|
True story my first experience with tier 1 operators were some mercenary contractors in Iraq, which was weird, but on the way to a raid their vehicle just left our convoy without saying poo poo and we found out one of the shooters in the back was showing off his cool new pistol and shot another shooter in the leg and almost killed him
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2022 01:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 19:38 |
|
|
Does Samson Optioning count as a loss? 
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2022 01:29
|
|
|
PawParole posted:i mean the Ethiopian army under the DERG was one of the most politicized armies in history, and yet it constantly kept losing to guerrilas. Having a politically oriented military isn't like a magical pill. If your theory is bad then your engagement will also be bad. It's still better than having no theory if you're trying to get cooperation from people who are skeptical of or resent your power. Not having a politicised military is fine if you only have to defend against external enemies, but that's not what we use the US military for.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2022 09:09
|
|
|
To me, a dumb foreigner, the US military seems like it has pretty distinct political tendencies. How many service members reject both major political parties? Seems to me 99% of troops are wholehearted supporters of Americanism.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2022 09:34
|
|
|
Weka posted:To me, a dumb foreigner, the US military seems like it has pretty distinct political tendencies. How many service members reject both major political parties? Seems to me 99% of troops are wholehearted supporters of Americanism. Active duty personnel are just as likely to support Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders as much as any explicitly belligerent imperialist - in much greater proportions than the general public. Even if it's only because they don't want to die themselves, they're a lot more anti-war than the average American. Military members having their own personal politics doesn't equate to the military itself having a politics. It's structured to be an instrument of the American government and nothing more.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2022 09:41
|
|
|
Danann posted:It's a combination of the US entering forever war with insurgencies all around the globe and the various services wanting to be relevant in the apparent future of no more conventional wars. Small units that can be deployed everywhere and can ideally also punch above their weight are more ideal for this because there's less political hassles, less logistical requirements, and less manpower requirements compared to a standard divisional deployment. brigade combat team I assume? KomradeX posted:I'm pretty sure that was literally the plan for everyone NATO Solider in West Berlin, fight to the death for nothing That was one of the things that 50 foot ant probably wasn't exaggerating; the attrition rates would have been staggering A Bakers Cousin posted:True story my first experience with tier 1 operators were some mercenary contractors in Iraq, which was weird, but on the way to a raid their vehicle just left our convoy without saying poo poo and we found out one of the shooters in the back was showing off his cool new pistol and shot another shooter in the leg and almost killed him lmao
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2022 16:13
|
|
|
Tankbuster posted:Can someone explain the special forces tier one operator space marine fetish please? I recall this particular time where a commonwealth doctrine following line infantry regiment straight up smoked a US trained special forces unit in terrain that special forces were supposed to be dominant in. Hell even in pop history books like charlie wilson's war the US brain trust realised that the Soviets using special forces in regular firefights was a huge L because the situation had become too desperate. Smash cut to the entire post 9/11 world and you have so many special forces units running around and creating their own cult following and are returning home to be giga rightwing cranks. it's been about trying to slim down "boots on the ground" based on a post-Vietnam sentiment that part of the thing that caused the US to lose the war was that the people at home saw too many dead bodies part of that was addressed by the whole "embedded program" and the general cooption of the media so that they'd always present a positive view of the wars but the other angle of attack is to just wage war with fewer people, whether in the form of air strikes, that would later transform into drone strikes, or to shift away from large standing formations and use "special forces" all the time
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2022 16:33
|
|
|
it's also a continuation of the trend since world war 2: the big gamble Roosevelt made was that if you loaded down a farmboy commanded by another, slightly richer farm boy with enough gear, he'd be able to beat a trained soldier. this turned out to be completely accurate. the cult of the operator is what happens when someone says 'but what if instead of a bunch of people with a ton of equipment, there were a tiny number of people with more equipment than some nations' and you backfill in mythology to compensate
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2022 16:49
|
|
|
Not really anything new, but catching up on this thread reminded me of a us army vet I used to work with who would tell stories about being posted in Germany before the wall came down and how everyone knew that if it ever popped off they were as good as corpses. Turns out resignation to imminent death at any moment leads to high level partying.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2022 17:56
|
|
|
Milo and POTUS posted:brigade combat team I assume? With Yellow Peril in full swing the US Army is now moving back into divisional formations. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2022 21:51
|
|
|
Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:it's also a continuation of the trend since world war 2: the big gamble Roosevelt made was that if you loaded down a farmboy commanded by another, slightly richer farm boy with enough gear, he'd be able to beat a trained soldier. this turned out to be completely accurate. hmm, can you expand on this? pop history usually points to the French revolutionary wars, rather than ww2, as the point at which armies began to be dominated by large numbers of relatively untrained conscripts, as opposed to the professional soldiers of European 18th-century armies. Roosevelt was hardly unique in ww2 in using large-scale conscription; the red army could also be described as farm boys with tanks (although their material advantages, of course, were nowhere near as overwhelming as the US's). also, the special forces fetishism in the popular imagination focuses at least as much on their intense training as their technological prowess. see, for instance, the old urban legend about delta force/navy seals/mossad/whoever having to raise a puppy during their training and then having to kill it on their last day. special forces fetishism is probably a reaction to all of the west's military failures in the 70s. I'm thinking mainly Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis. the US seemed beset by a bunch of non-peer actors, and their lack of a conventional army was actually an advantage, not a disadvantage: the VC proved impossible to track down and eliminate, and political pressures made it impossible for the US to resolve the hostage crisis by overt force. top secret special forces seemed to promise that the MIC actually could still resolve these thorny international crises, not through making more planes and tanks, but by training bad enough dudes who could fix things by applying violence in the right way. special forces' supposed hyper competence also suggests that they'll always shoot just the bad guys and nobody else, which neatly solves the Vietnam war problem.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 06:39
|
|
|
Special forces are cool because they can effectively bear an overwhelming amount of force, in person. It's as simple as that. People get really invested into the power fantasy of being an operator. Shifting to a focus on SOCOM was a natural development, because what you really need to combat a materially inferior insurgency is a death squad.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 06:52
|
|
|
Aglet56 posted:hmm, can you expand on this? pop history usually points to the French revolutionary wars, rather than ww2, as the point at which armies began to be dominated by large numbers of relatively untrained conscripts, as opposed to the professional soldiers of European 18th-century armies. Roosevelt was hardly unique in ww2 in using large-scale conscription; the red army could also be described as farm boys with tanks (although their material advantages, of course, were nowhere near as overwhelming as the US's). The French revolutionary armies being untrained rabble who simply overwhelmed the cool and good aristocrats with bodies is as much bullshit as the "Soviet hordes" of WW2.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 07:26
|
|
|
We like to pretend that American special forces trace back to commando units, but we leave out the fact that they also inherited the practices of sonderkommando & einsatzgruppen. But using special units to carry out the duties of death squads wouldn't really kick into gear until the Phoenix Program during Vietnam. The Sonderkommando and Einsatsgruppen didn't need special equipment or training, because regular military issue was more than enough to deal with civilian populations in Europe. Common people had no means to fight back, and partisans had meager weapons & supplies. That all changed with Vietnam, where suddenly you had a well armed and supplied insurgency operating everywhere. You can't just send a regular combat unit out to do anti-insurgency anymore, you need trained killers who can overwhelm a resisting population, and directly target supporters of the insurgency. The same problem came up from populations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In some cases every household was armed. So if you're dealing with an armed & unruly population, the only thing that gets results for killing insurgents & sympathizers is sending in the elite death squads.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 07:50
|
|
|
There is a feedback loop between the MIC (military industrial complex)and hollywood that has made “operator worship” a thing. 1. With the end of the draft and the fact that the US hasn’t fought a conventional force since Korea, the Us has needed to switch away from relying on grunts to relying on special forces, who are willing to do the random violence and torture needed to suppress an insurgent population. 2. Since embracing neoliberalism, the MIC has gone from being a military first and a graft machine second to being the other way around. As such, the focus has gone from equipping an army to equipping a select few with the most expensive gear imaginable. 3. A poo poo-load of money goes into Hollywood to tell heroic stories about special operators and super-heroes, which are their fictional equivalent. Iron Man is a war contractor and operator, with a super-hero tint. Wonder woman is a troop. Hell, ever wonder why the loving Transfomer series, a bunch of movies about toy robots you grew up with had a poo poo-load of army stuff in it? All pentagon $$$ baby! 4. The media attracts dumber and more vicious recruits, less interested in making money for college and more interested in getting into fire fights and killing brown people. 5. You need a more vicious special forces to suppress locals as the focus is less about defeating an army and more about protecting an oil pipeline / poppy field. 6. The insurgents eventually win. Blame it on the democrats and buy more expensive toys for fewer troops. If you’re a general, make bank when you retire and go work for Northrop Grumman or Disney/Marvel. 7. Repeat.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 08:05
|
|
|
more from "About Face": * DIT stands for Directorate of Individual Training   
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 08:46
|
|
|
IMO the cult of the operator really begins in the pages of Soldier of Fortune, which actively solicited people to be foreign volunteers or mercenaries. That kind of ultra macho militant subculture didn't really spring up in films until the 80s. You also had popular memoirs from Green Berets and Delta Forces being published, anticommunist military fantasy in airport racks. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that Hollywood was catering to a pre-existing demand from a very virulent culture of professional military worship.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 08:48
|
|
|
Pener Kropoopkin posted:Active duty personnel are just as likely to support Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders as much as any explicitly belligerent imperialist - in much greater proportions than the general public. Even if it's only because they don't want to die themselves, they're a lot more anti-war than the average American. Military members having their own personal politics doesn't equate to the military itself having a politics. It's structured to be an instrument of the American government and nothing more. Yeah my point is that the American government is pretty unidirectional. It's pure neoliberalism and even those two outliers you mentioned if you dial down on their policies in practice are neoliberals. The Atomic Man-Boy posted:There is a feedback loop between the MIC (military industrial complex)and hollywood that has made “operator worship” a thing. Offhand, the NVA, Iraq times two, the Balkans intervention.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 10:37
|
|
|
Danann posted:Brigade Combat Team yeah. Kinda lol that that corps sized formation has a single shorad bn to its name
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 15:05
|
|
|
aphid_licker posted:Kinda lol that that corps sized formation has a single shorad bn to its name Yeah, that might be a bit of an issue if you are fighting a power with an actual Air Force. (SHORAD is AA)
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 16:16
|
|
|
Aglet56 posted:hmm, can you expand on this? pop history usually points to the French revolutionary wars, rather than ww2, as the point at which armies began to be dominated by large numbers of relatively untrained conscripts, as opposed to the professional soldiers of European 18th-century armies. Roosevelt was hardly unique in ww2 in using large-scale conscription; the red army could also be described as farm boys with tanks (although their material advantages, of course, were nowhere near as overwhelming as the US's). trend within the American armed forces, not larger world, couldn't speak to that. the thing that made America unique wasn't relying on conscription, it was that it had no officer corps or military tradition to speak of, compared to the other players. we were uniquely forced to go ALL the gently caress in on gear over training because we didn't have anyone who could train.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 16:53
|
|
|
A lot of that is just that the pre-war US army was comparatively tiny and didn’t even really have tanks in sizable numbers as the war began. The US had to get up to speed very quickly.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 16:58
|
|
|
The US always demobilized after a war and relied on volunteers or conscription if necessary to rebuild in the event of a new war. That was the pattern all the way up to the Cold War, when the US never demobilized and always had at least a million active duty military stationed around the globe. The main reason we had any standing army at all was to fight Indian Wars.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 17:05
|
|
|
Rent-A-Cop posted:People are always trying to sell the next book about The War That Changed War, but you always fight with the army you have. Nobody ever said "LOL gently caress professionals, get me some farmers!!" The french artillery was always highly trained professionals who knew how to do things like mathematics. aphid_licker posted:Kinda lol that that corps sized formation has a single shorad bn to its name thats a division no?
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 19:02
|
|
|
Ardennes posted:Yeah, that might be a bit of an issue if you are fighting a power with an actual Air Force. (SHORAD is AA) I guess they're going all in that the Airforce will be able to wipeout out the PLAAF
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 19:42
|
|
|
aphid_licker posted:Kinda lol that that corps sized formation has a single shorad bn to its name This always perplexed me about the US army order of battle compared to for example Russia, what happens if our air force is a little too busy fighting the enemy air force to come drop a bomb on some shack you see across the valley? What happens if our air force is so tied up the enemy has opportunities to deploy theirs in ground-attack roles safely? Are you really going to rely on Strykers with a pod of 4 stingers to fend off an air attack? What if they use stand-off weapons that outrange stinger? Russia's got a cavalcade of air defense (Tor, Shilka, Tunguska, Osa, etc on top of MANPADS obviously) we got ???? dudes with MANPADS or MANPADS bolted to IFVs? I guess there's Patriot... but good luck in a high-mobility environment. The US used to have more/heavier tracked/road mobile air defense stuff but after the Cold War we just kinda assumed the AF would do all the heavy lifting and never filled that hole. Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 19:54 on Jan 18, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 19:44
|
|
|
Tankbuster posted:The french artillery was always highly trained professionals who knew how to do things like mathematics. They call it a division but a division should have like two or three brigades, not eight. It's a shitload of stuff, even if the bdes are on the small side probably. E: like the mech bdes only have the bns to make a regiment, but then it's still enough regiments for two small divisions, plus all the extra stuff aphid_licker has issued a correction as of 20:08 on Jan 18, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 20:04
|
|
|
KomradeX posted:I guess they're going all in that the Airforce will be able to wipeout out the PLAAF Yeah, that if a bit of an issue considering the PLAAF is rapidly mirroring the capabilities of the USAF and at very least would deny the US air superiority (which would in turn neuter the US army’s offensive capabilities since they don’t really have any where the dedicated AA capabilities they need.)
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 20:06
|
|
|
The US really doesn't have much ground based AA capabilities huh. Like do we even field a long range SAM system ala the SA- series? I understand the US loves fighters and hates cheap effective systems, but lol.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 20:09
|
|
|
skooma512 posted:The US really doesn't have much ground based AA capabilities huh. Patriot's really it, anything larger is geared towards ICBM interception and isn't mobile (or at least isn't meant to shoot and move quick enough to support a maneuver brigade) afaik. Pretty sure Patriot also cannot be fired on the move and has a long setup time. You get a pod of 4 stingers and a 25mm/30mm cannon and that's it! Good luck, commander! Maybe the navy will invent dirtbreaker technology and steam in some destroyers overland. Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 20:19 on Jan 18, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 20:16
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/EndGameWW3/status/1483560487145164808 huh, yeah, that's fun
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 23:05
|
|
|
aphid_licker posted:Kinda lol that that corps sized formation has a single shorad bn to its name The other ones also have a single AD battalion so I guess they all have to share the uh 11 or so independent air defense brigades floating around.     aphid_licker posted:They call it a division but a division should have like two or three brigades, not eight. It's a shitload of stuff, even if the bdes are on the small side probably. It's basically a HoI 4 40w division compared to the other 20w divisions. skooma512 posted:The US really doesn't have much ground based AA capabilities huh. There's Patriot but it's the medium range stuff like Tunguskas, Osas, and Pantsirs that the US lacks the equivalent to. Danann has issued a correction as of 00:05 on Jan 19, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 23:10
|
|
|
Justin Tyme posted:Patriot's really it, anything larger is geared towards ICBM interception and isn't mobile (or at least isn't meant to shoot and move quick enough to support a maneuver brigade) afaik. Pretty sure Patriot also cannot be fired on the move and has a long setup time. install legs instead imo 
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 23:12
|
|
|
Danann posted:install legs instead imo Amphibious landings brought to you by Dahir Insaat
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 23:14
|
|
|
Pener Kropoopkin posted:We like to pretend that American special forces trace back to commando units, but we leave out the fact that they also inherited the practices of sonderkommando & einsatzgruppen. But using special units to carry out the duties of death squads wouldn't really kick into gear until the Phoenix Program during Vietnam. got any good reading on this ?
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 23:26
|
|
|
Danann posted:install legs instead imo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX0ndYDprLQ
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2022 23:33
|
|
|
Almost no NATO army has any significant air defences, excluding long range missiles like the Patriot, with more range than MANPADS. Turkey, the Czech Republic (i will never say czechia), Spain and Norway have a few medium range SAMs, Italy has some but they aren't vehicle mounted. Germany only had MANPAD carriers but are in the process of introducing some medium range SAMs. France just has the mistral. Britain just has the Starstreak, another MANPADS. The Canadian Army notably has no anti-aircraft capability at all, not even manpads, and would be all but helpless against a single helicopter. The only major exceptions are the Polish, who have 64 Osas and 30 Kubs, and oddly enough the Greeks, who have 20 Tors and 30 Osas.
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2022 00:02
|
|
|
pancake rabbit posted:https://twitter.com/EndGameWW3/status/1483560487145164808  One of those things is not like the others (fully functional ships)
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2022 00:05
|
|
|
Danann posted:The other ones also have a single AD battalion so I guess they all have to share the uh 11 or so independent air defense brigades floating around. No rocket arty, interestingly. How many tubes is an arty bn? Three times 12, so 36ish?
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2022 00:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 19:38 |
|
|
sullat posted:
Yeah, that’s the LBJ, despite being launched in 2018, it hasn’t been commissioned. Midranged AA is probably the most important in a tactical sense, most modern air forces will either work out of the range of MANPADS or use tactics to disrupt them and pretty much all long range AA is strategic (some are more mobile than others). It would make sense Poland and Greece would retain some capabilities considering their relative positions.
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2022 00:30
|
|