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Diarrhea Elemental
Apr 2, 2012

Am I correct in my assumption, you fish-faced enemy of the people?

Herstory Begins Now posted:

no clue how this applies to military trainings though cuz that is 0% my domain. from an outside perspective, militaries do seem to train people specifically to have a borderline irrationally optimistic approach to challenges and obstacles, but that makes a lot of sense in the context of what militaries have to do. I'd be surprised if that isn't a fairly deliberate outcome.

"Borderline irrationally optimistic" is a really charitable read of that. A gaggle of belligerently stubborn ego-driven assholes will do some crazy poo poo, especially when you trauma bond them to a psychotic degree.

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Hyperlynx
Sep 13, 2015

bulletsponge13 posted:

I'll be adding Apollo to my reading list.

One summer, I'm going to go to grown up space camp where you get to do Mission Control poo poo, which seems way more fun to my mental illness than doing the astronaut part. Even as a kid, I didn't want to be an astronaut, I just wanted to go to Space Camp.

Nice! In that case you'll probably enjoy Gene Kranz's autobiography, too, if you haven't read it before.

Jaguars!
Jul 31, 2012


Herstory Begins Now posted:

yeah at least as far as most complex skills acquisition goes there's ~da learning zone~ (assuming someone has the fundamentals down already) where the most progress is made while challenged significantly but not to the point of it being insurmountable. that last point is really key. in an ideal world you're tuning a scenario to consistently add new challenges to keep people adapting and in ~da learning zone~ while not trying to overload things to the point of break down. for a lot of people learning how to keep loving trying even when something is hard and to sustain that is hard as hell.

no clue how this applies to military trainings though cuz that is 0% my domain. from an outside perspective, militaries do seem to train people specifically to have a borderline irrationally optimistic approach to challenges and obstacles, but that makes a lot of sense in the context of what militaries have to do. I'd be surprised if that isn't a fairly deliberate outcome.

There's a time and a place, clowning on someone who's just learning how to move in an assault is pointless because their brain will be completely saturated anyway. A unit preparing for operations should have hard poo poo thrown at it. Hard lessons are good when poo poo needs to be learned fast but hammering their heads against a brick wall has consequences - If the unit hivemind decides you're putting yourself over the training, they'll stop taking regard of you, and in peacetime at least they'll start finding ways to get away.

I've been in the 'blue always wins' scenario and funnily enough, you know you've failed anyway. It doesn't fool anyone, it's just a device to allow training to continue.

mlmp08
Jul 11, 2004

Prepare for my priapic projectile's exalted penetration
Nap Ghost

BrotherJayne posted:

It's gonna be a HARM, isn't it.

E: Yup.

Are you saying Ukraine fired a HARM into their market? Be more clear.

bulletsponge13
Apr 28, 2010

Hyperlynx posted:

Nice! In that case you'll probably enjoy Gene Kranz's autobiography, too, if you haven't read it before.

I had to check the name, because I couldn't recall why I know it, but added that, too!

Vahakyla
May 3, 2013
On internet combat footage subreddits, there’s shills saying Ukraine fired the missile into their own market.

It’s definitely a sign of being in questionable infofeed to parrot that.

Comrade Blyatlov
Aug 4, 2007


should have picked four fingers





Vahakyla posted:

On internet combat footage subreddits, there’s shills saying Ukraine fired the missile into their own market.

It’s definitely a sign of being in questionable infofeed to parrot that.

....what? why? i can't think of a single thing ukraine could do to make russia look worse than they've made themselves look

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

mlmp08 posted:

Are you saying Ukraine fired a HARM into their market? Be more clear.
Yeah, definitely looks like they're accusing Ukraine of bombing their own market with an anti-radiation missile. Would be very curious for a source on that.

Vahakyla
May 3, 2013

Cugel the Clever posted:

Yeah, definitely looks like they're accusing Ukraine of bombing their own market with an anti-radiation missile. Would be very curious for a source on that.

Instagram page Mighty Russia, a big Russian shill page, is currently running that mis-info hardcore. Even, let’s say it is factually true from a freak accident or whatever, the implication is that it is intentional.

Hyperlynx
Sep 13, 2015

bulletsponge13 posted:

I had to check the name, because I couldn't recall why I know it, but added that, too!

I had to check the name too because I always get it mixed up with Chris Kraft :shobon:

(For anyone playing along at home: Gene Kranz was the flight director who happened to be on shift for both the first landing on the moon, and also for the Apollo 13 accident. Chris Kraft was his boss.)

GD_American
Jul 21, 2004

LISTEN TO WHAT I HAVE TO SAY AS IT'S INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT!

Vahakyla posted:

OPFOR that just wins isn't very useful, and neither is making them awesome at everything.

In my year at TRADOC doing cadre for the Signal Officer's Basic Course, one story sticks from this; we ran a week-long field exercise every month that was the end-ex for that particular class. It as intended to give them some tactical and field time, and usually had an OPFOR ambush somewhere along there, usually with whatever random people the unit could scrounge up that week. Our jo as enlisted puds was to essentially just watch; the training wasn't for our benefit. I cannot stress enough how babytown frolics the tactical stuff was; this is TRADOC, for officers, and signal officers at that.

Well, this month iit was the XO and a bunch of cadets doing their summer 2 weeks, who were all geeked up about running around in black shirts. They got clever and hit us moving sites, and laid an old fallen log in the road to block us.

They did not plan on SPC Rocquemore. He was, like me, just riding out the last part of his initial contract after deployment, although I think he went with 4th ID instead of 1 ID like me. Rocquemore was in the 5 ton leading the convoy, and when he saw that log and heard the blanks firing off, he put the hammer down. I was the TC, and all I heard him say was "Nope." The 5 ton hit that rotten old tree and it exploded beautifully; the rest of the convoy hauled rear end behind him outside of their clever ambush.

(We found out later) the XO was yelling at us on the SINGCARS to stop for an AAR, but he had the wrong fill and we didn't hear it, so we just drove onto the next site and were in the middle of setting up when he came up to our site an hour later, steaming hot. (Apparently he didn't know where our next site was, so he was hopping all around training areas in the back of Fort Gordon, trying to raise us on the radio, looking progressively worse to all these cadets.) So we had to stop in the middle of setting up the Node Center to do an AAR on their failed ambush. I vividly remember them saying that Rocquemore was supposed to have stopped so they could ambush the trainees. Pretty much the whole enlisted cadre responded that if that was their clever plan, perhaps they should have told us so we could play along like good little victims. Rocquemore pointed to his combat patch and said "That's a truck, not a gunship. If I get ambushed, I'm not sticking around."

Well that made so much sense that it pretty much shut everyone up and they just wrote the whole thing off.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
https://twitter.com/KyivPost/status/1699738071363662144

quote:

A #Russian combat unit deployed from Russia’s autonomous republic of Bashkiria to fight in #Ukraine is using two horses to transport #weapons and equipment to inaccessible front-line positions.

In my head I'm wondering how long it'll take before a couple of hungry mobiks turn the elite war horses into elite horse steaks.

armpit_enjoyer
Jan 25, 2023

my god. it's full of posts
Was this posted here already?

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/09/russia-ukraine-chernobyl-disaster/675083/

quote:

By the end of March, the plant personnel became convinced that the Russians were preparing for battle at the disaster site. The soldiers built barricades out of sandbags they filled with radioactive sand they’d dug from right around the plant. Firing points were erected on top of the plant’s buildings. Several old, dysfunctional military vehicles appeared on the plant’s territory, apparently to be used as dummies at military checkpoints. The staff immediately recognized these vehicles: They were the ones used to eliminate the fallout of the 1986 disaster, and since then had been installed in an open-air museum in town. The vehicles were so highly contaminated that museum visitors were not allowed within a dozen meters of them. Now they were sitting in the middle of the nuclear plant, with uninformed soldiers manning checkpoints right next to them.

Soon rumors reached the staff that the Russians were digging trenches in the Red Forest, the most contaminated part of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. This woodland, adjacent to the plant, had suffered such heavy radioactive fallout in the summer of 1986 that its pine trees turned red. The poisoned trees were cut down and buried under the very ground where the Russians now started to dig.

How was this even possible? Valentyn Heyko had an inkling after speaking with Andrey Frolenkov, one of the Russian commanders. The takeover of the Chornobyl plant had gone so smoothly, Frolenkov boasted, because the facility had an identical twin in Russia. The Russian military had apparently used this doppelgänger, the Kursk Nuclear Power Station, to plan and rehearse the Chornobyl takeover—including the siting of defensive trenches around the plant.

The Kursk nuclear station is indeed similar to Chornobyl in every respect but one: Its territory is not radioactively contaminated.

By late March, Russian forces were facing a rout in the Kyiv region, and the troops in Chornobyl began looting the area for anything of value they could take home. They didn’t bother to check the radiation levels of their bounty. What they couldn’t carry away, they destroyed. Upon their departure, they took with them 169 soldiers of the Ukrainian national guard whom they’d seized as prisoners during the occupation. One hundred and eight are still in captivity at the time of writing.

Antigravitas
Dec 8, 2019

Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:
I'm surprised they are using horses instead of mules like everyone else.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

I saw it posted somewhere on SA, but not sure where. However, it's extremely hilarious that it managed to drain one of the Russian fronts of fuel AND irradiate a bunch of their idiot troops and officers in one go.

Jarmak
Jan 24, 2005

GD_American posted:

In my year at TRADOC doing cadre for the Signal Officer's Basic Course, one story sticks from this; we ran a week-long field exercise every month that was the end-ex for that particular class. It as intended to give them some tactical and field time, and usually had an OPFOR ambush somewhere along there, usually with whatever random people the unit could scrounge up that week. Our jo as enlisted puds was to essentially just watch; the training wasn't for our benefit. I cannot stress enough how babytown frolics the tactical stuff was; this is TRADOC, for officers, and signal officers at that.

Well, this month iit was the XO and a bunch of cadets doing their summer 2 weeks, who were all geeked up about running around in black shirts. They got clever and hit us moving sites, and laid an old fallen log in the road to block us.

They did not plan on SPC Rocquemore. He was, like me, just riding out the last part of his initial contract after deployment, although I think he went with 4th ID instead of 1 ID like me. Rocquemore was in the 5 ton leading the convoy, and when he saw that log and heard the blanks firing off, he put the hammer down. I was the TC, and all I heard him say was "Nope." The 5 ton hit that rotten old tree and it exploded beautifully; the rest of the convoy hauled rear end behind him outside of their clever ambush.

(We found out later) the XO was yelling at us on the SINGCARS to stop for an AAR, but he had the wrong fill and we didn't hear it, so we just drove onto the next site and were in the middle of setting up when he came up to our site an hour later, steaming hot. (Apparently he didn't know where our next site was, so he was hopping all around training areas in the back of Fort Gordon, trying to raise us on the radio, looking progressively worse to all these cadets.) So we had to stop in the middle of setting up the Node Center to do an AAR on their failed ambush. I vividly remember them saying that Rocquemore was supposed to have stopped so they could ambush the trainees. Pretty much the whole enlisted cadre responded that if that was their clever plan, perhaps they should have told us so we could play along like good little victims. Rocquemore pointed to his combat patch and said "That's a truck, not a gunship. If I get ambushed, I'm not sticking around."

Well that made so much sense that it pretty much shut everyone up and they just wrote the whole thing off.

Holy poo poo rule 1-10 of reacting to an ambush is don't stop in the loving kill zone.

ASAPI
Apr 20, 2007
I invented the line.

GD_American posted:

In my year at TRADOC doing cadre for the Signal Officer's Basic Course, one story sticks from this; we ran a week-long field exercise every month that was the end-ex for that particular class. It as intended to give them some tactical and field time, and usually had an OPFOR ambush somewhere along there, usually with whatever random people the unit could scrounge up that week. Our jo as enlisted puds was to essentially just watch; the training wasn't for our benefit. I cannot stress enough how babytown frolics the tactical stuff was; this is TRADOC, for officers, and signal officers at that.

Well, this month iit was the XO and a bunch of cadets doing their summer 2 weeks, who were all geeked up about running around in black shirts. They got clever and hit us moving sites, and laid an old fallen log in the road to block us.

They did not plan on SPC Rocquemore. He was, like me, just riding out the last part of his initial contract after deployment, although I think he went with 4th ID instead of 1 ID like me. Rocquemore was in the 5 ton leading the convoy, and when he saw that log and heard the blanks firing off, he put the hammer down. I was the TC, and all I heard him say was "Nope." The 5 ton hit that rotten old tree and it exploded beautifully; the rest of the convoy hauled rear end behind him outside of their clever ambush.

(We found out later) the XO was yelling at us on the SINGCARS to stop for an AAR, but he had the wrong fill and we didn't hear it, so we just drove onto the next site and were in the middle of setting up when he came up to our site an hour later, steaming hot. (Apparently he didn't know where our next site was, so he was hopping all around training areas in the back of Fort Gordon, trying to raise us on the radio, looking progressively worse to all these cadets.) So we had to stop in the middle of setting up the Node Center to do an AAR on their failed ambush. I vividly remember them saying that Rocquemore was supposed to have stopped so they could ambush the trainees. Pretty much the whole enlisted cadre responded that if that was their clever plan, perhaps they should have told us so we could play along like good little victims. Rocquemore pointed to his combat patch and said "That's a truck, not a gunship. If I get ambushed, I'm not sticking around."

Well that made so much sense that it pretty much shut everyone up and they just wrote the whole thing off.

I had an entire section full of soldiers like that. It didn't help that I encouraged them.

I was always a fan a "real world" training, but don't make the scenario contingent on my guys doing the wrong thing at the beginning to make that scenario happen. Or, at least make your ambush/kill box less obvious.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/21361

Oh, this is happening again.

quote:

Anti-Putin Russians Kill FSB Border Guard During Cross-Border Raid

In another border incursion within Russia, volunteers from the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) have reportedly killed one and wounded ten FSB personnel during a fiery raid.

Giving Russia the fun choice of re-allocating some troops for the invasion/occupation to keeping the home territories safe or suffering a number of embarrassing raids.

The Door Frame
Dec 5, 2011

I don't know man everytime I go to the gym here there are like two huge dudes with raging high and tights snorting Nitro-tech off of each other's rock hard abs.
E

The Door Frame fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Sep 7, 2023

McNally
Sep 13, 2007

Ask me about Proposition 305


Do you like muskets?

BrotherJayne posted:

It's gonna be a HARM, isn't it.

E: Yup.

Please don't share Russian msinfo in here without clearly marking it as such, thanks.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug


Geeee....where have we seen this before....

mlmp08
Jul 11, 2004

Prepare for my priapic projectile's exalted penetration
Nap Ghost
Metal gear?!

Dandywalken
Feb 11, 2014

Neigh!

A.o.D.
Jan 15, 2006
With the rasputitsa coming up, hooved logistics make as much sense as any other means of supply.

Antigravitas
Dec 8, 2019

Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:

mlmp08 posted:

Metal gear?!



?

windshipper
Jun 19, 2006

Dr. Whet Faartz would like to know if this smells funny to you?

mlmp08 posted:

Metal gear?!

Kind of!

Only registered members can see post attachments!

The Door Frame
Dec 5, 2011

I don't know man everytime I go to the gym here there are like two huge dudes with raging high and tights snorting Nitro-tech off of each other's rock hard abs.

A.o.D. posted:

With the rasputitsa coming up, hooved logistics make as much sense as any other means of supply.

If we're looking at going back to hooved logistics I'd recommend bactrian camels if there's a choice. They were native to Crimea, they eat inedible plants, can hold up to pretty intense weather, can carry more than equines, can handle harsher terrain, can go days without food or water, and are still in active military use for those qualities. Sure, they're not as social and don't go as fast, but when your defensive military starts to move at the speed of hooves pulling towed guns, a ~1km/h slower probably won't be a war deciding factor. Maybe Russia could buy some from India or one of the other central Asian steppe nations where they are just domestic livestock

The other benefit of animals as logistics is that when the food trucks can't reach you, you know that you have several hundred pounds of edible meat that can be eaten in an emergency

CommieGIR posted:

Geeee....where have we seen this before....

Oh, nowhere...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyZK8k4gzyg

Or Ssgt Reckless

Antigravitas posted:

I'm surprised they are using horses instead of mules like everyone else.

Riding horses don't rust when left in a field for generations, can't be stripped for copper or advanced electronics, and probably can't be easily pawned to locals the way draft horses, donkeys, and mules could be. Perfect for current Russian field sensibilities

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
I was gonna say mules and donkeys would probably be smart enough to defect.

Antigravitas
Dec 8, 2019

Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:
Fun fact:





https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatz-_und_Ausbildungszentrum_f%C3%BCr_Tragtierwesen_230

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haflinger

:eng101:

Lovely Joe Stalin
Jun 12, 2007

Our Lovely Wang
Yeah, there's nothing intrinsically dumb about using horses to move gear, if that is the most efficient way to do it.

Whether or not it is the most efficient way in this case I don't know, depends where those troops are deployed. It does seem unlikely though.

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008







Mark 1 Recoilless rear end

Antigravitas
Dec 8, 2019

Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:
It almost certainly isn't, on account of a severe lack of mountains.

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008






If they run out of homeopathic beef stew, they can always eat the horse.

lightpole
Jun 4, 2004
I think that MBAs are useful, in case you are looking for an answer to the question of "Is lightpole a total fucking idiot".

The Door Frame posted:

If we're looking at going back to hooved logistics I'd recommend bactrian camels if there's a choice. They were native to Crimea, they eat inedible plants, can hold up to pretty intense weather, can carry more than equines, can handle harsher terrain, can go days without food or water, and are still in active military use for those qualities. Sure, they're not as social and don't go as fast, but when your defensive military starts to move at the speed of hooves pulling towed guns, a ~1km/h slower probably won't be a war deciding factor. Maybe Russia could buy some from India or one of the other central Asian steppe nations where they are just domestic livestock

The other benefit of animals as logistics is that when the food trucks can't reach you, you know that you have several hundred pounds of edible meat that can be eaten in an emergency

Oh, nowhere...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyZK8k4gzyg

Or Ssgt Reckless

Riding horses don't rust when left in a field for generations, can't be stripped for copper or advanced electronics, and probably can't be easily pawned to locals the way draft horses, donkeys, and mules could be. Perfect for current Russian field sensibilities

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Camel_Corps

Humbug Scoolbus
Apr 25, 2008

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Clapping Larry
I did a couple of rotations at JRTC at Polk as OPFOR; we didn't try to gently caress over the training units, except if we saw an O5 or higher in their group. We loved going after staff and HQ sections, including baiting an O6 and their hummer into a swamp and getting it completely stuck.

Nice piece of fish
Jan 29, 2008

Ultra Carp
Is the Ukraine offensive going to be in danger of stalling due to the upcoming rasputitsa?

Arc Light
Sep 26, 2013



Humbug Scoolbus posted:

I did a couple of rotations at JRTC at Polk as OPFOR; we didn't try to gently caress over the training units, except if we saw an O5 or higher in their group. We loved going after staff and HQ sections, including baiting an O6 and their hummer into a swamp and getting it completely stuck.

Oh cool cool cool. During my spin up for Afghanistan, I had a random Major from another unit stuck in my fire team. So now I know why I kept getting sim rounds to the leg.

A.o.D.
Jan 15, 2006

Nice piece of fish posted:

Is the Ukraine offensive going to be in danger of stalling due to the upcoming rasputitsa?

It's less of an issue in the south near the sea of Azov, but it's not a complete non-issue.

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008






Nice piece of fish posted:

Is the Ukraine offensive going to be in danger of stalling due to the upcoming rasputitsa?

It's been very difficult for them to cross open field anyway due to the mines.

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The Door Frame
Dec 5, 2011

I don't know man everytime I go to the gym here there are like two huge dudes with raging high and tights snorting Nitro-tech off of each other's rock hard abs.

The Indian BSF still has active camel cav


On top of those clearly intended for the deserts and the ones in the ceremonial band, they also have been seen in woodland camo barding that secures crew served weapons, so they likely have camel troops for other regions that don't get the same publicity

E: to be clear, there's nothing wrong with using a beast of burden when machines are impractical due to terrain, weather, logistics, etc. But using animals when you're in the same fortified position for months that's <50 miles away on the mostly flat and solid steppe from some of the largest railheads in Ukraine; there's issues that need to be addressed

The Door Frame fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Sep 7, 2023

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