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How effective are border walls generally? Like I know mostly what the deal is with walls around towns and cities or forts, but I was thinking about the Great Wall of China, and how it developed out of the fact that previously disunited chinese states had walls between eachother, and I don't think I've ever heard of something like that in European history.
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Dec 11, 2020 00:07
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I guess if you made a version of Pearl Harbor that was more sympathetic to the attackers than the defenders you could make it into a slapstick comedy.
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Dec 11, 2020 15:37
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Isn't there still a sort of need to maintain the uniquely impressive scale of the nuclear bombs for the sake of averting their usage in modern war? And if nukes weren't dropped on Japan, would we have ended up dropping them during the Korean war?
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Dec 13, 2020 02:17
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Was the Maginot Line socially disruptive at all? Any local communities get disrupted or something like that? And did they find any uses for the facilities after the war?
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Dec 17, 2020 03:45
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Dance Officer posted:Yes but the French had too small a professional army at the start of the war for all the things it needed to do, like train recruits and man the borders. This was done knowingly by the French government because it feared making the army too strong would lead to a military coup. I guess that's probably plausible considering France's history before and after the war, but was there anything in particular that was causing civil unrest that they were worried about? Or did they just think that some charismatic officer could take hold of the entire army and coup the federal government without needing some wedge to build public support?
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Dec 17, 2020 17:50
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I really want the modern military to find an excuse to make giant inflatable armies. Or maybe that should catch on with reenactors.
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Dec 19, 2020 00:49
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In a twist, the strafing is actually a plane pulling a bunch of realistic kites, because the germans want to fool the allies into thinking they fell for the trick.
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Dec 19, 2020 01:03
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I feel like blaming Germany solely for WW1 ignores (or worse, purposefully plays down) the fact that all the great powers had been readying up for war for a while and had set up a system of alliances specifically to escalate whatever conflict came next into something where somebody gets to destroy their rival and be the star power of the next great rebalancing of Europe. France in particular wanted to get revenge on Germany for the last war, while Britain wanted to muck about and be dominant over the continent. feedmegin posted:To be fair to them they had Nazis to their west in Norway, their east in Finland and their south in Denmark. There was very definitely an element of 'trade with us or we'll occupy your poo poo'. I wonder if Scandinavia would've suffered less overall if they held down a united front against the Germans. Not that I'd really expect neighboring countries to instinctively band together against outside threats rather than prioritizing local rivalries.
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Dec 27, 2020 18:42
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New Zealand isn't fake! I do think there's good reason to be at least wary about your country, whatever it is. Not just your country's sins, but because of the kind of stuff that nationalist groups who are excessively proud of their country get up to. I also kinda think sometimes that maybe I don't have to take responsibility for things that happened in this country before my family got here, but I know that I still benefit from the things people in this country did. But also from the same token, Canadians benefited a whole lot from American and British imperialism, or at least wound up with a lot of products from it.
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Dec 31, 2020 06:27
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LatwPIAT posted:I'm going to dig up a few things from a few weeks ago as I'm catching up here, like a huge rear end in a top hat How dare you bring up old things in the history thread.
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Jan 9, 2021 02:52
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I saw a video that mentioned that China's internal airlines are bad because most of their airspace is military-controlled so that the civilian airlines only have relatively narrow corridors that they have to spend a lot of time waiting for them to clear of traffic. So what does the Chinese military need with all that airspace? If it's not around the borders it doesn't seem like it's actively needed for defense.
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Jan 20, 2021 18:35
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Fangz posted:They don't want people to overfly their bases I assume. For example there's stuff like second-strike ICBMs that they could be paranoid about people spotting. The video implied that there was much more restricted space than just directly above the bases. I can't really find much corroborating data because searching for information about chinese airspace winds up being a lot of stuff about over the ocean and Taiwan.
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Jan 20, 2021 20:58
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It might be amazing, but I'd be too worried about some kind of health consequences even if the scientists did all the math that said there would be no or negligible exposure. I've also heard enough stories of early nuclear scientists or even unqualified radiation enthusiasts killing themselves I definitely wouldn't trust their judgement.
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Jan 27, 2021 18:29
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Thing is though, that event was already called a revolution. The Revolution of 1905. That's how they got the Duma in the first place, a mass strike along with some violence. Much like how I think the French Revolution was being called a revolution long before they got around to the war with Austria and beheading the king. In theory though, sure, maybe. If an absolute monarch could probably avert things if they had made the right choices and done the right management, but the biggest reason that they don't is usually that they don't like giving power and decision-making away to some kind of representative group of people, probably after being brought up their whole lives with the idea that their people love them and need them and all reports of dissent come filtered through a mob of yes-men and asskissers. Alternatively, there may be a level of brutality that could put down that kind of unrest that is either too uncomfortable or too expensive to maintain. Because even if you successfully suppress dissent, you still have to use your control to actually do things, and brutally suppressed populations are just plain worse at a lot of things.
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Jan 29, 2021 02:35
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Well, in contrast you have King Charles, who refused to ever bend to the point that even when he lost the war and was put on trial, he was still trying to find an angle to bring in a new army to take his country back. I'm not really sure how things would've turned out if he managed to get through the trial without any provocation, but Parliament definitely didn't have a plan for ruling without a king. Although there's sort of bad analysis in working with only a few examples and focusing mainly on the cases that went horribly wrong.
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Jan 29, 2021 04:29
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ChubbyChecker posted:wrt. duncan, he isn't a historian, he's just a guy with a microphone and internet connection Gaius Marius posted:Being published doesn't mean poo poo. It means that he's in some way respected by somebody with some kind of money rather than some rando all on his own, which is a bar that filters out a lot of the chaff, even though there's plenty of garbage people who get past that point. Fact is, he's a guy who puts out a lot of words describing historical events for a living, that sounds like a historian. And even if you think he's made mistakes or whatever, that doesn't make him not a historian. There are lots of bad historians or even historians that have their own agenda and are mussing up the facts to those ends. With some very important events, we only have some unreliable biased sources to work with. A big part of learning about history is learning to sort through conflicting accounts because there are a whole lot of conflicting accounts, and developing methodology for dealing with that sort of thing. That's why historiography is even a thing. Vincent Van Goatse posted:Cincinnatus I guess quitting is one of the best things a dictator can do, but then you'd have to consider counting Pinochet too.
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Jan 29, 2021 17:51
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The first historian was an bitter old man who was writing down speeches long after they were spoken that maybe (or probably?) he didn't even personally hear. Or maybe they were just intended to be a narrative device that other Greeks would've expected. He opened his work opining about the days of pirates who were free of any state and how much everybody loved that, which does indicate a sort of slant.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:08
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I've been reading a couple fantasy stories, and I started wondering what kinds of tactics would an army use to fight like a non-humanoid threat. I know that there's like group hunts of boar, but what if there was a stampeding herd of like a thousand boar, or if they were a herd of giant pigs that if an army couldn't stop, they'd go destroy a city? Would like a shield wall be good? Maybe a pike square? Or would it be better for a bunch of mounted cavalry try flank and divert the herd like a bunch of cowboys? What if they were like wolves or velociraptors? What if there were some kind of giant monsters that you had to fight with infantry? How would you leverage like a hundred infantry against a dragon? (I guess, disregarding any fire-breathing, since pretty much no medieval army is optimized to deal with that, and if there is magic in the world, there'd probably be magical countermeasures available contingent on the nature of magic). I feel like there's probably been more thought and effort and easily accessible real-world examples of what tactics a more modern army with guns would realistically do against that kind of threat, but fantasy stories all kinda just wing it without much consideration.
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Feb 7, 2021 20:29
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A Festivus Miracle posted:Every history podcast and audiobook that I've listened to on the Romans has led me to believe that the Romans weren't so much this unstoppable military juggernaut, but more like boxing with a wacky-inflatable man. I think the wars of the Republic are definitely characterized like that, but after they became an empire they really were a massive juggernaut, and they also knew well enough to stay down, like when they got their poo poo kicked in at Germany, they basically left them alone after that and gave up on conquering the area, and even occasionally gave up on territory in the name of defensibility. Even Caesar's conquest of Gaul fit a similar model where he was one man conquering in the name of his own ambition instead of being driven by the cultural will of the Republic, and if he got himself totally destroyed while out on campaign, I don't think the Republic would've taken it personally and mustered itself to retry his conquest. But could Rome have won a war against emus?
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Feb 9, 2021 19:16
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What if we hide all tanks inside of bigger inflatable tanks as decoys?
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Feb 14, 2021 18:45
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My grandad got a job at some place making and patching up planes when the US was ramping up for war, but when the war started, he wanted to enlist. Only problem was that he was in an industry that was exempt from the draft, so they wouldn't let him enlist until he went like a county over to a place where they didn't know him.
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Feb 16, 2021 02:57
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Imagining a rogue James Cameron trying to explore the depths of the ocean in a world where submarines have been outlawed.HookedOnChthonics posted:lmao, don't sleep on the replies Are there people who put spiritual importance on the german emperor, or is this guy talking 100% out his rear end?
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Feb 18, 2021 21:32
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He also hangs around like a mold listening to people asking for help. Pleas lichen sub scribe.
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Feb 19, 2021 01:48
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I don't think I've ever been in the same room as a slide rule, but I'd guess that was one. When you learn trigonometry, that's a point in math where they don't really tell you how to do the operations that you're doing, they just calculated a bunch of ratios long ago for sines and cosines and give them to you for you to use in your own calculations, and I think that's what they're for. I think it's similar with logarithms.
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Feb 20, 2021 18:17
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Raenir Salazar posted:How can a system be corrupt when it can produce such an awesome shovel!? Man, so many of these uses require grabbing onto the sharpened edge of the shovel.
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Feb 26, 2021 00:04
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If civilian cars throughout America were required to each have a constant transponder like planes and boats, would it be more reasonable to put them on tanks then?
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Mar 5, 2021 19:29
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An invading army doesn't have to be literally racist nazis in order to be an uncomfortable presence to the locals they're conquering. Nilfgaard doesn't really seem very Roman, and I don't know much about China's historical political structures, but just from playing the last game, it seems like Nilfgaard is characterized by having a very powerful nobility despite the existence of a powerful emperor who is busy staging invasions. Which kinda sounds like...Poland.
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Mar 10, 2021 23:55
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Gundam is relevant to milhist in as much as it is a major part of Japan's cultural opinions on war, both in its message and in how many works following it explored more of the themes of soldiers dealing with trauma from their service, and the echoing message of war being bad to the point that so many works will just end up with some kind of pacifist faction that ends up winning. Of course, that also needs to be counterbalanced by also taking into account pro-war (or even pro-genocide) works like that one series about how modern Japan could totally win a war with a medieval fantasy kingdom ir Goblin Slayer. There's also a whole lot of works that don't really do much narrative philosophical criticism of the general concept of war while still having a lot of fun with military trappings in a way that more subtly encourages the "war is cool" perspective like Ghost in the Shell. And then if you're really digging into things, anime and manga are only a part of the wider spectrum of japanese media, although that is a big way in which Japanese perspectives can influence the rest of the world.
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Mar 11, 2021 02:15
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I know when I read about the Comanche I didn't get the impression that they particularly had much of an idea of how to conserve the buffalo, and definitely since they had an almost entirely meat diet, they would've had much less options for scaling back on hunting even if they did. Apparently during their decline they also started selling hunting rights on their land, which seems like a terrible decision for conserving their food supply. Their lack of an actual centralized imperial administration with temporary independent pseudo-states specifically for raiding seems almost tactically designed to be impossible for more centralized authorities to negotiate with in good faith, although there's a lot of cultures throughout history that have developed similar setups that lasted for a couple centuries.
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Mar 18, 2021 00:36
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I feel like it's a very different combat experience when both sides are properly armed. Especially when they have some kind of sharp weapons to try poking around the shields. And then there's tear gas grenades that you've got to douse in water or toss back.
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Apr 2, 2021 17:03
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What was the process that damaged planes and tanks had to go through in the 20th century to get repaired and eventually put back into service? How much repairs could they make at a carrier, and did they ever have to send planes back to a more equipped station to get better repairs? Would tank repairs involve hauling it back to some kind of depot?
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Apr 17, 2021 19:16
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zoux posted:Here's one, what's the stupidest way a head-of-state or monarch has died in combat Fighting the weather because you wrote out your inauguration speech and you really wanna get it all out. Really worth the effort there Harrison.
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Apr 21, 2021 01:20
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MikeCrotch posted:I would rather watch Lindybeige than anything by the History channel Wow, you sure like Lindybeige.
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Apr 24, 2021 20:30
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My first instinct of a place that is historically relevant in military history but unusually dry right now is Crimea, but that may be getting more involved in military current events soon. Weird that the trees don't have leaves yet. I don't know what to tell from that, maybe it's far north? Although the fact that you're taking pictures of old ditches implies maybe something to do with WW1.
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May 10, 2021 00:14
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Big Dick Cheney posted:Do you have any examples? I've only heard about it failing. The French Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 basically managed to pull it off, although it was really more focused in Paris. Technically the 1905 Russian Revolution as well, although that didn't engineer long-lasting change. A lot of attempts at least manage to appear hugely successful for a while at first before the authorities gather their forces to crush the dissenters. Also depending on definitions, "the people rise up to join us" could also be used to mean "it becomes easier to find recruits after starting the uprising so you can bolster your forces" which is a much more measured perspective and can be used to include things like the American Revolution and the Mexican Revolution, which were fought more by normal armies. I think there's a whole thing where mass uprisings throughout the population tend to be more spontaneous instead of being the result of planning.
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May 11, 2021 17:57
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Yeah, the book I read was The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hämäläinen, which seemed pretty good to me. I did get the sense that while the treatment that most native groups got was unfortunate and a tragedy, with the Comanche specifically of course the way of life they worked out in the 18th century couldn't possibly peacefully coexist with sedentary agricultural societies like what the US was founded upon. Of course, the Comanche spent most of their history raiding southwards into Mexico, even after Mexico tried to get Texas to become a buffer, so it's not like what the US did to them was direct retaliation. In some ways it's fairly obvious that the one of the biggest empires of postcolumbian native societies would be doing a lot of wars, since that's how you build an empire, but developing into steppe nomads and building a whole economy off of raiding and an administrative system for raids where it's basically impossible to create a meaningful peace treaty is a whole lot. I think a lot of people get wrapped up in contrarianism to the classic cowboys vs. indian stories and mourning the loss of various native peoples, but it definitely wasn't a wholly one-sided affair, even if the fictional stories get really exaggerated. Not even really a two-sided one, since there was a lot of politicking between native groups and european groups and natives fighting natives just like how europeans fought europeans. Technically a lot of european descendants got into the same sort of deal where independent citizens would ignore governmental treaties and attack on their own, so even when only the US was involved dealing with natives, neither side was truly negotiating in a unified way. Not that it's wrong to bemoan the loss of natives or anything, just that when you dig into the specifics of what happened, it's real complicated with a lot of complex interplay and people with different intentions. Fearless posted:I read that and remember reading the author describing the homelands of the Comanche going back into the distant past and in the next chapter describing those same lands as being untouched by human hands or unseen by human eyes. I don't get the sense that the author is some slavering racist, but I think rather that this highlights how deeply entrenched a lot of colonial assumptions about what North and South America looked like before and after contact are. Well, with the Comanche specifically, they were actually relative newcomers to the area, arriving at some point between the 16th and 18th centuries. And their way of life was based around using dogs as pack animals before they adopted horses. Not every native group stays where they were since the beginning of time. I think the core of their lands was unoccupied at the time, but they did also push out and subjugate other native groups when they started expanding, it's been a while since I read the thing though. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 04:48 on May 14, 2021 |
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May 14, 2021 04:41
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I think sometimes people focus too much on the Spanish having guns and not enough on how they had armor that obsidian blades would just chip on, or horses (at least, sometimes) to give individual men way more mobility than anyone in the New World had ever dealt with before. The technological advantage still wasn't the only thing the Spaniards had going for them, but what technological advantages they were.
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May 15, 2021 16:53
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Come to think of it, I've heard a lot about native Americans buying guns from colonists, but I don't think I've ever heard anything about natives buying iron goods or trying to learn about blacksmithing.
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May 15, 2021 18:09
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Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great both maintained control over all the land that they conquered for the entirety of their lives, which is honestly the limit to how long a lot of people care about their successes lasting. Both of them also died without leaving an obvious direct heir, but one of them only conquered a couple countries to add onto an already massive centralized empire, and the other conquered a bunch of disparate, disconnected nations, so there was no centralized seat of power for the successors to battle over to take the whole pot and it was easier for them to hold onto their own chunks. Although I don't really know as many details about the succession of Alexander's generals. Napoleon lived to see his conquests mostly dismantled if he was told anything about world events in prison, although I'm not sure what his grand plan was for the future if he didn't eventually get ground down and defeated by his foreverwar. He carved out thrones for him and his family throughout half of Europe, and I guess the other half was supposed to remain theoretically independent, but indefinitely subordinate to France?
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May 21, 2021 17:52
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There's a lot of social value put on the idea of being a war hero or doing your civic duty to fight for the place where you live that you can sorta get from some people's treatment of the Iraq War, but it's waaaaaay stronger when the war is actually somehow imperiling your country like in the world wars. But aside from that, a lot of soldiers can get drawn in by just the fact that it's a job that often at least promises good pay and has low requirements, so the opportunity for material gain isn't something to sneeze at. Something I wonder about soldier salaries is how much of an effect is there from soldiers who don't spend much while doing their service and so after they come back from service they'd have a big pile of money the equivalent of being paid a competitive salary in the real world for the duration of their duty but saving all of it because they didn't have rent, groceries, or other regular expenses.
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Jun 14, 2021 20:19
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