else completely - what was it, basically?
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Oct 9, 2019 23:06
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LatwPIAT posted:What did warfare in a chemical warfare environment actually look like? I've read a lot about how Cold War AFVs were designed to fight in NBC environments and how it was thought that troops should fight in NBC environments, but how did the Iraqi troops actually conduct mechanized warfare on a chemical battlefield? Did they sit about inside their BTRs without dismounting and shooting through the firing ports, was it basically identical to regular mechanized warfare, was it something else completely - what was it, basically? Initially they would leave a gap of around 8 hours for the agent to dissipate and go in on foot with their tanks in varying degrees of MOPP ranging from just surgical masks in earlier days to actual proper gas masks and capes. There are tapes of some high level Iraqi meetings where they emphasise the 8 hour gap for gas effects to be minimized before they send their troops in and notes on Iraqi training say that it was impressed on them the importance of using gas masks when they were subjected to live chemical weapons training, though precisely what that training was is unelaborated. There are references to republican guards units running into trouble with fighting in close quarters against Iranian soldiers while wearing gas masks with condensation blinding them and the respirator causing them to lose breath. I believe standard procedure was dismount infantry to support tanks and advance slowly in the marshy areas that they did the majority of their fighting in. There is an incident where Iraq tries to get a bit clever and sends in its tanks shortly after the preparatory gas attack, this lead to Iraqi tanks getting ambushed by Pasdaran forces who had held their nerve after the gas attacks. There is reference to the loss of a brigade of tanks to a Pasdaran ambush in the second battle of the marshes which i infer may have been as a result of the infantry staying back in their BTR's and not escorting the tanks as they would do so on other occasions, but that is a guess on the fact that a major ambush was pulled off and it was also when they went in a bit earlier.
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Oct 10, 2019 00:17
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Polyakov posted:varying degrees of MOPP ranging from just surgical masks in earlier days What the poo poo
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Oct 10, 2019 00:25
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Dance Officer posted:The students from Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and an assortment of other Arab countries that I came across in university were all deeply religious people, which is like 6 years ago now. I've read some books from a Dutch anthropologist who spent several years at a university in Egypt, and he basically comes to the same conclusion. I guess it clashes with our own stereotypes of highly educated people, but belief and scientific method don't seem to be incompatible. Why would they be incompatible? I think the only people who really believe that are the stupid kind of atheist and extreme scripture literalists. I can't say much for other fields, but having studies mathematics and physics previously in my life I can tell you that religious people are not all that uncommon in those fields. If you look at the history of physics, particular of the more theoretical bent, you'll find that it isn't that uncommon to find deeply religious people among its ranks, often of the unorthodox variety, but not necessarily always. Highly theoretical subjects like mathematics and (especially theoretical) physics almost seem to me to be kind of conducive to a "religious mind" so to speak, because of their universality and the trend of unification they seem to often engender and require an appreciation for the profound if that makes sense.
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Oct 10, 2019 00:27
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhPgw6X8ubE Our very own Ensign Expendable was involved in a little thing on YouTube.
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Oct 10, 2019 00:28
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Milo and POTUS posted:What the poo poo What is referred to as "hygiene masks", so i presume something like this actually rather than surgical masks.  Not that that is any better.
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Oct 10, 2019 00:29
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I imagine a piss soaked rag would offer more protection.
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Oct 10, 2019 00:34
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Molentik posted:I imagine a piss soaked rag would offer more protection. I thought piss was specific to certain ww1-era gasses?
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Oct 10, 2019 02:09
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Kangxi posted:If I remember correctly, Hawaii. And it only ended because of a US-backed coup.
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Oct 10, 2019 02:13
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Dance Officer posted:The students from Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and an assortment of other Arab countries that I came across in university were all deeply religious people, which is like 6 years ago now. I've read some books from a Dutch anthropologist who spent several years at a university in Egypt, and he basically comes to the same conclusion. I guess it clashes with our own stereotypes of highly educated people, but belief and scientific method don't seem to be incompatible. The Muslim Brotherhood drew and still draws a lot of their recruitment from university students, and the Islamic University of Gaza was founded by the founder of Hamas, and Hamas has a really strong presence there.
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Oct 10, 2019 02:32
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The Lone Badger posted:I thought piss was specific to certain ww1-era gasses? In the original instance it was anti-chlorine, the ammonia in urine breaks it down. Might work on others too, not sure.
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Oct 10, 2019 02:44
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Taerkar posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhPgw6X8ubE Hmm he doesn’t sound russian
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Oct 10, 2019 02:50
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Kangxi posted:If I remember correctly, Hawaii. To expand on this, the Hawaiian Archipelago had been unified politically since 1810, were recognized as an independent country by Queen Victoria, King Leopold I, King Louis-Phillipe, as well as Emperor Napoleon III and had received ambassadors from other major powers of the time. They were far more independent than Texas could hope to be but basically no one outside Hawaii realizes that. True story, Iolani Palace in Honolulu was wired for electricity and had telephones before Westminster Palace or the White House.
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Oct 10, 2019 02:54
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I bet they updated in the last 20 years too.
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Oct 10, 2019 03:03
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Polyakov posted:For two weeks in late April. The mission profile was a MiG-25 would be loaded with 4 500kg bombs and external fuel tanks, take off from Kirkuk and burn the external fuel reaching the Iranian border, it would jettison its external fuel tanks and climb to 60’000 feet (Above the F-14’s service ceiling of 50’000 feet) and accelerated to around Mach 2.5 and sprint at Tehran, twenty minutes later it would reach a point 25 miles from Tehran and drop its bombs which would follow a ballistic trajectory for the last leg of their journey and drop into Tehran. This sounds like a good way to spend an awful lot of money accomplishing very little.
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Oct 10, 2019 04:39
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Taerkar posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhPgw6X8ubE Oh yeah, I forgot to share that here. Also my book is already out, but only available on the publisher's website so far (good news if you're in the UK). Amazon hasn't been updated yet, but on preoders alone I'm #16 in the Battle of Berlin category even though the word "Berlin" does not appear in the book.
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Oct 10, 2019 04:40
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I really appreciate these Iran-Iraq war posts - they're really interesting, in a how-badly-can-a-war-be-run type of way.
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Oct 10, 2019 04:49
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Not to touch on the military present but wasn't Saladin a Kurd? Was it an attempt by Saddam to appeal to this demographic (seems extremely unlikely from what little I know about how he treated them), or was it just some plea to a glorious pan-Iraqi history or something along those lines? e: i guess they might not have conceived of ethnicity and nationality the same way we do back then, too.
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Oct 10, 2019 07:10
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Milo and POTUS posted:Not to touch on the military present but wasn't Saladin a Kurd? Was it an attempt by Saddam to appeal to this demographic (seems extremely unlikely from what little I know about how he treated them), or was it just some plea to a glorious pan-Iraqi history or something along those lines? Saladin was indeed Kurdish, but from a heavily Arabized aristocratic family who were essentially married into the dominant Turkish military aristocracy of the Near East. He may have been of partly Turkish descent, though this is unknown, some of his brothers are known by Turkish names and his own most well-known wife was Turkish. Still Saladin faced some problems governing his empire because of his ethnicity, though that was more because he was not himself Turkish than specifically because he was Kurdish. His army and higher administration was mostly made up of Turkish soldiers, Mamluks, professional mercenaries and tribal auxiliaries. He likely would have faced similar problems in this regard if he were an Arab, which to an extent he was on a cultural and linguistic level, but at the time Arabs* kind of had even less of a military presence than Kurds did, many families, like Saladin's, were prominent in the military aristocracy of northern Syria and Iraq, and as I said, essentially married into the ruling Turkish aristocracy. Him being Kurdish has never really been much of an issue regarding his idolization in the Arab world. He himself emphasized a pan-Sunni religious policy and Muslim unity against the Crusaders, and in modern times this has kind of been appropriated by Arab Nationalists as an early expression of Pan-Arabism. Though to be honest I don't quite know how he is perceived by Kurdish people, favorably I assume, though there isn't much historical basis to claim him as a figure of Kurdish independence or nationalism, though that has rarely stopped people really. *Though note that "Arab" back then wasn't as meaningful a label as it is now and though I mentioned Saladin was to some extent significantly Arabized, he would not have been thought of as an Arab by any of his contemporaries. Turks and Kurds kind of were meaningful nationalities, because they belonged to militarily prominent, tribal populations with distinct languages and customs. Arab back then, and really until the late 19th century/early 20th mostly always referred to Bedouin, other Arabic speakers would not have thought of themselves as "Arabs" but would have identified themselves by region, which was mostly a matter of which was the dominant city in your region (not uncommon in the Middle East for the name of a city to refer to the entire attached region so to speak), so they'd be referred to as being from Mosul, Aleppo, Alexandria, Damascus, etc. edit: And to kind of answer the actual question, Saddam Hussein's adoration of Saladin most likely stems from the general pan-Arabist adoration of him, of which the Baathists are counted as part of. Also they happened to share a birthplace, Tikrit, which Saddam would emphasize to draw comparisons in propaganda. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Oct 10, 2019 |
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Oct 10, 2019 07:29
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Polyakov posted:What is referred to as "hygiene masks", so i presume something like this actually rather than surgical masks. Against the nerve agents you're going to vomit into the mask and die instead of vomiting onto the ground and dying.
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Oct 10, 2019 12:05
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Sulphur mustard isn’t even a gas. The reason that surgical masks work is that airborne germs are not gases—they’re ærosolised, riding the wind in tiny drops of liquid. That’s also how mustard spreads, so paper masks are more effective against it than they would be against many other chemical agents.
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Oct 10, 2019 12:15
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Randarkman posted:Deseret/Utah right? Kingdom of Hawaii - 83 years Vermont Republic - 14 years Republic of Texas - 10 years State of Deseret - ~1 year California Republic - hardly counts, but 25 days
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Oct 10, 2019 14:08
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Polyakov posted:Its certainly not something i think of as unique to Iran (even in the modern day), its not so much a geography thing and more a time scale thing. This is a modern state in 1980, Iran had been a pretty educated and prosperous nation for a while now going into this war. Its a shock to the system when you have university students going out en masse and signing up for the revolutionary guards, I know people who were born in Iran and were alive in this time period. I guess its a mental seperation between the "past" where i expect this to happen and the "present" where i dont. Which i know to be ridiculous intellectually speaking but the little mental tic is still there. There was a patriotic uplift amongst my high school cohort immediately following 9/11 and a bunch of people enlisted who might not have, otherwise. Can you imagine if your country was fighting in a truly existential war? It's always perplexing to me when people do not understand these shifts.
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Oct 10, 2019 14:10
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:There was a patriotic uplift amongst my high school cohort immediately following 9/11 and a bunch of people enlisted who might not have, otherwise. Can you imagine if your country was fighting in a truly existential war? It's always perplexing to me when people do not understand these shifts. How was the Iran-Iraq War truly existential? Except for the ruling clerics?
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Oct 10, 2019 14:16
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ChubbyChecker posted:How was the Iran-Iraq War truly existential? Except for the ruling clerics? "Existential war" is more of a state of mind. But if you bought into the idea of the Islamic Revolution and you see Saddam as a murderous dictator trying to take over the middle east, well, it's about as existential as WWII.
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Oct 10, 2019 14:24
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Kingdom of Hawaii - 83 years Wow. I honestly thought that was much longer. I blame Victoria 1 and 2.
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Oct 10, 2019 14:35
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ChubbyChecker posted:How was the Iran-Iraq War truly existential? Except for the ruling clerics? i dunno maybe check in with the residents of khorramshahr
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Oct 10, 2019 14:44
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:There was a patriotic uplift amongst my high school cohort immediately following 9/11 and a bunch of people enlisted who might not have, otherwise. Can you imagine if your country was fighting in a truly existential war? It's always perplexing to me when people do not understand these shifts. There is a distinction between a patriotic urge to fight for your country, which i understand and grasp, and the active seeking out and glorification of Martyrdom which i do not. These people are going and getting sent out to perform hugely bloody and futile attacks with massive body counts, the realities of which are not really particularly hidden from the people at home either, largely on the promise of eternal life in paradise after and are often doing so gladly. THAT is what gets me.
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Oct 10, 2019 15:25
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look, you're closer to the sources and research than i am but isn't it conceivable that the focus on martyrdom is in part a post-facto consolation for necessary sacrifice to support the nation? it's just framed in a religious context that does not make sense to you.
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Oct 10, 2019 15:41
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feedmegin posted:The Republic of Ireland seems to be decisive enough?
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Oct 10, 2019 15:48
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It is certainly used as an ongoing justification throughout the war, not just ex-post facto, its part of the whole state propaganda effort that is employed to keep people fighting and dieing. You are quite correct to an extent, but the fact that death itself is so glorified, almost to the extent of martyrdom being an end unto itself that really just does not compute. Im certain it made sense to those people at the time i just find characterising that mindset to be very hard. It isnt just a consolation to the people that are left behind that your son/brother/father or whatever died for god, the idea of dying for god and its reward is used as a very successful recruitment tool. Certainly there are many examples throughout history in all religions about this, and indeed in more modern contexts with terrorism generally. Its not something unique. I dunno, maybe its the fact that the death is on such a scale, and its conducted by an actual proper state that i can point to on a map, and it has sufficient buy-in from the entire population that said state remains standing to this day.
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Oct 10, 2019 15:54
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:i dunno maybe check in with the residents of khorramshahr Fangz posted:"Existential war" is more of a state of mind. But if you bought into the idea of the Islamic Revolution and you see Saddam as a murderous dictator trying to take over the middle east, well, it's about as existential as WWII. I haven't read much about Iraqi milhist. I know that Saddam genocided Kurds, but did he genocide Iranians too, or was he planing to do so if Iraq had won? I don't remember hearing about it, so the idea that that it was an existential war sounds odd.
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Oct 10, 2019 16:17
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