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Jon Pod Van Damm
Apr 6, 2009

THE POSSESSION OF WEALTH IS IN AND OF ITSELF A SIGN OF POOR VIRTUE. AS SUCH:
1 NEVER TRUST ANY RICH PERSON.
2 NEVER HIRE ANY RICH PERSON.
BY RULE 1, IT IS APPROPRIATE TO PRESUME THAT ALL DEGREES AND CREDENTIALS HELD BY A WEALTHY PERSON ARE FRAUDULENT. THIS JUSTIFIES RULE 2--RULE 1 NEEDS NO JUSTIFIC



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf41KA-5U9w

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crepeface
Nov 5, 2004

r*p*f*c*

Jon Pod Van Damm posted:

https://youtu.be/Lf41KA-5U9w?si=WGmGXO4aqJSfdoQG

quote:

China Daily: Lately the US has provided advanced weaponry to China’s Taiwan region through arms sales, military assistance and loans. China’s foreign ministry spokesperson said earlier that China would take strong measures to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity. I wonder if you have anything new on that?

Mao Ning: In disregard of China’s firm opposition, the US government deliberately supplies weapons to China’s Taiwan region. This seriously violates the one-China principle and the stipulations of the three China-US joint communiqués, contravenes international law and basic norms governing international relations, and undermines China’s sovereignty and security interests. The US is going further down the wrong and dangerous path of arming Taiwan.
Lockheed Martin Corporation, St. Louis, MO directly participated in the US arms sale to Taiwan announced on August 24 as the principal contractor. Northrop Grumman participated in several US arms sales to Taiwan. In accordance with the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law of the People’s Republic of China, China decides to impose sanctions on these two above-mentioned US defense corporations.

Let me stress, the Chinese government never wavers in its resolve of safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity. We call on the US to earnestly abide by the one-China principle and the stipulations of the three China-US joint communiqués, stop arms sales to Taiwan, stop military collusion with Taiwan, and stop arming Taiwan, otherwise it will be met with China’s resolute response.

oh man the sanctions war is really kicking off.

DancingShade
Jul 26, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

crepeface posted:

oh man the sanctions war is really kicking off.

Lockheed Martins latest next generation fighter. Now with entirely mechanical and hydraulic controls because they couldn't get the chips.

crepeface
Nov 5, 2004

r*p*f*c*

DancingShade posted:

Lockheed Martins latest next generation fighter. Now with entirely mechanical and hydraulic controls because they couldn't get the chips.

i was going to say that i thought the f-35 used some rare earth magnet that they got from china but looking up the story:

quote:

But due to a concern about compliance with the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, or DFARS, the F-35 Joint Program Office has ordered the Defense Contract Management Agency to stop accepting F-35s for now.

Lockheed Martin said that, going forward, turbomachine production will use magnets made from another alloy using materials from the U.S.
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2022/09/07/pentagon-suspends-f-35-deliveries-over-chinese-alloy-in-magnet/

i wonder how that's going.

Votskomit
Jun 26, 2013
https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1702858454870941740?t=ybcHJeKLh49OniUGpbpwtg&s=19


quote:

The US Army War College published a summary of what will apparently be multiple detailed papers on the "lessons from Ukraine".

I have highlighted below two striking passages.

TLDR: The US is not remotely capable of "large-scale combat operations".

https://t.co/AHsfJr4veI


Votskomit has issued a correction as of 10:17 on Sep 16, 2023

stephenthinkpad
Jan 2, 2020
The Surovikin line put the US artisanal warfighters in their places.

Cerebral Bore
Apr 21, 2010


Fun Shoe
lol the us isn't even remotely capable of reimplementing the draft even if they wanted to

Cerebral Bore
Apr 21, 2010


Fun Shoe
conscription would be outsourced to mckinsey or somesuch at a bargain price of only one million dollars per draftee

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Cerebral Bore posted:

lol the us isn't even remotely capable of reimplementing the draft even if they wanted to

Lol yeah that was the bargain Nixon made to prevent the country from blowing up. Can't put that toothpaste back in the tube.

stephenthinkpad
Jan 2, 2020
It's interesting that the US wasted one-time used card of "national draft" over the Vietnam war, which in retrospect, didn't gain the US empire anything.

They prevented the spread of Communism in the island part of SEA but I am not sure if that had anything to do with the war. The eastern camp couldn't get Communism work in Myanmar and Cambodia. I think those regions hadn't finished state building and were not ready for Communist style government.

Was the US state captured by MIC already that they went to Vietnam just for the benefit of the MIC ecosystem?

Frosted Flake
Sep 13, 2011

Semper Shitpost Ubique

Cerebral Bore posted:

lol the us isn't even remotely capable of reimplementing the draft even if they wanted to

I wish I could post about a specific conversation about this but I can’t. I will say only that social/political/“classical” whatever the gently caress liberals are extremely stupid and will talk about Citizen-Soldiers even if you have all of the actual data about recruitment and retention in front of you.

I don’t know how to describe it other than it is impossible to actually make headway in a conversation with them because they believe in a fairy tale that serves some sort of ideological purpose (???) about republican virtues (again, monarchy) and pure civic duty… rather than … motivating soldiers.

I have never been as frustrated as I have been in the past few months as they talk about expanding the military without acknowledging material conditions or motivations on the one hand, and social contracts and bonds on the other.

Ardennes
May 12, 2002

Frosted Flake posted:

I wish I could post about a specific conversation about this but I can’t. I will say only that social/political/“classical” whatever the gently caress liberals are extremely stupid and will talk about Citizen-Soldiers even if you have all of the actual data about recruitment and retention in front of you.

I don’t know how to describe it other than it is impossible to actually make headway in a conversation with them because they believe in a fairy tale that serves some sort of ideological purpose (???) about republican virtues (again, monarchy) and pure civic duty… rather than … motivating soldiers.

I have never been as frustrated as I have been in the past few months as they talk about expanding the military without acknowledging material conditions or motivations on the one hand, and social contracts and bonds on the other.

They are just used to get what they want and bullshitting the public a bit. I don't know about Canada but both the UK and the US have very clear recruitment and retainment issues, and a lot of it is just pay and conditions, which just isn't great. The US navy specifically is having a rough time, and in their case morale is at a low as ships are clearly having maintenance issues, there has been a marked increase in suicides and mental health crises and the US is at relative peace.

Mantis42
Jul 26, 2010

stephenthinkpad posted:

It's interesting that the US wasted one-time used card of "national draft" over the Vietnam war, which in retrospect, didn't gain the US empire anything.

?? Are you saying the Vietnam War was the first American war with a national draft? I don't think that's true, there was definitely a draft in the Civil War, WW1+2, and Korea

stephenthinkpad
Jan 2, 2020

Mantis42 posted:

?? Are you saying the Vietnam War was the first American war with a national draft? I don't think that's true, there was definitely a draft in the Civil War, WW1+2, and Korea

In the sense that the draft soured the nation so much they abandoned the system afterward.

I guess you can still restart it if there is a nuclear war.

Frosted Flake
Sep 13, 2011

Semper Shitpost Ubique

I have another meeting with these liberal academics next week - in a literal, not pejorative sense - doctors of liberal moral and political philosophy the government has included in policy roundtables for some reason, so if someone can explain what they believe and how I’m supposed to talk to them, I would be forever in your debt. I’ve included their handout below.

I want to mention that none of them had ever heard of the Battles of Ridgeway and Fort Erie, where Fenians who had been drafted into the US Army for the Civil War, the same Irish involved in the 1863 Draft Riots, routed Canadian militia twice in 1866. It’s a very clear example of the Militia Myth we’re all taught, but it made no impression on them whatsoever. Literally “well, nevertheless…”

:siren: Apparently what liberals actually believe :siren:

Military service can be allocated in different ways, some involving the market, others not. Conscription allocates service without the use of markets. In its simplest version, it Êlls places according to a lottery of eligible citizens. A second way of allocating places in the military was employed by the Union during the American Civil War. It introduced market principles, but only to a point. In the Êrst American draft, enacted in 1863, those who were called but who did not want to serve could hire a substitute to take their place. Many draftees advertised for substitutes in the newspapers, offering amounts from a few hundred dollars up to Êfteen hundred dollars. The system was less than a resounding success. There were widespread protests. In the New York draft riots a thousand peo- ple died. Congress tried to quell the protest by amending the pol- icy by setting a Êat fee for exemption. If you were drafted and didn’t want to serve, you could pay a three-hundred-dollar fee to the government. You didn’t have to bother Ênding someone else. Three hundred dollars in those days was equivalent to one year’s wages for a laborer.

A third way of Êlling the ranks of the military carries market principles one step further. Rather than draft people and then al- low the market to operate, the present-day American all-volunteer army uses market principles from the start. The term “volunteer” is something of a misnomer. Soldiers do not volunteer in the way that people volunteer to work in the local soup kitchen on Thanksgiving—that is, to serve without pay. The volunteer army is a professional army, in which soldiers work for pay. It is volun- tary only in the sense that all paid labor is voluntary. No one is conscripted, and the job is performed by those who agree to do so in exchange for money and other beneÊts.

Compare these three ways of allocating military service—con- scription, conscription with a buy-out provision (the Civil War system), and the market system. Which is most desirable? From the standpoint of market reasoning, the Civil War system is pref- erable to a system of pure conscription because it increases the range of choice. Those who are conscripted but who do not want to serve have the option of buying their way out, and those who are not conscripted but who want the job can buy their way in. From the standpoint of market reasoning, however, the volunteer army is better still. Like the Civil War system, it enables people to buy their way into or out of military service. But it is preferable to the Civil War system because it places the cost of hiring soldiers on the society as a whole, not just on the unlucky few who happen to be drafted and must therefore serve or hire a substitute to take their place.

So from the standpoint of market reasoning, the volunteer army is best, the Civil War system second best, and conscription the least desirable way of allocating military service. But there are at least two objections to this line of argument. One is that we can- not prefer the volunteer army without knowing more about the background conditions that prevail in the society. The volunteer army seems attractive because it avoids the coercion of conscrip- tion. It makes military service a matter of consent. But some of those who serve in the all-volunteer army may be as averse to mil- itary service as those who stay away. If poverty and economic dis- advantage is widespread, the choice to serve may simply reÊect the lack of alternatives. This is the problem of the poor persons’ army. According to this objection (an instance of the objection from co- ercion), those who buy their way in, or fail to buy their way out, are conscripted by the lottery of economic necessity.

The difference between conscription and the volunteer army is not that one is compulsory, whereas the other is not; it is rather that each employs a different form of compulsion—the state in the Êrst case, economic necessity in the second. Only if people are sim- ilarly situated to begin with can it be said that the choice to serve for pay reÊects people’s preferences, rather than their limited alter- natives.

The actual composition of the American all-volunteer army seems to bear out this objection. Thirty percent of the U.S. army troops who were sent to Êght the Gulf War were African Ameri- cans, almost three times the percent of African Americans in the population as a whole. The enlistment rates for children of the richest Êfteen percent of the population are one-Êfth of the na- tional average. So it is easy to appreciate the force of the objection that the volunteer army is not as voluntary as it seems.

It is worth pointing out that this objection can in principle be met without doing away with the all-volunteer army. It can be met by making the background conditions of the society sufÊ- ciently equal so that people’s choice of work reÊects meaningful consent rather than dire economic necessity. In this case as in oth- ers, the argument from coercion is not an objection to the com- modiÊcation of military service as such, only to commodiÊcation that takes place under certain unfair background conditions.
A second objection to letting people buy their way into and out of military service is independent of the Êrst. It holds that, even in a society where the choice of work did not reÊect deep inequalities in life circumstances, military service should not be allocated by the labor market, as if it were just another job. According to this argument, all citizens have an obligation to serve their country. Whether this obligation is best discharged through military or other national service, it is not the sort of thing that people should be free to buy or sell. To turn such service into a commodity—a job for pay—is to corrupt or degrade the sense of civic virtue that properly attends it. A familiar instance of this argument is offered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the state is not far from its fall. When it is necessary to march out to war, they pay troops and stay at home. . . . In a country that is truly free, the citizens do ev- erything with their own arms and nothing by means of money; so far from paying to be exempted from their duties, they would even pay for the privilege of fulÊlling them themselves. . . . I hold en- forced labor to be less opposed to liberty than taxes.”

Rousseau’s argument against commodifying military service is an instance of the argument from corruption. It invokes the repub- lican conception of citizenship. Market advocates might defend the volunteer army by rejecting the republican conception of citi- zenship, or by denying its relevance to military service. But doesn’t the volunteer army as currently practiced implicitly acknowledge certain limits to market principles, limits that derive from a resid- ual commitment to the ideal of republican citizenship? Consider the difference between the contemporary volunteer army and an army of mercenaries. Both pay soldiers to Êght. Both entice people to enlist by the promise of pay and other beneÊts. The U.S. army runs television commercials that make the job seem as attractive as possible. But if the market is an appropriate way of allocating military service, what is wrong with mercenaries? It might be replied that mercenaries are foreign nationals who Êght only for pay, whereas the American volunteer army hires only Americans. But if military service is just another job, why should the employer discriminate in hiring on the basis of nationality? Why shouldn’t the U.S. military be open to citizens of any country who want the work and possess the relevant qualiÊcations?
The logic of the market could be extended to challenge the no- tion that armies should be run by the government. Why not sub- contract military functions to private enterprise? In fact, the privatization of war, like the privatization of prisons, is a growing trend. Private corporations that hire mercenary forces play an in- creasing role in conÊicts around the world. Sandline International is a London-based company registered in the Bahamas. It was hired by Papua New Guinea last year to put down a secessionist rebellion. Papua New Guinea’s prime minister hired Sandline for $32 million to crush rebels his own army was unable to defeat. “I am sick and tired of our boys coming back in body bags,” he said.

Sandline, in turn, subcontracted with a South African–based company euphemistically named Executive Outcomes, which supplies and trains the soldiers. “Executive Outcomes has racked up an impressive record of military victories for its customers,” re- ports the Boston Globe. “Equipped with Russian attack helicopters, heavy artillery, and battle-hardened veterans recruited from the troops that defended South Africa’s former white supremacist government, Executive Outcomes has waged war on behalf of the governments of Angola and Sierra Leone.”

In 1989, the United Nations proposed the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing, and Training of Mercenaries. But only ten nations have signed it, and two of them, Angola and Zaire, have already violated it. The United States did pressure the South African government to restrain the role of Ex- ecutive Outcomes in Angola. But the American principled posi- tion was complicated by the fact that the United States then lobbied the Angolan government to hire a competing U.S. Êrm, Military Professional Resources Inc., to train the Angolan armed forces.

The cases we have considered pose the following challenge to the commodiÊcation of military service represented by the all-vol- unteer army: If the Civil War system is objectionable on the grounds that it allows people to buy their way out of a civic obliga- tion, isn’t the volunteer army objectionable on similar grounds? And if military service is just another job to be allocated by the la- bor market, is there any principled distinction between the volun- teer army and the mercenary forces recruited by Sandline, Executive Outcomes, and other Êrms? All three policies—the Civil War system, the volunteer army, and the mercenary forces— offend the republican conception of citizenship. Our unease in each case is best articulated and justiÊed by the argument from corrup- tion, which presupposes in turn the republican ideal of citizenship.

DancingShade
Jul 26, 2007

by Fluffdaddy
Military service but made into an app. The uber eats of just in time soldiers.

Oh yeah, rather than central armories we'll give soldiers a bullet allowance worked into their hourly rate. It'll lower wasted shots if they aim more.

Jel Shaker
Apr 19, 2003

Cerebral Bore posted:

conscription would be outsourced to mckinsey or somesuch at a bargain price of only one million dollars per draftee

would you be surprised if i said that the UK army had already done this for a decade with Crapita, and it’s been an absolute disaster with people unable to even log on to the website

stephenthinkpad
Jan 2, 2020
You know I just read an article of an AI startup, valued at billions of dollars. They just pay people in Philippines min min salary to label things to "train" AI. Like 30 bux a day just to label poo poo in English. Edit, I remember it wrong, only $6-10 a day.

In the future, they are going to pay people in Philippines and Africa pennies to fly suicide drones into combatants. But you have this Ender's Game layer of AI masking video game elements over live combat video feed. You just fly Sonic looking things into shiny rings. Sometimes after you hit the targets, video glitch and you see the aftermath of broken limbs
Everything is privatized and on PMC contract based, you don't need to keep a national army and can free up your budget to do other awful things.

stephenthinkpad has issued a correction as of 14:08 on Sep 16, 2023

Gripweed
Nov 8, 2018

stephenthinkpad posted:

You know I just read an article of an AI startup, valued at billions of dollars. They just pay people in Philippines min min salary to label things to "train" AI. Like 30 bux a day just to label poo poo in English. Edit, I remember it wrong, only $6-10 a day.

In the future, they are going to pay people in Philippines and Africa pennies to fly suicide drones into combatants. But you have this Ender's Game layer of AI masking video game elements over live combat video feed. You just fly Sonic looking things into shiny rings. Sometimes after you hit the targets, video glitch and you see the aftermath of broken limbs
Everything is privatized and on PMC contract based, you don't need to keep a national army and can free up your budget to do other awful things.

But drones can't actually take territory. Your scheme wouldn't win wars, it would just spread destruction and terror

JAY ZERO SUM GAME
Oct 18, 2005

Walter.
I know you know how to do this.
Get up.


sounds right

stephenthinkpad
Jan 2, 2020

Gripweed posted:

But drones can't actually take territory. Your scheme wouldn't win wars, it would just spread destruction and terror

You build a different tower defense game to mask over the land holding Wall-E robots. This belongs to a different PMC and a different contact.

Zodium
Jun 19, 2004

Gripweed posted:

But drones can't actually take territory. Your scheme wouldn't win wars, it would just spread destruction and terror

Zodium posted:

however, the capitalists don't need to win in a conventional military sense, only destroy relatively more (but not, of course, total destruction, such as by global nuclear war).

Frosted Flake
Sep 13, 2011

Semper Shitpost Ubique

Jel Shaker posted:

would you be surprised if i said that the UK army had already done this for a decade with Crapita, and it’s been an absolute disaster with people unable to even log on to the website

lol I had a call centre person call me about my overseas commission into the Royal Marines and rather than actually pull my Canadian medical records they just assumed I was mortally wounded, which is why I ended up as an academic instead of under the colours again. I'm 99% sure if they had just done an actual medical I would have either passed or gotten a waiver, but jokes on them - the King has probably spent more on my education than salary since then.

fanfic insert
Nov 4, 2009
Do not under any circumstances help Frosted Flake get his point across to his superiors, it would be detrimental to communism everywhere.

Frosted Flake
Sep 13, 2011

Semper Shitpost Ubique

fanfic insert posted:

Do not under any circumstances help Frosted Flake get his point across to his superiors, it would be detrimental to communism everywhere.

My superiors actually understand this because it's drummed into us that Long Service Professionals exist because the Militia can only serve as an auxiliary. All of Canadian military history bears that out. The Militia Myth led to Canadians getting routed in 1812, 1860-70, the Métis Rebellions, the Boer War. The Canadian ruling class, led by the Tories, did not want to maintain a military before Confederation, or after, and so they tried to substitute for one with militia - a purely material consideration. They then invented all sorts of ideological dressing for it, which is why Canada has more Highland Regiments than Great Britain. The same thing happened throughout the Empire from the 1850's as the Dominions did not want to pay for their own defence and the Mother Country balked at the costs.

John Keegan talks about it in Six Armies in Normandy, in fact most British military historians find it amusing that the Dominions fielded these elaborately uniformed and titled military units of barely-trained farmers. They were, to paraphrase a Toronto newspaper in the 1870's, very enthusiastic about dressing up in gold braid and lace and drinking beer, less enthusiastic about fighting. When the Boer War came around, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa had to get serious which is why by the World Wars each had one or two Regular regiments. The same goes today where there are the RCR, PPCLI, R22R and then more militia than you can count:

Remember, there are THREE Regular regiments posted:

Governor General's Foot Guards
The Canadian Grenadier Guards
The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada
The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada
Les Voltigeurs de Québec
The Royal Regiment of Canada
The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry (Wentworth Regiment)
The Princess of Wales' Own Regiment
The Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment
The Lincoln and Welland Regiment
The Royal Highland Fusiliers of Canada
The Grey and Simcoe Foresters
The Lorne Scots (Peel, Dufferin and Halton Regiment)
The Brockville Rifles
Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders
Les Fusiliers du St-Laurent
Le Régiment de la Chaudière
Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal
The Princess Louise Fusiliers
The Royal New Brunswick Regiment
The West Nova Scotia Regiment
The Nova Scotia Highlanders
The North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment
Le Régiment de Maisonneuve
The Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa (Duke of Edinburgh's Own)
The Royal Winnipeg Rifles
The Essex and Kent Scottish
48th Highlanders of Canada
Le Régiment du Saguenay
The Cape Breton Highlanders
The Algonquin Regiment (Northern Pioneers)
The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada (Princess Louise's)
The Lake Superior Scottish Regiment
The North Saskatchewan Regiment
The Royal Regina Rifles
The Rocky Mountain Rangers
The Loyal Edmonton Regiment (4th Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry)
The Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada
The Royal Westminster Regiment
The Calgary Highlanders
Les Fusiliers de Sherbrooke
The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada
The Canadian Scottish Regiment (Princess Mary's)
The Royal Montreal Regiment
Irish Regiment of Canada
The Toronto Scottish Regiment (Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother's Own)
The Royal Newfoundland Regiment

It's these professors from Queens university that are incomprehensible to me. I know practically political liberal philosophy like Rawls exists to launder class power, so they write 400 page books about "Who can say if it is good or bad that you choose to sell your labour for a pittance[/I]", but I have read and reread that handout like 6 times and have two problems:

- I have no idea what the gently caress they are trying to say

- It's at odds with military history and the literature on soldier motivation, as well as the actual institutional history of conscripted and volunteer armies

For instance, all French soldiers sent to Indochina were volunteers. The Viet Minh used very intensive conscription. Who was more motivated, when an estimated third of the garrison of Dien Bien Phu actively avoided combat during the siege?

Maybe this is how other people feel when they read liberals describe the economy, they're talking about a fictional, frictionless, perfectly spherical thing to obscure the real system of exploitation. In this case, they are not really describing either military service or citizenship but some sort of weird perfectly spherical market-oriented military experience. It would be desirable to have a system of conscription where people can openly purchase their way out of it, because they are using their power in the market to exercise autonomy? loving really?

Historical evidence aside, it takes about a half second of thought to see the problems with that from a soldier morale perspective.

Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 14:53 on Sep 16, 2023

Raskolnikov38
Mar 3, 2007

We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

stephenthinkpad posted:

It's interesting that the US wasted one-time used card of "national draft" over the Vietnam war, which in retrospect, didn't gain the US empire anything.

They prevented the spread of Communism in the island part of SEA but I am not sure if that had anything to do with the war. The eastern camp couldn't get Communism work in Myanmar and Cambodia. I think those regions hadn't finished state building and were not ready for Communist style government.

Was the US state captured by MIC already that they went to Vietnam just for the benefit of the MIC ecosystem?

probably had more to do with a giant amount of the peacetime army sitting in Germany waiting for the day they got vaporized. can’t pull those troops to go to Vietnam and the numbers needed weren’t going to be made by volunteers, thus the draft

Frosted Flake
Sep 13, 2011

Semper Shitpost Ubique

Raskolnikov38 posted:

probably had more to do with a giant amount of the peacetime army sitting in Germany waiting for the day they got vaporized. can’t pull those troops to go to Vietnam and the numbers needed weren’t going to be made by volunteers, thus the draft

I can explain this if I have time this afternoon, but there were a bunch of decisions in the early 60's that led to this as they did not want to rotate actual combat units to Vietnam for "the duration", so they used the individual tours of duty. This ties into my earlier point because it's an absolutely garbage system from a military effectiveness, unit cohesion or soldier morale perspective, but politically bore the least cost. The rationale being that padding out troop numbers with a heterogeneous mix of draftees rotating home at irregular times would allow units to be in Vietnam for years, with only the headquarters staff actually having any sort of continuity, and so whole combat units from Germany would not have to be redeployed.

It led to there being, in a very real sense two US Armies in the 60's and 70's, as even the personal equipment, organization and weapons of troops in Germany differed from those in Vietnam, as well as personnel.

e: You can sort of compare this to the British Army in the 70's and 80's which had one army in Ireland and the BAOR, which were not mutually interchangeable.

ee: Or the French Army in Europe in the 50's and 60's which had entirely different equipment and organization, as well as personnel composition, than the one in Algeria and Indochina.

To date it has not worked for anyone but people keep attempting it.

eee: Or the Dutch KNIL, which went further and was officially different from the Royal Netherlands Army.

Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 15:02 on Sep 16, 2023

Delta-Wye
Sep 29, 2005

Frosted Flake posted:

In a country that is truly free, the citizens do ev- erything with their own arms and nothing by means of money;

idk they seem pretty smart to me

Cao Ni Ma
May 25, 2010




Basically what a lot of people have been quietly saying but theres still a contingent of current officers that are now generals that have only known afghanistan and iraq that still think that small lean mean high speed force is what its needed.

Frosted Flake
Sep 13, 2011

Semper Shitpost Ubique

Cao Ni Ma posted:

Basically what a lot of people have been quietly saying but theres still a contingent of current officers that are now generals that have only known afghanistan and iraq that still think that small lean mean high speed force is what its needed.

Because if you were in Big Army from ~ 2003, you were past over for promotion over and over again by the SF guys, who had whole commands created for them and came to dominate the military.

People who spent their time in mech battalions were overshadowed for so long that there was massive brain drain of ambitious and competent NCOs and officers to the high speed shops, and still is now.

So, for example, in my corps, the JTAC course and SF qualifications were the way to go, very few artillery officers would actually remain either with the batteries or even serving as regular FOOs if they had the opportunity. Not just the idk worldview but even and especially the skills of the regular army were deincentivized. The people who you would need commanding artillery batteries and regiments or working as FOOs, or advising infantry as staff in their formations, all went into those Special Operations career progressions instead.

e: and the prized SF qualifications did not always actually reflect their real skills, as opposed to ability to jog and do pushups, as you can see in my favourite example

Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 15:48 on Sep 16, 2023

KomradeX
Oct 29, 2011

Ardennes posted:

They are just used to get what they want and bullshitting the public a bit. I don't know about Canada but both the UK and the US have very clear recruitment and retainment issues, and a lot of it is just pay and conditions, which just isn't great. The US navy specifically is having a rough time, and in their case morale is at a low as ships are clearly having maintenance issues, there has been a marked increase in suicides and mental health crises and the US is at relative peace.

Don't forget about that special forces have just become an organized drug gang who murder troops. Not even mentioning all of the rapes.

fits my needs
Jan 1, 2011

Grimey Drawer
https://twitter.com/verge/status/1702017012837257406

quote:

The US Army is awarding Microsoft with another order of advanced mixed reality goggles designed for combat situations, Bloomberg reports. Microsoft had sent the Army a batch of 20 updated prototype headsets in late July, which were tested by two squads of soldiers in August who responded positively to improvements in its design: namely, they no longer felt nauseous and pained while wearing them.

Microsoft, in the past year, has worked with the US Army to create HoloLens-like mixed reality headsets known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), but initial reports in 2022 indicated it was causing headaches, nausea, and eyestrain in testing. The problematic headsets were part of an order of 5,000 headsets the Army started taking delivery in September 2022.

The newer headsets, now on version 1.2, had “demonstrated improvements in reliability, low light sensor performance, and form factor,” Army spokesperson David Patterson tells Bloomberg. The US Army awarded Microsoft with another contract on September 5th for the new systems and to see if the company could scale production.

The US Army had asked Congress to fund its purchase of 6,900 headsets from Microsoft, but it was denied earlier this year. Instead, Congress reduced the $400 million in funding the Army requested to just $40 million to improve the system. The Army awarded Microsoft that money plus an additional $125 million to continue development.

The US Army plans to spend as much as $21.9 billion on the project, and the headset will undergo testing in 2025 by the Army for use in combat. Microsoft’s HoloLens tech continues to live on in these special military goggles, as the development of the home and work use cases of the headsets seems to have dropped off following layoffs affecting the teams involved in January.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
https://twitter.com/DeptofDefense/status/1702669848252133556?t=y3RjUhaUOWF8kGvDN2x3DQ&s=19

Frosted Flake
Sep 13, 2011

Semper Shitpost Ubique


Literally fabricated by Nixon, deliberately lol.

KomradeX
Oct 29, 2011

Frosted Flake posted:

Literally fabricated by Nixon, deliberately lol.

It was real funny seeing all those flags on public buildings in the 90s when I was a kid only to learn it was all bullshit made up whole cloth when I was in high school/early college in the mid to late 2000s

webcams for christ
Nov 2, 2005

Zodium posted:

no. the system is thus in the business of keeping two critical relationships stable: within countries, the relationship between workers and capitalists, and between countries, the relationship between core and periphery.

the first is a question of money. workers must always have too little money so that they need to sell their labor power for money so they can buy commodities, and capitalists must always have much more money than they need so that they can buy labor power to produce commodities they can sell for more money, i.e., the cmc and mcm' loops. you will not wake up one morning to no federal government, because the federal government ensures this relationship holds, if necessary by simply giving capitalists money. as for the power, I can't say. the second is a question of material development and productive forces. control of the linchpins of the supply chains must rest with the core bourgeoisie, and periphery countries must need to sell their natural resources and labor, so that if a periphery country starts to develop too quickly relative to the core, the linchpin can be removed to make the economic wheels come off.

cybernetic capitalism is still, first and foremost, capitalism. where it becomes cybernetic is through the historically particular means of maintaining stability of these relationships by the application of continuous feedback monitoring and adjustment, in the manner of an autopilot, that is, self-organized control. cybernetic capitalism is to finance capitalism what marxism is to utopian socialism: scientific management of economic relations, the apotheosis of deleuze's control society. for example, the within-country relationship is vulnerable to organized labor causing workers to retain a larger proportion of the value they produce, but if the relationship between capitalists and workers becomes threatened in a country, the system automatically adjusts by moving production somewhere it isn't, as happened during the deindustrialization of the core. the between-country relationship is vulnerable to excessively rapid development of the periphery, but if the relationship between core and periphery becomes threatened, a linchpin can be removed, as happened with the asian financial crisis. the plaza accord is an interesting intermediate step here that allowed the japanese bourgeoisie to join the core in return for not threatening the system's stability at a critical phase in its development, but I think this is long enough already. :3:

the endgame, if you can call it that, is first a gradual destabilization of the developmental relationship between core and periphery, and with that, as the autopilot becomes unable to manage relationships by moving productive forces around, destabilization of the relationship between worker and capitalist. that doesn't mean automatic socialism, only a collapse of the autopilot's ability to counteract dialectical turbulence. I predicted a couple of years ago that productive forces would begin to recede behind the national boundaries of the core, and I think that's been bearing out, but whether that ends in an inversion of relations between the core and periphery as the core stagnates, or in destruction of productive forces by war, is anybody's guess. however, the capitalists don't need to win in a conventional military sense, only destroy relatively more (but not, of course, total destruction, such as by global nuclear war). I also predict the neoliberal rot is a temporary state of affairs that follows from and is contingent on the ongoing destabilization of the relationship between core and periphery, and the consequent disruption of value inflows, which will reverse as the recession of productive forces behind the national boundaries of the core reaches a critical point.

i don't know that they are scared so much as they want workers to be scared. AI isn't really a qualitative change to how the system has worked since 1970, it's simply a quantitatively better way of monitoring and adjusting at an incredible scale and level of detail.

great post

Tankbuster
Oct 1, 2021

will it run on the gamebryo engine?

Digital Jedi
May 28, 2007

Fallen Rib

Frosted Flake posted:

Literally fabricated by Nixon, deliberately lol.

KomradeX posted:

It was real funny seeing all those flags on public buildings in the 90s when I was a kid only to learn it was all bullshit made up whole cloth when I was in high school/early college in the mid to late 2000s

I would like to know more

Frosted Flake
Sep 13, 2011

Semper Shitpost Ubique

Digital Jedi posted:

I would like to know more

Rick Perlstein covers it in The Invisible Bridge, but basically Nixon created a wholly fictitious controversy for domestic political reasons.

The book opens with USAF and USN POWs being returned at the close of the war, and Nixon hoping it would overshadow the peace movement/hippies/counterculture. To keep turning that dial and engage the moral majority, the cause of POWs had to be advanced from something being negotiated before the peace process, to something going on during the peace process, and when that didn't achieve enough, after the peace process (when the US knew all POWs had been returned).

The reason the right wing is so important is that Nixon had some experience manipulating their support during his Eisenhower days. This is key because Korean War POWs were already a conspiracy theory during the heyday of the John Birch Society and Red Scare, which Nixon was at the heart of.

Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 22:17 on Sep 16, 2023

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Raskolnikov38
Mar 3, 2007

We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

Digital Jedi posted:

I would like to know more

basically nixon needed an excuse to delay the paris peace talks and continue bombing. one of his and kissenger's methods to accomplish this was to claim every person that was KIA - Body Not Recovered was actually MIA and then accuse North Vietnam of secretly holding them as prisoners and demanding their return before the talks could progress. North Vietnam was confused as to why the Americans were demanding them to turn over prisoners that they didnt have and never existed while Nixon got to go around saying he wanted to end the war but just couldn't until every American prisoner was returned. His administration also started doing massive media events of and with returned PoWs and these eventually coalesced into the PoW/MIA movement that continues today and still accuses Vietnam of holding long dead soldiers as prisoners.

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