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pogi posted:An interesting supplemental thing I’ve found on Vietnam is the Senate’s Committee of Foreign relation’s hearing of journalist Harrison Salisbury’s trip to North Vietnam. Here’s the link to the document: this is from like six pages ago, but I just wanted to point out that the chairman of that committee was a notoriously hardline anti-Vietnam-War dove who ended up getting primaried by a more hawkish Democrat almost entirely because of his anti-war positions, so he is almost certainly being sarcastic here
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Jan 26, 2022 23:07
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Giap is all the more impressive for having started out with both no army and no military training to speak of, the guy essentially started from nothing a high school teacher with thirty-five soldiers, armed with rusty flintlocks that would have been obsolete in 1870, built one of the finest armies in human history off that foundation
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Feb 11, 2022 02:17
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also, anyone suggesting buying a new combat vehicle from another country without involving US defense contractors at all would probably be laughed out of the room the primary purpose of all US defense procurement is graft, the actual functionality of what you're buying is at best secondary
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Feb 20, 2022 01:46
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Ardennes posted:Yeah Mercenaries, had a count down timer where literally thousands of people were dying in by the second, and it wasn’t considered that weird at the time. also the US are depicted as straight up villains who are only there to serve the interests of oil companies looking to privatize and steal VZ’s oil, one of the factions you work with is a Marxist guerrilla movement who pay you to kill the oil companies’ mercenaries, and the Chinese are the most honest, straightforward, and decent people in the game also there’s a major faction of Jamaican pirates who are all Rastafarian stereotypes and get into full-on conventional battles with the Venezuelan Army it was a weird fuckin game
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Aug 30, 2022 00:39
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sullat posted:Yeah sometimes some wild stuff gets past the censors. I read one book by an ex-CIA spook where he casually tells an anecdote about how he tried to assassinate Laurent Kabila on behalf of Mobutu in like, 1970 or something. back in like 2007 some French and Algerian communists made a documentary about Cuban participation in anti-colonial struggles in Africa in the 1960s and 70s, and they managed to get an interview with Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in the Congo during the Congo Crisis, and he was just straight-up like 'yeah I was instructed to kill Patrice Lumumba and the orders came directly from the White House and we ensured it happened', conversationally and without a hint of shame he even tells a light-hearted little anecdote, laughing the whole time, about how he had to hide all the poisons he was supplied with, to murder a lawfully elected head of state, in his safe because he was afraid one of his co-workers would use the poisoned toothpaste and die
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Nov 15, 2022 20:35
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during the pullout from Afghanistan there were a bunch of deranged Tory idiots suggesting that the UK should refuse to leave and just stay in Afghanistan unilaterally, without US support, using the Royal Navy's single dinky aircraft carrier as the offshore base for the operation nevermind that Afghanistan is far enough inland that even reaching it with the carrier's aircraft would be annoying, there is actually a far funnier problem, which is that a significant portion of the carrier's fighter complement aren't even British, and are actually US aviators who are only nominally under Royal Navy authority. the ship technically gets to fly a Brit naval ensign but it can't really do anything without the explicit permission of the United States.
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Nov 24, 2022 23:46
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also there’s a thriving grey market of shady ammo resellers who buy up all the popular calibers and relist them online for triple what they paid for them a lot of stores around here have limits on the max amount of ammo you can buy per person to try to discourage the practice, but even then it’s common for most of the more popular calibers to be sold out
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Feb 17, 2023 04:18
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Frosted Flake posted:I think this came up in some lecture I attended on the Victorian Royal Navy and cruisers, which were like 15% of the entire state expenditure: the point of warships is to risk and lose them, it's why countries take on the enormous cost of having them accomplish absolutely nothing in peacetime. The Royal Navy paid for all of these ships to bob at anchor in the middle of nowhere, cruise around the world's oceans, to be replaced every 10 years as they wore out and became obsolete. They even set up an incomprehensibly expensive network of coaling and telegraph stations around the world. it would be even worse because the casualties would be in the same ballpark as the total US death toll from the entire Iraq War combined, a scale of mass death that the US military has completely forgotten how to deal with and which isn’t even supposed to be possible anymore the US military being, not just strong, but literally invincible and literally incapable of losing a war, is an article of faith here, one that many people believe so fervently that people routinely claim that the Vietnam War technically counts as a US victory because they killed more people than the Vietnamese did (‘American tactical victory’ is the phrase they like to use). death on that scale is something the military is supposed to inflict on other people, not suffer itself. I don’t know exactly how they would react but I know it would completely and permanently shatter some people’s psyches
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Mar 2, 2023 02:21
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I think we've had conversations about this in other threads before but China produces more steel than every other country on the planet combined, and the second and third place producers are the I and the R in 'BRICS' (with the B at 10, and Iran sitting at #11) obviously that's just one commodity and you can't eat steel, but it is really not an exaggeration to call China the 'workshop of the world', the disparity there is loving absurd. and you can't just move all that production back to the US or wherever, the process of deindustrialization was a decades-long and extremely thorough gutting of everything that made it possible for the US to once fill that role. The factories were not just closed, they were stripped bare, the firms that once operated them restructured, the skilled labor that once worked them is all dead or retired, the unions that once helped to maintain the necessary benefits and protections to make someone willing to work those jobs have been neutered, the public education system that created suitable new recruits for those positions has been sabotaged, the railroads that moved raw materials in and finished goods out are completely loving decrepit, and the government has neither the power to compel private industry to solve any of those problems nor the will to fix any of them itself. Danann posted:I'm more surprised there's specified payment for hypothetical 8-year privates. sometimes people get busted down if they commit an egregious crime or otherwise really gently caress up Mister Bates has issued a correction as of 01:11 on Mar 11, 2023 |
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Mar 11, 2023 01:06
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yellowcar posted:also state authorities seizing each other's medical supplies while they were in transit was pretty funny the federal government handing over a bunch of confiscated medical supplies to private companies that then resold it to the people it had been stolen from in the first place the US Navy committing piracy multiple times to steal shipments of medical supplies and not even bothering to try to justify it the New England Patriots smuggling ventilators through customs on their private jet on behalf of their home state’s government to keep them from getting confiscated
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Mar 16, 2023 23:52
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Doktor Avalanche posted:didn't the nazi military industry make these complicated tanks and vehicles that broke down quickly and couldn't be repaired while the soviets just churned out boxes with wheels/tank treads which worked in anything for a bit more time than their nazi counterparts the Panther tank had a good chance of stripping the teeth off every gear in the transmission and permanently immobilizing itself if the driver shifted into third gear too vigorously, and you had to dismantle almost the entire tank to get in there and fix the drat thing
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Mar 17, 2023 08:24
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the US army came dangerously close to complete collapse in Vietnam, and stab-in-the-back myths about the politicians betraying our brave boys on the cusp of victory aside, the US only gave up on Vietnam because they had been militarily defeated and could no longer continue the war. here is a (retired) USMC artillery colonel explaining the situation from his perspective in Armed Forces Journal, a magazine for military officers, in 1971: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/Vietnam/heinl.html (the author has an annual award, the Colonel Robert D Heinl Jr Memorial Award in Marine Corps History, named after him, fun fact) now obviously there's stuff in this that this guy was wrong about, and he was also extremely racist and extremely paranoid about communists, liberals, rock music, etc., but he is accurately reporting how much of the US military's officer corps perceived the situation at the time. the draftee army was a complete failure and they knew it. morale was rock bottom and by 1971 it was increasingly difficult to get the draftee units to do anything at all. the ARVN was a sad joke and there weren't enough professional US military units to prosecute the entire war by themselves - even if all of them were willing to go fight, which by 1971 was not a sure thing anymore; even the guys who volunteered were getting fed up. none of the problems which collapsed the draftee army in Vietnam have gone away and most of them have since gotten way worse, and soldiers can now text each other seditious literature instead of having to secretly mimeograph illegal newsletters in the barracks. lol, and now I'm imagining some crypto bro trying to disrupt the 'cash bounties on gung-ho officers' industry by putting out an app that lets you pay out bounties in ETH
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Mar 18, 2023 07:12
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lmao the peace dividend the idea was supposed to be that, now that the US has defeated the Soviets, looted everything in Eastern Europe that wasn't nailed down, and punished the people for their disobedience such that no one in that region would ever think about opposing the West again, the military budget can be sharply reduced and all of that money can be diverted to social spending, poverty reduction, infrastructure improvements, education, science and technology, and generally improving the country. we have reached the end of history, defeated the great enemy, won the final victory, and now we can reap the rewards and enjoy a slow, gradual improvement of society what actually happened is that the US political leadership and media all simultaneously decided to suddenly be extremely concerned about the deficit and about reducing spending, the common people got no tangible benefit out of any of that money, and also the small reduction in the defense budget was completely undone and then some within a decade
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Mar 24, 2023 21:16
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mlmp08 posted:Yeah, the F-15E crews will be the most practiced in stuff like takeoff, landing, and insurgency-level CAS, but they might be LESS capable when it comes to advanced A2A combat training or SEAD/DEAD or long-range strike compared to crews getting less hours, but training instead for high end combat. F-15E squadrons still deploy to the middle east, but a lot of the focus over the last couple years has been getting them back into training the kind of skills required for a Pacific conflict. I predict the F-35 crews will get quite a lot of practice at being DEAD
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Mar 25, 2023 21:14
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in theory a versatile, 'good-enough' multirole aircraft is cheaper and more efficient than having a bunch of dedicated hyper-specialized aircraft for every individual task you wanted to do, and would be able to perform a bunch of different missions to an acceptable standard in most situations, letting you better leverage your more specialized aircraft by focusing them on more important or more difficult objectives. for carrier-capable aircraft like the F-18 or the MiG-29, having an aircraft that can be configured for both air-to-air and ground attack missions also helps address the problem of only being able to carry a limited number of airplanes on the carrier. of course the F-35 was supposed to be not only 'good enough' but better at everything than any of the dedicated aircraft designed to do those things, and lmao at it being cheap or efficient
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Mar 26, 2023 16:00
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galagazombie posted:This is why I always take doomposting about US/Western military capabilities with a big grain of salt. There is a rich history of the MIC saying that the 1991 Soviet Union is poised to overrun Europe if we don’t cancel all social programs and give them lots of money. the Soviet military would have absolutely won a conventional war in Europe pretty much right up to the point the Berlin Wall came down, which is why the West's plans for fighting the Soviets involved deploying nukes early and often
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Apr 20, 2023 20:48
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a significant portion of the other British aircraft carrier's nominal fighter complement are literally Americans, as in, American aviators flying American aircraft and operating under American command, which is to say that if and when the ship does anything at all it is only because the US has deigned to allow them to functionally it's just an American ship the Americans don't have to pay for, and this is the 'pride' of the once-mighty Royal Navy, lmao
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Apr 26, 2023 21:21
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as history has repeatedly shown us, the side that can manufacture and deploy large quantities of good-enough weapons and keep them consistently supplied with ammunition and spare parts will nearly always lose against the side that instead produces very small quantities of extremely expensive bespoke wonder weapons (lol one of the things they're short of is even literally a German tank, it's like poetry, it rhymes)
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May 22, 2023 22:38
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are there any other countries besides the US that treat their marines/naval infantry as effectively their own separate and independent military that replicates all the functions of the other branches in miniature?
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Jun 10, 2023 19:48
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the US will never ever risk B-2s over an enemy that has a functioning air force because they built less than two dozen of them and they need them to launch nukes when the time comes to end human civilization
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Jun 18, 2023 14:16
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Slavvy posted:Tom Clancy reliably informed me that American subs are covered in rubberized briquettes and super secret sonar stealth paint tho pretty much everyone uses the rubber tiles now, the Russians love those things and most modern American subs are also covered in them so long as they stay stuck on the boat they make it dramatically quieter, like, 90% quieter unfortunately they're glued on and over the last few years there have been major problems with the glue failing and huge patches of the tiles falling right off of US submarines, with the Brits apparently experiencing the same problem
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Jul 26, 2023 01:31
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DancingShade posted:Also ISIS only operates in the bits where the oil wells are. Fortunately the US will guard and look after the wells. They might also take the oil but that's just business, can't expect all that regional security to be free after all. lol, years back this is what finally got me to realize that the 'Rojava revolution' was a US proxy and that's why the US government weren't bothering to arrest or otherwise stop all the American adventure tourists going over there to play at war long live the non-specific anti-authoritarian revolution, it is imperative that we turn over all the oil to the United States as Bookchin said
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Jul 31, 2023 14:40
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the 'you're denying X country's agency and saying that no one can make independent decisions without being influenced by the US' argument has never made any sense to me because no state has ever had 'agency', not even an uncontested hegemon actually acts completely independently, even the US itself has a limited number of things it can realistically do in any given situation like, yes, states do make decisions based on and in reaction to things that are occurring in the world, and those decisions are based on information that state has access to, informed by ideology, and limited by the material situation that state finds itself in, why is that a controversial position to hold, why would we assume that states generally make decisions in a vacuum
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Jul 31, 2023 17:10
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mlmp08 posted:Not for active aircraft, but they do sometimes publish the list of stored non-flying airframes sitting in the yard. tag yourself I'm the one Ryan Firebee target drone
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Aug 8, 2023 19:15
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a former roommate was a retired Army rear echelon NCO and he used to talk about all the dumb poo poo that got routed through his workplace the standout for me was the time they handled a shipment of ‘tactical hatchets’ that came in little digital camo patterned hatchet sheaths, which the Army was being charged 300 dollars each for he mentioned looking them up and finding them for sale on the manufacturer’s website for 50 bucks each also no one ever even took them out of the plastic bags they came in
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Aug 9, 2023 15:35
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lol Twilight 2000 predicted this way back in the 1980s
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Aug 10, 2023 04:24
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every once in a while I think about glider infantry and am still blown away that multiple militaries thought that was a good idea, good enough to train and equip thousands of soldiers and build hundreds of gliders and actually use the things in combat in multiple major operations what a lovely job, you didn't get any of the extra pay or prestige that came with being a paratrooper but still got all the danger, and the glider pilots had all the training and prestige of a truck driver (in the US, at least, the Brits treated theirs better)
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Aug 15, 2023 20:02
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The Oldest Man posted:this is some reddit fanfic grade naming convention poo poo lmao when the gently caress did this all happen lmao that space base reminds me that it's right next to the abandoned ruins of Camp Century, the Army's experimental proof-of-concept for ICBM bases buried in the Greenland ice sheet, which was abandoned as a failed experiment because all of the base's sewage was soaking into the ice and was actually destabilizing the structure, with several of the ice tunnels deforming and slowly sinking into a literal pool of poo poo, and the odor of sewage becoming so unbearable that troops could not live or work there anymore
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Aug 20, 2023 23:48
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this discussion of the space force got me wondering if the space force actually has any astronauts in it, and I suspected the answer was 'no', so I looked it up, and I was wrong! there are in fact astronauts who are commissioned in the Space Force. there are two none of the four active-duty military guys selected as astronauts in the time since Space Force was formed were members of Space Force, although two of them are in the Air Force, lmao
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Aug 21, 2023 02:41
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osprey ftw
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Aug 27, 2023 19:24
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Slavvy posted:Good news! lmao 'it's relatively small, also it does not include any of the heaviest or bulkiest components, which will have to be added separately'
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Aug 28, 2023 06:16
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gonna sell the US government a box of screws and call it the world's smallest and most compact laser. it isn't a complete weapon system, more of a plug-in component. that'll be 40 million US dollars please.
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Aug 28, 2023 14:11
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when I was in aircraft mechanic school years back one of our instructors decided to try to do the thing where you go around the classroom each reading a section of the reading assignment out loud, and he eventually got frustrated and stopped because a substantial portion of the class was having real serious difficulty reading the textbooks this was an adult class at a technical college where the youngest student was in his mid-20s and most of us were in our late 20s or 30s
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Sep 3, 2023 00:43
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9123 posted:
the US defense industry couldn't create anything by 2025 lmao if they started designing a new infantry rifle today, and the entire process went perfectly with no setbacks or hiccups, they might maybe start adopting it in service in like 2035, but we're supposed to believe they can start rolling out a robot army in 15 months
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Sep 7, 2023 04:23
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literal combat ship more like figurative combat ship
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Sep 7, 2023 14:16
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people believed it so fanatically that there were multiple attempts in the 1980s to sneak into Vietnam or Laos to find and 'rescue' the prisoners they were allegedly still keeping, including one where they announced their starting location, date, and time, sold merch like flags and T-shirts to commemorate it, and were anticlimactically stopped by Laotian border police immediately and sent back there were also Vietnam vets denouncing McCain as a traitor in 2008 for publicly stating he didn't think there were any live POWs still being held in Vietnam Senator Jesse Helms went even further, and claimed in the early 1990s that not only was Vietnam still secretly holding American POWs, but that the Soviet Union - which was months away from ceasing to exist at that point - was also still secretly holding American POWs from the Korean War
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Sep 17, 2023 21:41
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skooma512 posted:Back bring the Avro Arrow
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Sep 20, 2023 17:46
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KomradeX posted:When Clancy tried to make the IRA his big bads was pretty funny that was easily the fourth-funniest of the Jack Ryan books, behind the one where Palestinians collaborate with the American Indian Movement to successfully nuke the Super Bowl, the one where Japan goes to war with the US, and the one where Iran engineers an Ebola epidemic the IRA one features one of the heroes outright lying to an IRA-supporting Irish American, falsely attributing an attack by a different group to the Provos to turn him against them, with this treated as a good and heroic thing he is doing also has the Irish terrorists collaborate with black American communist militants who are a clear stand-in for the Black Liberation Army, and then during the attack they betray the Americans and murder all of them for no clear reason. 'the evil foreigners have stooges from an American minority group that they betray and murder for no reason' comes up more than once in his books, actually, the same thing happens in Sum of All Fears when the Palestinians murder their AIM ally
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Sep 23, 2023 20:16
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and it has no real political or cultural impact in-universe and everyone seems to pretty much forget about it after the debris is cleared in later, post-9/11 books, the September 11th attacks are treated with greater narrative weight and as though they are a greater injustice than the time that an actual nuclear weapon was detonated in a major US city
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Sep 24, 2023 20:46
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poisonpill posted:am I insane for thinking the US mil could buy like four hundred super tucanos and use them basically everywhere they normally spend like 1,000x the cost per flight? is the only downside that our super special pilots wouldn’t like being on a prop plane instead of a jet? in addition to it being uncool and the jet pilots not going for it, this would also be an admission that the US primarily fights offensive wars against opponents that are massively weaker than them and are not capable of putting up any meaningful resistance in conventional warfare, and that the US military is so hyper-specialized in its role as a counterinsurgency force and army of occupation that it more or less couldn't fight an actual peer competitor in a straight-up conventional war for more than a couple of days now, this is true, but it runs so counter to America's national mythology that they will never, ever admit it, and they will definitely not base billion-dollar procurement decisions on it. the cheap efficient COIN airplanes are for the colonial auxiliary forces, like the 'powerful Afghan Air Force', who get only those and must never be allowed access to anything even capable of air-to-air combat, just in case they ever revolt
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Sep 24, 2023 21:36
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