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Throatwarbler posted:For example the Super 7 project, to upgrade Chinese Mig-21 derivatives with American engines and avionics. It's a bit of a stretch to fully trace the lineage of the current FC-1 back to the Super 7 project, no matter what sinodefence says. A more relevant example might be the 'Peace Pearl' assistance program to produce an updated version of the Chinese J-8 fighter: http://www.sinodefence.com/airforce/fighter/j8ii.asp, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-8#J-8II.
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Jan 14, 2011 17:21
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EvanSchenck posted:The thing to remember is that the Warsaw Pact had near-total superiority in conventional weapons, so they expected NATO to escalate to the use of nuclear weapons first. Really depends on what timeframe you're referencing to. Allegedly the KGB briefed some honchos in the early '80s on the fact that they probably wouldn't be able to quickly defeat NATO in a conventional war. Admiral Snackbar posted:Hackett wrote a follow up book, The Third World War: The Untold Story in 1982 that accounted for new political and technological developments, but I haven't read that one. My understanding is that it is more or less just a revised version, but it may be more readily available than the first. Anyway, I like the style of this book because it focuses on large-scale concepts rather than some cliché character-oriented plot line. It's certainly a way better version of the same story than the first one but the core scenario may be flawed. Hackett describes a tit-for-tat nuclear action that ends the war because of a Warsaw Pact breakup over it. The exact same thing might have happened just as easily with NATO since their individual governments had much more leeway in setting their own goals. Team Yankee, which has a decent handle on the tactical level of things, uses Hackett's outline as its background to the main plot by the way. For me the most impressive book on the WWIII scenario has to be Red Army by Ralph Peters, which is written from a soviet perspective. Although Peters seems to have lost the plot a bit since he paints a realistic picture of the war's progression and its indicisive end: Germany retreats from the war because of massive Warsaw Pact gains in NORTHAG's (NATO's Northern German Army Group) sector, which threatens to develop into a Rhine Crossing, but the NATO forces in the south remain very much undefeated. jassi007 posted:I get the general idea is we built weapons that could wipe out their society more or less but the idea was we'd never use them. Their idea was they could just win a conventional war and then what? We wouldn't use the final option? There's always the possibility of trying to gain some kind of more advantageous position in some kind of faustpfandaktion or having to wage a war to get out of a domestic crisis. More to the point, the Soviets always claimed they were being threatened by NATO as their adversaries did vice-versa. All in all, no contingency came to happen. By the way, here's the disposition of forces in the European theatre: http://i53.tinypic.com/2aqcnb.jpg http://i52.tinypic.com/2ef450h.jpg These are the troops available for eather side at Hour 0, with LANDJUT (the Danish Army and the German 6. PzgDiv) to the North of the Elbe for Nato and the Central Group of Forces (CGF) together with the Czechoslovakian army south of the GDR and the main Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. Some people claim the Soviets probably wouldn't have sent up the East Germans with the first echelon for various reasons but I wouldn't count them out. Still, the troops you see on the map are what was there if something were to go amiss fast from the '70s onwards. I've wargamed the conflict from the tactical to the operational level, both on land and at sea, it would have been a mess.
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Feb 8, 2011 02:13
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Boiled Water posted:How does war, which from my point of view is pretty messy already, get to be described as messy? As in very little static lines of defense, lots of envelopments and pocketed forces, pretty much a big cauldron of 'red' and 'blue'. EvanSchenck posted:Do you have any more detail about this anecdote? The meaning of it would seem to depend a lot on context. Yeah I'm a bit reserved about it as well, let's just leave it in the middle since I can't even find the quote again. You can see a definitive swing towards limited and even defensive operations in WP exercises towards the end of the '80s but that's a bit outside the timeframe of any conflict realistically happening. EvanSchenck posted:I'm not sure how this works. Even if the southern forces under American command are able to hold the line against the forces initially disposed against them, how would they keep it up as Soviet forces to the north turned down the Rhine and added a second axis of attack? I'd wager CENTAG would have had a much better chance in the initial phase. First of all the terrain is much more conductive in NORTHAG's sector, north of the Mittelland Kanal in particular. From there on south it gets worse, even along the Salzgitter - Hildesheim - Hameln axis there's a lot of nasty terrain to cross, not to mention both the Weser and the Leine in some relatively hilly areas. From Kassel onwards (and the start of the 3. Korps area, CENTAG's northernmost) everything turns to poo poo for the attackers, with many hull-down and ambush positions along ridge- and treelines for defending forces to exploit. Of course there's the axes around the Vogelsberg (and I'd rather slog through the faultline between the 3. Korps and V Corps towards Giessen than get bogged down near Fulda) and the lesser known 'Hof Gap' but you'd get your nose bloodied there. Further towards the West there's the Odenwald, Taunus and Rothaargebirge /Sauerland to cross if you're the unlucky commander of the 8th Guards army of 1st Guards Tank Army (mislabeled on the map). In the north there's only the Weser and, potentially troublesome, the Teutoberger Wald southeast of Osnabrück. Form there on it's one big funnel towards the low countries: everything above the line Bremen - Antwerp is insignificant towards any goal of enveloping southern forces (save for trying to knock out the Dutch, although the army might want to fight on) and to the south you've got, again, the Sauerland and possibly even worse conditions in the Rhein-Ruhr area. Like this. I've seen it happen time and time again, both in the HPS Modern Campaign series and multiple TOAW scenarios: relative standstill in the south, rapid penetration in the north at H48-72. I guess Ralph Peters was on to something when he ended Red Army with the W. Germans giving up because of both the US and the UK pushing for a nuclear release, assuming of course that the conflict would have started off non-nuclear. A huge caveat. EvanSchenck posted:What impact do you think followup forces from the second line of Warsaw Pact states might have? AFAIK for NATO the forces on your map plus the independent French army was everything that could be expected to make a serious contribution, whereas secondary Warsaw Pact states maintained armies that, if not up to Soviet standard, were still relatively large and well-equipped compared to, say, Greece or Portugal. Do people wargame stuff like Hungarian divisions pushing through Austria into Venezia against Italian resistance, or Bulgarians and Romanians taking on Turkey and/or Greece? I guess they do wargame it but it's still a sideshow compared to the big standoff, I guess that's why HPS released three Panzer Campaign titles in the NATO v WP headliner in Germany mold and not, say, Thrace 1985 or Friuli 1985  The availability of follow-on forces all depends on the timetable for the attack. If there hadn't been more than a couple of weeks of preparation, scratch all cat. B and lower WP divisions. There's talk going around of the Soviets not trusting the East Germans to enter their western neighbours in the first echelon (ready divisions of the GSFG minus the 20th GA probably) and more talk about them not trusting the Poles to remain on home soil. EvanSchenck posted:Equipment would vary according to what year you're talking about. You'd even have four top of the line tank divisions slugging it out with the Brits across the Mittellandkanal with older equipment slowly crawling at V and VII corps. From their order of battles you can clearly see the Soviets favored the North German plain. Koesj fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Feb 8, 2011 |
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Feb 8, 2011 16:20
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coolatronic posted:So, tank nerds, what should I respond with that will blow him away or at least make me sound like I actually know what I am talking about. The Merkava isn't considered a lovely tank, lots of discussion centers around whether or not its the 'best'. Oh and this is a tank which actually does carry, or at least is able to carry some dismounts. Just nitpicking.
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Jun 4, 2011 16:47
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Mr. Sunshine posted:Hitler mainly ruled by encouraging this and having his subordinates continually backstab each other, thus ensuring that no-one could ever challenge him. Kershaw paints a pretty thorough picture of it being the other way around: Hitler being aloof of the institutional trappings around him and his clique self-radicalizing to stay in his perceived favor. It's an agency issue but the end result was probably still the same. e: Here's a decent writeup. Koesj fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Sep 16, 2011 |
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Sep 16, 2011 15:13
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EvanSchenck posted:Fair enough. Do we know what killed them, or is that secret for reasons of operational security? I would guess IEDs or lucky hits from RPGs. We don't know exactly, there's some things floating around on the web but nothing confirmed. By the way, at what point do RPG hits stop being lucky and start being unavoidable due to a large number of them being fired from all angles? Hell, even a 1961 RPG-7 hitting the sideskirts of a vanilla M1A1 (which the Marines still use today) will probably get you a mobility kill, something that would have meant having to take it out by air in Baghdad circa april 2003 lest you let the enemy loot about 1 million $ worth of ammo and equipment either to be used against you or sold to a third party. The M1 is not some kind of end-all, be-all supertank. Tradeoffs in tank design make for a pretty tightly margined product. Weight gains in frontal protection (front turret, glacis) have to be offset by weaker armor on the sides, rear and top of the vehicle. Modern tandem warheads will slice through those areas unless stopped by either reactive armor or hard kill systems, which bring their own slew of problems concerning interoperability with dismounted infantry not to mention cost.
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Dec 22, 2011 20:25
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Fair enough. The point of contention with 'lucky' hits is that these vehicles were, and are, deployed in environments where such hits are much more likely than the (semi-) open terrain they were designed to operate in. I'll just quote a 2005 post on tank-net about Charlie 1-2: "The loss of the M1A1 Charlie One Two (IIRC...my copy [link] isn't handy) was due to a fire started on the stowage racks that caused an engine air filter fire that could not be put out. Comments were made to adhere to SOP for stowage of external gear to prevent external fires." You could point to the alleged Kornet kills in Lebanon as an (or maybe the) example where a modern MBT has encountered a 'non-specific' thread. I'm glad there haven't been more cases where a specific weak point proved to be statistically significant like shot traps in WWII.
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Dec 22, 2011 21:20
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ripped0ff posted:Fulda Gap On a sidenote, the use of this as an analogy for the whole central european battle-line is kinda starting to wear thin. The so called 'gap' is only a less than 20km wide river valley through readily defensible terrain. Yes, it presented an opportunity for a local Soviet breakthrough but there was a 700km+ front-line in the AFCENT area alone. Any local or regional terrain feature could have gotten a 'gaplike' mythological status had anyone actually fought over it. As a synecdoche it's both extremely reductionist and way too US-centric to be taken seriously.
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Feb 21, 2012 11:58
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wins32767 posted:There are a few reasons for it. First, the US was responsible for that section of the front rather than some other NATO ally. I don't know whether or not you're trying to be argumentative here but let me just expand a little bit. It's entirely true that the Fulda Gap was an area to be defended by US troops (probably by V Corps's 8th Infantry Division if we are to believe Stasi spywork). Then again, in the southeastern part of V Corps' area of operations 35. Panzergrenadierbrigade (in the Hammelburg area) would probably have deployed into the Rhön first since large parts of the 8th ID were significantly maldeployed. Not to mention all the units of WBK IV of the Territorialheer that should have come online inside the V Corps sector after a couple of days of mobilization (which is where you have to start asking questions about potential scenarios where the Soviets would have even wanted to let this happen). It's all very nitpicky, I know, but there's loads more nuance to the 'cold war turned hot' scenario than to be able to choose one particular (small) potential battlefield, which was my original point of rejecting the notion of the Fulda Gap as analogous for the whole Central European battlefield. quote:Additionally, the US had an important logistics hub and airbases on the other side of it near Frankfurt, one of the largest cities in West Germany. From Frankfurt it's nice open tank country from there to the industrial heart of Germany and the Rhine. Frankfurt would have been an important target but the Rhein/Ruhr area is (or at least was) the industrial heart of Germany, any way you cut it. Then there's the additional goal of capturing Bonn too and being able to threaten the low countries and, potentially, non-deployed REFORGER units from that area as well. No use for swinging towards such a large area through, again, such a comparatively small valley as the Fulda Gap in an extremely roundabout way so I don't know whether your geography is way off or you're parsing potential Warsaw Pact strategic objectives (#1 priority: forcing the Rhine through lovely terrain against, at least in the eighties, the best forces NATO has) out of nowhere here. Switching over to the other side of the fence, the 8th Guards Army (which was opposite to V Corps), you'd probably try to force your way over the Weser somewhere near Kassel, which is very close to the border, and plod along the A44 towards Dortmund. Then again, you might as well swing towards the northwest coming from Giessen/Wetzlar although this would either mean advancing through the southern part of the Sauerland or the hilly terrain on the left bank of the Rhine. Both these directions feel like something either the 1st or 20th Guards Tank Armies would have done coming up from the rear as a sort of 1.5th echelon force in a 'from the barracks' scenario (while the 8th GA performs a holding attack) or by deploying between the 3rd Shock and 8th Guards armies in a more gradual mobilization. quote:The defense for the other main direction of attack, north of Hannover in the plains, was under the command of the British and given the relative force ratios in the first few weeks or months of a conflict was a much more difficult defensive assignment. This notion of 'directions of attack' feels like putting the cart before the horse since the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany was a single theater command which would have had one main operational direction with multiple supporting offensives, holding attacks and division sized diversions going on at the same time. Might it be that this whole notion of two directions of attack comes from the fact that AFCENT was divided into two Army Groups? Who knows. quote:The US(and by extension) NATO might be able to win a fight for the Fulda gap; the North German Plain not so much. If there was going to be a non-nuclear conflict in Germany it was likely going revolve around a Soviet drive towards Frankfurt and the Rhine. Yeah, we don't know this. Same goes for your remark about the 'first weeks or months of a conflict'. Way too contextually dependent to be able to easily speculate about (which is also true about the bit I just wrote about potential Soviet directions of attack btw).
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Feb 21, 2012 19:42
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New Division posted:So, I'm kind of morbidly curious as to what the potential aftermath of a full scale nuclear exchange between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have looked like. Have there been many publicly released studies that speculate on the aftermath of the Cold War turning extremely hot? Lots of limited or either outdated or way up to date stuff, here's an example: http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/ToonRobockTurcoPhysicsToday.pdf And the infamous FEMA fallout with prevailing winds map (red=really bad):  This is probably from an effects study on counterforce scenarios so there's no civilian targets directly hit for the sole purpose of killing civvies.
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Feb 21, 2012 20:37
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Nothing worth targeting I guess.
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Feb 21, 2012 21:05
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wins32767 posted:My assumption was that you didn't have any meaningful background in the subject and so I tried to dash off a quick response aimed at explaining why the synecdoche came to be. If you want to get into the real meat of it, I'd be happy to. I'm not sure what's left to say, and it's all a bit of a tangent, but when you look at stuff that's on Wikipedia: "The concept of a major tank battle along the Fulda Gap was a predominant element of NATO war planning during the Cold War" Ugh. I understand how and why the analogy came to be but this is just disingenuous.
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Feb 21, 2012 22:42
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Yay, finally found the NRDC paper that has it all: http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/warplan/index.asp READ THIS
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Feb 23, 2012 16:50
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I don't care for their message but the technical analysis is impressive. As for your points, they're targeting 2 warheads at each silo? And wrt more redundancy: "achieving near-100 percent kill against many such targets is only possible by allocating a disproportionately greater number of attacking warheads. At this point of diminished returns, obtained by assigning more attacking warheads to achieve a higher kill probability, an alternative option would be to integrate missile defense capabilities with offensive forces" I don't even know what you're trying to argue here, did you read the entire study?
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Feb 23, 2012 22:09
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ripped0ff posted:I'm not really sure I understand what the snippet you posted is implying. Are they attempting to imply that the alternative to knocking out an enemy's strike capability with ballistic missiles would be to give your conventional forces missile defense options? How is this supposed to help the Soviets counter our ICBMs in Wyoming? Is the implication that systems like Nike could actually be counted on to have any real hope of intercepting MIRVs? I'm not trying to be snippy here; I seriously just don't even understand that point. The "alternative option" they're offering just seems ridiculous. "NRDC Report, Ch.2, p.47-48 posted:The attack uses 500 W87 warheads—equivalent to all MM III missiles converted to Two warheads each against 360 silo aimpoints for a 60~97% chance of taking them out, depending on RV CEP and reliability. Leaving, on average, after 288 seperate scenario calculations, 24 silos operational of which only, again on average, another 7 would have been taken out by increasing the number of warheads per aimpoint to three. You're quickly going to get up to a point of very marginal returns when upping the numbers of warheads for a better chance of taking out hardened targets. The point they try to make is that it's much more interesting to catch the stragglers on the defensive side. This is a june 2001 report on the then current situation so you can't parse it one on one to a cold war scenario but the trade-offs are the same. Do yourself a favor and read the report, you'll see that while this: quote:Perhaps a few key population centers would have been hit, but for the most part, both our planning and the Soviets focused on military and industrial targets. might be true strictly from a planning perspective, the effects of those strikes on population centers would have been way more severe than any (semi-)clean counterforce scenario suggests. There's a nice countervalue scenario in Ch. 5 outlining the potential of having a single SSBN warload as a countervalue deterrent. 50 million plus casualties in most cases, which is more than one third of the Russian population in 2001.
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Feb 24, 2012 15:36
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 quote:FIGURE 4.11
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Feb 24, 2012 17:20
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Have these reports y'all have posted placed any estimates on global casualties? Are we talking a 1% drop in world population? 10%? Depends on what you're targeting. McNamara theorised about having an assured deterrent when you're able to threaten 25% of the enemy population. If it had come to total war these are the potential numbers you're looking at, 1999 ones at least: All NATO Member Countries Total pop.: 754,933,329 25%: 188,730,000 Warheads needed to threaten 25%: 300 Russia Total pop.: 151,827,600 25%: 37,956,300 Warheads needed to threaten 25%: 51 China Total pop.: 1,281,008,318 25: 320,252,079 Warheads needed to threaten 25%: 368 500kt. warheads I think, little less than half a billion casualties for the big three nuclear powers/alliance blocks when citybusting with 717 warheads, easily done in the seventies and eighties. That's probably more than 10% of the world population as an immediate casualty with way less than 10% of stockpiled warheads used during those decades.
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Feb 24, 2012 18:52
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Nenonen posted:You'll also need to mind the long time and global consequences. The disturbance on grain trade caused by WWIII, combined with the effect on climate causing crops to suffer everywhere, would have terrible consequences. Especially in third world countries already suffering from famines. For a few years the whole world would be living like North Koreans, while the North Koreans would become even slimmer. Immediate casualty were the operative words here.
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Feb 24, 2012 19:12
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Umm maybe the soviets could have put an early R-7 version in flight but otherwise you're looking at no ICBMs in '59. e: wait I guess there were a handful of early-rear end Atlases around.
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Feb 24, 2012 20:48
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The Merry Marauder posted:Ah, yeah, your edit beat me. You could also say there were no SLBMs, as well, but my point is that the environment is vastly different in 59-62 than 87-89 (arbitrary ranges), and so too must be the strategic thinking. Most definitely. Instead of outlandish radar picket lines in the arctic and the first attempts to automatize air intercept vectors, all in order to get warning times up again, you can fret all about whether or not a cruise missile or depressed trajectory SLBM is going to take all of your command & control out in one fell swoop. Gnarly.
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Feb 24, 2012 21:02
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LimburgLimbo posted:But as was, the Japanese basically bought everything they needed to modernize from the Western powers. While I do think it's applicable in this case, using any kind of 'take-off' model to explain its rapid development is a pretty contentious issue in the historiography of modern Japan (and developmental economics in general btw). There's tons of historical examples where wholesale cooptation of modern technologies didn't work out because of a lack of specific institutional efficiencies to back it all up. That's what, IMO, makes the 1868< Japanese case an outlier. And indeed totally unexpected by the great powers of the time.
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Mar 29, 2012 18:15
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It probably wouldn't have been put into the M0 supply (currency in circulation) right away and at the same time though.
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Apr 7, 2012 20:49
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Which leads to...? I'm sorry but I fail to see the point in stressing these tenuous what-ifs.
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Apr 8, 2012 19:19
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Nenonen posted:Modern torpedoes don't hold the same advantage in bang-for-buck ratio because anti-ship missiles, whether surface or air-launched, are faster and have a greater range while battleship guns have become obsolete. Torpedoes still hold their place as submarine launched anti-surface and anti-submarine weapons, but as far as light boats go, some type of anti-ship missile is a better choice. A small boat just couldn't get close enough to, say, a carrier group to launch torpedoes at it. To expand on this a little bit: a modern navy vessel trades away good old armor for a lot more situational awareness and acceleration potential than vintage craft. Surface ships using missiles instead of torpedoes cut down the awareness factor a lot because of the range and speed while underwater munitions small and cheap enough to be carried by for example irregular forces would probably both be slow, unguided and therefore comparatively easy to outmaneuver. So you're back to good old mines to blow poo poo up from under the waterline on the cheap (they never went away of course) and/or crazy attack profiles if lasers and the like are going to finally fulfill their defensive potential.
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May 3, 2012 19:46
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Throatwarbler posted:What assets? I read one of the articles that that article linked to and it seems to indicate that the S3 might be one but no more details are given... I'm assuming Princeton is a Ticonderoga class cruiser, the US has like 60 of those More like 22 CGs left, and 7 more will probably be thrown out in 2013/14. How's that for not maintaining/decommissioning assets?
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May 5, 2012 16:17
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Lebensraum. The Germans getting the bomb, in '44 no less, is pretty stupid as counterfactuals go since all the ultimate causes for them not being able to build one IRL (fleeing/expulsion/persecution of scientists, destructive intra-governmental competition, capricious leadership behavior and goal-setting) preclude any meaningful comparison to events as they played out. You can't just change the one variable.
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May 5, 2012 20:04
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Oh and Fat Man/Little Boy were both 4.5 times heavier than even the V-2's maximum payload, not to mention the V-1. So what's their delivery platform again?
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May 5, 2012 20:36
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Eh, there's a few things I can think of. The best use I could think of would probably be to load it aboard a ship and try to wipe out the core of the Royal Navy in a suicide attack. The logistics would be difficult to figure out, but if it worked, suddenly France has control of the seas and Britain may as well be out of the war. That's a good one, another option is putting it on a submarine and blowing up target cities from inside harbors. Problem is that you can't really guarantee the survivability of the bomb. That's a very expensive piece of hardware right there and losing it isn't really an option. Sending bombers into contested airspace is out of the question for the very same reason. I think the only realistic option is to use it as either a mine or a demolition munition, preferably both since you want maximum effect on target with such a slow to produce bomb (the US only completed four of them before the end of the war). Against troops it'd be hard to pick a target where its destructive effects vastly outweigh that of a day's work for a couple of artillery regiments and I don't think there are many (or any) targets to crater or inundate. Maybe along the upper Rhine but that's a different theater and probably to close to the homeland/inside valuable territory. Something that could have been used as a defensive WMD on the German side: tripwire persistent chemicals. Maybe with the bomb as an offensive retaliatory backup (if you respond in kind, we'll destroy Moscow/London etc.) e: Argh Nenonen posted:Then there's the option of burying it under a battlefield as a nuclear mine. The problem would be getting your enemy to come to that particular location in a sufficient force, but if done properly the troop concentrations of the time would guarantee the destruction of an entire army. (And half of yours if they weren't entrenched... The early bombs were pretty small, you'd hit more like a divisions' worth of troops. http://www.carloslabs.com/node/20 Koesj fucked around with this message at 13:11 on May 6, 2012 |
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May 6, 2012 13:00
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Jeoh posted:$600 a year in 1944 is $7830 nowadays. Which is still pitifully low but keep that in mind. Wellll as a share of per capita GDP that'd amount to about $18k in 2011 terms. e: I guess an army E-2 got a little under $20k in basic pay in 2011? Koesj fucked around with this message at 23:22 on May 7, 2012 |
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May 7, 2012 23:19
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Red Crown posted:e: ^^^ It isn't well known, but US servicemen were not well paid until the 1960s. As a share of per capita GDP it was about the same amount back in the mid 40ies as now though  quote:Question to the OP and other MAs of History in the thread - I'm an undergrad in History at a university that is generally well regarded for its History program in its region. That said, I am profoundly disappointed in the quality of my education. How much does a Master's program differ from a bachelor's? Western European perspective: no more lectures, way smaller classes (like 2 teachers per class of 12 and in my case even 4-6 students), more in-depth use of certain methods and instruments, a focus on 'cutting edge' published works in your field and a more iterative approach to producing work. e: this is in the socioeconomic field mind you.
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May 8, 2012 18:21
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Nenonen posted:Share of per capita GDP over half a century is not a perfect measure - income equality can change over time, for better or worse. Comparison of purchase power is a better measure, though to be complete that too should include a comparison of job perks like possible free meals, accommodation or healthcare. Sure, it's a very direct way of comparing the job's societal worth though. OctaviusBeaver posted:Also that was what they earned in the US. During WWII most of them would be getting a bonus for serving overseas and I believe another bonus if they were actually in combat. Yeah, as for nowadays, it's the same.
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May 8, 2012 18:54
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I dunno, how many flares can the spirit of Juche produce? Funny thing is that the RAF is moving to only precision munitions for their aircraft and other western air forces probably looking to do the same. Meanwhile I'd guess the USAF will never do away with dumb bomb stockpiles as long as there's a chance that they have to carpet bomb the gently caress out of 200kms of mountainous terrain. Same with mines btw.
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May 9, 2012 16:14
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SeanBeansShako posted:Today I'm kind of curious about that little war that split the Netherlands apart and made Belgium an independent nation. Wikipedia's pages on the Ten Days Campaign in principal and the Belgian Revolution in general are a pretty good summary. I wouldn't know much more about the military side, Roegiers & van Sas are pretty negative about William I and his indecisiveness though. Is there anything in particular you'd like to know?
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Jun 5, 2012 18:12
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SeanBeansShako posted:I think Wikipedia covers the basics, I just see this war always happening in the Victoria games when you start out and it made me curious. There's just not much going for it on the operational side of things while all the strategizing is directly linked to Great Power politics.
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Jun 5, 2012 18:35
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Hob_Gadling posted:Expected use. Expected opposition too. Wheeled South African Ratel 'IFVs' are pretty much only protected against mines and small arms fire when used in the Bush War but those were the main weapons used by the opposition anyway. It's armed with a 20mm autocannon though which is a heavier weapon than the M2/Mk.19 the Israeli Namer carries, which is an APC with tank-like protection.
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Jun 16, 2012 11:59
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Jumpingmanjim posted:Despite Vietnam being what you would call an assymetrical, I read somewhere that the NVA did have some soviet tanks, can you tell me about any notable tank battles of the Vietnam war? There's only one instance of armored combat between US and NVA forces, M48s versus PT-76s in 1969. ARVN tanks fought a lot more though. Here's Donn Starry's book on Mounted Combat in Vietnam: http://www.history.army.mil/books/Vietnam/mounted/index.htm#contents I hate the NVA moniker by the way since it was the official name of the East German Army - Nationale Volksarmee - same goes for KLA/UÇK.
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Jun 18, 2012 14:57
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tallkidwithglasses posted:Industrialization, modernized warfare and the development of contemporary health services and infrastructure are all deeply intertwined in ways that can't really be simply picked apart, but there's a clear correlation in the rise of industrialized warfare and the appearance of large numbers of cases of people who experienced some degree of psychological trauma as a result of battle. Really? Because I'd love to see the data on pre-industrial warfare on which this correlation would be based.
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Jun 20, 2012 17:10
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Sure the absolute numbers are different but then so is modern medicin's capability to keep wounded soldiers alive and society's capacity to absorb larger number of comparatively lower-functioning veterans in the workplace afterwards. As was already said. But I won't go on a limb here and claim stuff about pre-modern PTSD, there's simply no evidence to make any claims based on our anachronistic definition.
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Jun 20, 2012 20:59
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SlothfulCobra posted:Is there any evidence that some soldiers had PTSD before the advent of gunpowder? That's not what I said mate.
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Jun 20, 2012 23:38
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Dr. Tough posted:So just how big are regiments in the British army? A wiki plunge brought me to the page on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Highlanders and it lists it as having 21 battalions That'd be around 2 tanks per battalion on the armoured side I guess! Seriously though, it's all lineage.
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Jul 4, 2012 11:12
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