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MikeCrotch posted:One of things I don't like about Drach is how he's all "silly politicians don't want to spend money on ships Has there ever been an instance of this “pure” military decision making, and then specifically where it didn’t end badly or have weird knock on effects down the line? I’m just a simple country moron who doesn’t know anything, but it would seem to me that even relatively simple choices that appear good in isolation would be quite complicated if you don’t account for larger social, economic and logistical issues down the line. Like take even a toy example : the army currently uses gun X that holds Y many bullets, now gun Z is identical in every single way but holds Y + 1 many bullets. (Again, completely and utterly a toy example removed from all reality.) This looks like a pretty unalloyed good : gently caress yeah, more bullets, right? And maybe it is once you take in to account the pain in the rear end of actually changing out all of the individual guns and magazines and any parts or cleaning kits or anything not actually identical or even just perceived to not be identical. And random dudes are gonna want to know why things are being changed which inevitably leads to some people deciding the old version must be better because people do that. And we gotta deal with the people who make the bullets and ship the bullets and store the bullets and idk polish the bullets. And the money for all this has to come from somewhere. And if we mess up any of this it could snowball into a crisis later because the bullet polisher’s union was overworked and this leads to them going on strike and now we’re the people who caused us to go to war with ugly, dirty bullets.
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Sep 27, 2021 23:19
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" without really going into the wider context. It's very "pure" military history which has a relatively limited appeal I think. Meanwhile Ian seems to be better at talking about how guns fit into a certain social and historical situation.
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MazelTovCocktail posted:Well I meant as part of the Stalin book. That said I picked up the Audiobook of Stalin Court of the Red Tsar and looking at the TOC it appears Beria gets significant coverage. It’s mostly as a result of Death of Stalin and wanting to see how the USSR functioned under Stalin and those he kept around him. On Stalin's Team, also by Fitzpatrick, is exactly what you're looking for as a study of how Stalin and his decision-making process worked in practice; the only caveat is that it's not primarily a study of the war and military operations, but rather the USSR as a whole.
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Sep 27, 2021 23:34
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Flappy Bert posted:On Stalin's Team, also by Fitzpatrick, is exactly what you're looking for as a study of how Stalin and his decision-making process worked in practice; the only caveat is that it's not primarily a study of the war and military operations, but rather the USSR as a whole. That's actually fine. I'm always interested in the day to day of how non-democratic countries function. I mean there is still always going to be non-political crimes, sewers have to built or maintained, etc how is that handled, so I'm fine with that covering the USSR as whole, as I suspect Red Tsar will cover those areas in more detail (which is fine).
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Sep 27, 2021 23:48
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Xiahou Dun posted:Has there ever been an instance of this “pure” military decision making, and then specifically where it didn’t end badly or have weird knock on effects down the line? I’m just a simple country moron who doesn’t know anything, but it would seem to me that even relatively simple choices that appear good in isolation would be quite complicated if you don’t account for larger social, economic and logistical issues down the line. No, for the simple reason that militaries don't exist in a vacuum. The military does poo poo on behalf of the state (be it a democracy or dictatorship), and the state is run by people who are steeped in the political, cultural, economic, religious, etc. tradition and history that they come from. The people who serve in it are usually (but not always) products of that same context and exist within it when they're not actively doing military stuff. You can spool that out into economic considerations, environmental considerations, etc. but at the end of the day everything is contextual. The gun example is actually a pretty good one, because holy poo poo there have been some drawn out and bitter arguments about how many bullets to give soldiers in their guns. I'm talking all the way back to the 19th century, with people arguing about whether or not the common soldier could be trusted with a magazine fed rifle or if they should stick to single-shot firearms. Some of this was couched in logistics (soldiers who can shoot faster use more bullets and thus run out of ammo faster), some of it in terms of concerns about not being able to exercise fire control, and some of it on explicitly cultural terms. Some of the German (nee Prussian) officers who argued against a magazine-fed rifle in the 1870s, for example, were afraid that if the soldiers had too many bullets in their gun they would prefer to stay put and shoot, rather than carry the charge forward into the enemy line. Better to have just the one in the chamber so that they knew they had to keep running, least "our dear Old-Prussian Offensive Tradition" die out. For what it's worth the flip side of that argument also leaned on cultural arguments - none of it was purely in terms of military theory.
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Sep 27, 2021 23:54
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You caught me. While I am a moron I did spend a couple seconds to come up with a cogent if made up and silly example. They don’t actually polish bullets, right?
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Sep 28, 2021 00:27
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As the great sage of military wisdom put it, "Warfare is the continuation of politics by other means." There isn't really an intelligent way to talk about a military situation in a vacuum - the closest you get is doing wargames where you make assumptions about the politics to keep the number of factors you're fighting down, but even that isn't so much "isolated from politics" as "we're going to treat the politics as out-of-our-hands." Wars have all sorts of crazy baggage going into them (many societies bent their form of warfare to make it possible for young men to show off & advance socially - Comanche, Rome, I've seen that argument advanced about the US in the 21st century though I don't put a lot of stock into that one). And yeah that bullets one is a good example. We've had multiple discussions in this thread about how the Nazis made decisions that impacted combat effectiveness because they couldn't tolerate the hit to "going on parades" effectiveness. Armies are societies in miniature, and this has all sorts of implications (consider the class structure of a feudal society vs the type of army they make, consider the class structure of the 21st century US vs the army it makes, and so on).
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Sep 28, 2021 00:49
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Bret Devereaux (ancient military historian) of ACOUP pretty frequently brings up the point that a society’s military institutions tend* to be structured as a mirror of its civilian institutions and to be honest I never quite got what that meant but it seems pertinent to bring up here *iirc he actually says it’s universal but I’m not confident in that
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Sep 28, 2021 01:50
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MazelTovCocktail posted:Can anyone recommend a good history of Stalin and the Central committee and Soviet top leadership, during World War Two? I was just watching Death of Stalin (a fantastic movie) and I’d like to learn more about the decision making and governing that went on during the period. I’m also not really looking for a military history like the detail doesn’t have to be on troop movements at Stalingrad, but on Stalin’s decision-making on what to deploy along with others. Also very interested in anything on Beria. I’m looking for something that makes good use of Russian sources, granted this isn’t probably a huge issue as battlefield reports on the Eastern front and overuse of German sources. I can’t vouch for it as I haven’t read it and don’t know if the author is reputable, but my SO picked up a biography on Beria (after watching Death of Stalin), by Amy Knight. From what he told me about it seems legit, but be forewarned it kinda hosed him up to where he only reads fictional horror now. E:punctuation!
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Sep 28, 2021 02:20
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Bulgaroctonus posted:I can’t vouch for it as I haven’t read it and don’t know if the author is reputable, but my SO picked up a biography on Beria (after watching Death of Stalin), by Amy Knight. From what he told me about it seems legit, but be forewarned it kinda hosed him up to where he only reads fictional horror now. I don't know the book or author, but if reading it hosed him up it's probably a reasonably accurate reflection of Beria. Dude was a goddamned horror show.
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Sep 28, 2021 02:27
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Yeah, I’d like to read it at some point but probably won’t. I don’t think theirs too much to add to what I already know about him. Supposedly there’s gonna be some archive dump in like 2028 or something, so that may be interesting but I don’t have much faith in Russia putting out much of anything new. I think it’ll just be like a list of his victims and confirming other poo poo we already more or less knew.
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Sep 28, 2021 02:54
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Koramei posted:Bret Devereaux (ancient military historian) of ACOUP pretty frequently brings up the point that a society’s military institutions tend* to be structured as a mirror of its civilian institutions and to be honest I never quite got what that meant but it seems pertinent to bring up here Michael Howard's War in European History is a really interesting and short book about this relationship. It looks at the periods of massive military reforms in Europe and how they were driven or drove major changes to the rest of society especially its politics and economics.
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Sep 28, 2021 03:22
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All the really secret poo poo is classified under the "Special Folder" designation. That doesn't have a set date for getting declassified, IIRC these documents are reviewed every decade and a decision is made then. "Special Folder" doesn't mean sealed away forever, a lot of the pre-WWII stuff is already public for instance.
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Sep 28, 2021 03:22
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Ensign Expendable posted:All the really secret poo poo is classified under the "Special Folder" designation. That doesn't have a set date for getting declassified, IIRC these documents are reviewed every decade and a decision is made then. "Special Folder" doesn't mean sealed away forever, a lot of the pre-WWII stuff is already public for instance. Does Russia have anything like a FOIA? I’d assume not but maybe with Soviet era stuff eventually? Also, from what I understand; after the fall of the Soviet Union files were briefly (like ‘91-‘93) at least somewhat open to western researchers. Are there any good books or articles about this time?
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Sep 28, 2021 03:54
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Pretty sure Putin has stopped any more Soviet stuff from being released. He wants to polish up their image.
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Sep 28, 2021 03:55
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gently caress. I really want the Soviet version of Command and Control at some point.
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Sep 28, 2021 04:39
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Bulgaroctonus posted:gently caress. I really want the Soviet version of Command and Control at some point. Just start screaming endlessly. It's a pretty accurate summary.
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Sep 28, 2021 04:46
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Work so hard you give yourself ruinous excema on your hands because you have no junior officer corps.
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Sep 28, 2021 04:56
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Bulgaroctonus posted:Does Russia have anything like a FOIA? I’d assume not but maybe with Soviet era stuff eventually? Also, from what I understand; after the fall of the Soviet Union files were briefly (like ‘91-‘93) at least somewhat open to western researchers. Are there any good books or articles about this time? Not really. Right now a lot of WW2 era documents are getting released with many scanned and uploaded online. Documents that implicate specific individuals in crimes are usually not uploaded, but are still accessible at physical archives. Some post was stuff is available too, I've only really seen the tanks stuff. This only applies to Russia, state archives of ex-Soviet republics still have all their documents and have their own rules.
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Sep 28, 2021 05:19
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The Lone Badger posted:Just start screaming endlessly. It's a pretty accurate summary. But, this is already what I did while reading C&C? How do you say gently caress! in Russian? Or oh, poo poo! Or are you loving kidding me? They did what?!? I got the screaming into a void of despair and disbelief down, pretty sure that transcends language
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Sep 28, 2021 05:32
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Cyka blyat
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Sep 28, 2021 05:33
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Idi nahui
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Sep 28, 2021 08:41
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Ensign Expendable posted:Not really. Right now a lot of WW2 era documents are getting released with many scanned and uploaded online. Documents that implicate specific individuals in crimes are usually not uploaded, but are still accessible at physical archives. With such haphazard access to documents, it feels like unscrupulous individuals could just make up documents that support their argument and if they ever get called on it say, "Well, you know how hard it is to find these things, what can you do"
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Sep 28, 2021 09:55
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MazelTovCocktail posted:Can anyone recommend a good history of Stalin and the Central committee and Soviet top leadership, during World War Two? I was just watching Death of Stalin (a fantastic movie) and I’d like to learn more about the decision making and governing that went on during the period. I’m also not really looking for a military history like the detail doesn’t have to be on troop movements at Stalingrad, but on Stalin’s decision-making on what to deploy along with others. Also very interested in anything on Beria. I’m looking for something that makes good use of Russian sources, granted this isn’t probably a huge issue as battlefield reports on the Eastern front and overuse of German sources. wait for the concluding volume of kotkin's stalin bio like the rest of us. In the meantime the second volume, 'waiting for hitler,' might be more or less what you're looking for. Fair warning that the cottage industry of Stalinography is loaded with plenty of tripe
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Sep 28, 2021 11:18
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Xiahou Dun posted:Like take even a toy example : the army currently uses gun X that holds Y many bullets, now gun Z is identical in every single way but holds Y + 1 many bullets. (Again, completely and utterly a toy example removed from all reality.) This looks like a pretty unalloyed good : gently caress yeah, more bullets, right? And maybe it is once you take in to account the pain in the rear end of actually changing out all of the individual guns and magazines and any parts or cleaning kits or anything not actually identical or even just perceived to not be identical. I mean this literally was a thing after World War 1 - people had plans for new, shinier, better guns but there are 50 million Lee Enfields and the ammo for them lying around in our warehouses and also it's peacetime and also we're broke so you'd better have a VERY good reason for trying to replace all this poo poo we've already got with, for example, a nice modern semi-automatic rifle instead of bolt action. 1939 rolls around: welp, the Americans have the Garand but hope you guys like bolt action!
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Sep 28, 2021 11:59
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Warships, especially the biggest ones, are much more of a one-and-done thing though. You don't need to worry about parts commonality and people confusing shells nearly as much.
Fangz fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 12:32
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Gaius Marius posted:Cyka blyat I thought this was a gimmick until I started dating a russian, and nope, just infinite blyats at the slightest invoncenience
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Sep 28, 2021 13:30
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Koramei posted:Bret Devereaux (ancient military historian) of ACOUP pretty frequently brings up the point that a society’s military institutions tend* to be structured as a mirror of its civilian institutions and to be honest I never quite got what that meant but it seems pertinent to bring up here In a sense it kind of has to be, though if you're sufficiently pedantic about "mirror" it can fall apart. As a kind of trivial example, consider warrior castes. A society either has a warrior caste or it doesn't, pretty binary. The existence of such a caste has dramatic implications for both the military of a society and its civilian life: in the military side, you have a base for a group of life-long warriors who are going to interact with the rest of your command structure in very important ways. In the civilian side, you're gonna have a caste system, you've pretty much made that decision already. What the causation is, that's not really what I'm looking at, just that if you have a warrior caste at all there are a lot of things you can tell about both the military and the civilian life. This can extrapolate pretty fast into less strict but still valuable insight into other elements of the society: caste systems nearly always have strict sumptuary laws, having a group that is life long dedicated to war has foreign policy implications, the experience of soldiers who aren't part of the warrior caste is likely going to be worse, and so on. Sometimes there's more broad stuff. Mustering levies is one of the most traditional, successful military tools for intensive agrarian societies. For the 21st century US, this tool is not really available and would be extremely poor quality if attempted even just compared to the baseline for the tool. Mustering levies works because the source of cohesion and command both come directly from long civilian experience, but Americans move all the time and identify only weakly with their neighbors compared to their coworkers. Anyway that's all just example not like, proof. The reason that there has to be a link between civilian structure and military structure is that the military is a product of the civilian society that sustains it. Even if you find a military that seems compartmentalized from the civilians, that requires a society that is very good at compartmentalization.
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Sep 28, 2021 14:10
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feedmegin posted:I mean this literally was a thing after World War 1 - people had plans for new, shinier, better guns but there are 50 million Lee Enfields and the ammo for them lying around in our warehouses and also it's peacetime and also we're broke so you'd better have a VERY good reason for trying to replace all this poo poo we've already got with, for example, a nice modern semi-automatic rifle instead of bolt action. And the Garand was originally .276 but MacArthur said “we’ve got all this .30-06 lying around in warehouses, redesign it.” Then cue decades of various militaries trying to move towards smaller cartridges and the US saying “No, .308 forever,” and fast-forwards to today where the US is again looking at rounds that are ballistically quite similar to .276z
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Sep 28, 2021 14:20
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It's fun to see how many decisions are based on existing ammunition stockpiles, but when world war breaks out those pre-war stockpiles get used up nearly instantly.
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Sep 28, 2021 14:31
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P-Mack posted:It's fun to see how many decisions are based on existing ammunition stockpiles, but when world war breaks out those pre-war stockpiles get used up nearly instantly. Some stockpiles last longer, like Purple Hearts!
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Sep 28, 2021 14:40
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P-Mack posted:It's fun to see how many decisions are based on existing ammunition stockpiles, but when world war breaks out those pre-war stockpiles get used up nearly instantly. It's not just about the stockpiles, it's also about the infrastructure that goes into manufacturing them and the logistics pipelines. Doubly so if, like most armies in the early 20th century, you're sharing a cartridge between rifles and MGs. We just adopted a new rifle with a new cartridge, are we depreciating all the MGs or are we now making both ammos? The logistical nightmare of switching ammo during wartime is why the British stuck with .303 into WW2, even going so far as to have the limited numbers of P13's (the Enfield replacement) that they had made chambered in .303 (and renumbered as the P14) instead of in .276 Enfield like they'd wanted. This is doubly hilarious because the whole reason they were going with a new rifle was the new cartridge, as they were pretty unhappy with .303's performance. This is also the reason the German army got the Mauser m71/84 in 11mm Mauser even though they knew that smaller caliber rifles were the way to go - even for black powder - and Paul Mauser had just gotten done flogging a version of the m71 to the Serbs in 10.15mm. Hell, within a couple of years he sold the Ottomans a slightly tweaked m71/84 (the Ottoman m1886=7) in 9.5mm that was widely considered to be the pinnacle of black powder bolt action rifle tech. BUT, poo poo was super fluid with powder improvements, everyone knew that smaller calibers were the way to go in the future, and it was pretty obvious that Germany would need a totally new rifle within a decade or so anyways, so the 71/84 kept the old caliber as a stopgap measure and to simplify the inevitable two-caliber system once the reservists were on the old rifles and the regular on the hypothetical 1890s new rifles. As it turned out they probably could have just waited all together. They'd barely finished rearming with the 71/84 when smokeless poweder happened, jacketed bullets happened, and everyone is off and running. The Rifle Testing Commission ended up cooking together the very excellent Patrone 88 (the parent cartridge of what became known somewhat erroneously as 8mm Mauser), which was probably the most modern, best rifle cartridge of the 1890s and the unfairly maligned Gewehr 88.
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Sep 28, 2021 14:45
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Gort posted:With such haphazard access to documents, it feels like unscrupulous individuals could just make up documents that support their argument and if they ever get called on it say, "Well, you know how hard it is to find these things, what can you do" Not really, any document has an archive code, you can go in and find it. I suppose someone can make up a document and count on their critics' inability to see it, but you can do the same thing with a document from any nation's archive, or even a rare book.
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Sep 28, 2021 15:10
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Koramei posted:Bret Devereaux (ancient military historian) of ACOUP pretty frequently brings up the point that a society’s military institutions tend* to be structured as a mirror of its civilian institutions and to be honest I never quite got what that meant but it seems pertinent to bring up here Hell, I've made posts about how political ideology goes down to soldiers' uniforms. Cessna fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 15:14
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Tulip posted:As a kind of trivial example, consider warrior castes. A society either has a warrior caste or it doesn't, pretty binary. Does the USA have a "warrior caste?"
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Sep 28, 2021 15:17
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Ensign Expendable posted:Not really, any document has an archive code, you can go in and find it. I suppose someone can make up a document and count on their critics' inability to see it, but you can do the same thing with a document from any nation's archive, or even a rare book. David Irving did this for the German archives and got away with it for decades, until in the context of him suing someone for libel another historian working with the defence went in there and checked his notes and found he had been misrepresenting the vast majority of what he wrote, particularly to do with the Holocaust. Other historians had gone and demonstrated it before but it was the libel trial that really catapulted that fact to general public consciousness, not just historical academic circles. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 15:27
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Cessna posted:Does the USA have a "warrior caste?" I'd argue yes, with the caveat that being part of the caste doesn't necessarily mean you get a benefit.
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Sep 28, 2021 15:34
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Cessna posted:Does the USA have a "warrior caste?" I'd say no but it desperately wants one
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Sep 28, 2021 15:35
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Cessna posted:Does the USA have a "warrior caste?" No, professional soldier class system is pretty distinct. Class and caste are pretty different. I'll admit that low mobility class systems can feel pretty caste-like and I was simplifying a bit to keep things moving1, but in the US AFAIK endogamy isn't a major feature of the military. Plus you were military - you weren't born into a hereditary position, and IIRC you're just fully not a soldier any more. A Spartiate or Kshatriya doesn't generally retire. There do seem to be political activists who want the US to have a warrior caste, but to my knowledge they're mostly just weirdos and grifters. I could see the US's thing where there are "military families" calcifying into a caste system, as our larger social system becomes less mobile and inheritance dominates, but I think there's still some distance to go. There is the interesting case that has been made that racial segregation created a de facto caste system. Which had its own...affects on the US military. 1 if you become a blacksmith because your father was a blacksmith and his father was a blacksmith it's pretty academic if this all counts as a caste system, but as a rule caste systems tend to only get mentioned when they REALLY stand out, like aforementioned Sparta
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Sep 28, 2021 15:38
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Cessna posted:Does the USA have a "warrior caste?" I'd definitely argue it does -- historically it was limited more to officers, but since the start of the all volunteer military it now extends to all ranks. I never miss an opportunity to post this, it is a few years old now but it laid out the situation (and associated problems) better than anything else I've found since. One of my favorite maps, taken from said article:  You can pretty much pick out by color where the major military bases are, and an awful lot of that data is driven by multi-generational military families.
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Sep 28, 2021 15:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's not just about the stockpiles, it's also about the infrastructure that goes into manufacturing them and the logistics pipelines. Doubly so if, like most armies in the early 20th century, you're sharing a cartridge between rifles and MGs. We just adopted a new rifle with a new cartridge, are we depreciating all the MGs or are we now making both ammos? The P14 was a WW1 stopgap, not a WW2 stopgap. The SMLE was originally a stopgap modification of the Lee-Metford after the experience of the Boar wars. While that was going on a much longer project was started of a ground up new bolt action rifle, focusing on a high velocity and small calibre (for the time). This became the P13 but the high velocities caused lots of barrel overheating issues that were still being worked on when WW1 kicked off. The genesis of the P14 came from the inability of American gun makers (Winchester et al) to make SMLEs to the required quality and amounts due to a finickity production process. To solve this the plans for the P13 were dusted off and it was converted to .303 as it would be much easier to make. The P14s were then issued to anyone who wasn't on the front lines to free up the SMLEs produced in Britain, India and Australia. I don't have accurate figures but the amount of P14s made in America was AFAIK around the same as the SMLE, if not more. After WW1 the SMLE proved that it was more than good enough so the P13 project was shelved. The P14 was used in WW2 because any gun was better than none but was kept to Home Guard and none frontline units. The Americans liked the P14 so much that they made it in 30-06 as the M1917 Enfield. There ended up more M1917s made and issued than the M1903. The hearsay is that the troops like the M1917 more than the Springfield but the US Army kept the Springfield because of nationalistic reasons. Every one in the 30s knew the semi-auto rifle was the next thing but until the Garand there were no options. Also the limited budgets had to cover new tanks, new planes, new ships and mechanisation. The choice was often a new tank or a new rifle, and if you had a decent LMG/GPMG the tank was a better option. Hell, a fleet of lorries to carry your army was probably a better option.
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Sep 28, 2021 16:02
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