Raskolnikov38 posted:

is there oil or some rare fish around the falklands? why does anyone care much about rocks with ~3k people on them

Raskolnikov38 posted:

is there oil or some rare fish around the falklands? why does anyone care much about rocks with ~3k people on them

Pryor on Fire posted:

I have posted this too many times but it's still my favorite military operation ever, I can't believe it actually happened. The British people are completely deranged:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5yAtuYPHK4

Maximo Roboto posted:

Why was the First Gulf War imperialist? Bush's ambassador hosed up an avoidable war, but that aside wasn't it also defensive war against authoritarian aggression, that had sanction from the international community?

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/SameeraKhan/status/1451910940547600387

Weka posted:

I asked about this and didn't get much of an answer but I thought about it for a bit and I'm leaning towards Bush gave Saddam the green light to invade so he could start the war. Seems about on par for an ex CIA director.

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/oni_blackstock/status/1452272887902187529

but but i thought newspapers were the bedrock of democracy

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Does anyone know anything about Russia and the Japanese during WWI? I mean they're both on the same side, but what were their relations like? I don't know anything before the Japanese interventions in the Russian Far East during the Civil War.

sullat posted:

for some reason they didn't have a Far East fleet

Pryor on Fire posted:

I have posted this too many times but it's still my favorite military operation ever, I can't believe it actually happened. The British people are completely deranged:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5yAtuYPHK4

oscarthewilde posted:

it's even more deranged - more quintessentially British - cause these hugely impressive feats of military engineering and logistics were complete failures. only one mission actually did some actual damage, and even that was repaired by the argentinians within 24 hours. it's propaganda, plain and simple, one last hurrah for blitz spirit and British exceptionalism.

quote:

While the Vulcans were capable of carrying conventional munitions, this had not been done for a long time. To carry twenty-one bombs, the Vulcan required three sets of bomb carriers, each of which held seven bombs. Their release was controlled by a panel at the navigator's station, known as a 90-way, that monitored the electrical connections to each bomb, and was said to provide 90 different sequences for releasing the 1,000-pound bombs. None of the Vulcans at Waddington were fitted with the bomb racks or the 90-way. A search of the supply dumps at Waddington and RAF Scampton located the 90-way panels, which were fitted and tested, but finding enough septuple bomb carriers proved harder, and at least nine were required. Someone remembered that some had been sold to a scrapyard in Newark-on-Trent, and they were retrieved from there. Locating sufficient bombs also proved difficult, and only 167 could be located. Some had cast bomb cases rather than machined ones, which was problematic as they tended to shatter, and this mission required bombs that would penetrate into the ground.

quote:

Most of the praise that Engels dictated in this situation belonged to those officers of junior rank who achieved something noteworthy. This is particularly significant as it demonstrated a further development in Engels’ thought process where he began to notice the lower level decision-makers and decisions that were critical to an operation, as well as the importance of junior officers. Three examples in particular stand out. First, The English Engineer, Colonel Sir Harry David Jones, who oversaw the English fortifications in the Baltic and Crimean theaters, was adept at realizing and understanding the capabilities and limitations of the English forces available to him.{248} Similarly, one of the chief Russian engineers, Colonel Count Eduard I. Todtleben, a “comparably obscure man in the Russian service,” proved himself adept at developing fortifications inside Sevastopol.{249} Finally, Engels took enough notice of the astute observations of a young Prussian Major in 1836 when that officer wrote about the particulars and details of defending Silistria. That Engels took such an early no- tice of the remarks of Major Helmuth von Moltke reflects quite positively on his observational skills.{250}

...

McClellan maintained the dubious distinction of being one of the very few American Civil War Generals concerning whom Engels remarked, and his comments were far from favorable. Engels rather flippantly dismissed McClellan in May 1862, as a “military incompetent,” who was unable to win battles through fear of losing them.{255}

Engels in May 1862 posted:

Hero McClellan is in a dead fix. I think this will mark the passing of his spurious glory. He has had another division transferred to him from McDowell, but that won't help him much. All that can save him are the ironclads... If they cleared the rivers to right and left and engaged the flanks and rear with their guns, these ships could once again save this jackass or traitor.

MeatwadIsGod posted:

The collected letters and articles in The Civil War in the United States are a pro-read

Slavvy posted:

Lmao Engels was a catty bitch

gradenko_2000 posted:

quote:

It is somewhat surprising that for all of the importance of economics in the theoretical observations and logic of Karl Marx’s thought, and of communism in general, that subject figured so little in Engels’ reflections concerning war and fighting. Surprisingly, when Engels first read one of the most well- known military missives of the nineteenth century, Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, the first thing that caught his attention was the way in which Clausewitz incorporated commerce into war. Engels specifically drew Marx to this correlation.{286}

Certainly, there were frequent examples of how economics functioned in conflict, but for the most part, these observations occurred primarily in the early years of his writing, and seldom concerned any innovations at the tactical levels of warfare. Distinct themes surface throughout these writings, however, particularly the role of conflict in resolving the struggle between rich and poor, and the importance of financial viability in the execution of warfare as an increasingly expensive field. In this last regard, Engels made several very insightful observations, and almost foreshadows later writers, such as Jean de Bloch, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, pointed to the difficulty of waging and financing war on a mass scale.

quote:

Two years later, Engels remained critical of the English rank and file when he wrote his entry “Alma” for The New American Cyclopaedia, noting the English “habitual clumsy way” of conducting military operations.{329}

But perhaps his most insightful comment on the English soldier was not one of condemnation, but one of praise for the system under which the warrior fought. Such a man was to be envied because, almost alone in the European armies of the nineteenth century, he was “by no means regarded by the law as a machine that has no will of its own and must obey without argument any order given it, but as a ‘free agent,’ a man possessing free will, who at all times must know what he is doing and who bears responsibility for all his actions,’{330} This attitude arises from Engels’ belief that the soldier/worker maintained an individual consciousness and was a subject capable of defining his own world and not an automaton. Such discussion, written in March 1849, in the midst of revolution for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung displays a remarkable grasp of futuristic military conceptions of responsibility and accountability.

quote:

Even before the final convulsions of the early 1850s, Engels began to describe some of the specific concepts that made such popular wars different from previous conflicts.

Foremost among these new trends was the degree of barbarism that inherently was a part of such war. Engels’ most insightful comments on such conflicts occurred in the spring of 1857, when he wrote about the situation involving the British in China and India and commented that “in a popular war the means used by the insurgent nation cannot be measured by the commonly recognized rules of regular warfare, nor by any other abstract standard, but by the degree of civilization only attained by that insurgent nation.”{343} In this particular instance, this meant that the war was not being fought under the conventional, Euro-centric conception of honorable fighting, but instead fell increasingly under the rules that the “oppressed” Chinese people wished to emplace on the conflict.

Such new measures of this fight therefore included actions like poisoning of foodstuffs, kidnapping, and random massacre of European travelers.{344} This was not the way that regular European forces were accustomed to fighting–it was a new type of warfare. Later, when writing for The New American Cyclopaedia, Engels commented on the same type of combat parameter redefinition occurring in Algeria, where the fighting on both sides took on a degree of barbarism that was not common in Europe. The significant point about these particular engagements was that many of the atrocities were committed by the more “civilized” French troops, who indiscriminately burned and destroyed Arab houses, supplies, and crops.

...

Even when Engels discussed military tactics and procedures that both regular forces and irregular soldiers needed to learn, he structured these skills within the construct of maintaining military spirit and presence of mind on the battle-field:

quote:

The considerable extension of patrol and foraging expeditions, outpost duties, etc., the greater activity demanded of every soldier, the more frequent recurrence of cases in which the soldier has to act on his own and has to rely on his own intellectual resources, and, finally, the great importance of skirmish engagements in the fighting, the success of which depends on the intelligence, the coup d’œil and the energy of each individual soldier-all this presupposes a greater degree of education of the non-commissioned officer and rank-and-file soldier. A barbaric or semi-barbaric nation, however, is unable to offer a degree of education of the masses such that 500,000-600,000 men recruited at random could, on the one hand, become disciplined and trained to act like machines, and at the same time acquire or retain this coup d’œil

quote:

As discussed above, Friedrich Engels was one of the first early socialist writers to devote energy to the actual operations of armies in the field. And although he might not have been a dramatic innovator his observations and concepts nevertheless contributed greatly to the way in which socialist movements since his time developed and engaged in military operations. And his impact has been felt in no arena more than in the area of guerrilla warfare. Engels, almost alone of his contemporaries, discussed to considerable length the ideas behind guerrilla movements:

quote:

Mass uprising, revolutionary war, guerilla detachments everywhere--that is the only means by which a small nation can overcome a large one, by which a less strong army can be put in a position to resist a stronger and better organized one.{351}—Friedrich Engels, “The Defeat of the Piedmontese”

quote:

Now, insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them.{352}—Friedrich Engels, “The Defeat of the Piedmontese”

quote:

In the summer of 1848, Engels watched the developments in Paris with great attention. It was a situation where the workers were competing militarily against a regular force that both outnumbered them and contained far more lethal weaponry than they possessed. While the ultimate outcome was not in doubt for long, and the bulk of the fighting ended within a week, Engels drew some conclusions concerning the nature of insurgency warfare, especially when conducted in an urban environment.

First, Engels emphasized the Parisian revolutionaries’ success and necessity of turning individual buildings into strongpoint defenses.{355} Through the use of barricades along critical streets and passageways, each individual building was transformed into a defensible strongpoint, suitable for sustained action against a foe. While these strongpoints were being constructed and manned, the insurgents properly used smaller elements to maintain lines of communications, using barricades and lesser streets to keep contact between individual strongpoints. All of this was done only in sections of the city where the workers were relatively sure of local support, and not in more affluent districts of the city.

In addition to this, the rebel leader Joachim R. T. G. de Kersausie (a former military officer) concentrated his available manpower on a single objective, the Hotel de Ville, while lesser sections of the movement protected the insurgency’s bases of operations. These bases, Engels observed, had been “skillfully transformed into formidable fortresses.”{356}

Popy posted:

I was joking with a friend about some marrying some decedent of the spanish burbon royal family and he laughed at me and told me to look up whose the current king of spain.

Did the french revolution actually matter

Popy posted:

I was joking with a friend about some marrying some decedent of the spanish burbon royal family and he laughed at me and told me to look up whose the current king of spain.

Did the french revolution actually matter

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUQqwyDPZRw

watched this lecture today - it's a discussion on the Soviet theory of operational warfare, specifically touching on concepts advanced by Mikhail Tukhachevsky

there's a lot of hemming-and-hawing from the speaker about not wanting to show favor towards the Soviet system because it's America and you have to walk on eggshells talking about communism, and perhaps this is a bit too basic for anyone who's already been reading a lot of Soviet warmaking and strategy, but I thought it was a good intro to the subject

Popy posted:

I was joking with a friend about some marrying some decedent of the spanish burbon royal family and he laughed at me and told me to look up whose the current king of spain.

Did the french revolution actually matter

Weka posted:

It mattered and it was bad. Plunging Europe into 20 years of war is kinda a big deal imo.

Pryor on Fire posted:

This theory that the army would just resupply itself magically as the workers rose up in the Russo-Polish war is hilarious, it's the same delusional line of thought that led to the Japanese sending tens of thousands of soldiers to starve on various islands with no food and no supplies.