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Jetpacks are too unwieldy, better to go with catapults.
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Jan 13, 2022 23:22
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Tankbuster posted:lmao staff officers that should be planning are being forced to do exhausting backbreaking endurance courses? They get the planning stuff later. The problem is that they made backbreaking endurance courses a bottleneck for staff recruitment. Mantis42 posted:Jetpacks are too unwieldy, better to go with catapults. A guy launched from a catapult with a parachute could at least carry a weapon.
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Jan 14, 2022 03:58
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Shittiest possible Iron Man
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Jan 14, 2022 04:15
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:They get the planning stuff later. The problem is that they made backbreaking endurance courses a bottleneck for staff recruitment. I would have done it if I’d picked another Academy. but I’d have been exactly what they were selecting for. the problem of selecting of excellent senior officers.... I’m not sure Ranger school is the problem. all organizations are pretty terrible at it. I mean I’ve read some pretty lol internal large corporate discussions on the subject. it’s basically an issue for all organizations over a certain size. they get way up their own asses about it.
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Jan 14, 2022 04:47
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it’s good that the armed forces only recruit idiots and incompetents to be leaders cause it means more troops will die
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Jan 14, 2022 05:17
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indigi posted:it’s good that the armed forces only recruit idiots and incompetents to be leaders cause it means more troops will die All the bad news about First World militaries ITT is good news for humanity.
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Jan 14, 2022 05:24
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indigi posted:it’s good that the armed forces only recruit idiots and incompetents to be leaders cause it means more troops will die Win win situation
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Jan 14, 2022 05:25
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Armacham posted:Win win situation It does (partly) explain the amount of meat heads in positions of authority. I have seen some weird videos out of OCS as well. Ardennes has issued a correction as of 07:46 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 07:39
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:All the bad news about First World militaries ITT is good news for humanity. i know a careerist troop here in Singapore who quit because he was scared of dying in a peacetime deployment in Israel real brave poo poo these guys are
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Jan 14, 2022 08:31
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 Note: on the topic of "The Great Squad Leader in the Sky", in James William Gibson's "The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam" (another book I'd heavily recommend to anyone interested in dissecting just how badly the US fought in Indochina), he describes how these officers, the platoon, the battalion, the brigade, and even the division commander, would all be on their own helicopters, each progressively higher than the other, all orbiting the same spot, giving orders to their downlines who were themselves just a couple hundred feet below them. Pener Kropoopkin posted:I guess the real takeaway is that overwhelming material superiority makes you stupid. The Vietnamese had to exploit every possible homefield advantage they could just to give the Americans a bloody nose, and we couldn't even tell that we were loving up from the sheer destruction we waged on the whole country. Gibson's thesis is centered around the idea that the US got into a mentality of a "capital-intensive" war, where you'd inflict maximum damage with a minimum of labour by investing in high-tech weaponry, which at the time was Arclite strikes from B-52s, Air Cavalry units, and paradropped seismic listening devices that were supposed to allow the CIA to hear the footsteps of NVA troops as they marched down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Notwithstanding that the US never really managed to divorce itself from this idea, even when they tried to implement post-Vietnam reforms, the problem with this kind of warmaking was that it was a mismatch with the ideological grounding of their opponent. Ho and Giap weren't playing the same game, so it never mattered that the "return on investment", as calculated by the likes of McNamara, was so much higher. ___    
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Jan 14, 2022 09:14
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What's slam in this case, SLA Marshall? I've either got the rona or the flu and I'm even dumber than usual and my eyes just glaze over the text
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Jan 14, 2022 10:17
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Milo and POTUS posted:What's slam in this case, SLA Marshall? I've either got the rona or the flu and I'm even dumber than usual and my eyes just glaze over the text yes, the guy's name is SLA Marshall, and his nickname is "Slam"
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Jan 14, 2022 10:27
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I remember reading a novel by some guy that was in the green berets or something, years ago, that mentioned the trait of commanders hanging out in helicopters and giving platoons orders. On the face of it, you think, well, that's great, they can see everything and order them around easy as maps, but the guy mentioned (especially in Vietnam) that you can't really feel the weight of fire, can't really be aware of the casualties and the morale at the moment, so in fact you're giving out orders that are out of date, or worse, not possible, to soldiers that are in danger, while you just see them as ants. Would this be a good place to read and discuss military tactics and strategy? I've always been interested in this kind of stuff. For example, I found these short summaries by James Connolly, to be pretty interesting. Would anyone like to read them? They are discussing older revolutionary warfare, what kind of things work and what don't, and although the years have passed, I still think they have some value. https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1915/rw/revwar.htm Here's his summary of what he was trying to achieve, James Connolly posted:We propose to give under this heading from time to time accounts of such military happenings in the past as may serve to enlighten and instruct our members, in the work they are banded together to perform. A close study of these articles will we hope, be valuable to all those who desire to acquire a knowledge of how brave men and women have at other times and in other place, overcome difficulties and achieved something for a cause held to be sacred. It is not our place to pass verdict on the sacredness or worth of the cause for which they contended: our function is to discuss their achievements from the standpoint of their value to those who desire to see perfected a Citizen Army able to perform whatever duty may be thrust upon it."
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Jan 14, 2022 11:46
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Ardent Communist posted:I remember reading a novel by some guy that was in the green berets or something, years ago, that mentioned the trait of commanders hanging out in helicopters and giving platoons orders. On the face of it, you think, well, that's great, they can see everything and order them around easy as maps, but the guy mentioned (especially in Vietnam) that you can't really feel the weight of fire, can't really be aware of the casualties and the morale at the moment, so in fact you're giving out orders that are out of date, or worse, not possible, to soldiers that are in danger, while you just see them as ants.
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Jan 14, 2022 11:48
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if those numbers in the pages are right (>1k VC dead, 140 US dead + 560 US wounded) it was brutal for the vietcong
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Jan 14, 2022 12:06
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An interesting supplemental thing I’ve found on Vietnam is the Senate’s Committee of Foreign relation’s hearing of journalist Harrison Salisbury’s trip to North Vietnam. Here’s the link to the document: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-90shrg74687/pdf/CHRG-90shrg74687.pdf A few interesting excerpts. The American bombing campaign would sometimes knock out railroads, and apparently the solution was to unload the train’s cargo on a brigade of bicycles (around 600 pounds worth of material per bike) and wheel them down the line until they could pack everything into a new train. Just incredible.   Here is the chairman of the committee being the most blisteringly stupid rear end in a top hat I have ever witnessed lol 
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Jan 14, 2022 13:02
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Doctor Jeep posted:if those numbers in the pages are right (>1k VC dead, 140 US dead + 560 US wounded) it was brutal for the vietcong well yeah they lost at least half a million troops (and probably 3-5x that civilians) over the course of the war, it was incredibly, ridiculously costly for the Vietnamese in terms of life. these passages make me think that if the us command had been even 30% competent it would have been way, way worse
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Jan 14, 2022 14:37
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Ardent Communist posted:Would this be a good place to read and discuss military tactics and strategy? I've always been interested in this kind of stuff. Absolutely, go for it. It's already become a Vietnam War thread half the time given what gradenko's posting, so I think the scope might as well broaden to think about military stuff in general. Doctor Jeep posted:if those numbers in the pages are right (>1k VC dead, 140 US dead + 560 US wounded) it was brutal for the vietcong The Viet Cong/NVA usually took higher casualties than US forces in combat, but they had the national spirit and motivation to sustain those kinds of casualties and the US didn't. It's also important to note that those US wounded numbers are if anything more important than the dead: a dead soldier is bad press and is devastating for the people who loved them, but is relatively easier to deal with for the military logistically, whereas a wounded soldier demands constant expenditure of resources for evacuation, treatment, rehabilitation, etc., and then in the case of the US during the Vietnam War a wounded soldier also ends up back home with a permanent wound as a constant reminder to them and to everyone they interact with that the war is still going on and the US is not winning.
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Jan 14, 2022 15:14
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yeah sorry I don't mean to dominate / derail the thread I just thought all this stuff about how much the US military is a fuckup is germane
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Jan 14, 2022 15:39
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gradenko_2000 posted:yeah sorry I don't mean to dominate / derail the thread I just thought all this stuff about how much the US military is a fuckup is germane don't sweat it, it's extremely relevant
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Jan 14, 2022 15:41
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gradenko_2000 posted:yeah sorry I don't mean to dominate / derail the thread I just thought all this stuff about how much the US military is a fuckup is germane no, i'm definitely not wanting you to stop posting, it just inspired me to talk about this other thing since i think it's interesting. but feel free to post more, it is germane.
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Jan 14, 2022 15:45
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The Vietnam War is a just an example, but it shows that the defects in the US military that existed in the 1970s are likely even worse. The US didn’t have a response, even with its material superiority, to an enemy that genuinely wanted to fight. (Iraq 1/2 and Libya were pretty much just air shows in comparison.)
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Jan 14, 2022 15:55
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and even Iraq 2 went so poorly it led to ISIS
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Jan 14, 2022 16:42
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It really makes me wonder how the US would have performed in NATO vs Warsaw Pact war (before it went nuclear and ended everything) like on the one hand that's the war they were training for and building all their equipment to fight. But on the other the assumption that the Soviets would only come through the Fulda Gap, the noisy obvious and expected place for them to storm through seems like we might have been in for a rude awakening (of course till the nukes fly)
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Jan 14, 2022 17:00
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Ardennes posted:, even with its material superiority, to an enemy that genuinely wanted to fight. it’s probably a mistake to think this. Both in Vietnam and the more recent gulf conflicts. a more accurate assessment is the US doesn’t have a response to an enemy willing to lose fights for extended period of time.
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Jan 14, 2022 17:09
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KomradeX posted:It really makes me wonder how the US would have performed in NATO vs Warsaw Pact war (before it went nuclear and ended everything) like on the one hand that's the war they were training for and building all their equipment to fight. But on the other the assumption that the Soviets would only come through the Fulda Gap, the noisy obvious and expected place for them to storm through seems like we might have been in for a rude awakening (of course till the nukes fly) It would have probably still been a grisly fight, at that point NATO still had enough numbers to seriously disrupt any offensive. However, pretty much all Soviet planning was reactive in anticipation of a NATO first strike. Maybe the Warsaw Pact could have pushed through sheer weight if of numbers but with heavy causalities. —— I would say if anything it was the Persian Gulf conflict in its own way more disastrous since it gave such (undeserved) confidence in Western capabilities that since that point Western militaries quite literally rested on their laurels. Bar Ran Dun posted:it’s probably a mistake to think this. Both in Vietnam and the more recent gulf conflicts. A population that wants to fight off an invader will accept loses for an extended period of time. In the case of Afghanistan slowly but surely the population turned against us with relatively minimal violence because we we had already threw up our hands. During Iraq 1/2 and Libya both government had minimal levels of support, so we could utilize air power without having to “worry” about the ground conflict except for a few cases. How would have Iraq gone if every town in Iraq had been a Fallujah? Ardennes has issued a correction as of 17:27 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 17:14
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vyelkin posted:Absolutely, go for it. It's already become a Vietnam War thread half the time given what gradenko's posting, so I think the scope might as well broaden to think about military stuff in general. We might as well change the title here to something more generally military like "Jane's Milsurp" or something along those lines. At least it will stop the smartasses from making the same joke replying to the OP every time.
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Jan 14, 2022 17:38
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my impression of the whole Fulda Gap thing was that NATO ground forces were always weaker than the nominal/predicted Warsaw Pact offensive force, and that they were designed to be deliberately be like this, such that they'd be overrun, which justifies the use of tactical nuclear weapons to stop the Russian tanks, but in the knowledge that use of tactical nukes would develop into escalations that go all the way up to MAD, and that the Soviets knew this, and it turns into a version of interlocking MAD all by itself: if you cross into West Germany, you will beat us, then we will nuke you, and you will nuke us back, and the world ends but that only works if you manage to thread the needle of maintaining an army in Germany that's strong enough that it looks like you're going to resist and defend, but not so strong that they could beat a Soviet offensive in a stand-up conventional fight
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Jan 14, 2022 17:51
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Ardennes posted:It would have probably still been a grisly fight, at that point NATO still had enough numbers to seriously disrupt any offensive. However, pretty much all Soviet planning was reactive in anticipation of a NATO first strike. To build off your point about the Gulf War, I remember how many friendly fire incidents there was of the A-10 just demolishing American forces, and can only imagine how much of a mess that would be over Germany. The US keeps getting these hints at how dysfunctional the military is and just keeps ignoring it, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the Bosnian wars, and The War on Terror (let alone how bad NATO performed in the Balkans and how Libya showed that the US is NATO cause Europe couldn't fight a war for two weeks. Of course assuming that wasn't the UK & France being full of poo poo to give the US an excuse to enter the war), which good let the rot of the empire destroy it.
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Jan 14, 2022 17:53
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Ardennes posted:The Vietnam War is a just an example, but it shows that the defects in the US military that existed in the 1970s are likely even worse. The US didn’t have a response, even with its material superiority, to an enemy that genuinely wanted to fight. It's not like the US military isn't learning any lessons from all of its failures, it's just coming up with all the wrong solutions. We tried doing all sorts of counter-insurgency methods in Iraq & Afghanistan only for them to ultimately fail for the same reasons we failed in Vietnam. You can engage the people and try to resolve their grievances, but if you are not the real political power in the region then you will lose out in the end. Insurgents will always have a presence in the countryside. They will always be there after you've retreated back to base camp - forming a state in parallel that can actually serve peoples' needs while you twiddle your thumbs waiting for the next deployment or enemy attack. For the US military to be a real political player in foreign countries, it would take an overwhelming scale of occupational force. You'd need so many soldiers deployed that they're practically a political party in their own right. So that's materially infeasible right off the bat. It's just never going to happen. On top of that, the people we pick to be the political power in the occupied country are notoriously corrupt, stupidly reactionary, only interested in their own survival. These are the natural characteristics of a comprador. We impose a political order that has no legitimacy to the locals, and that allows insurgents to constantly come in and eat our lunch.
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Jan 14, 2022 17:56
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vyelkin posted:It's also important to note that those US wounded numbers are if anything more important than the dead: a dead soldier is bad press and is devastating for the people who loved them, but is relatively easier to deal with for the military logistically, whereas a wounded soldier demands constant expenditure of resources for evacuation, treatment, rehabilitation, etc., and then in the case of the US during the Vietnam War a wounded soldier also ends up back home with a permanent wound as a constant reminder to them and to everyone they interact with that the war is still going on and the US is not winning. Also you can load a dead soldier’s chest cavity up with heroin an ship it home for a tidy profit. By the end of the war at least half of the soldiers were opium users if not full addicts. If you think that the deep state’s access to the smack trade wasn’t big factors in going into Vietnam and Afghanistan, I have an F-35 to sell you.
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Jan 14, 2022 17:57
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KomradeX posted:It really makes me wonder how the US would have performed in NATO vs Warsaw Pact war (before it went nuclear and ended everything) like on the one hand that's the war they were training for and building all their equipment to fight. But on the other the assumption that the Soviets would only come through the Fulda Gap, the noisy obvious and expected place for them to storm through seems like we might have been in for a rude awakening (of course till the nukes fly) The Fulda Gap was the right place to anticipate confrontation with the Warsaw Pact for all sorts of geographical reasons. There's no way for instance that anybody was going to be doing amphibious exercises in the Arctic or the Pacific, without even knowing who could win the naval war. Central Asia was a non-starter because the terrain is too difficult for large scale operations. The rest of the "Iron curtain" in Europe wouldn't work for the same reasons. The relatively flat terrain of Northern Germany was the only way to go for a big conventional war.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:04
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Ardennes posted:During Iraq 1/2 and Libya both government had minimal levels of support, so we could utilize air power without having to “worry” about the ground conflict except for a few cases. How would have Iraq gone if every town in Iraq had been a Fallujah? you are conflating willingness of soldiers to fight with another problem one more rooted in the abstract and in our ideology. and that’s the case even in Vietnam and Tet is a good example of it. it’s easier to see the problem in Vietnam so I’m going to use that example. we were giving a poo poo about metrics (to the point of manipulating those metrics) and we decided from metrics. we weren’t giving a poo poo about the opponent’s telos for the war or thinking critically about our own. it is to make the same error to conflate this with willingness to fight.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:07
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:It's not like the US military isn't learning any lessons from all of its failures, it's just coming up with all the wrong solutions. We tried doing all sorts of counter-insurgency methods in Iraq & Afghanistan only for them to ultimately fail for the same reasons we failed in Vietnam. You can engage the people and try to resolve their grievances, but if you are not the real political power in the region then you will lose out in the end. Insurgents will always have a presence in the countryside. They will always be there after you've retreated back to base camp - forming a state in parallel that can actually serve peoples' needs while you twiddle your thumbs waiting for the next deployment or enemy attack. I think a lot of this boils down to the persistent end of history belief that inside every foreigner is an American waiting to get out. American occupying forces think occupation is going to be easier than it is because everybody in the occupied country will obviously side with the land of liberty and freedom, and so they think they can half-rear end the job because they'll have a certain level of automatic buy-in from the occupied population just for being American. And the process of trying to build half-assed American institutions is rife for grift and corruption, contracting out to corporate friends of the occupation leaders and giving stacks of cash to whoever talks most eloquently about the importance of building a McDonald's at the Kabul airport.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:10
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vyelkin posted:I think a lot of this boils down to the persistent end of history belief that inside every foreigner is an American waiting to get out. American occupying forces think occupation is going to be easier than it is because everybody in the occupied country will obviously side with the land of liberty and freedom, and so they think they can half-rear end the job because they'll have a certain level of automatic buy-in from the occupied population just for being American. And the process of trying to build half-assed American institutions is rife for grift and corruption, contracting out to corporate friends of the occupation leaders and giving stacks of cash to whoever talks most eloquently about the importance of building a McDonald's at the Kabul airport. Those delusions weren't really at play in Vietnam though. The US military is just fundamentally not capable of fighting a political conflict because it's institutionally "depoliticized" at the national level. It's an organization designed to defeat foreign armies whenever the government tells them to and that's it. There's no room for the USM to have a political doctrine because that leaves the door open for the military to challenge civilian authority.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:14
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Bar Ran Dun posted:you are conflating willingness of soldiers to fight with another problem one more rooted in the abstract and in our ideology. and that’s the case even in Vietnam and Tet is a good example of it. why are you using “we” here, you and I have nothing to do with the machinations of the imperial war machine
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Jan 14, 2022 18:31
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Those delusions weren't really at play in Vietnam though. The US military is just fundamentally not capable of fighting a political conflict because it's institutionally "depoliticized" at the national level. It's an organization designed to defeat foreign armies whenever the government tells them to and that's it. There's no room for the USM to have a political doctrine because that leaves the door open for the military to challenge civilian authority. I think there was still some of it at play in Vietnam. The US seemed unable to see just how corrupt and fragile South Vietnam really was, probably for all the same reasons that gradenko's source lays out for why they also couldn't see how the war effort was failing. Instead they operated on a diet of hope and optimism that obviously the capitalist democracy (such as it was) would win out if they could just outlast the communists thanks to US support. End of history as a mode of thought didn't emerge fully formed in the 90s, though Fukuyama gave it the canonical name. It was really the US's way of thinking throughout the Cold War, and the way that conflict concluded just made them certain that they had been right all along. The doctrine of containment as a way of winning the Cold War was essentially an end of history strategy revolving around the ideological certainty that capitalism was so obviously superior that it would eventually win if they could just keep the communists from conquering the world in the meantime, and I would say that that exact idea motivated US strategic thinking in Vietnam and, adapted to new ideological threats but based on the same fundamental principle, again in Afghanistan and Iraq in the War on Terror era.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:38
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:It's not like the US military isn't learning any lessons from all of its failures, it's just coming up with all the wrong solutions. We tried doing all sorts of counter-insurgency methods in Iraq & Afghanistan only for them to ultimately fail for the same reasons we failed in Vietnam. You can engage the people and try to resolve their grievances, but if you are not the real political power in the region then you will lose out in the end. Insurgents will always have a presence in the countryside. They will always be there after you've retreated back to base camp - forming a state in parallel that can actually serve peoples' needs while you twiddle your thumbs waiting for the next deployment or enemy attack. We know something is wrong, but I wouldn’t say we are learning lessons. “Engaging” a population doesn’t work when they have every reason to want you out of their country, and otherwise the only other solution is simply to have a unsustainably large occupation force. Also, it makes sense, considering how the US is run, that out puppets would be corrupt, unpopular, and incompetent. Ultimately, the Taliban/Saddam/Gadiffi were all low hanging fruit but the rest of the world has already adapted to our strategy. Bar Ran Dun posted:you are conflating willingness of soldiers to fight with another problem one more rooted in the abstract and in our ideology. and that’s the case even in Vietnam and Tet is a good example of it. I was talking about the Vietnamese people as a whole willingness to fight, this in turn would impact US soldiers since it is obvious that their enemy wouldn’t give up. In Iraq, only portions of Anbar province showed any real resistance and a lot of that simply had to do with Saddam has his rule. The population as a whole generally didn’t care, but if they did, we will be in the same so to situation as Vietnam (including an obsession with metrics). Ardennes has issued a correction as of 19:53 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 19:40
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Ardennes posted:We know something is wrong, but I wouldn’t say we are learning lessons. “Engaging” a population doesn’t work when they have every reason to want you out of their country, and otherwise the only other solution is simply to have a unsustainably large occupation force. Also, it makes sense, considering how the US is run, that out puppets would be corrupt, unpopular, and incompetent. Ultimately, the Taliban/Saddam/Gadiffi were all low hanging fruit but the rest of the world has already adapted to our strategy. are you using “our” here because you’re actively involved in the poo poo the empire does?
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Jan 14, 2022 19:47
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Centrist Committee posted:are you using “our” here because you’re actively involved in the poo poo the empire does? I am probably the farthest from it, but “our” refers to the United States. Also, “we” and “our” are grammatically correct in those two instances. Ardennes has issued a correction as of 19:57 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 19:55
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