CaptainACAB posted:

Nah that's still the police.

Bar Ran Dun posted:

ILWU literally won that fight to exist.

https://www.ilwu.org/honoring-bloody-thursday-in-uncertain-times/

CaptainACAB posted:

and who was it that killed them, with impunity, because their union is so strong they can literally get away with murder?

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

They're defending the airspace so the superbowl can't be turned into another 9/11 lmao

Palladium posted:

it will be a 9/11 if they used the F-35

quote:

SUNDAY, 27 JUNE 1971

GUEST: Colonel David H. Hackworth, U.S. Army

INTERVIEWED BY: Howard Tuckner, ABC News Saigon Correspondent

MR. TUCKNER: You have served in Korea, you have served in Vietnam for a long time, you have served back at the Pentagon. How do you rate the training of U.S. Army troops who came to Vietnam?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: I think in the main the training for Vietnam from the standpoint of the individual soldier, the young officer, and even the battalion, brigade, and division staff officers and senior commanders has been totally inadequate.

I think that our training was geared to the individual replacement system of World War II. The curriculum was wrong, the quality of the instructors and the leaders was—in my judgment we didn’t have the type people that should have been there. The commanders there should have been—the battalion commanders should have commanded battalions in Vietnam. The company commanders should have commanded companies, here, and leaders should have been the finest leaders our country could have mustered to provide the young soldiers with the type training, the realistic training that they needed to confront a guerrilla enemy in Vietnam.

And I’d like to just make the point that when my well-trained, STRAC, one of the finest units in the U.S. Army arrived in Vietnam in June and July of 1965, the mistakes they made were criminal. The number of dead that they have killed among themselves, men that were shot by their comrades, artillery that had fallen on them. Great mistakes were made because of improper training, being not prepared for the war, even though we had from 1953 to 1965 to prepare for the war.

MR. TUCKNER: In your view did poor training lead to higher casualties in Vietnam?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: I am convinced of it. I think that our casualties were at least thirty percent higher because of—or even higher than that, but I’d say, just safely, thirty percent higher because of troops that were not properly trained.

I participated in a study group in the Pentagon in ’67 and early ’68 which considered U.S. casualties caused by friendly fires and the group was composed of highly experienced personnel that had served in Vietnam and it was our conclusion that fifteen to twenty percent of the casualties caused in Vietnam were the result of friendly fire—one man shooting another man; artillery, friendly artillery firing on a friendly element; friendly helicopters firing on a friendly unit; tac air striking a friendly unit; and I could count you, in my own case, countless personal examples. For example, during the battle of Dak To, June the seventeenth, a rocket ship came into my A Company’s position by mistake and released its rockets right on top of the company killing the executive officer and wounding twenty-nine other troopers.

I can recall in September of 1965 as my battalion was deployed, artillery was fired in the wrong place killing seven men in one of my platoons.

MR. TUCKNER: Can it be said that the generals in the U.S. Army, many of them, did not really adjust to the tactics of this war?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: I think the average general that came to Vietnam did not have a good concept, good appreciation of the nature of guerrilla warfare. In most cases because of their lack of even reading in depth about guerrilla warfare, they were not prepared for the war and they had to fall back on Korea and World War II and they used the thought process and the techniques that worked successfully there, moving in large formations, making battalion and brigade airmobile assaults on a small LZ and having everything very tidy, artillery in position and fighting much as we did on the plains of Europe.

I don’t feel that too many division commanders, or even separate brigade commanders, really understood the name of the game.

MR. TUCKNER: Did this mean more U.S. casualties, this misunderstanding of the name of the game, as you put it?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think probably one of the most classic examples is Hamburger Hill. Here was a hill that had to be taken. Hundreds and hundreds of casualties occurred taking this hill. They had the hill for a few days, the Americans did, and pulled off. So what was the point of taking the hill? Why not stand back if the enemy is on it and bomb, but why use infantry to take the hill?

MR. TUCKNER: Did the upper echelon of the Army really ever become changed on this war? Did they learn from their mistakes?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: I don’t think so. I don’t think that the top level ever developed a realistic strategic plan nor did they ever have tactics to support that strategic plan.

MR. TUCKNER: Why?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: I think that the top managers of the Army—and there is a big difference between a leader, a combat leader and a manager, the top managers were so involved in systems analysis, in the normal bureaucracy of it all that they were fighting from day to day just to move the paper that crossed their desk and they couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

In February when we went into Laos, we went into Laos conventionally. The idea was to block the enemy’s supply routes. So we dropped in there. We paid a horrible—the Vietnamese paid a horrible price. Tremendous mistakes were made. Again, conventional thinking. Conventional thinking put us in that operation rather than having a light, mobile guerrilla force, but a guerrilla force that belonged to the Government of Vietnam, or the American Army operating in there like guerrillas. It takes a thief to catch a thief. What we need is a thief. We don’t need a conventionally trained FBI agent dashing through the woods with a large force behind him.

We need small people, well trained, highly motivated, and this is what we have not had, because what we have now among the Army is a bunch of shallow dilettantes who run from pillar to post trying to punch their card, serving minimum time at company level because the exposure—you are very close to the heat of the furnace there, meaning you can get in trouble easily.

MR. TUCKNER: Have you found that many other U.S. Army officers who have been here in Vietnam feel the way you do?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: Most of my young friends—that would be captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels—who have a considerable amount of experience in Vietnam, feel as I do. A number of very highly qualified full colonels whom I know feel as I do, and I suppose there are a few generals who feel as I do, but in the main this group unfortunately—I suppose it is because of the nature of the beast—is not highly vocal regarding their views because if one would become highly vocal you might become a Billy Mitchell. It might be the end of your career.

MR. TUCKNER: Hasn’t this silence meant that some who have died in this war might have been saved?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: That is right, and that is why perhaps we who have not been vocal should be charged for just criminal neglect, because it is our obligation, it is our responsibility, not only to train our soldiers well, to lead our soldiers well, but to make sure that there are no mistakes made, that they are protected as well as possible from mistakes and error and once you make mistakes they must be surfaced, critiqued, identified, and remedial action taken.

MR. TUCKNER: Colonel, I understand that because of the fact that you are considered one of the best infantry officers in the Army you have been asked a number of times to go to the War College, which is preparation for becoming general one day.

COLONEL HACKWORTH: Yes, I have been asked to go to War College for three years straight, and my reason for refusing is that I just simply felt that we were on the battlefield, we were engaged in a critical battle, and I didn’t need to go to school at the time to learn anything. I was learning it on the battlefield and I was transferring the skills that I had to my men and probably saving lives.

I can recall in November of 1969 a major general here in Vietnam told me that, when I asked him, should I extend again, he said, “Hack, get out. The war for the U.S. Army is over with in Vietnam/7

He said, “You’e got all the right tickets and all the right credentials. Go on to War College now and prepare yourself for bigger things.”

MR. TUCKNER: Colonel, we have heard a lot about body count in this war. What about it?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: Well, it has been used as a rule of measurement of success. The body count has cost us a lot. It has cost us unnecessary casualties because always in the chain of command one commander is pressuring the other commander for what is the success, what is the body count and it ends up you are calling the platoon leader, “How many have you killed?”

The platoon leader is in a firefight and he hasn’t a clue of how many he has killed, but he may have to stop the fight. He may have to expose a few soldiers to go out and count the bodies during the fight. He may lose the momentum of the attack to stay on the enemy and pursue him while he is counting bodies. He may have to squat on the enemy and count the bodies.

It has also really weakened the moral fiber of the officer corps because it has taught them to lie; it has taught them to exaggerate because, again, it is a form of success. It is “How many touchdowns do you have? What is the final score of the game?” And the body count has been greatly exaggerated as a result of this and I would say it has been exaggerated to the tune of twenty to twenty-five percent.

MR. TUCKNER: Do you know of any example specifically where you were involved in trying to substantiate body count that you didn’t think was accurate?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: Yes. I could give several good examples. One which comes to mind is a battle which was fought with a great number of friendly maneuver elements, found—reputedly found—an enemy force; we encircled the enemy force. All night long artillery, rockets, fighter bombers were placed on the enemy for us, and came the dawn when we swept the enemy positions there was a total of enemy dead on the battlefield of not more than twenty.

When I crossed over to the other side of the canal that we were fighting on to talk to the commander of the other battalion which was the other half of the encirclement force, the brigade commander came in and started talking about such a brilliant victory we had and that we killed something like two hundred seventy-five or two hundred eighty enemy dead, and this was a classic battle. It illustrated the techniques of mobile warfare, how we could drop on an enemy force, find them, fix them, surround them, and then destroy them, and I pointed out to the brigade commander, the acting brigade commander, I should say, that there wasn’t that many dead on the battlefield. We had only killed, I would say, no more than twelve or fifteen and the colonel on the other side had told me he had six or seven, so there couldn’t have been twenty or twenty-two or so and I was told there were two hundred eighty killed. II

This is what had been reported to Division. I said, “Well, it is not right. We only had—This battalion is reported to have a strength of three hundred and if we killed two hundred eighty that would leave less than twenty able-bodied men, able to remove the bodies from the battlefield,” which is a normal VC technique, which was his excuse for why the bodies weren’t on the battlefield.

He said, “Well, that night the survivors carried them off.”

I said, “Look, we had the enemy completely surrounded; there was no corridor in which he could escape. If there were a small path that he could have gained escape through our lines that would have meant that every survivor would have had to carry seven or eight bodies plus all their individual weapons.” I think there were five total individual weapons found on the battlefield, and this complete battle was a total lie in my judgment.

I was called in by the commander at the time to endorse his after-action report, this report which had all of these bodies in it, and great other irregularities and falsehood, I think designed to make this individual look like Rommel or look like some great tactician and very, very effective combat leader. And I refused to do it. And he and I had somewhat of a major confrontation.

Also during this time I was asked to sign a statement, a narrative statement to support an award for the Distinguished Service Cross for this individual who didn’t even get out of his helicopter during the “battle,” and I refused to do that.

It was insinuated if I would sign one or two of these documents that I would be—my unit would be considered, possibly, for a unit citation as a result of this action, which I, of course, refused to go along with.

MR. TUCKNER: Did you sign it?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: Absolutely not.

MR. TUCKNER: When leading U.S. government officials, people like former Secretary of Defense McNamara, come to Vietnam for a visit, do they get the clear, straight picture?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: I think what we do for a presentation for a senior official such as Mr. McNamara is put on a razzle-dazzle briefing, complete with charts and extremely well rehearsed briefing officers, and we try to put our best foot forward to try to look as good as possible. Perhaps a scenario would go kind of like this:

After the briefing Mr. McNamara turned to General Wheeler, who was with him, or to General Westmoreland, who I would think accompanied him, and said, “What do you think about that?” And General Wheeler said, “Great battle! We are knockin’ ’em dead.” And General Westmoreland would have said, “We really got ’em that time! This is a typical action in Vietnam of your U.S. modern Army in action! We have really nailed them and that is the way we are nailing them and that is why we are winning this war. Just give us a few more troops, a few more resources, and we will have ’em on the run. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

He didn’t say the VC was holding the candle but he said the end is in sight.

So as a consequence, Mr. McNamara, believing this, perhaps—because it looked real enough to believe—went back and he is sitting—again part of the scenario with the President, and Mr. Johnson says, “How’s it going in Vietnam?” and McNamara says, “We are winning.”

MR. TUCKNER: Colonel, in 1968 you were so highly thought of that you were selected from a group of a few officers to contribute to a report to General Westmoreland. What did you say in that report?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: Well, my comments were very exciting insofar as the Army staff was concerned. I felt they were truthful and I said that in my judgment at the time this paper was written in 1968, the U.S. Army had badly botched the war in Vietnam and I had considered from a tactical standpoint we had lost the war.

And now my experience three years later only confirms those comments to General Westmoreland.

MR. TUCKNER: What’s happened since then? Has there been any change? Have your comments helped anything?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: No, I don’t think so. I said that I felt there have been no viable reforms. I felt that the corruption that exists in Vietnam, the graft, the failure to produce continues to exist. I felt that the military had not established any strategic goals, nor had there been any tactical concept developed to support the strategic goals which were not developed and announced.

I felt that we sent an Army to Vietnam that was not prepared to fight the war. We sent an Army that was top-heavy in administrators and logisticians and bloody thin on fighters, not trained for the war. I felt that we didn’t understand the nature of the war in the military. I felt that just everything we had done in Vietnam had been done wrong.

MR. TUCKNER: Do you think it is possible, Colonel, that past United States Presidents who have been involved during the Vietnam War, the present Administration, do you think it is possible they may feel they are getting the straight truth, but that it might not be?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: Well, my thing is infantry, which I am very familiar with, and I don’t know what happens at the higher echelons. I know the nature of the beast in the military is to sanitize a report to look good. I have seen what has happened at brigade level where the whole situation has been distorted.

I think it is highly probable that all of these beautiful briefings and excellent reports were so production-line Hollywoodized that by the time they got to the President and they got to the people who were making decisions, they didn’t have the real facts; they didn’t understand what was happening.

MR. TUCKNER: Colonel, what do you think of the Vietnamization program? Is it viable now?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: Well, my view of Vietnamization is, it is a nice word. I think that it has been glamorized; I think that it has been Madison Avenued; I think that it is perhaps a PR’s dream. It is a public-relations gimmick.

I have been with the Vietnamese a long time and I have seen great improvements, significant improvement, but I haven’t seen the improvements that I read about in many papers, and different magazines, and I hear leading statesmen of our nation say. I don’t think the Vietnamese are that good. I don’t think the whole Vietnamization thing is real.

MR. TUCKNER: If the enemy chose to react and if American troops were not here, what do you think would happen to the Vietnamese Army?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: I think if the enemy had the capability of launching a concerted attack I would think we would find ourselves in a situation as we were in in ’63, ’64, and early ’65, really, because of the American involvement here, was to save the shattered Vietnamese Army. We were losing on the average of, as I recall, almost a battalion of Vietnamese a week in ’65 and I think we would find the same situation developing. If the North Vietnamese, who I feel have the capability—they certainly proved they were pretty dangerous and tough up in Laos—and we find that we recently made a foray into Cambodia, and the enemy is much harder in Cambodia. Last April the targets we were striking along my zone in Cambodia were like taking candy from a baby. Now you go to Cambodia and you find the enemy with his stuff together. He is tough; he is moving back into the areas we used to raid with ease. I think we are going to find it more and more difficult of making these raids into Cambodia.

MR. TUCKNER: Do you think that the programs that the U.S. military and perhaps the U.S. mission had here did not fit the situation for Vietnamization?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: Exactly. We gave them a sheet of music designed by the military and that is what they had to dance by, and the whole organization of the Vietnamese Army in my judgment has been wrong; it has not been tailored or designed to fight the guerrilla in this type of warfare and we have given them a lot of sophisticated equipment, helicopters, sensor devices, radars, complicated vehicles, other complicated equipment that the Vietnamese are just incapable of using, incapable of maintaining, so we have given them now all kinds of sophisticated junk and asked them to use this. Vietnamization now will suddenly win the war because the Vietnamese have helicopters. We will suddenly win the war because the Vietnamese have the M-16 rifle, but it takes a lot more than a piece of equipment or a complicated piece of equipment such as radar and sensors and so on for them to win the war.

Instead of saying, “What you need is well-trained soldiers, what you need is highly motivated soldiers, what you need is soldiers who are similar to the Viet Cong soldiers who are fighting for an ideal, who are fighting for something—similar to Christianity; who are fighting for a cause, a crusade, not fighting to get a Honda or get a new watch or get a portable radio or to have a nice house, but fighting for a cause, and this is what has not been inculcated in the whole army of Vietnam.

MR. TUCKNER: Colonel, do you feel it is possible you have become too emotionally involved in Vietnam?

COLONEL HACKWORTH: I have become emotionally involved in Vietnam. One couldn’t have spent the number of years I have spent in Vietnam without becoming emotionally involved. One couldn’t see the number of young studs die or be terribly wounded without becoming emotionally involved.

I just have seen the American nation spend so much of its wonderful, great young men in this country. I have seen our national wealth being drained away. I see the nation being split apart and almost being split asunder because of this war, and I am wondering to what end it is all going to lead to.

quote:

The scuttlebutt is that a lot of weapon systems across the fleet are non-operational at this point due to how much maintenance has been our sourced, I would believe.

skooma512 posted:

Brand new plane that could support every social program in the US for years for the cost of just one, is already rusting.

The fighter we designed specifically to operate in maritime environments rusts faster than a fishing boat.

Retromancer posted:

I saw someone on TikTok talking about using A-10s and AC-130s in a potential conflict in Ukraine, and it just struck home how skewed American's vision of war is by not having a near peer conflict in 70+ years. using an A-10 or AC130 in any conflict zone where you haven't established complete air superiority is just setting millions of dollars on fire, and even if you do have air superiority they're sitting ducks for small anti aircraft weapons. Just pure fetishizing of military tech they know about from COD games.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

The A-10 is meant for low altitude ground support, so if you can clear an area of AA defenses they'll be good to go. An AC-130 however would be totally smoked by every mid-high altitude SAM in the region.

Wheeee posted:

it’s better than that: what’s rusting is the iron in the special secret stealth coating which needs to be stripped and re-applied as maintenance by design

Retromancer posted:

I saw someone on TikTok talking about using A-10s and AC-130s in a potential conflict in Ukraine, and it just struck home how skewed American's vision of war is by not having a near peer conflict in 70+ years. using an A-10 or AC130 in any conflict zone where you haven't established complete air superiority is just setting millions of dollars on fire, and even if you do have air superiority they're sitting ducks for small anti aircraft weapons. Just pure fetishizing of military tech they know about from COD games.

skooma512 posted:

This will be a great thing to worry about in wartime conditions. Airworthy planes have to stay in the hanger because they used an iron-based compound on a carrier based aircraft and they need to be repainted on top of keeping up with other maintenance and repairing battle damage.

Even the USAF themselves expected their A-10 force to be attrited to nothing within a couple weeks should the Soviets have come through the Fulda Gap. Especially since the Soviets/Russia invested heavily in anti-air platforms.

skooma512 posted:

Even the USAF themselves expected their A-10 force to be attrited to nothing within a couple weeks should the Soviets have come through the Fulda Gap. Especially since the Soviets/Russia invested heavily in anti-air platforms.

Frosted Flake posted:

Think of the predicsment of NATO advisors - most of us only had preliminary instruction in conventional war, all of our operational experience is unconventional, and until 2014 I can’t remember any serious exercises or supplemental training on conventional war. As opposed to dozens of hours on room clearing and IEDs.

It’s an interesting problem that’s come up in Canadian exercises - we don’t have Victory Disease, we have Victory Amnesia. All of the knowledge exists, but it’s held at The Schools, or by senior officers who learn it for their career courses and for their wargames and table exercises. There’s cursory knowledge - for the Artillery Forward Observer Detachment course you have to call out targets from the handbook like “1 BMP and 8 dismounts in the open” “1 tank platoon, 3 vehicles, T-72”, whatever, but it was pretty clear that you were ticking a box from an outdated manual. Exercises might have intelligence briefings that say there’s an air threat, but nobody is going to bomb our positions, at most the Umpires will tell our staff X% of us are dead. So if we disperse, it’s to game the Umpires, and not because it’s something that feels “real”, if you know what I mean.

The reason is really simple- say I’m teaching Arty DP1, the basic Artillery qualification. I have the Gun Commander’s Handbook which lays out procedures for things like anti-tank drill and entrenchment. Okay, anti-tank drill is 8 hours of instruction, we haven’t been issued any 105mm HEAT, I’ve only seen those shells in the slides, lectures and tests from my courses. I don’t even know the NSNs to order them from Ammo, and none have been allocated to the course. So we either book a range with Centurion hulks, which doesn’t require quickly traversing the gun against moving targets, no risk of overrun, and firing HE ammo, not HEAT, or we spend an hour reading from the handbook to bored candidates. Which do you think the School snd Course O sign off on, since the course is destined for Afghanistan? Those are 8 hours they could be doing dismounted IED searches, “real” training that will save lives.

Digging in a howitzer by hand takes 12 hours for the gun, another 2 for crew fighting positions, another 6 to dig in the gun tractor (truck), 2 more to link those with communication trenches, minimum 2 hours to camouflage. That’s 3 days of the course. Now, the pamphlet says we’re supposed to call on engineering support so they can do this quickly and dig in deeper. Cool, but the Engineering School is running IED courses and building FOBs with hescos, they aren’t going to send some of their guys with a backhoe to do some obsolete Cold War poo poo like dig in an artillery battery. We either “waste” 3+ days of instruction or read from the handbook for an hour and blow up the diagrams onto handouts or PowerPoints.

and on an on for everything like that. The Command Post Operations handbook says how to set up fireplans so our flashes can’t be spotted or to overwhelm enemy counter-battery radars, alright, so let’s practice that once a year. Roving Gun? Check. Plotting data from firing batteries into “silent” ones so their position is concealed the from enemy until the big day? Check.

Direct fire? Check. We missed the BTR-70 cutout target by dozens of metres, when it was static and skylined, good thing it couldn’t shoot back against our undispersed, uncamouflaged, unentrenched positions because I have a hunch 14.5mm rounds would tear us up. Anyways, well done, battery passes annual qualifying shoot.

The handbook has elaborate procedures for Firing-By-Map, including using our own CB radars to plot our fall of shot, but firing unobserved in Afghanistan ranges from no-no to warcrime, so that’s a command post exercise only. We run the radar course at the same time the Demonstration Battery is firing for other courses, so they’ve seen shells on their screens, and sent that to the CP, but they’re not “really” treating it like life or death.

We have signals guys come in and work with us on EW, we even send our Indoor Kids to learn how to run that into the CP, so enemy radars and signals are plotted, ours are disguised, we work with the Intel shop to determine what activity looks like an artillery position or headquarters, all that poo poo. We’re supposed to be an integrated Brigade-Level EW asset. Cool, well now Sgt so-and-so has this obscure course on his resume and in his qualifications can say “advises the CO on EW threats and procedures”. What’s he do in Afghanistan? Patrol like everybody else not on the gunline.

What about the Carl G’s we have as medium anti-tank weapons? Most people shoot them once in their preliminary training, do the loading and firing drills with dummy ammo annually to stay qualified. M72’s? Shoot them once in training before 2010, after that in the simulator. Pull open the dummy launcher to stay qualified. Javelins? Idk, never saw ours, pretty sure they’re in boxes in the ammo lockup. Eryx? Never saw it, read the pamphlet. The fancy automatic grenade launchers for battery defence? The pamphlet says the HEDP may damage IFVs or inconvenience MBTs, we just set them up for their thermal sights on sentry. Most of this stuff is not even loaded onto vehicles for exercises, let alone used. What’s the point? Taliban haven’t had tanks since 2001.

All of that to say, the institutional incentives were tilted heavily against doing any of this, so the Ukrainians are hosed because all they can learn from us is what’s in the manual.

I’ve mentioned it before but US troops literally have garbage strewn around their uncamouflaged, unentrenched positions for exactly this reason.

Maybe the OSINT guys should be looking at satellite photos of [i]NATO positions, because the contrast with the Russians is probably striking. They have to squint and guess at what’s going on in photos of the latter, it’s got to be clear as day for the former.

Danann posted:

crossposting from eurasia thread:

being good at fighting insurgencies means being bad at conventional fighting rip

KomradeX posted:

We keep losing to those insurgencies.

I get the feeling that even if by some insane feat, we were able to reform the ground forces to fight a peer or near peer enemy. Capital has caused so much rot that you'll sell end up with useless poo poo not working that can't be fixed cause everything was privatized.

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/us-forced-to-import-bullets-from-israel-as-troops-use-250000-for-every-rebel-killed-28580666.html posted:

US forced to import bullets from Israel as troops use 250,000 for every rebel killed.

As a result the US is having to import supplies from Israel.

Palladium posted:

And that was 2011

looking good for the troops and their wet dreams of owning russia

KomradeX posted:

We keep losing to those insurgencies.


I get the feeling that even if by some insane feat, we were able to reform the ground forces to fight a peer or near peer enemy. Capital has caused so much rot that you'll sell end up with useless poo poo not working that can't be fixed cause everything was privatized.

Rutibex posted:

250,000 bullets? you could just give every rebel enough money to retire instead of killing them

Frosted Flake posted:

Frosted Flake posted:

Funny you should mention that, x-posting myself from the Eurasia thread about that broke-brained thinking:

The real hilarious poo poo is proposals like using Iron Dome and CRAM so that enemy artillery can just be ignored. This came about because at a certain point they gave up on trying to find Taliban mortars so, much like covid, they looked for ways To Live With The Shelling. I read a bunch of Max Boot rear end papers about how because the CRAM radar can track and engage x shells a minute, as long as we had enough we’d be invincible. Even more after the hype for Iron Dome. Okay, so ignore for a minute it’s not 100% reliable or effective, then scale up for all the troops you’d need to protect in a conventional heavy NATO formation, scale up again for the size of the threat and the “plan” would cost…

Keep in mind Russian 122mm and 152mm shells cost between $200-400 CAD. I think a 122mm Grad rocket is fairly cheap but rockets aren’t my thing. I used to have exact prices of shells from their export catalogues but that I probably can’t shitpost.

So, we thumb through Publicly available NATO articles on contemporary Russian artillery doctrine, and we see the problem - that’s a lot of shells and rockets!

Unit cost for the land based Phalanx is ~$7M CAD, Iron Dome costs ~$63M CAD for a battery, per-interception cost is ~$190K per interception. Iron Dome needs to be reloaded after every 20 shots, which apparently takes a long time and is a source of embarrassment for the Israelis in the same way the Gulf War revealed Patriots take forever and a day to reload.

Without trying to crunch the numbers on the rate of fire of a gun artillery battery, a single Grad launcher has 40 tubes, so a battery of equivalent strength can quite literally just overwhelm any single Iron Dome Battery or CRAM, both would be dry while more than half the rounds were still in the air. That’s ignoring modernized launchers with more tubes, that some batteries have 6 launchers, and the Russians often fire by Battalion.

That’s not even getting into the Iron Dome or CRAM radars being able to track and engage that many targets, which I doubt and has never been established to match Israeli claims, and the rate of fire for the Grad being several times higher than Iron Done. Iron Dome would cost $3.8M CAD per 20 rockets fired at it.

Do you see what I mean? NATO has leaned so heavily on throwing money and technology at problems that we have papers being put out that propose spending millions of dollars to still get shelled, while claiming that constitutes invulnerability to the point where enemy shelling no longer has to be planned around. Just sign the country over to Rafael if that’s what you’re proposing because I gave up on trying to calculate costs for this post.

How did we get here? Because CRAM worked successfully on an extremely limited scale in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Iron Dome has also partially worked on an even more limited scale in Israel. Because people are unable to differentiate in their approach to Russia from that, it creates this broken thinking. It’s a sickness, really. Russia is just the GWOT but bigger, so we don’t need to change anything, just do more. This is weird Natsec Atlantic Council thinking because it doesn’t account for any military reality, only a change in setting.

It’s like - and I don’t know how to communicate this - these NATO hawks, at least the ones writing papers - literally can’t conceive of NATO troops being shelled. They know “NATO Must Confront Russia” but when they envision it, it’s no different from “ISAF Must Confront The Taliban” so they just transpose all of it.

They write papers on the Russian military, but none of their proposals suggest we change anything in response to that, if that makes sense. Like when Brown Moses counts Russian tanks in a Motor Rifle Regiment, I genuinely don’t think he sees them as something that threatens NATO. He sees targets for NATO airstrikes in the same way he counted tanks in Syria. It just means more sorties for F-35’s ,to fly unopposed, just like a massive Russian artillery park just means we “simply” need more Iron Domes.

So yeah, that’s a lot of words to say I’ve had to keep up with some of this stuff, and there’s this… gap? Maybe? Between evaluation and response, and I can see how it shapes the conversation, but I have no idea what the gently caress is going on in there. The Doctrine Papers don’t make sense, the Policy Papers don’t make sense, and whatever is causing that disconnect, where the first half is a reasonable evaluation of the situation and the second half is fantasyland poo poo, that is going to be a big problem because it shows that there’s this thing getting in the way of decision making.

Frosted Flake posted:

Funny you should mention that, x-posting myself from the Eurasia thread about that broke-brained thinking:

The real hilarious poo poo is proposals like using Iron Dome and CRAM so that enemy artillery can just be ignored. This came about because at a certain point they gave up on trying to find Taliban mortars so, much like covid, they looked for ways To Live With The Shelling. I read a bunch of Max Boot rear end papers about how because the CRAM radar can track and engage x shells a minute, as long as we had enough we’d be invincible. Even more after the hype for Iron Dome. Okay, so ignore for a minute it’s not 100% reliable or effective, then scale up for all the troops you’d need to protect in a conventional heavy NATO formation, scale up again for the size of the threat and the “plan” would cost…

Keep in mind Russian 122mm and 152mm shells cost between $200-400 CAD. I think a 122mm Grad rocket is fairly cheap but rockets aren’t my thing. I used to have exact prices of shells from their export catalogues but that I probably can’t shitpost.

So, we thumb through Publicly available NATO articles on contemporary Russian artillery doctrine, and we see the problem - that’s a lot of shells and rockets!

Unit cost for the land based Phalanx is ~$7M CAD, Iron Dome costs ~$63M CAD for a battery, per-interception cost is ~$190K per interception. Iron Dome needs to be reloaded after every 20 shots, which apparently takes a long time and is a source of embarrassment for the Israelis in the same way the Gulf War revealed Patriots take forever and a day to reload.

Without trying to crunch the numbers on the rate of fire of a gun artillery battery, a single Grad launcher has 40 tubes, so a battery of equivalent strength can quite literally just overwhelm any single Iron Dome Battery or CRAM, both would be dry while more than half the rounds were still in the air. That’s ignoring modernized launchers with more tubes, that some batteries have 6 launchers, and the Russians often fire by Battalion.

That’s not even getting into the Iron Dome or CRAM radars being able to track and engage that many targets, which I doubt and has never been established to match Israeli claims, and the rate of fire for the Grad being several times higher than Iron Done. Iron Dome would cost $3.8M CAD per 20 rockets fired at it.

Do you see what I mean? NATO has leaned so heavily on throwing money and technology at problems that we have papers being put out that propose spending millions of dollars to still get shelled, while claiming that constitutes invulnerability to the point where enemy shelling no longer has to be planned around. Just sign the country over to Rafael if that’s what you’re proposing because I gave up on trying to calculate costs for this post.

How did we get here? Because CRAM worked successfully on an extremely limited scale in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Iron Dome has also partially worked on an even more limited scale in Israel. Because people are unable to differentiate in their approach to Russia from that, it creates this broken thinking. It’s a sickness, really. Russia is just the GWOT but bigger, so we don’t need to change anything, just do more. This is weird Natsec Atlantic Council thinking because it doesn’t account for any military reality, only a change in setting.

It’s like - and I don’t know how to communicate this - these NATO hawks, at least the ones writing papers - literally can’t conceive of NATO troops being shelled. They know “NATO Must Confront Russia” but when they envision it, it’s no different from “ISAF Must Confront The Taliban” so they just transpose all of it.

They write papers on the Russian military, but none of their proposals suggest we change anything in response to that, if that makes sense. Like when Brown Moses counts Russian tanks in a Motor Rifle Regiment, I genuinely don’t think he sees them as something that threatens NATO. He sees targets for NATO airstrikes in the same way he counted tanks in Syria. It just means more sorties for F-35’s to fly unopposed, just like a massive Russian artillery park just means we “simply” need more Iron Domes.

So yeah, that’s a lot of words to say I’ve had to keep up with some of this stuff, and there’s this… gap? Maybe? Between evaluation and response, and I can see how it shapes the conversation, but I have no idea what the gently caress is going on in there. The Doctrine Papers don’t make sense, the Policy Papers don’t make sense, and whatever is causing that disconnect, where the first half is a reasonable evaluation of the situation and the second half is fantasyland poo poo, that is going to be a big problem because it shows that there’s this thing getting in the way of decision making.

skooma512 posted:

The US military is going to be in for a huge shock when a carrier goes down or the air force is worn down to a nub.