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Tomn posted:Sorry about that, I was knee-deep in the archives and got to a bit about the blockade in WW1 and submarine campaigns in WW2 and my mind popped the question. Interesting answers, though - I've always had a vague sense that the USN was one of the particular American advantages and I WAS vaguely aware that other nations weren't just going to let that slide but wasn't aware just how far they've gone in finding ways to even the odds. I got busy raising kids and playing video games and left off around 1860 sadly.
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May 9, 2021 22:55
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CommonShore posted:I went for a walk today! Anyone want to play "guess the milhist site"? Wow, that looks barely short of Arrakis-level parched
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May 9, 2021 23:12
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aphid_licker posted:Wow, that looks barely short of Arrakis-level parched I don't think its parched, its just spring. Note the trees and shrubs don't even have buds, let alone leaves. There was probably snow/frost pretty recently.
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May 9, 2021 23:44
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Ok another hint then - it is medium dry, but this site is actually in a geologically and biologically unique location.
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May 9, 2021 23:47
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Count Roland posted:I don't think its parched, its just spring. Note the trees and shrubs don't even have buds, let alone leaves. There was probably snow/frost pretty recently. Different standards then. That place looks dry as a bone to me, but I've got the greenness of the UK for my baseline.
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May 9, 2021 23:51
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The Battle of Batoche?
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May 9, 2021 23:58
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Coral Sea?
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May 10, 2021 00:00
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CommonShore posted:Ok another hint then - it is medium dry, but this site is actually in a geologically and biologically unique location.
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May 10, 2021 00:11
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My first instinct of a place that is historically relevant in military history but unusually dry right now is Crimea, but that may be getting more involved in military current events soon. Weird that the trees don't have leaves yet. I don't know what to tell from that, maybe it's far north? Although the fact that you're taking pictures of old ditches implies maybe something to do with WW1.
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May 10, 2021 00:14
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They already said it was in Canada though. I think nessus might have it. It almost has to be a Canadian government vs native american conflict. I don't know enough about Canada's history against them to make a guess though.
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May 10, 2021 00:17
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Camp Hughes?
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May 10, 2021 00:39
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Some site from the Northwest Rebellion maybe? Historically very relevant but I doubt earthworks would survive that long.
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May 10, 2021 00:52
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Yeah I'm a Western Canadian and I have no idea what battle would have left that level of ditching behind. Maybe the Northwest Rebellion involved sieges I don't know about?Nothingtoseehere posted:Different standards then. That place looks dry as a bone to me, but I've got the greenness of the UK for my baseline. Yeah that's just the prairie, it's probably pretty damp until the immediate surface. Spring doesn't really happen here until late May. I gather most of the Eurasian Steppe is the same way. Oh that's a good guess, I forgot about training sites. Which is silly, I walk past forested over trenches all the time here in Calgary 
PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 01:06 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 01:04
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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So the truth about “Technowar in Vietnam” is much like the Vietnam War itself: you can really go nuts on the details, but the basics are quite simple. America got involved in Vietnam due to overwhelming arrogance, one that assumed with enough force, materiel, and firepower, politics could be ignored. “The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam” by James Williams Gibson is a book with a very good core criticizing how and why the war was fought, but when it steps away from that core, it can be atrocious. The book’s cardinal flaw (or saving grace, depending on your point of view) is that this core and the halo of mostly confused nonsense around it never link together; the methods of one have nothing to do with the other. If the postmodern jank took over it’d be just another gibberish academic book to be filed and forgotten; had an editor managed to cut out the extraneous bits, Technowar might have been a classic. So...when the book is good, it is very very good, and when it is bad, it is horrid? To back up a bit: Technowar was written in the early/mid 1980s by Gibson, adapted from his Phd dissertation. Reading through the intro Gibson wrote for the second edition in 2000, you find that the author has pretty much scored bingo on his American social science academic card: he is a Marxist, could be described as a postmodern, and is not above quoting contemporary French philosophers or doing asides in later-discredited postmodern linguistic theories. So the book is going to have a few stylistic onions tied to its belt, as was the style at the time. Having read a few papers from similar people, I can also tell you to expect the occasional lunar theory: a comment that is ludicrous but just sort of dropped in as a fully authoritative statement, like the author’s contention that only the United States won World War 2, an idea Gibson definitely didn’t get from the USSR. The PRC similarly would have reason to criticize Gibson’s assertion that the decline of China was purely from western imperialism (oddly complementary to the Manchus, that), or that China's war with Japan started in 1939. But before the cat is out of the bag, let me say that in the good parts of the book, Gibson’s Marxism is, if anything, a strength. The wheelhouse of a Marxist is the critical analysis of material circumstances leading to social or political outcomes, and this approach lends itself very well to criticizing the “rational war” of Secretary of Defense Robert S. MacNamera. This is where the book shines, the core of which is showing how dumb idiocy at the top of the American command structure crafted policies that in Vietnam were not only doomed to failure, but disaster. MacNamera’s war was designed to be quantifiable; where objective data was produced by all military activities. This data was then an objective measure as to how close or how far victory was, an obscure point defined by American postwar thinking we’ll get into in a moment. The flaws of this approach are obvious: it ignored both the political and to a great extent the military situation in Vietnam, and created endless incentives for waste and pointless death. When in this mode, Gibson is admirably hard nosed, working through the vast library of public documents on Vietnam, up to classified CIA analysis released with the Pentagon Papers. These are parts of the book that will make you angry. The "production of death" aspects in the ground forces chapters in particular made me miss having to roll my eyes at the occasional pompous Marxist flourish, as the policies were so awful and horrific in effect I’d take anything as a distraction. Wide-scale murder was in effect incentivized, while at the same time the fiction that the opposite was true was cultivated, giving the leadership a veneer of plausible deniability. This reaches a nadir with the US Marines publishing a pamphlet for the Vietnamese peasants saying, and I'm paraphrasing but only a bit, “We’re a bunch of cool guys who are here to help and protect you. So, never run from us, because we assume you are the enemy when you do that, so we have to shoot you.” Again and again, attempts to ‘rationalize’ ‘combat production’ end with destruction and slaughter that has nothing to do with winning a war. The waste is not just in lives; shell production was such that artillery units found themselves shelling empty jungle just because they couldn’t get people to stop delivering the drat shells - and dud shells became an important source of explosives for the Viet Cong. The US Air Force, meanwhile, found itself mostly unnecessary in a low-tech ground war they’d done little to prepare for, and for MacNamera’s team found itself trying to meet production goals that constituted air forces expensively doing nothing, or worse, squinting at the Vietnamese countryside and defining worthwhile targets as “brick buildings'' (usually foreign built schools and hospitals, naturally.) The Air Forces involved decided that maybe a campaign against North Vietnamese petroleum fuels was worthwhile - it worked very well in World War 2 - but CIA analysis estimated daily North Vietnamese energy needs were met by a single tractor trailer tanker, five heavy trucks or 15 pickups. This doesn’t stop a campaign aimed at trying to bomb fuel depots of oil drums, which the North Vietnamese intelligently hid underground, leading to quite a few direct hits on empty fields. These chapters are also valuable as they serve as refutation to then-contemporary arguments as to how the Vietnam War might’ve been won. Gibson makes clear victory was impossible, for two reasons. First, the political battle for Vietnam had been decided before America became significantly involved. Gibson argues that the Vietnamese, being colonized first by China and then by the French, had all their political activity driven underground. This unified Vietnamese politics in a way that likely wouldn’t have been possible otherwise: political movements that might have seen others as rivals and enemies found themselves allied by being illegitimate. Critically, Ho Minh Chin and the Vietnamese communists wisely embraced a big tent approach to resistance, emphasizing nationalism over ideology, allowing this cohesion to happen. So when the Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, this was a victory for all Vietnamese nationalist political movements. Meanwhile, whatever pro-imperialist Vietnamese there were constituted just hangers-on and rich landowners, despised by the nation at large and only maintaining their privileges thanks to being pro Imperialist. So the imperial side found itself completely defeated politically. What's more, the united politics of the Vietnam nationalists gave some consensus of basic goals of Vietnam independence: sovereignty, with free and open political processes that didn't discriminate. This meant that socialist and communist parties were allowed just like any other. It was this last point that would get America involved, and even at this first point, there's a fatal contradiction. America claimed to want what the Vietnamese wanted: a sovereign nation with a healthy political culture. But because this culture if left to the Vietnamese would be socialist of some description, America's reflexive anti-communism rejected this, and in doing so, rejected the entire legitimate spectrum of Vietnamese nationalism, and sided instead with the losers of the previous war (IE the small group of Vietnamese who stood to lose if the nationalists got their way.) Reflexive anti-communism lead to being opposed to legitimate Vietnamese politics while claiming to be fighting for legitimate Vietnamese politics. In another lamp black irony on Gibson’s account, had the US problems with the new nation of Vietnam (like a guarantee of religious rights for Vietnam’s Catholic minority,) these were easily achievable had diplomacy been tried instead of force. The second reason Vietnam was unwinnable was that the entire notion of victory American forces were counting towards was esoteric in the extreme. Gibson gets into the miasma of bad thinking that hung over the swamp of US Victory in Vietnam. Re-reading this section I don’t trust all of Gibson’s conclusions, but it is at least an interesting discussion. Certainly you need to wear your high-falutin’ big thinking hat to see the flaws in American thinking. One: anti-communism. In the Manichean conception of the post war world, there was FREEDOM and there was COMMUNISM. In the late 1940s thanks to internal memos like NSC-68 and the Greek intervention, America’s position on communism was monolithic: it was all the same thing, and had to be opposed everywhere. As Gibson points out, this had the effect of reducing things like history and politics, two things that I think we can all agree can be complex, into black and while pieces on a game board, which Gibson quite rightly derides as a gross simplification. This simplification meant that anything deemed ‘communist’ had to be opposed regardless of context. There was also an ever-present fear that small gains for the bad side in the near term would lead to enormous gains in the long term, IE the very dubious domino theory. Second: economic determinism, a view where those who are the richest or have the most resources win wars, asterisk, as long as nuclear weapons are not involved. With direct conflict with the USSR carrying a promise of total annihilation, policy wonks like Dr. Henry Kissinger started to see secondary conflicts (IE proxy wars in the Third World) as desirable. In addition to avoiding the whole “everybody dies” issue, proxy wars were to the United States' advantage, especially proxy wars of attrition, the logic being economic determinism meant the USSR backed faction would always lose. Let me restate the problem so its flaws are a bit more pronounced: the Soviets couldn’t win a war of attrition. I feel it necessary to start a new paragraph. Things just get weirder from there. Game Theory, or at least some cousin of it, was assumed to not only be universal, but universally understood. I say cousin because the language Gibson quotes certainly sounds like the rational calculation of game theory, and it assumes results that sound like the result of it: namely that in a war where the enemy has overwhelming superiority in force and firepower, the other side will naturally just give up without much of a fight. Gibson himself uses the term but seems to confuse it with profit maximization. Still, the diseased weasel under the stairs Uncle Sam had for MAD days escaping does sound plausible. In the Vietnam War, it was predicted that the Vietnamese after a certain point would rationally just give up after “material superiority was demonstrated”, because that's just game theory and you can't argue with that. Third, profit maximization. In MacNamera’s victory number, assumptions were made that often looked to business and microeconomics. One major theme was victory would be accomplished with the “right” amount of force; equating victory with maximum efficiency. The miasma of numbers drifting off swamp Vietnam was partially to adjust the use of force in the conflict with the scheme of “messaging” just discussed. It wasn’t long until stranger things  started to happen, with “sorties not flown” becoming a part of the calculation. Now Gibson dismisses the whole thing out of hand as “fetishistic thinking”, and it’s too bad, because there is interesting material here. Because clearly, the notion of the right amount of force/men/material etc is frequently a topic in war and military matters, as Generals and nations face the same constraints often faced elsewhere: limited resources to accomplish goals. For instance: in terms of its investment for victory in World War 2, the United States didn’t get much of a return in its Iowa class battleships and Alaska class battlecruisers. By the time they deployed, their main employment was as an armored anti-aircraft gun platform, and offering fire support in amphibious invasions - something that older battleships were quite capable of doing. The Soviets often looked at efficiency as a measure of effectiveness for weapon systems: the T-34 was built for a short battlefield life, because the Soviets had calculated the combat life of a tank before destruction or refurbishment was short. This decision made production faster and saved resources, and is a paragraph in the story of how the Soviets triumphed over the Nazis with an economy of a similar size. Another example of Soviet cost/benefit in World War 2 was their abandoning of strategic bombers once the Great Patriotic War started, to concentrate on other aircraft types, especially tactical and close air support aircraft. At the time, more basic types were desperately needed, and in the longer term, the Soviet Union’s western Allies covered the strategic air campaign. Speaking of strategic campaigns, the German U-boat campaigns often took tactical cues from profit maximization, as Admiral Donitz sought the best return of sunken merchantmen for his U-boat fleet. It is for this reason that America's entry into World War 2 saw the U-boats second “happy time” on the eastern seaboard shortly after. In all these cases, “profit maximization” as a concept is clearly at play. So why did MacNamera’s method fail? Let’s return to the Iowa class for a second. In retrospect, it is clear that the Iowa class was not especially needful. At the time of their construction and commissioning, that would have been impossible to know. The Imperial Japanese fleet had many battleships, and capital ship fights was a feature throughout most of World War 2. While the Japanese battleships were conserved until the Battle of Leyte Gulf, there was nothing stopping them from being used earlier. And that’s the thing, really: in war, (as in engineering and the legal world) the pessimist is who you want doing your planning. Efficiency has to be tempered by preparing for the unexpected. In contrast, MacNamera assumed his information was perfect and via the intellectual hooks and crooks detailed above, he was in total control of the situation, as a manager would be on his own production line. The entire war, then, was trying to reach X, where X was trying to demonstrate a sufficient value of force to make the Vietnamese give up. This of course was completely at odds with how the Vietnamese saw the conflict, a point MacNamera himself would concede many years later. Gibson gets some very good, entirely justified digs in here, including how it was really a shame Vietnamese nationalists had not been trained in the elite schools of the American war leaders. Without a plausible view of victory and mystified by an enemy they never bothered to try and understand, even with very good information all American strategy was doomed. Then of course, politics: in another good section Gibson goes over what happened when, even by the artificial standards of MacNamera, the statistics were clearly showing defeat instead of victory by a then-classified CIA audit. Not surprisingly, the stats were then falsified to reflect the politically acceptable view. The final brother in this Grimm story of warcrime and magic ducks is metaphysics, IE the use of knowledge or perspectives that are by definition impossible. Gibson claims that America thought that their worldview was not better than their opponents, but perfect. Gibson is going to claim this a lot, but he at least can point to some crazy stuff Kissenger wrote to get him started. Namely: America is the greatest, richest, strongest, smartest, prettiest (etc) because it has a perfect worldview; that the third World is not any of those things because they don’t have any of the perfect worldview; and that the Soviets have “some, but not all” of that perfect worldview. (You may wonder why that concession needs to be made; it’s because the Soviets by virtue of their technology and position as a great rival must by definition have “some” of the right stuff.) This “perfect” worldview allowed American policy makers to assume they were literally infallible. This creates all sorts of epistemic trouble, (to say nothing of “pride goeth before...”) since having a perfect worldview without some buttressing from fictional metaphysical concepts is impossible. When even your basic concept of truth is not being parsed by the logic compiler, you have some problems right now, and also in your future. So while not complete, or even gone into in depth, this picture of thinking dysfunction at least fits in our understanding of the Vietnam War today and how American policymakers viewed it. We now come to the start of the book’s flaws, which are right there in the title, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. The Perfect War allusion you now get, but the concept of “technowar” is where things start to go wrong. On Gibson’s account, “technowar” is war conducted by modern capitalist-imperialist Americans; MacNamera's war being the logical development of a false worldview. This false worldview starts, and I'm not making this up, with the labor theory of value. (For the confused: the labor theory of value is an early economic view that Adam Smith and that the prices of things was a reflection of the human labor it took to generate that thing, and nothing else, While economics moved on, Marx kept the idea.) Labor theory of Value seems like an aside when Gibson details it early in the book, but it becomes central as Gibson makes the Manichean distinction between “real” things created via Marxism, and “false” things everywhere else (Capitalism/Imperialism/literally America - shortened to CILA hereafter.) Technowar, on Gibson’s account, then, is a war fought from a falsified perspective that actually has no connection to reality. Not a bad description of MacNamera's war, but beyond that this definition torpedoes the whole usefulness of ‘technowar’ as a concept, since it is reduced to being a partisan pejorative to wars CILA makes, but not Marxists. Further, Gibson mirrors the faulty metaphysical logic he effectively criticized earlier. He has a ‘true’ world, that of ‘social relations’ - which, haha, in the Marxist view always end in Marxism - and the “fetishistic commodification” of the evil bad world. This is definitely a case of ideas putting on a little pompousness to hide their simplicity, since “fetishistic commodification” is “I disagree with how things are priced” in a corset and ballroom gown. Still, the dichotomy of Marx vs. BAD is absolute. This is actually very postmodern. I’ll forgo a full discussion, but postmodernism in one sense of the term arose in the 1970s among Marxist academics. Y’see, all the Marxists of the 1960s were sure, absolutely sure, the great proletarian revolution was getting underway. But, of course, that never happened. Your 1970s Marxist academic had several choices as to how to think about this development, but annoyingly, all save one involved some kind of mea culpa; saying “I, Marxist, got the theories wrong in this case” or “I, Marxist, have discovered some flaws in my beliefs and are going to modify them, because that’s the sort of thing that happens when you have an empirical theory.” So naturally, some of these academics picked the one that wasn’t either of those: deny reality. Qanon, eat your heart out! Among the continental (IE Western European) Marxist academics, it suddenly became very fashionable to talk about the falsification of reality itself. All you really need to know about these people is that they regularly said “there is no truth, and that is a truth” while never seeing the joke. Back to Gibson, as he’s done something similar - attributing “reality” to his political views and “unreality” to everyone else, making all of the Vietnam War a product of this “unreality” [and thus technowar.] As Gibson pointed out earlier, quite correctly, in a slightly different context, this is a view that reduces immense complexity to black and white, but that doesn’t stop Gibson from doing it whenever he steps away from his reporting. For example, the differences between how the Johnson and Nixon administration viewed the Vietnam War is unaddressed, with Gibson just flapping a hand on how they were “exactly the same”, by which he means “part of the bad team.” Nixon, hilariously, is too complex for Gibson, as the idea of detante by itself a refutation of his simplistic worldview, as is Nixon recognizing People's Republic of China, or, Nixon and Henry loving Kissinger saving world communism from itself. [That last one is almost forgivable, since for a blind partisan like Gibson, the cognitive dissonance in becoming conscious of that little incident might cause his head to literally explode.] Similarly something he can’t make reference to is American domestic politics, since it too is “of the bad”, so its impact on the Vietnam War is utterly ignored. A similar myopia can be found when Gibson discusses books on Vietnam are books written by chief policy makers in charge at the time - and Gibson’s book, which is both a hilarious simplification and one that makes Gibson a lone crusading hero against the evil of CILA. Anything that cannot be made to fit into Gibson’s black and white worldview is ignored. And this really shouldn’t come as a surprise; Gibson explicitly says in one of his intros that his method is the only correct method to understanding the Vietnam War. This blind partisanship of Gibson has a few other negative effects. First, Gibson’s value judgments on Vietnam are meaningless, since ultimately any judgment he makes against CILA and the terrible things done in Vietnam he’d reverse (or try to deny) if the sides were reversed. Like if we’re talking about imperial hubris and overreach leading to a ruinous war in a third world country in Asia, what about the USSR invasion of Afghanistan? Surely the ol’ technowar criteria could be used there. Well, fun fact: in Technowar, the only mention of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is Gibson gloating how some of the men who ambushed the US Rangers in Mogadishu [with their good proletarian RPGs] had been trained by good Soviet Marxists in Afghanistan. I’ve no idea if this is true, but it is a good example of the sheer ugliness of the blind partisan worldview, and how the partisan excuses this ugliness in himself by projecting it onto the Other. Speaking of ugly, there’s a spit-take moment when Gibson looks down his nose at revolts by US soldiers against their own officers, noting some of them became ‘radicalized’ (more marketing tinsel meaning Marxist) but most of them did not, so who the hell cares. Dismissing people who are fighting against the thing your book is nominally also against because they didn’t sign on to the right -ism is some first class gormlessness that you’d figure even a blind partisan would know better than to show. Though truth be told, there’s a lot of material in Technowar that shows Gibson operates only on the partisan ledger where the only goal is scoring more than the other side, gormlessness be damned. This you can see pretty much anytime history outside of Vietnam comes up, for example, FDR. Now you’d think that a guy who teamed up with Stalin to murder fascists and used a command economy to murder fascists AND create a GDP half of the earth’s in 1945 would merit a few kind words. You’d be dead wrong, of course, since FDR is just another CILA and thus bad. A far uglier (and truth be told, grimly funny) example can be seen as Gibson tip-toes around the Cambodian Genocide. {Hat tip to the milhist goons, who helped me to understand just how much detail Gibson was passing over.} Cambodia was in a civil war, where the partisan ordering of things breaks down completely. The Khmer Rouge were politically useful to the PRC and America, as while they were communist revolutionaries working with the North Vietnamese, longstanding grievances between the Vietnamese and the Cambodians meant any alliances between the two were temporary. Nixon illegally expanded the war into Cambodia with the B-52 raids of Operation Menu, and side note, I'd no goddamn idea *how* secret these raids were. Nixon, Kissinger, and a bunch of officers essentially carved out an secret organization inside the USAF just to accomplish these attacks. Gibson once again can't deal with that sort of ambiguity and complexity. So bad things the the Americans did are discussed, but Gibson tried to cast operation Menu as a snark hunt for a nonexistent Viet Cong jungle fortress HQ, then mentioning “oh, and the Viet Cong did have bases in Eastern Cambodia.' That these were also attacked is carefully omitted, then we skip ahead to the ground invasion, which of course fails. Once the Khemer Rouge, who Gibson does not describe as explicitly Marxist, takes the fore, the tale ends. As far as Gibson tells, Cambodia is a story of the American ogre triggering a revolt of some sort against its badness, huzzah! (The Marxist Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, French-educated communist and not mentioned in Technowar, would kill 25% of Cambodia’s population in just three years. One of Pot’s lieutenants actually possessed a Phd from the Sorbonne, and I guess if you think the kool kids are a bunch of Marxist French postmodernists, you have a whole basket of reasons to not mention it.) This demonstrates the pattern throughout the book: anything not reducible to Gibson’s simplistic worldview is passed over, obfuscated, or ignored. Blind Partisanship I think is understood all too well by people ITT, so let me tell one more tale of Gibson inflicting some wounds on himself. Most of the book’s discussion of air power in Vietnam is on point at critiquing how America fought in Vietnam. The services involved were usually a massive force in search of a mission, and Gibson documents attempts by war planners to find missions more in line with the force’s capabilities, sometimes ending in tragedy, sometimes farce. But then Gibson, having proved his point, goes on. (God strike me dead if these are not accurate summaries.) American F-105 Thunderchief fighter bombers were clearly bad, because they were heavier than the aircraft the North Vietnamese used, and had more electronics. F-105s were also bad because flying from bases in Thailand, they had to refuel flying to AND from Vietnam! Speaking of, having to stage aircraft from Thailand proves the F-105’s deficiencies. (Gibson himself argues elsewhere that American forces had heavy trouble ensuring security around airbases in Vietnam regardless of location.) A further deficiency here is that the airbases were undefended against air attack. Had the North Vietnamese attacked, the results would have been horrendous! (This one physically hurts it is so stupid; the reason why Thailand airbases had no air defenses is that the North Vietnamese air force didn’t have the capability to attack bases in Thailand. It’s like observing that North American defense plants in World War 2 could have been bombed to cinders, had the Nazis had bombers or missiles capable of attacking them.) American fighter-bombers in Vietnam rarely used supersonic flight. In fact, they were incapable of it, because it takes too much fuel. An aircraft breaking mach 2 would instantly run out of fuel. This is because the CILA industry loves the generation of abstract numbers instead of actually meeting a performance goal, unlike the good Marxist engineered aircraft that were slower but could achieve their cited performance statistics. (For the curious, the North Vietnamese AF fielded MiG-17s, MiG-19s and MiG-21s, with the first two types being supplemented by Chinese copies. MiG-21s, by the way, are point defense interceptors who can achieve mach 2.) American aircraft were also more complex than the above fighters. To keep a fighter wing of F4 Phantoms flying (which is, ahem, 70-75 aircraft), a warehouse of 70,000 different parts was needed, as well as a computer inventory system for it. F4s also need “thick concrete runways”, and the USAF pilots and crews needed to regularly patrol the aprons and runways for foreign objects that could be ingested by the jet turbines! This last point is magnificently stupid, as Foerign Object Detection [FOD] walks are a bog-standard part of modern aviation, and in no way a practice restricted to the USAF. This is something Gibson could have learned had he asked at the nearest airport. So, why do I bring all this up, aside to point and laugh? A few reasons. First, I think it demonstrates well how a blind partisan thinks. Clearly, Gibson knew nothing about the practical side of aviation. He then, I imagine, looked at what the North Vietnamese fielded in combat aircraft. Then, because they were Marxist and obviously right, any capability or aircraft deployed beyond that was a waste and/or a lie. He also uses the line of reasoning to argue that CILA is obsessed with numbers and abstractions that have nothing to do with reality, and Marxists do not, to which history replies ”lol, no, just no One further point, though: Gibson’s criticism of the use of the American Air Force in Vietnam is unaffected by this buffoonish tangent. You don’t really need to understand what a FOD walk is to effectively criticize the USAF in Vietnam. That’s the bottom line, really: even a man with a worldview I’d characterize as “childishly simplistic” quite successfully critiques US policy in Vietnam, and makes many points I agree with. If that isn’t a damning statement on the Vietnam War in itself, I’m not sure what is. Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 02:30 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 01:31
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I have a totally serious and yet stoner question that I think must be answered by higher minds. How many people have to be on a ship for it to be statistically probable that someone is always taking a poo poo at any given time.
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May 10, 2021 01:32
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Related question, if you're serving an 8 hour watch and you need to relieve yourself, how is that handled?
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May 10, 2021 02:03
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I'll do a more thorough blurb on my take on Technowar in a few days, but, uh, here's a teaser.quote:By changing from military uniforms to civilian slacks and shirts, the United States considered itself to be in “accord” with Article 4 of the agreement: “The United States will not continue its military involvement or intervene in the internal affairs of South Vietnam.”3 By transferring legal papers having to do with its bases and equipment, the United States was in “accord” with Article 6, the provision calling for “dismantlement of all military bases in South Vietnam of the United States” and its non-Vietnamese foreign allies such as the Koreans and Australians.4 One American official noted the Vietnamese shock when they learned that the United States had no bases to destroy or equipment to ship out: “General Tra seemed to be genuinely surprised.”5 As the U.S. State Department report said, “We did not explain to the DRV negotiators our interpretation ‘of the phrase of the United States.’”6 Oh yes, Gibson, it's such a shocking horror that the US gave away a bunch of old gear and bases rather than destroying them. Those perfidious Americans.. giving military hardware away, something that's never happened with respect to a Good Marxist People's War project. quote:Those at the top of the stratification system had a virtual monopoly on socially accepted “scientific” knowledge. Conflict among different war-managers was quite common, yet these conflicts all occurred within the paradigm of Technowar and its technical knowledge about the war. Never was the “otherness” of the foreign Other really questioned, nor was the social world of the Vietnamese peasantry examined, nor were the terrible contradictions and double-reality facing U.S. soldiers in the field ever confronted. Debates at the top were only debates and struggles concerning the direction of Technowar, not a questioning of its basic assumptions. Conversely, those closer to the bottom of the stratification system — the soldiers, the Vietnamese peasantry, and, in a way, the Vietcong and NVA — saw the world more in terms of social relationships where questions of “meaning” were more important. It was not as if these different groups shared the same homogeneous body of knowledge, but rather that their horizons for conceptualization concerned social relationships, not mechanistic formulations. For the Communist party, those relationships involved the dynamics of revolution — mobilizing and uniting the people to counter the technological superiority of the Americans. For the peasantry, those social relationships included their relationships with landlords and GVN officials, with the Vietcong, and with the Americans. For the American soldiers, both their relationships with the Vietnamese and with their own commanders formed the bases for their warrior’s knowledge. Soldiers’ novels, memoirs, poems, and interviews repeatedly contradict the system formulations of Technowar. The warrior’s knowledge falls under Michel Foucault’s conception of “subjugated knowledges.” Such knowledge is below the threshold of “scienticity,” not in the sense that its propositions are poorly formed or that its claims to knowledge are always invalid, but rather that such stories or accounts do not follow the social and intellectual rules governing who can be a serious thinker and the correct form for serious ideas and important facts: This is not a passage you want to have in a book that is purporting to make broad statements about things like Technowar or things like helicopter warfare. (His critique of helicopter warfare starts with an SLA Marshall quote and uses as its evidence that helicopters can have trouble in bad weather and anecdotes about soldiers in ambushes on long patrols.) Panzeh fucked around with this message at 02:46 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 02:13
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Gaj posted:I have a totally serious and yet stoner question that I think must be answered by higher minds. This is going to be very dependent on watch schedules and the type/quality of the food being served, among other things. If you assume that on average someone takes 5 minutes to take a poo poo (or about 0.34% of a day), and people are making GBS threads at completely random times throughout the day, then around 200 people is the point where it's more likely than not (above 50% chance) that someone is taking a poo poo at any given time. With around 650 people, odds are 9 in 10 that at least one person is taking a poo poo at any given time. This is assuming I'm doing the probability calculation correctly (essentially 1-0.9965^n), but that seems about right. But of course, things don't just happen at random on a ship. You have shifts of people who all have the same daily schedule, regular (heh) meal times, and cultural and biological factors that will favor certain times of the day. Wednesday morning after Taco Tuesday? As close as possible to 100% chance as you can get. Just sounded general quarters? Probably close to 0%, other than a possible brief spike right at the beginning. I have no idea how to account for all of these factors, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone has had to sit down and work that out while designing a new ship. PittTheElder posted:Related question, if you're serving an 8 hour watch and you need to relieve yourself, how is that handled? Depends on the watch, really. Ideally there's either someone else standing another watch in the same room who can cover for you, or who you can call in to cover for you. Usually for anything critical you've got at least two people, a primary watchstander and some kind of assistant or secondary watch. But for some watches (mostly monitoring chat rooms) I've just waited for a slow period and popped out to take a leak.
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May 10, 2021 02:14
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Nebakenezzer posted:So the truth about “Technowar in Vietnam” is much like the Vietnam War itself: you can really go nuts on the details, but the basics are quite simple. America got involved in Vietnam due to overwhelming arrogance, one that assumed with enough force, material, and firepower, politics could be ignored. “The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam” by James Williams Gibson is a book with a very good core criticizing how and why the war was fought, but when it steps away from that core, it can be atrocious. Thanks for the write-up! I always appreciate a nice book review. I do want to comment on two terms of art you use that I do not think were used correctly and I do not know if those represent Gibson's uses or yours so forgive me if I'm preaching to the choir here. First, postmodern. You use the word 'postmodern' to describe Gibson as an author but then describe his actual train of thought and it is, from your description, extremely modern. Stridently applying a very direct form of Marxist materialism to all circumstances in all places? Pretty much the textbook example of anti-postmodernism. That belief that the Marxists are the only ones with access to the right knowledge and are immune to the errors the capitalists make? Classic sin of modernism. Second, from your post: Nebakenezzer posted:metaphysics, IE the use of knowledge or perspectives that are by definition impossible.
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May 10, 2021 02:47
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Panzeh posted:I'll do a more thorough blurb on my take on Technowar in a few days, but, uh, here's a teaser. I look forward to it. Also PS> have you heard of this Seymor Melman, a engineer professor and apparently self-described economist? Gibson at the end of the book is quoting this guy to say the US in the mid 1980s is spending a lot on defense (true) and is spending much more than the USSR. I've read that part several times, and I have no clue what metric Melman is using, and why he's completely eschewing more conventional methods to talk about this
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May 10, 2021 02:48
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A winner! This is a consistently smart thread - good guesses all around!  There's lots of first world war trenches there, all wonderfully overgrown and eroded. It's a neat spot. The unique biome is the Carberry Spirit Sands / Spruce Woods, which is a mixed woodland on a large prehistoric sand bar that has a combination of animals and vegetation that aren't found anywhere else on the planet (as a set). It literally always looks dry as bones, because there's only about 1 inch of fragile topsoil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1RnH68U02Y
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May 10, 2021 02:55
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Tulip posted:Thanks for the write-up! I always appreciate a nice book review. Gibson is trying to apply Foucault, but almost as a way to not have to look into war as strategy, operations, and tactics but as a psychic struggle between mindsets. That, I think is the gist of Gibson's book. It's about how there's a psychic technowar, and then there's also this sort of counterexample "people's war" or "political war" or "real war" that others fight and win with. To explain US actions he uses "The Other" quite a bit, but his description of the Vietnamese veer toward exoticization to an absurd degree. But honestly, it's very hard to take seriously his argument about the difference in these ways of war when he writes something like this: quote:Similar stories have been recorded. Technowar projects the foreign Other as like itself, another technologically equipped bureaucratic hierarchy, but with less production capacity. Since Vietnamese nationalism and social revolution were theoretically invisible to the war-managers, then troops had little or no orientation toward combat where they were the real aliens and entire populations were fighting against them. Sent into combat as expendable bait to activate a killing machine, the troops found themselves attacked by enemies they could not see. With no clear targets except villages that might or might not be enemies, many soldiers saw dead Vietnamese as the only way to guarantee survival. Yet this massive killing of civilians drove Vietnamese toward the Vietcong. Technowar thus produced a spiral of death, a series of contortions killing both Americans and Vietnamese, but it did not produce a victory. The implication is that the US soldiers aren't fighting enemy soldiers or even insurgents but "Vietnamese Nationalism" and "social revolution", as though the North Vietnamese Politburo or COSVN are just kind of abstract ideas, and that they were just an abstraction. The idea that The Best Ideas and Most Powerful Feelings should win wars, thusly they do is not uncommon in people with a limited knowledge of military history, but i've never really seen it so crystal clear in a work. This is a war that ended with North Vietnamese tanks rolling into Saigon. Not some great revolution storming the Bastille high on feelings, but tough military operations involving corps of troops. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 03:07 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 03:04
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I've had Technowar on my list of poo poo to read for a while. Thanks for letting me know I can delete it. Kilcullen's "out of the mountains" seems like a better use of my time.
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May 10, 2021 03:59
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Abongination posted:The Ampulomet Poisoned wind globadiers weren't on the list of Warhammer things I expected to be real.
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May 10, 2021 04:28
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Any links to this that aren't paywalled? I know just enough to know that China and the USSR did not get along, but this seems like something slightly more specific. Also great break down, appreciate the literature review.
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May 10, 2021 05:14
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Honestly don’t think I’ve ever walked into the head and not had someone in there taking a poo poo. Was never sure how other officers could stand to brush their teeth or shave in the head rather than use the sink in their room. And absolute condolences to the enlisted who have no other option. I’d be interested to know how low we would need to get the number of crew to guarantee at least one day without a clogged shitter. Step one would be no marines, of course. Some of the things I’ve heard a ships captain note over the 1mc as having been pulled out the shitter include head phones, t shirts, and shaving razors
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May 10, 2021 05:20
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Look, the whole "fall with it and pick it up" thing only applies to your firearm.
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May 10, 2021 05:41
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Nebakenezzer posted:So the truth about “Technowar in Vietnam” is much like the Vietnam War itself: you can really go nuts on the details, but the basics are quite simple. good poo poo, good poo poo
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May 10, 2021 06:52
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FastestGunAlive posted:Some of the things I’ve heard a ships captain note over the 1mc as having been pulled out the shitter include head phones, t shirts, and shaving razors Yes, those can be hard to digest. I would suggest chewing longer and having more fibers (cotton t-shirts don't count).
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May 10, 2021 07:14
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Nebakenezzer posted:Third, profit maximization. In MacNamera’s victory number, assumptions were made that often looked to business and microeconomics. One major theme was victory would be accomplished with the “right” amount of force; equating victory with maximum efficiency. The miasma of numbers drifting off swamp Vietnam was partially to adjust the use of force in the conflict with the scheme of “messaging” just discussed. It wasn’t long until stranger things This is a very good critique. I have one slight nit to pick, about profit maximization. You rightly point out that all parties in armed conflict seek to maximize return on resources expended. The key difference between "Technowar" War Managers and earlier decision makers is the constrained variable. It's not a question of optimism or pessimism. In the prior situations your constraint is resources available. In an economic sense, the question is: I can produce K tanks if I build them to a high production standard versus N tanks if I build them to a lower production standard, and what output will having N instead of K tanks of the different qualities get me? This is an attempt at maximizing return on resources available. With the War Manager, the desired outcome is the constrained variable, and the problem becomes one of cost-cutting. The question is not "how many tanks can I produce with available resources that will deliver the best result" but it becomes "what is the smallest number of tanks I need to achieve my desired result." I guess in a sense this leads to a sense of optimism because you treat winning as a fixed condition, but I don't think that optimism and pessimism are really the right way to frame it.
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May 10, 2021 09:58
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The Iraq/Afghanistan debacle one day also deserves some serious Technowar style analysis of the bizarre incentives at play to perpetuate the war. Because it's not just weird measurements around killing X people would result in Y victory condition, but individuals with private interests had enough sway to drag the war on indefinitely. For instance the recent article about how Trump got lobbied to spend billions of dollars perpetuating the War in Afghanistan in hopes that securing mining contracts, that made what, a couple million of dollars for the local warlords? https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/how-afghanistans-president-helped-his-brother-secure-lucrative-mining-deals-with-a-us-contractor
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May 10, 2021 10:11
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:This is a very good critique. Honestly, I think while it's fun to try to look at Westmoreland and Macnamara as new managers trying to over-apply their corporate management skills to war, i'm not sure it does a very good job of describing how the US made decisions, especially at the strategic and operational levels. Johnson intervened because 1964 was going disastrously for the South Vietnamese, mainly due to the fact that ARVN was paralyzed by a year of coup after coup while the army tried to figure out some kind of compromisie candidate. They eventually settled in Thieu, but the VC made hay in the meantime. The thing is, in the context of an imperial power with a lot of commitments abroad, there are, in fact, limited resources. An 8-division commitment to Vietnam is enormous with a country trying to also maintain commitments in Korea and Europe while also being ready to send troops to other crises- this generated a momentum toward trying to finish things up in the war, leading to Westmoreland wanting to try to defeat the VC main force troops through Search and Destroy operations. I mean, pretty much every war comes with a push to make progress, though, so i'm not really sure the Technowar abstraction is really useful. Most of Gibson's evidence for the failures of the US in vietnam tends to be anecdotes from parties involved as well as journalism and ad copy, as though this is more insightful than, say, official histories. Not that these are worthless, but a more cogent critique might actually be able to attack Search and Destroy as an operational concept on its own terms rather than reducing it to a weird abstraction. Yes, this does make it less trivial to apply it to US imperial ventures like Afghanistan and Iraq, but these wars are all rather different in how they're playing out than Vietnam, and come with different attitudes involved, some directly based on lessons learned in Vietnam.
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May 10, 2021 11:05
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Asking for Gibson to include an operational level critique of Search and Destroy is kind of like asking a fish to ride a bicycle. Regardless of whether you think his theses are correct or not, that's not what the book is about. You seem to be wanting the book to be something it's not.
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May 10, 2021 11:49
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Asking for Gibson to include an operational level critique of Search and Destroy is kind of like asking a fish to ride a bicycle. Regardless of whether you think his theses are correct or not, that's not what the book is about. You seem to be wanting the book to be something it's not. If the book is criticizing Search and Destroy, it might be better to, y'know, look at the results, operationally, strategically, tactically, of said operations, rather than hit it with an SLA Marshall pull quote and a bunch of anecdotes. Gibson's mode of analysis seems to almost reject the concept of operational level critique as valid, since it's simply a Technowar mode of analysis. quote:Psychiatrist Charles J. Levy heard this story from a patient. Levy classified it as an example of “inverted warfare,” the sense in which American common sense on how the world operates was reversed or inverted in Vietnam. The jet aircraft represents America’s mastery of scientific principles concerning how nature works. To see the aircraft’s efficacy vanquished by the technologically primitive technique of burrowing into a mountain inverts the normal Technowar order. Levy says: “The rationale for much of American technology had been the conquest of nature. But in Vietnam, the VC/NVA used nature for the conquest of technology.”79 So, the thing about tunnels is incorrect(large scale tunnel networks for transportation were mostly in the Cu Chi area, not throughout the country), but also it's just a bunch of unsupported blather. If this is the result of the mode of analysis, man, this critique sucks. I do try to forgive him because in 1986, he has few sources with any kind of knowledge of the Vietnamese side of the war, but this kind of statement is tripe. Honestly, in a lot of ways it strikes me as exactly the kind of Othering he claims US decision makers were doing.
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May 10, 2021 12:04
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Panzeh posted:Gibson's mode of analysis seems to almost reject the concept of operational level critique as valid, since it's simply a Technowar mode of analysis. this is basically accurate
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May 10, 2021 12:39
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Nebakenezzer posted:Third, profit maximization. In MacNamera’s victory number, assumptions were made that often looked to business and microeconomics. One major theme was victory would be accomplished with the “right” amount of force; equating victory with maximum efficiency. The miasma of numbers drifting off swamp Vietnam was partially to adjust the use of force in the conflict with the scheme of “messaging” just discussed. It wasn’t long until stranger things Thanks for the review. A comment on the use of words. I bring a gift of useful terms to replace things like 'return on investment'! It feels a bit like it is used for want of something better in this case. regardless if it comes from Gibson or anyone else, I feel people in this thread might appreciate phraseology that avoid terms with somewhat negative connotations to some people on SA, so, from the world of logistics; The science, or profession of logistics is, in short concerned with delivering the right amount, the right place at the correct time. Say your goal is to supply you infantry on the Western front with ammo for normal operations. You could do this by employing a million b-17s airdropping crates on every square meter of Western Europe every day. It would probably suffice to fulfill the above mantra, but you expend a lot of resources on fulfilling your goal. Most logistics is therefore concerned with achieving goals efficiently. Getting things done in an infinite resource scenario is easy, getting them done efficiently is the real challenge. The measure that describes how well you use your resources in achieving your goals is called 'logistical efficiency'. Depending on your goal and your available resources you can achieve a high logistical efficiency by different measures, but actually defining your resources right has a huge effect on what constitutes a large expenditure. If your manpower is cheap and plentiful, and you are sufficently ruthless you do not need to consider loss of life to be a big detriment in your calculus as an example. Profit is the resource surplus you are left with on completion of some operation, but in military and political contexts you are rarely interested in surpluses in and of themselves, but as a means in pursuit of some greater goal. As a means to an end profit is useful for giving you more resources to achieve your goals, but what is REALLY interesting is the question of how you define your goals and how you decide to achieve them, and how competent you are at achieving logistical effficiency.
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May 10, 2021 13:19
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SU-101 and SU-102 on the Uralmash-1 chassis Queue: Centurion Mk.I, SU-100 front line impressions, IS-2 front line impressions, Myths of Soviet tank building: early Great Patriotic War, Influence of the T-34 on German tank building, Medium Tank T25, Heavy Tank T26/T26E1/T26E3, Career of Harry Knox, GMC M36, Geschützwagen Tiger für 17cm K72 (Sf), Early Early Soviet tank development (MS-1, AN Teplokhod), Career of Semyon Aleksandrovich Ginzburg, AT-1, Object 140, SU-76 frontline impressions, Creation of the IS-3, IS-6, SU-5, Myths of Soviet tank building: 1943-44, IS-2 post-war modifications, Myths of Soviet tank building: end of the Great Patriotic War, Medium Tank T6, RPG-1, Lahti L-39, American tank building plans post-war, German tanks for 1946, HMC M7 Priest, GMC M12, GMC M40/M43, ISU-152, AMR 35 ZT, Soviet post-war tank building plans, T-100Y and SU-14-1, Object 430, Pz.Kpfw.35(t), T-60 tanks in combat, SU-76M modernizations, Panhard 178, 15 cm sFH 13/1 (Sf), 43M Zrínyi, Medium Tank M46, Modernization of the M48 to the M60 standard, German tank building trends at the end of WW2, Pz.Kpfw.III/IV, E-50 and E-75 development, Pre-war and early war British tank building, BT-7M/A-8 trials, Jagdtiger suspension, Light Tank T37, Light Tank T41, T-26-6 (SU-26), Voroshilovets tractor trials. Available for request (others' articles):  Shashmurin's career T-55 underwater driving equipment T-64's composite armour  Oerlikon and Solothurn anti-tank rifles Evolution of German tank observation devices
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May 10, 2021 13:50
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I have one slight nit to pick, about profit maximization. You rightly point out that all parties in armed conflict seek to maximize return on resources expended. The key difference between "Technowar" War Managers and earlier decision makers is the constrained variable. It's not a question of optimism or pessimism. In the prior situations your constraint is resources available. In an economic sense, the question is: I can produce K tanks if I build them to a high production standard versus N tanks if I build them to a lower production standard, and what output will having N instead of K tanks of the different qualities get me? This is an attempt at maximizing return on resources available. This is what I was trying to say on that, thanks.
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May 10, 2021 14:47
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Tulip posted:Thanks for the write-up! I always appreciate a nice book review. I'm gonna beg forbearance as it's been awhile since I wrote smarty-stuff. Though we're flirting with danger here: the definitions of metaphysics and especially postmodernism could well become the new tank destroyer. Second point first: you are correct that metaphysics is not the affirmation of the impossible. But in my trip through philosophy, I ended up with people who did use metaphysics to mean "impossible beliefs", because we needed to distinguish between what we thought was grounded inquiry, and inquiry that was flawed in its assumptions and thus got poo poo wrong. I'm a pragmatist on truth, so there's a lot, really, in philosophy and elsewhere, that ends up being wrong because it assumes things like perfect worldviews. In the bit in the effortpost, something weird happens with Kissinger's thinking: he is talking about perfect worldviews and "objective" truth, in this case meaning perspective-less truth. Both require modes of knowledge that are impossible. As for Gibson, I think he does use the term "metaphysics" that way, because as you observe quite correctly, he has a classical modern view of his own position. Postmodern, though: this gets messy, because like "moral" or "objective" it's one of those terms that gets used so much in philosophy that it has a bunch of definitions. Example: I'm writing this not quite knowing what your use of the term is. Or, haha, Gibson. He'd likely describe *himself* as postmodern, for the reasons I wrote, but you are completely correct in describing his views as classically modern. In fact, when it comes to Gibson's postmodernism, that's one of the knocks against them. Academics tried to overthrow the whole concept of truth, but if you kept pushing them, they'd think in a classically modern way about their own beliefs, usually seeing Marxism and/or Freudian psychology as sacrosanct. So it is in short, highly flawed and rather confusing even at the start.
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May 10, 2021 15:31
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everydayfalls posted:Any links to this that aren't paywalled? I know just enough to know that China and the USSR did not get along, but this seems like something slightly more specific. So I have to warn you that wikipedia has been scrubbed of mention of this. But: in 1969 the Chinese and the Soviets got into a border conflict that was escalating, to the point that war seemed possible. Near the Peak of tensions, the Nixon admin got involved, saying to the USSR that they would attack - IE full nuclear war - if the Soviets nuked China. While I don't think it defused the situation by itself, it did help, and both sides de-escalated not long after.
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May 10, 2021 15:36
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