Bar Ran Dun posted:

holy hell that guy is a hawk. Jesus Christ looking back through his published articles.

KomradeX posted:

I get the distinct feeling that the US is unprepared for an enemy that can actually shoot back, and bring the same level of firepower we do.

quote:

“It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,”

quote:

Many British military histories assert that ‘the verdict of history’ is that the ‘British army was well-trained and well-led’.⁷⁶ This was true only at the individual soldier level. Nor is one of the best-written British regi- mental histories in full agreement with this evaluation. It says that ‘the majority of the men in the ranks were young soldiers of less than three years service or else reservists who only a fortnight before had been in civil life. For a week [after landing in France] they had been harassed and deprived of sleep, marched and counter-marched, and they were already tired and footsore when they were called on to face an enemy of over- powering strength.’⁷⁷

...

The British General Staff was not organised until Haldane’s reforms from 1906 to 1909. The first modern doctrinal manual, Field Service Regulations – Operations, was not writ- ten until 1909. There was not enough time to practise these procedures – the British army held only two army-level manoeuvres before the First World War, in 1912 and 1913. II Corps, which was to conduct almost all of the fighting in August 1914, did not even exist until mobilisation.

One of the few books to deal with British pre-war doctrine is Bidwell and Graham’s Firepower.⁸⁰ Their description is not a pretty one. In effect, the British army did not have a functioning tactical doctrine, and British manuals did not provide for combined-arms tactics. The British empha- sis on regimental (actually battalion) autonomy worked against com- bined arms, and would continue to do so through the Second World War. The artillery manual did not establish priorities for artillery fire. There was confusion concerning what constituted ‘fire superiority’ and the conduct of fire and movement. There was no tactics manual for the machine gun. Just before the war the British army shifted from the old eight-company Napoleonic battalion organisation to the German-style four-company battalion, each company with four platoons. ‘The platoon was something quite new. On paper a fully mobilized battalion head- quarters was over 200 strong, but no one in high places seems to have thought of really organising it for battle. It was left for individual com- manders to do what they liked.’⁸¹ In effect, the British had plagiarised the German tactics regulations without understanding them. Ascoli implicitly says that tactical training got short shrift because British excellence at rifle marksmanship and artillery gunnery were ‘born of the British pas- sion for field sports’, which Ascoli obviously meant as a compliment.⁸²

The fundamental problem was that while the British army did not offi- cially have a continental mission, it did have one of imperial policing which occupied the attention of half the force.

Battal- ions were continually changing brigades, which made stable brigade- level training impossible. There were simply too many innovations, and too little time and training opportunities to become familiar with them. Major-General A. L. Ransome, who was with the Dorsets before the War, said: ‘In the current tactical training of the serving infantry soldier great emphasis had been placed on the attack; the defence was seldom prac- tised. When it was, dispositions were inevitably linear.’⁸⁴ The Cheshire regimental history said: ‘Before the war, in order to foster the offensive spirit, retirement as an operation of war was ignored during training.’⁸⁵

The British army therefore concentrated on individual training, partic- ularly individual rifle marksmanship. The Worcestershire regimental his- tory says that marksmanship competition was a matter of adding up indi- vidual range-firing scores; the company with the highest additive score won.⁸⁶ These were fired on standard ranges against bulls-eye targets. In the German army, live-fire qualification courses were conducted tactically at platoon, company and battalion levels.

...

British regimental histories that discuss peacetime operations at all usually con- centrate on the exploits of the unit sports teams. A notable exception is again the Worcestershire regimental history, which says that after the South African War ‘more modern methods of training’ were introduced ‘and the severe “Kitchener test” was instituted as a criterion of effi- ciency’. This test consisted of ‘a long forced march in full kit by the whole battalion, followed by an attack practice’. This hardly meets Ger- man standards for tactical training.

An army fights the way it has been trained to fight. Doctrine and train- ing must correspond to the most likely missions that the army will have to perform. The British army focused on offensive operations; in the first three weeks of the war it would conduct positional defence and with- drawals under pressure, missions for which it was poorly prepared. Aside from the effectiveness of individual training, the British army did not execute the defence/withdrawal missions well, and almost all the casualties would be the consequences of a poorly organised defence and badly conducted withdrawal.

...

In order to preserve the political fiction that the British army was not preparing for a war against Germany, the official history said that ‘The study of German military organisation and methods was specifically for- bidden at war games, staff tours and intelligence classes, which would have provided the best opportunities for such instruction’. It goes on to say: ‘Ignorance of the German Army proved a serious handicap in the early part of the campaign.’⁸⁸ The official history cites as an example Ger- man machine-gun crews that were carrying the gun by the four legs of the gun mount and were taken to be stretcher-bearers and were not fired upon. British misperception of German tactics was so serious that the BEF had literally no idea what the Germans were doing.

Another example illustrative of British ignorance of German tactics re- gards British troops regularly reporting that advancing Germans ‘fired from the hip’. Such a manoeuvre is unlikely, as anyone who has ever fired a bolt-action rifle while trying to move forward can attest. German training, on the other hand, emphasised carefully conducted aimed fire. How can this contradiction be explained? The solution is simple: the pencil drawings by Döberich-Steglitz show the Germans advancing by fire and movement. While one group of German troops provide covering fire, the other group bounds forward, carrying his weapon by his side at ‘trail arms’. The British, who could not see the prone German riflemen firing, thought the running men were firing. It is truly amazing that the authors of the British official history did not correct this misperception: they did not understand German tactics either.

Nix Panicus posted:

Is the Ukraine gently caress up basically the result of trying to invade with heavy equipment over thawing muddy terrain and Russia being completely unequipped to solve the logistical issues arising from that?

Lostconfused posted:

https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1503037134931906566

Lostconfused posted:

https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1503037134931906566

gradenko_2000 posted:

Any kind of "loss" for Russia would be in terms of the war becoming unfeasible for economic and/or political reasons that they'd have to pull out of their own accord, and I don't know how likely either of those scenarios are.

animist posted:

sure i lost that fight against thedrunk guy at the bar but you put me in the ring against a high-level boxer my psycho mode instincts will kick in

Nix Panicus posted:

Is the Ukraine gently caress up basically the result of trying to invade with heavy equipment over thawing muddy terrain and Russia being completely unequipped to solve the logistical issues arising from that?

gradenko_2000 posted:

Ukraine does not really have the kind of offensive/striking power needed to actively drive-out the Russians from the territory they're currently occupying. Even if their defense stiffened to the point where the Russians don't take another square meter of land, pairs of soldiers killing tanks with Javelins isn't going to win back occupied territory, and that's notwithstanding that the bulk of the regular army is all the way over in the eastern part of the country (where it may well be encircled).

Any kind of "loss" for Russia would be in terms of the war becoming unfeasible for economic and/or political reasons that they'd have to pull out of their own accord, and I don't know how likely either of those scenarios are.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Why is loss in quotation marks? Isn't this the exact same way America lost the Vietnam War? Actually, it becoming unfeasibly expensive would be a bigger loss, since the state wouldn't even be able to prosecute a war, rather than deciding not to due to it not being a vote winner.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I'm of the opinion that Russia has a particular set of war-goals that they would like to accomplish: a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO, recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states, and recognition of Crimea as part of Russia, in that order.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

OK, I can see why you come to the conclusion you do then. Not entirely sure why you believe those are the goals, but your logic is sound.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/DefenseCharts/status/1503382765496115202

gradenko_2000 posted:

I'm of the opinion that Russia has a particular set of war-goals that they would like to accomplish: a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO, recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states, and recognition of Crimea as part of Russia, in that order. None of these necessitate long-term occupation of [more] Ukrainian territory [than what has already arguably been taken since 2014].

Bar Ran Dun posted:

that’s just it though. they almost certainly could have gotten those goals. those goals were what everybody expected. those would have gotten a slap on the wrist response and accomplished the larger strategic goals of driving EU and US apart.

they overreached past those goals. apparently with no one but Putin expecting them to. producing significantly more reaction than just sticking to them would have and likely preventing them from being accomplished.

Bar Ran Dun posted:

that’s just it though. they almost certainly could have gotten those goals. those goals were what everybody expected.

Centrist Committee posted:

nah the west pushed putin into a gross loving war and now continues to escalate while the ukrainian people get flattened. the “good” news is the us is led by idiots who are using this to drunkenly stumble into an economic war with china too. ww3 is happening right before your eyes and the us has already lost control

ArmZ posted:

gradenko_2000 posted:

more on "The Mons Myth":

I do want to say that back in the heady days of playing Red Orchesta 2 all afternoon, one learned to distinguish Soviet soldiers from German ones by how they ran - a German soldier would, as this book says, carry their weapon in one hand by their side, while the Soviet soldier would cradle their rifle in both arms, holding it across their chest.

animist posted:

sure i lost that fight against thedrunk guy at the bar but you put me in the ring against a high-level boxer my psycho mode instincts will kick in

Frosted Flake posted:

I just wanted to say Fire Power is the single best book for understanding any Commonwealth military, absolute pro-read.

quote:

Fire-Power: The British Army Weapons & Theories of War 1904–1945

The great siege of Gibraltar was the longest recorded in the annals of the British army. Between 1779 and 1783 a small British force defended the Rock against the Spanish and the French who were determined take this strategically vital point guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean. The tenacity and endurance shown by the attackers and defenders alike, and the sheer ingenuity of the siege operations mounted by both sides, make the episode an epic of military history, and the story gives us a fascinating insight into the realities of siege warfare. In this, the first full study of the siege for over 40 years, James Falkner draws on a wide range of contemporary sources to tell the exciting tale of a huge and complex operation.

quote:

This title, first published in 1982, offers an objective and thoroughly-researched analysis of the evolution of British military tactics, with an emphasis on artillery.

i say swears online posted:

okay lmao that's definitely what FF is referring to

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/DefenseCharts/status/1503382765496115202