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Taerkar posted:He's well known to create multiple accounts on places so that he would have valiant defenders of his views, including how M113s can be turned into self-propelled airborne assault vehicles which are launched off the back of Iowa class battleships. Carried by, no poo poo, A-10s. Because nothing says rapid support than an A-10 dropping a single M113 in your lap.
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Dec 11, 2013 16:28
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Panzeh posted:I mean, there's some legitimate controversy to be had with the DoD's extremely corrupt/nepotistic policies that have heavily favored massively overpriced systems. The M113 is a useful auxiliary vehicle, like the MT-LB, but it's just really odd how someone could look to it as the ultimate answer to everything. my guess is that he worked with M113s just as the switch to Bradleys happend. Like most new military equipment, the Bradley was widely considered a piece of crap (too tall, too heavy, doesn't carry as many men). So he wondered out loud why they were replacing Vehicle Of Glorious Design M113, and things spiraled from there.
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Dec 11, 2013 18:02
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Eej posted:Was the X-32 really that bad compared to the X-35? Because it really seems like they hosed up pretty bad right now anyway. From what I understand, the X-32 somehow managed to solve the problems facing the JSF even worse than the F-35. Like "failed hovering tests"-worse.
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Dec 12, 2013 22:01
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Slavvy posted:Why is cujo in the picture and why does it look like it wants to eat my soul? Dogs in Early Modern pictures are one of the most widespread trope of the time. Papers have literally been written about their role in artistic representation of events (I haven't read them, so I can't tell you why).
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Dec 14, 2013 05:10
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:You don't, really. You coerce local governments, or install your own. Maybe your territory is mostly empty and you just ignore the unprofitable bits like French West Africa. Or maybe, you can divert all your resources into a single area that you can access easily, like the Congo river, rather than the entire territory of the Congo Free State. There is the (probably false) story about a poll conducted in India after they got their independence. 40% of the polled hadn't even noticed that the British were gone. 30 % hadn't even noticed the British had ever been there.
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Dec 16, 2013 00:18
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SlothfulCobra posted:Well that's what you get when a bunch of separate nations with their own rules and cultural differences joining together after the dictionaries have already been written. The old Holy Roman Empire had many uniting factors, but language standardization isn't one of them. As a German, whenever I hear that the EU can't possibly ever work because of linguistic and cultural differences, I just sort of giggle.
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Dec 29, 2013 11:15
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count_von_count posted:Since we're subchatting, one of my current side projects is translating the war diaries of U-618, the type VIIC that my great-uncle Hans served on until its sinking in August '44. Uncle Hans is pictured here (scroll down to the crew photo, he's leftmost on the front row); here's a sample page from U-618's first patrol with my attempt at translation. Just a minor thing: Your translation says that they surfaced to repair the periscope, but the original clearly states that they surfaced after they repaired the periscope.
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Jan 2, 2014 10:33
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Kemper Boyd posted:Before you had explosives, anything like that was kind of pointless, considering the effort you had to make to actually throw poo poo longer distances. Never mind that the equipment you needed for that wasn't exactly portable enough for battlefield use. And even if it was, it had trouble hitting targets smaller than a city.
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Jan 3, 2014 11:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:The U-boats modified specifically to become transports to Japan could carry about 200-250 tons of cargo. They carried things like dismantled V-1 and V-2 rockets, dismantled Panther tanks, engines, weapons schematics, and occasionally liaison officers between the two nations. It did not really make any difference - the Japanese didn't (couldn't) do anything with the technology that was shared by the Germans. They had blueprints for their own versions of the Me-262 and or the Komet, but those never went into production even if they were derived from stuff shared through the U-boats. I still wonder why they didn't chose to mass produce the Achtacht when the B 29 attacks started. The Mg 42 and the MP40 were also massively superior to whatever Japan was using at the time, and neither of them was particularly difficult to create. The Mg 42 in particular was designed to be very economic for a light machine gun.
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Jan 3, 2014 21:27
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In trying to get illegal drugs over a border I would believe rate of fire is the primary concern.
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Jan 6, 2014 10:25
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Fangz posted:Well, if the Schlieffen plan had worked (could it have worked?) we'd probably be looking at things differently. Trench warfare didn't happen on the Eastern front, for what it's worth. Schlieffen couldn't work, even Schlieffen himself acknowledged that. The road network in Belgium simply wasn't dense enough to allow the troops needed for that giant flanking maneuver through. In fact, the early war as it happened went better than Schlieffen had expected.
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Jan 10, 2014 16:35
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Obdicut posted:I drew lots of pictures of planes bombing the poo poo out of buildings and dogs ripping off people's arms and stuff. I did not see such things, I used my 'imagination'. Yeah, same here. He was a kid in school bored out of his mind and started to doodle. I mean for fucks sake there is a picture of him turning into a dragon and spitting fire.
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Jan 13, 2014 16:22
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Libluini posted:The English wikipedia is out of date, the Puma has so many problems the Bundeswehr most likely won't even consider taking them anymore. The few that will be bought will just stand uselessly around until they fall apart. But I'm sure there will be many buyers (suckers) outside of Germany. By the way, this is just one of the many catastrophes our overly bureaucratic acquirement process produced over the years. There's a combat helicopter which was supposed to be introduced during the 90s. It's still not finished. That's not entirely fair, a lot of procurement projects were set back when people realized that the Russians probably weren't going to attack after all. After all, the Eurofighter was once know as Jäger 90 (after the year it was supposed to enter service). At least we didn't jump on the F-35 bandwagon. And I, for one, was somewhat disturbed when I realized that a) Greece has more modern MBTs than Germany has, b) Greece has an active fascist party making gains and c) Greeks hate Germans with a passion at the moment. Yeah, there are the entire Balkans inbetween them and us, but still...
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Jan 15, 2014 22:57
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SaltyJesus posted:They probably came attached to one of those bailout deals. As in "Here's some money, but you can only spend it on buying our poo poo." I remember there was a furore over some German submarines they bought like that. No, they bought them long before that. Probably half the reason they are so deep in the poo poo is because they kept buying modern weapons they couldn't afford. The submarine thing caused an uproar because it went through after the bailout money had been paid and everyone could see that Greece should spend that money on getting its infrastructure sorted, and because it may or may not (read: it did) involve massive bribes.
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Jan 16, 2014 02:15
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I would happily accept an army half its current size if I got the feeling that we knew what we wanted it for and designed and equipped it accordingly. Right now we have an army that is equipped to fight a conventional maneuver war against attacking UNKNOWN while we use it to do peacekeeping in mountainous countries. Hopefully we can get that discussion going once we're out of Afghanistan. The Eurohawk disaster was just one part of it. The Bundeswehr seems to want to be able to do everything with enough money to do half of it and the necessary expertise to do a third of it.
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Jan 16, 2014 19:32
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Libluini posted:Yes, it's about Germany. We're retreating right now out of Afghanistan like the USA out of Vietnam, just a little more orderly and with less people getting shot -for now. We're also promising people who worked for us we will protect them from the revenge-hungry Taliban, but I've grown too cynical to hold my hopes up. I understood that as meaning that we will settle them in Germany if they so wish. Which is the right thing to do. What's curious is that in the beginning, there was actually a surprising amount of support for Germany's engagement in Afghanistan, to the point where I think the politicians underestimated the acceptance of the war. Hell, it took them years to even slightly hint that there might be a war on in Afghanistan. And even then they did it in a incredibly backhanded way ("Many soldiers in Afghanistan would today describe the situation as warlike - I can see where they are coming from (though it is obviously not a war or else I would have said so)"). By that point it was painfully obvious to anyone with a brain that we were a party in a civil war. But that is the Merkel style of government for you. All things considered, (unified) Germany's military record looks a lot worse than stereotypical France's, actually. 1870/71: won WWI: lost WWII: lost Kosovo: won(ish) Afghanistan: lost (probably)
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Jan 17, 2014 18:27
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:I've been reading the wiki pages on war crimes in the Vietnam War and it seems that South Korean forces were responsible for the good majority of massacres on the US side. Why is that? I would guess being part of an anticommunist regime, being commanded by (intensly anticommunist) veterans of the Korean War, and the usual bit of racism that seem to permeate Asia (not that race didn't play a role in American warfare in Vietnam).
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Jan 18, 2014 03:28
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It should be noted that most historians would be very, very wary of describing anything in the Early Modern Times with terms of modern medicine. Sicknesses exist in a cultural context, calling Heimweh a form of PTSD would simply be inaccurate. And besides, psychology stresses that the most important thing is to actually talk to the patient, this is impossible with historical figures for obvious reasons. While you can read diaries and letters, these only get you so far. And it must be noted that letters, in particular, are a form of public communication, which means that the writer tries to create a certain image of himself. Put simply, what do you do with a duke who writes how sad he feels about the world in a time where a ruler was supposed to understand the sorrowful state of the world and shoulder the weight of reigning in it?
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Jan 18, 2014 14:34
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The Entire Universe posted:Seconding the Guns of August. It's good for this specific purpose because it details the breakdown of the various gentlemen's agreements between countries not to start shooting, as each player falls to the allure of reaching for that brass ring of continental hegemony. Basically 'we had better move before they do' with each they meaning everyone other than the speaker. France wanted to avenge 1871, Germany felt like they were unfairly seen as a bully, and wanted to slap France around some more for feeling raw after 1871, Britain had their agreement to defend Belgian neutrality as an excuse to dive in and slap the Germans around, etc. The most fascinating aspect for me is how the militaries of the various European states were completely horrified at the thought that peace might be maintained after they were promised a war. Guns of August is full of grown men breaking down crying after the Kaiser/Czar/President postponed mobilization by a day to give the diplomats a little more time. It is probably unprovable, but I'd say there was at least an element of "We worked on our mobilization plan for ten years, by God we're gonna use it!" involved. quote:Am I reading that wiki article properly in assuming that the Brandmeister's job is to basically raise funds by threatening to burn down villages? Fun fact: Brandmeister is still in use in Germany and refers to a rank in the fire department.
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Jan 20, 2014 02:04
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DasReich posted:Fun fact! France was going to violate Belgian neutrality but the Germans beat them to the punch! [citation needed]
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Jan 20, 2014 11:10
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:France would be humiliated and driven further into crazed nationalism, Austria-Hungary's problems would only really have been put on a burner, and a strong victorious Germany could only butt heads with a strong, unscathed Britain. So we have a fascist France hell-bent on reacquiring her territory and a multi-ethnic monarchy in Austria-Hungary tethering on the brink of a revolution that may well go communist. Meanwhile Germany is pouring more money into the fleet now that France is out of the picture, so conflict with Britain is a near certainty, and the Russian Czar tries desperately to stay in power after losing yet another war. Sounds like a decent scenario.
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Jan 22, 2014 07:07
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Was the distinction between Social Democrats and Communists more pronounced in A-H? At least in Germany, the Communist party started out as a wing of the social democrats that didn't want to vote in favor of the war. To the casual observer, that would indicate that there were no communists in Germany before 1914, which is silly. Social Democrats covered the entire left wing spectrum. Multi-ethnicity does not per se preclude a communist revolution, Russia had dozens of ethnic groups (who were shat on under Stalin and slightly less shat on later). Whether or not the various countries would stay without the monarchy is indeed doubtful.
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Jan 22, 2014 10:36
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Slavvy posted:Here's something: I picture that in any given war between nation-states, of the officially recognised combat forces (so not guerillas, espionage agents etc), there is a percentage of actual combatants who shoot guns/fly planes/ride horses and so on, and then a much larger number of people who do behind the scenes stuff like logistics, communications and so on. That is pretty much spot on. The big problem with pre-industrialized logistics is that your supplies would really only travel about as fast as your army, so that meant regular resupply was only really possible in one situation: siege warfare. Especially since foraging means that a country is very quickly stripped of its foodstuffs, and sieges require you to stay in the same spot for a long time. With industrialized warfare, logistics and support became more involved, and with the increased mechanization of warfare, this only grew more pronounced. There was actually a move backwards in the last few years, with logistics being handed over to private contractors (just like it was in the Early Modern Times). And lots of talk about improving the teeth:tail ratio. A good, if incredibly dry, read about it is Martin Van Creveld's Supplying War.
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Jan 24, 2014 08:25
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The movie is better than the book. Also, some phenomenal sfx work. There are plenty people who would demand you take it outside for that comment.
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Jan 24, 2014 19:43
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Now there's another effortpost right here, debunking the legend that before Fisher came the RN was a bunch of circlejerking clowns. Considering that they managed to get two ships sunk in deepest peace time because their officers were trained never to question a superior's orders and the Admiral in question thought himself infallible, I'm looking forward to it.
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Jan 25, 2014 12:37
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the JJ posted:The Cyropedia? It's basically got a Tom Clancy-esque theory crafting section on making the best army possible. (Interestingly, Xenophon proposed disciplined sword and shield as an alternative to the hoplite warfare common at the time...) Boondoggles, noble figures in the opposition flipping sides, a terribly conservative political outlook, a saintly hero figure beloved by everyone... So what you are saying is that it was pierside literature.
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Jan 26, 2014 01:44
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I just read through the wikipedia article on the Tu22 and found out that apparently one of the Lybian Tu22s lost was piloted by an East German crew. East Germany being what it was, I assume they had the blessing of the government, but can someone point me to some ressources about East German advisors/mercenaries in the Cold War?
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Jan 27, 2014 21:58
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Mans posted:I wonder why it became so infamous though. Didn't they actually manage to rout the Russian artillery, even if at an heavy cost? Was it that rare for cavalry to suffer heavy casualties or something? I never got the fixation for that particular situation. Yeah, they took the guns and then fought off a counter charge on the way back. It is just famous because it was seriously stupid and everyone who saw it instantly realized that.
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Jan 28, 2014 04:37
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The Entire Universe posted:Klocz hasn't served watch yet, that's rich. Sadly, the pun doesn't work in German.
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Jan 28, 2014 06:40
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:In actual military history news (how often does that happen!) Ferguson continues to add to the pile of evidence that makes his naming to Harvard inexplicable. A man who does not understand the difference between "entering the war" and "sending troops" shouldn't comment on military history. Especially someone who should understand the role the Royal Navy played in British strategy. I read that yesterday and was completely flabbergasted. Has that man ever even read a book on WWI?
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Jan 31, 2014 01:16
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bewbies posted:It is? Where are you seeing this?  "We should have waited until the Germans beat their main adversaries on land so they can pour their resources, and the ones they have captured, into their fleet. This will allow us to fight on our terms, just like we did against noted proponent of industrialized warfare Napoleon Bonaparte. Also we had no Army in 1914. None. Nada. We had to build one from scratch and send it to France in just a few weeks. We also had to send in the troops the moment we went to war instead of pursuing a blockade. Also all our colonies left because of THE DEBT."I mean, you can argue that British decision making during WWI was flawed, and that it wasn't a noble effort by the otherwise pacifist Brits against the warlike Hun, but arguing that Britain should have stayed out of the war to improve their chances against Germany in a later war is insane. I can not come up with a scenario where a quick German victory against France means that the continental balance of power shifts to a more favorable arrangement for Britain. His main argument was that sending an army in France wasn't a good idea (debatable) and that Britain should have used its naval supremacy better (probably true). Except somehow that means that Britain should stayed out of the war entirely, instead of declaring war and blockading.
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Jan 31, 2014 03:37
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Kemper Boyd posted:The Germans also had the issue of Moltke being kind of a fuckup who first threw a shitfit when the political leadership suggested that maybe Germany should avoid being the aggressor and this would have messed up Moltke's mobilization plan. Though there were alternative plans that could have been used, which the Railroads section of the General Staff had developed for that eventuality. No, there were no alternative plans. The head of the Railroad section claimed after the war that he and his staff could have improvised a mobilization against Russia only, but a) France is still obliged to come to Russia's aid, meaning that they can't be ignored and b) you don't loving improvise a complete turnaround of a million+ men army. With six months warning? Easy. Three months? Doable. The moment the Archduke breathes his last? Hard. Three days before M-Day? Yeah right. The last German mobilization plan against Russia was from 1912, I think. That is to say nothing about institutional inertia. Schlieffen had been the foundation of German planning for almost a decade. There wasn't a General in Germany who would've thrown it out at the moment when it was about to be used. It's the equivalent of the Cold War heating up and 36 hours before the shooting is expected to start the US President wants to retask the US Forces in Europe to defend against an amphibious landing along the North Sea coast.
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Feb 4, 2014 13:42
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I don't know, the coldest winter in a generation (or longer) seems like it would count as an act of God.
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Feb 8, 2014 07:09
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mastervj posted:And what's going on with that weird cock-piece? Please don't purse-shame.
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Feb 8, 2014 12:14
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Mr. Sunshine posted:E: nv Like the name would suggest, it started in Early Modernity. The development of something that could be called states is a long process, and in Europe it is the process between 1500 and 1800 (give or take). You can't really point to single moment when the modern state starts to appear. Basically the Middle Ages ran on the concept of personal relationships. The Serfs were personally bound to their lords (the German term is Leibeigene, literally "the (physical) body's own"), the lords were bound to their lieges, and so on until the King/Emperor. During Early Modern times, that relationship - or at least the ruler's idea of that relationship - shifts from being the lord of a number of people (the Duke of Mecklenburg, for example, called himself Duke of the Wends and Lord of the Cities Rostock and Stade) to being ruler over a certain territory - and it was a long and often violent process before everyone living in that territory acknowledged that they were bound by the ruler's laws. To tie this back into military history, the Early Modernity was also a time of military changes (the so-called "Military Revolution"), which caused army size and monetary costs for waging war to explode. think about it - in the Middle Ages, rulers gave land to nobles in exchange for military service. Every ruler could call up a number of soldiers who were personally loyal to him. In Early Modern Times, this was no longer enough, and mercenaries had to be hired, which costs money. Later the states (or kinda-like-states-entities) had standing armies, which cost even more. Plus the costs associated with an artillery train and fortifications to defend against the new artillery. All of this meant that war cost a shitton of money, where before it kinda paid for itself - the knights got no money because they were supposed to live off the land (and the people) that had been granted to them by their liege lord. So, in order to pay for the wars, taxes were raised, and tax assessors were created who ran around the country assessing the wealth of the people. This is to be taken quite literally - archives are full of endless lists of how many sheep, pigs, cows, chickens, horses, fields, houses and so on every single peasant or citydweller had (often quite amusing to read - "he has a horse, but he says it is lame and that his five chickens lay few eggs, and because his pasture is poor his cows give little milk so he can pay no more than :tenbux:"). This, in turn, created the first elements of a effective state administration, which spread into other areas for a number of reasons. This is a very simplified overview, but seriously, "When did the modern nation state appear and how did it develop" is the big question of Early Modernity. You could fill an entire library with books written about it. Maybe we need a "ask us about Early Modernity" thread.
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Feb 11, 2014 10:08
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Slavvy posted:So the ancient 'states' weren't states in the strictest sense, despite having legal codes and borders and administrative bureaucracies? Or are we just talking about medieval europe here. Its the dirty little secret of Early Modernity that much of what was developed there existed earlier or elsewhere. But even the definition of what a state is (most people I know use the three core elements - area, population, supreme power) is based on the modern day, and using it on something like the Roman Empire wouldn't necessarily tell you about what it actually was. But you are right, Early Modernity is a strictly European period. Talking about Early Modern China is nonsense.
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Feb 11, 2014 10:49
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maev posted:Can someone give me an example of Soviet Deep Battle and how it'd work? I'm reading Zhukov's biography right now and there's a lot of talk about things like 'operational depth' but I'm not sure what that means in an on the ground way. How was it different from Blitzkrieg and does it essentially rely on having a huge numerical advantage? I think Operations Bagration is the usual example. But yeah, it relies on numerical superiority, but so does Blitzkrieg (at the Schwerpunkt). But where Blitzkrieg relies on breaking through at a more or less predetermined spot followed by exploiting and pushing deep into the rear, Deep battle is an attack along a long stretch of the front, with follow up waves exploiting breakthroughs.
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Feb 11, 2014 13:26
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It seems like I'm always doing this at this point, but I'd like to note that Guderian and Manstein were probably the only two people in the world who looked at the Ardennes and thought "that's where we should launch an armored offensive from". You can't really fault the French High Command for that. Not responding properly, yes, but pretty much no one foresaw that attack. Four years later, the offensive launched at the same spot failed for the same reasons it should have failed in 1940: running an armored offensive through a forested area with very few roads is loving stupid (but I like that apparently Eisenhower and Bradley looked at the map, decided that an attack through the Ardennes from the German side would, indeed, be loving stupid and almost committed the same mistake as the French HQ did in 1940).
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Feb 12, 2014 13:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:This sort of dynamic was one of the big influences of 20th century ship design: The Japanese Navy at Tsushima demonstrated that accurate long-range fire from only their biggest guns could be devastatingly effective against pre-Dreadnought designs that had a mix of large-caliber, medium-caliber and small-caliber guns. If you could keep the range high, then the smaller 6-inch or 8-inch guns of your enemy never comes into play, and even if they do, trying to sort out the fall of shot between 2-3 different calibers of guns is going to be a nightmare. While Tsushima no doubt played a major role, I am fairly certain that the all-big gun battleship was actually theorized beforehand, and for much the reasons it was built: if you outrange the enemy and have the speed to keep the range open, you are effectively invulnerable. Frankly, the advances in ship propulsion that were part of Dreadnought were probably as important as the guns. Danger - Octopus! posted:Is there a general history thread anywhere? The links in the OP are dead, and I was looking for some book reccomendations that aren't necessarily military related about a couple of time periods? You can try the history book thread in the book barn, or you can just ask here. Almost all history is connected to war in some way.
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Feb 16, 2014 20:47
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alex314 posted:I imagine that as long as Warsaw Pact forces keeped momentum everything would be ok, but during first successful counterstrike Polish, Czechoslovakian or German soldiers wouldn't be likely to fight for their opressors.. GDR political officer: "As long as the NATO advances, everything will be okay, but as soon as we give them a good reversal in a counterattack, the Germans, Dutch, Danish, Belgians and French won't be likely to fight for their oppressors..."
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Feb 17, 2014 13:45
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