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Nebakenezzer posted: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. Wait is this actually scrubbed?
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May 10, 2021 16:30
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Raenir Salazar posted:Wait is this actually scrubbed? I checked the wiki on the border dispute. It doesn't mention Nixon threatening the Soviets with a reprisal strike. It does mention it was around this time that the ball got rolling for Nixon visiting China himself. Edit: which I might as well say was a very interesting meeting. Margaret Macmillan's Nixon in China was fascinating. Count Roland fucked around with this message at 16:44 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 16:38
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This is an excellent review. Just a quick comment -Nebakenezzer posted: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.” He commits a similar error regarding the other side. As you say, he ascribes a similar unity to their leadership: Nebakenezzer posted: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. But as was pointed out just a few days ago in this very thread, Vietnamese leadership was far from unified. For one – well, we all know Ho Chi Minh. But it is important to remember that much of the Vietnamese really DIDN’T know him. Ho had left Vietnam in 1911 and lived abroad – in France, the UK, the USA, China, and the USSR – until 1941. That’s thirty years where he wasn’t in Vietnam, he left at age 21 and came back when he was 51, a significant amount of his life. In the meantime, the people who would become the senior leadership of the resistance against the Japanese, French, and USA were actually IN Vietnam, often directly fighting against the French or spending time in French prisons. Their experience was fundamentally different from Ho’s, and this often led to serious divisions. There were significant disagreements over how to handle land reform when the French left, for example; Truong Chinh (General Secretary of the Communist Party) fought long and hard against Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap over how to handle this crucial issue. Le Duan deftly handled this split and used it to rise to power himself. And there were major splits over how to fight the war against the USA; Ho was less aggressive than Le Duan and would have accepted a more peaceful and gradual withdrawal of foreign armies, while Le Duan favored the “General Offensive” that would manifest as the Tet Offensive, for just one example. This is VERY abbreviated; suffice it to say that there’s a lot more to this story. It is, bluntly, only after Ho was already quite old and had largely been sidelined that the nation was unified behind him – and at that point he was a figurehead. And this is just the Vietnamese – just a few days ago we were talking about the divisions between the Vietnamese and the Cambodians, the USSR and China, etc. Each of these rivalries caused divisions within the Vietnamese leadership. Some were more pro-USSR, some more pro-PRC, etc. If anything, Gibson is a product of the historiography of his times. During the late 70’s the main source of information on Vietnam was Vietnam itself, and the party presented a very sanitized view of their war. Tl;dr, Vietnam has always been fighting for its independence and was unified against foreigners as a result. After Saigon fell Le Duan himself said: quote:Our party is the unique and single leader that organized, controlled and governed the entire struggle of the Vietnamese people from the first day of the revolution. At the time (1975) this was largely accepted by Western historians, but this ignores all of the divisions WITHIN the party. Contemporary research conclusively shows deep divisions over almost every aspect of how to fight the war within the Vietnamese leadership.
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May 10, 2021 16:49
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Nebakenezzer posted: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. OK cool. I'm normally not all that nitpicky about terms, I'm generally pretty "the language works if the people using it don't suffer a confusing communication breakdown." I've just been seeing an uptick where people use virtually any philosophy term as just kind of a blanket pejorative, and some of these terms are quite useful! It does sound like Gibson himself was not particularly clear on how or why he was deploying certain philosophical concepts.
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May 10, 2021 17:09
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Cessna posted:At the time (1975) this was largely accepted by Western historians, but this ignores all of the divisions WITHIN the party. Contemporary research conclusively shows deep divisions over almost every aspect of how to fight the war within the Vietnamese leadership. Thanks! Once I started discussing things with you guys, I figured the truth was something like this. Now when it comes to historiography of the Vietnam War, y'all know I don't know much. My personal take is that the lack of Vietnamese sources doesn't affect Technowar very much, as when Gibson is in the good mode, he's always talking about the American side. I was a little surprised he didn't cite NSC-68, which was declassified in 1975. For all I know, there's a big gap between its declassification and it getting recognized as important.
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May 10, 2021 17:16
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Tulip posted:OK cool. I'm normally not all that nitpicky about terms, I'm generally pretty "the language works if the people using it don't suffer a confusing communication breakdown." I've just been seeing an uptick where people use virtually any philosophy term as just kind of a blanket pejorative, and some of these terms are quite useful! It does sound like Gibson himself was not particularly clear on how or why he was deploying certain philosophical concepts. Fair point. I know what you mean about the pejorative use, especially with Postmodernism.
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May 10, 2021 17:23
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Nebakenezzer posted: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. Was this before or after SIOP got revised so that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union didn't involve annihilating China too just for completeness? 
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May 10, 2021 17:23
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Nebakenezzer posted:Thanks! The problem, I think, with this is that without some kind of comparative observation, Technowar is an almost meaningless term. Some of the things he cites as strange aberrations in terms of statistics-gathering is considered basic staff work that would be done in pretty much every serious armed forces, including the North Vietnamese. Gibson, I think, is trying to compare Technowar and War Managers to something else, with its warriors which in a weird way, almost mirrors a jingoistic narrative but with the words changed around. The abstractions of "Vietnamese Nationalism" and "Social Revolution" as the US opponents don't really allow for this to be a very nuanced argument. Gibson spends pages critiquing the Summers book On Strategy, unfortunately, I think Gibson struggles to actually understand what Summers is saying because Gibson's understanding of the war that was actually fought was so shallow. Summers is saying that that sanctuary in Laos and North Vietnam is allowing the VC to field regiments and even divisions in the country, and that chasing them around in South Vietnam is fruitless, thusly US forces should move to Laos(and possibly North Vietnam) to cut off the logistical routes that allow these units to operate and exist. It's not a call for "more aggression" or "more technowar". This suggestion has a lot of problems(Summers, like Gibson, assumes the US has infinite resources and is willing to add even more divisions and take on more clients), but Gibson can't really engage with it because Gibson doesn't really want to even allow for the existence of VC regiments and divisions. Gibson's framework only makes sense if the VC is an amorphous mass for which technology is useless, that war is a matter of feelings. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 17:31 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 17:23
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PittTheElder posted:Was this before or after SIOP got revised so that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union didn't involve annihilating China too just for completeness? I don't care who started it! You're both
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May 10, 2021 17:34
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Nebakenezzer posted:My personal take is that the lack of Vietnamese sources doesn't affect Technowar very much, as when Gibson is in the good mode, he's always talking about the American side. That's like "I'm going to write a book about Germany's war in WWII. I'll ignore what the Allies and USSR do." I understand that authors need to pick a focus, and yes, focusing on the US in Vietnam is a fair approach. But the divisions I mentioned within the Vietnamese leadership completely dictated the course of the war, and the USA fought in response to the way those questions were resolved. In very, very, very brief terms - and man, I am condensing a LOT into just a few sentences here - there were factions in the Vietnamese leadership that favored fighting the war in different ways. Some wanted a protracted guerilla war, some wanted big conventional battles. Some were okay with a negotiated settlement and withdrawal, others wanted to win a decisive military victory. The USA had similar divisions. Some in the military favored Green Beret stye counterinsurgency on the village level, others favored forcing big WWII style battles. How these different approaches interacted determined how the war went. Gibson only looks at the US side of this, and views what happened as a foregone conclusion, when it absolutely wasn't. Cessna fucked around with this message at 18:05 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 17:36
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Gaj posted:I have a totally serious and yet stoner question that I think must be answered by higher minds. Depends on how bad the galley is
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May 10, 2021 18:22
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Nenonen posted:But they still have plans for it, no? That's all I'm saying. It's not total nonsense if real military professionals at Pentagon think about it. "Total nonsense" would suggest to me something like Flying M-113 Gavin All Weather AFV/Interceptors or Sexual & Racial Minority Austrian Painters. All good points, I guess I'm just biased because I don't want to lose my job because the US starts a stupid world war, ha ha I'd fully expect a China blockade to end up with the Russian Federation gleefully supplying the PRC to weaken the USA, and the EU eventually (if they're not already start neutral) breaking out of NATO and joining up with China to help end the blockade before their economies fully collapse. I expect full on actions of desperation if the US ever gets dumb enough to get the ball rolling
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May 10, 2021 19:06
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Libluini posted:All good points, I guess I'm just biased because I don't want to lose my job because the US starts a stupid world war, ha ha in addition to not being about history, at all, this is such absurd speculation Cessna posted:That's like "I'm going to write a book about Germany's war in WWII. I'll ignore what the Allies and USSR do." It's not really a book about that though, it's a book about specifically American leadership thought processes in the Vietnam war and how they failed. I agree that it's myopic but the scope is fairly well defined IMO. Like you could probably write a good book on hosed up German decision making in WWII without touching too much on what the Allies (including Soviets) were doing.
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May 10, 2021 19:54
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I'm more sympathetic to Technowar, because while I agree it's an awkward synthesis of Marx and Foucault, it's actually in the upper echelon of academic works that try and apply these theories to contemporary issues. And Gibson at least read a whole bunch of the Pentagon Papers. A true post-modernist wouldn't deign to engage with sources at all. Two conventional explanations of why the Vietnam War was an American defeat are quagmire theory, that America never really understood the situation until it was too far committed, and the neo-Clauswitzian theories, like Summer's On Strategy that argue that the war was not properly pursued against strategic targets in North Vietnam. And there's elements of truth. Both of these positions see the defeat in Vietnam as an aberration. With better leadership, the US military could have achieved its goals. We learn some lessons, and we do it better next time. My reading of Technowar as a theory is as an analysis of industrial warfare, particularly growing out of WW2, where the Allied victory was in large part possible through the harnessing of industrial might and scientific innovation. Tactical success was a matter of enabling the material flow of shells and bullets from stateside factories to the physical bodies and critical infrastructure of the enemy. The soldier is just the last step in a logistic chain that deliver kinetic energy to its target/consumer. Strategic dominance is assured by qualitatively better weapons. Especially during the Cold War, when there wouldn't be a few years protected by oceans and European allies to get the arsenal of democracy up and running, American weapons had to be perennially rearmed and refreshed. You plug Marx into Eisenhower's farewell address, and you get a not particularly original view of the military-industrial complex as a kind of autonomous imperialistic force that reaches for military intervention as something which justifies its existence. Where Foucauldian gets useful, as opposed to merely trendy, is that it offers an analysis of a military not just as an entity which exercises power, but also as an entity which produces facts. The two big classes of facts at external, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and internal, the position and supply status of units, as well as disciplinary and promotion reports on the fitness of soldiers. And any entity, including the US military in Vietnam, has epistemological values about what types of facts are true and worth acting on. The major thesis of Gibson's Technowar is that the epistemological values of the US military became totally disconnected from the military and political reality on the ground, that the war became a self-licking ice cream cone. In the absence of traditional measures of military success like cities captured or divisions destroyed, the external inputs became things like number of villages in the Strategic Hamlet Program and the body count, which were immediately subject to manipulation. Maybe it's a contemporary consensus, but my sense is that everybody involved in the body count metric knew it was being inflated by things like counting non-combatants as the enemy, upgrading probables to certain kills, and simple inflation as the numbers moved up the chain from some draftee scouring a battlefield for corpses to the Pentagon. Maybe there was some level where officers started believing the numbers (I've misplaced my copy of The War Managers, so I can't check, though it seems by 1974 most generals thought the numbers were bullshit), but with pressure from above to make the number bigger, it was easy for people to... just make the number bigger. Worse, because outcomes couldn't be measured, and because the Communists controlled the strategic tempo, the military epistemology began conflating inputs with outputs. Patrols run, shells fired, airstrikes executed, are all the means to victory. But because they were unambiguous events, they were treated as the measures of an effective military, and so the military began maximizing effort, which could be measured, rather than effect. And this gets reflecting in promotions and decorations, which claim that the average American officer is active, aggressive, even heroic, and overall an exceptional military leader when pragmatically, that's not the case. And finally, there was such a torrent of bullshit facts pouring up and down the chain of command, that even if a few people had some idea of what was really going on, it was drowned out by the minutia of technowar. McNamara deserves a lot of blame for his conduct in the Vietnam War, and one part of it is that having set up this epistemology, when it proved unworkable he resigned in silence rather than try and fix it. Gibson deserves criticism for getting a lot of details wrong. He's a sociologist, and sociology is methodologically impoverished compared to neighboring fields. It's entirely possible that he wrote the book without talking to a single person who was actually in Vietnam. I skimmed through the sources and didn't see any interviews. So you know, not great, but another point about how institutional epistemology guides an effort, sometimes in disastrous directions, whether it's a dissertation or a war. Biffmotron fucked around with this message at 20:50 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 20:20
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gently caress that is a good post
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May 10, 2021 20:23
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260 posts in 14+ years, made up for with loving triple-A quality.
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May 10, 2021 20:29
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Like you could probably write a good book on hosed up German decision making in WWII without touching too much on what the Allies (including Soviets) were doing. I guess you could, but that seems like a very bad idea. I'd argue that the USA never really had the initiative in Vietnam. With perilously few exceptions their actions were taken in response to Vietnamese actions. As such, ignoring the way that Vietnam made their decisions seems so short-sighted as to render such an analysis pointless. For example, and without getting too far into details, there were battles early in the war - Ap Bac, Ia Drang - that caused the PAVN to look at how they fought and change their strategies from the top down as one faction or another's ideas were vindicated or refuted. The USA changed their strategies in response. The book doesn't look at this at all; neither Ap Bac nor Ia Drang are ever mentioned once. Instead, it sees the Vietnamese as a monolithic and entirely unified entity that the USA batters itself against mindlessly. If you're going to look at how the USA fought you should understand that their approach changed over time in response to events. Gibbon doesn't seem to grasp the fact that the other side was changing too, that there was a constant ongoing back and forth in Hanoi over how the war would be conducted. And, if anything, Hanoi was making the changes and the USA was reacting. You don't need to write an in-depth study of internal Vietnamese party politics, you can just do a cursory look at how the war went over time.
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May 10, 2021 20:47
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quote:I'm more sympathetic to Technowar, because while I agree it's an awkward synthesis of Marx and Foucault, it's actually in the upper echelon of academic works that try and apply these theories to contemporary issues. And Gibson at least read a whole bunch of the Pentagon Papers. A true post-modernist wouldn't deign to engage with sources at all. Yeah, I can see the appeal of the parts where he's very specifically critiquing body counts as a measure of success. I think they're just way too interspersed with the author's weird axes to grind, or attempts to get sick dunks on. It doesn't help that the author doesn't really use a lot of good sourcing, especially on the tangents, because the evidence for "helicopters just went from ambush to ambush" is testamony from soldiers getting ambushed while out on foot patrol. I think this kind of wide critique would have to be mixed with specialist knowledge and at least some engagement with normal military history methodology to be effective. A strictly limited critique to the parts where Gibson has a point would be a much shorter book indeed. I like Marx and Foucault. I don't like Marx and Foucault for this application, as I think it creates abstractions so wide as to start to get absurd. It's easy to enjoy discussions of epistemology when one is dealing with more distant, less documented events, though when you get to something as well-documented as the Vietnam War, more conventional explanations appear, and have to coexist with more vague sociological constructs. quote:Worse, because outcomes couldn't be measured, and because the Communists controlled the strategic tempo, the military epistemology began conflating inputs with outputs. Patrols run, shells fired, airstrikes executed, are all the means to victory. But because they were unambiguous events, they were treated as the measures of an effective military, and so the military began maximizing effort, which could be measured, rather than effect. And this gets reflecting in promotions and decorations, which claim that the average American officer is active, aggressive, even heroic, and overall an exceptional military leader when pragmatically, that's not the case. It's interesting to see this because it's sort of a reflection of trying to find a silver lining in a flawed operational concept. The US army starts shelling and bombing in the country to try to interdict supply routes, causing enormous suffering in provinces that are declared free fire zones. There begins to be an emphasis on cache finds(they find caches because that's how the NLF supplies their conventional troops- areas are pre-seeded) and the US tries to use these as tea leaves. In the end, the VC conventional units aren't defeated by search and destroy, but their own side's belief in offensives.
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May 10, 2021 20:50
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Biffmotron posted:Worse, because outcomes couldn't be measured, and because the Communists controlled the strategic tempo, the military epistemology began conflating inputs with outputs. Patrols run, shells fired, airstrikes executed, are all the means to victory. But because they were unambiguous events, they were treated as the measures of an effective military, and so the military began maximizing effort, which could be measured, rather than effect. I would love a military history treatment of this specific blunder. I imagine there's numerous examples of this resulting in asymmetric outcomes and pyrric victories throughout history.
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May 10, 2021 20:52
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Officers dont use their sink so they dont have to clean it. I was always amazed on how perfect my OIC kept his state room then I found out after he left that he never used the sink or toilet in it and had roll up mattress and slept on the floor in a sleeping bag and left his racks perfectly made for 6 months I just came off a ship were someone thought it would be a good idea to flush condom wrappers and condoms down and of course the filters caught them.
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May 10, 2021 21:00
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Thank you for the kind words. The Vietnam War is one of four topics that I know something about. Lurkers are the backbone of the forums!piL posted:I would love a military history treatment of this specific blunder. I imagine there's numerous examples of this resulting in asymmetric outcomes and pyrric victories throughout history. So it's a little more general, but I have just the book for you in Dixon's On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. Speaking of obsolete theoretical frameworks, Dixon is a Freudian. But he was also bomb defusal specialist before becoming a psychologist, so at least he isn't talking entirely ex recto about the army. The short version is that peacetime militaries invest of energy in pomp and pointless order, and the kinds of officers who thrive in peacetime are often minutia focused authoritarians. When they wind up in charge of an actual battle, especially any kind of asymmetric one, they discount their reconnaissance, become confused and indecisive, and order costly frontal attacks because Something Must Be Done, and a frontal attack is Something.
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May 10, 2021 21:16
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Biffmotron posted:Thank you for the kind words. The Vietnam War is one of four topics that I know something about. Lurkers are the backbone of the forums! Also, your review and take are great writing, by the way. I hope I didn't come off as dismissive.
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May 10, 2021 21:25
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Biffmotron posted:
Added it to the list, thanks much. That last part seems like a big lesson to learn as well.
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May 10, 2021 21:36
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It's also worth remembering that "body count" as a metric often gets disproportionate attention, perhaps because of it's grimdark name. The fact is that yes, "body count" was important, but the fact is that similar metrics were used for EVERYTHING. It's tempting to look at the US military and think they were fixated on "body count," but when you start looking at records you see that they were trying to track and quantify drat near everything. If anything they were suffering from an overload of information. (This was the thesis of No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War by Daddis.)
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May 10, 2021 21:48
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Related to the Vietnam War, I recently reread Eri Hotta's 1941: Countdown to Infamy and the discussion here got me wondering - has anyone attempted to run some kind of analysis on how and why governments decide to embark on disastrous wars? Like, are there any noteworthy commonalities between Hitler's decision to Barbarossa, Napoleon's decision to go to Moscow, Washington's decision to enter Vietnam, Japan's decision to visit Pearl Harbor, Moscow's decision to enter Afghanistan, etc? Or are they all their own separate and highly unique individual situations and there's no "one easy trick" of decision-making or organizational structure that'll help prevent such mistakes?
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May 10, 2021 22:09
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I seriously doubt that you're going to boil it all down to anything that isn't a reduction-to-absurdity. You could say "welp, they thought they'd win," or "seemed like a good idea at the time," but that's not really any sort of insight.
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May 10, 2021 22:20
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Tomn posted:Related to the Vietnam War, I recently reread Eri Hotta's 1941: Countdown to Infamy and the discussion here got me wondering - has anyone attempted to run some kind of analysis on how and why governments decide to embark on disastrous wars? Like, are there any noteworthy commonalities between Hitler's decision to Barbarossa, Napoleon's decision to go to Moscow, Washington's decision to enter Vietnam, Japan's decision to visit Pearl Harbor, Moscow's decision to enter Afghanistan, etc? Or are they all their own separate and highly unique individual situations and there's no "one easy trick" of decision-making or organizational structure that'll help prevent such mistakes? Some of them are very much things that were planned for months, some are direct responses to a situation. For example, Johnson's decision to get more heavily involved in Vietnam is directly related to South Vietnam facing military disaster, due to the paralyzing effect on ARVN of the coup interregnum of 1964. Johnson believed at the time that if he didn't move, South Vietnam would fall shortly. Napoleon in Moscow and the USSR in afghanistan had somewhat similar motives- responses to immediate situations or opportunities, rather than big, well-planned bits of strategy.
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May 10, 2021 22:22
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Cessna posted:I seriously doubt that you're going to boil it all down to anything that isn't a reduction-to-absurdity. Milhist thread - "seemed like a good idea at the time"
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May 10, 2021 22:25
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There's a fair amount of literature on Why Military Organizations Make Dumb Mistakes. 
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May 10, 2021 22:25
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Crab Dad posted:Officers dont use their sink so they dont have to clean it. I was always amazed on how perfect my OIC kept his state room then I found out after he left that he never used the sink or toilet in it and had roll up mattress and slept on the floor in a sleeping bag and left his racks perfectly made for 6 months Yea, we had plenty of condoms and the tiny liquor bottles found in toilets as well. Not sleeping on the rack is just weird! I slept on the bed but I slept on top of the covers with a woobie, not because I was too lazy to make the bed but because the poncho liner is so drat comfy
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May 10, 2021 22:30
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They give woobies to sailors?
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May 10, 2021 22:33
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Panzeh posted:Some of them are very much things that were planned for months, some are direct responses to a situation. For example, Johnson's decision to get more heavily involved in Vietnam is directly related to South Vietnam facing military disaster, due to the paralyzing effect on ARVN of the coup interregnum of 1964. Johnson believed at the time that if he didn't move, South Vietnam would fall shortly. Somewhere in another universe Kennedy doesn't get assassinated and doesn't escalate the war in his second term.
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May 10, 2021 22:36
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Crab Dad posted:I was always amazed on how perfect my OIC kept his state room then I found out after he left that he never used the sink or toilet in it and had roll up mattress and slept on the floor in a sleeping bag and left his racks perfectly made for 6 months Once I had to pick up the company XO in a Humvee to take him to the field over on Okinawa. I got a quick look into his room in the BOQ when he made me help carry his gear. It looked like the hotel room Johnny Depp/Hunter S Thompson trashed in the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Not 24 hours before I had watched him yell at a grown man for five minutes for having a fingerprint on his bathroom mirror in a surprise inspection. WhY ArE rEtEnTiOn RaTeS So lOw, SiR? Cessna fucked around with this message at 23:02 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 22:41
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Scratch Monkey posted:They give woobies to sailors? You got your choice of a heavy green wool blanket or a lighter mustard polyester thing that feels like a window curtain. That wierd rear end blanket wasnt warm at all and it's only saving grace was it didnt hold wrinkles. There also was a thin blue blanket made of wonderfully soft sythentic flannel cloth like a woobie. You also got 1 unfitted sheet, pillow case and a goose feather pillow that would get random feathers out at angles to poke your head. We had just got a supply of pillows with squares of memory foam when i left. However I bought my own pillows, fitted sheets and slept in a sleeping bag with the wool blanket over me. Made bed making very easy.
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May 10, 2021 22:56
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Tomn posted:Related to the Vietnam War, I recently reread Eri Hotta's 1941: Countdown to Infamy and the discussion here got me wondering - has anyone attempted to run some kind of analysis on how and why governments decide to embark on disastrous wars? Like, are there any noteworthy commonalities between Hitler's decision to Barbarossa, Napoleon's decision to go to Moscow, Washington's decision to enter Vietnam, Japan's decision to visit Pearl Harbor, Moscow's decision to enter Afghanistan, etc? Or are they all their own separate and highly unique individual situations and there's no "one easy trick" of decision-making or organizational structure that'll help prevent such mistakes? So, what does it feel like to be wrong, once you've made the decision but before you've been proven wrong? It feels like being right. There is to my knowledge one very easy and highly likely to work trick to avoid embarking on a disastrous invasion, and that is to not invade other countries. But if you want to engage in wars but only wars you already know you'll win, that's going to depend on having what I can only term "supernatural" knowledge, before you even get into questions like 'solving politics.'
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May 10, 2021 23:00
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Tomn posted:Related to the Vietnam War, I recently reread Eri Hotta's 1941: Countdown to Infamy and the discussion here got me wondering - has anyone attempted to run some kind of analysis on how and why governments decide to embark on disastrous wars? Like, are there any noteworthy commonalities between Hitler's decision to Barbarossa, Napoleon's decision to go to Moscow, Washington's decision to enter Vietnam, Japan's decision to visit Pearl Harbor, Moscow's decision to enter Afghanistan, etc? Or are they all their own separate and highly unique individual situations and there's no "one easy trick" of decision-making or organizational structure that'll help prevent such mistakes? Cessna is right. I think about the only thing I can observe is that everybody who starts a war, who isn't attacked, has a story as to how they win it I emphasize the use of the term story, not strategy The Impact of Narrative on the Battlespace: from the Schliffilin Plan to "AAAAAAAAAAAAAH Run Away!" Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 23:14 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 23:12
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Tomn posted:Related to the Vietnam War, I recently reread Eri Hotta's 1941: Countdown to Infamy and the discussion here got me wondering - has anyone attempted to run some kind of analysis on how and why governments decide to embark on disastrous wars? Like, are there any noteworthy commonalities between Hitler's decision to Barbarossa, Napoleon's decision to go to Moscow, Washington's decision to enter Vietnam, Japan's decision to visit Pearl Harbor, Moscow's decision to enter Afghanistan, etc? Or are they all their own separate and highly unique individual situations and there's no "one easy trick" of decision-making or organizational structure that'll help prevent such mistakes? i think you can broadly categorize engagement in to two categories but of course this is an absolutely insane level of reduction and some things can easily be viewed through either lens. Incrementalism Soviets in Afghanistan, US in Vietnam, Allied participation in the Russian revolution, Greek part of Turkish war of independence, Napoleon in Spain etc. You start off with relatively limited objectives and a controlled scope and as soon as you get on the ground things start to spiral. In order to preserve the attainment of your limited objectives, you have to commit more and more forces, expanding the scope of the conflict. As you commit more resources across a larger scope, withdrawal becomes more difficult, and you have to commit progressively more and more forces, with a progressive expansion of scope, until you're fighting a full on war. Yoloism Window-of-opportunity theory, essentially. Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, etc where you know that your opponent has certain advantages and so to capitalize on your own real or perceived advantages you go all-in. Sometimes it works (France 39, Sinai 73) sometimes it doesn't (Russia 41, Pakistan 71, Hawaii 41, Falklands). I think a common thread here is relatively authoritarian governments tend to engage in this kind of magical thinking.
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May 10, 2021 23:16
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Incrementalism There's also been a lot of work about how bureaucratic politics and organizational imperatives drive state decisionmaking. You really can't understand Japan's behavior in 1937-1941 without understanding the way the Army and the Navy clashed over things in ways that made a coherent, "rational" foreign policy impossible, for instance.
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May 10, 2021 23:21
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Cessna posted:I seriously doubt that you're going to boil it all down to anything that isn't a reduction-to-absurdity. The curious thing about Japan particularly is that I don't think even a majority of the high command thought they would win, or even that they could. They were men constrained by fear and a lack of imagination, they could not back down from the course that the country had taken, not only because it would be unthinkable bit also because they knew they would likely get murdered for it, and nobody was sure of whether everyone else would support peace and so nobody operant enough took a stand. But there was a lot of private doubt and relatively sober assessment of their odds outside of the public eye. But they had spent too much, invested too much moral capital and had too many deaths to realistically be able to climb down. They could not think of an alternative, to simply be happy with Japan's empire as it stood was also unthinkable, so they ended up keeping rolling the dice and but the end result was that Japan stumbled into a war that they couldn't win largely because nobody could think of an alternative and ended up with their strategic plan of just hoping that the allies would get tired and give in. Honestly i think the greatest commonality is any plan which ends "and then they will be forced to the negotiating table". Because if the enemy decides to just not negotiate then the fact that your endgame is that implies you don't have confidence in your ability to end the war by just taking all of their poo poo. Not to say that it's never worked as a means to end a war. Edit: It's kind of like when you read the history of any mass uprising plan that includes the precondition "and then the people will rise up to support us", because almost invariably they don't and the uprising ends badly for all involved. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 23:30 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 23:23
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Scratch Monkey posted:They give woobies to sailors? I'm a marine. And yea those blankets they issue are real scratchy
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May 10, 2021 23:44
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