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Memento posted:Is there a torpedo design that's supposed to explode under a ship as opposed to hitting it? Is there an advantage or disadvantage to that design? Yes, the Mk.48 ADCAP that destroyed that ship was being tested for that very capability. There is a distinct advantage. When your torpedo detonates, it immediately vapourises a lot of nearby water, its shockwave lifts the keel of the boat above it upwards, bending it in a direction its not designed to be bent as it lifts it, because water is an incompressible medium the vast majority of the explosive force is being transmitted directly to the hull all at once. These two effects occur at two different rates, the shockwave is incredibly quick and hits the ship almost immediately but the gas bubble propogates at a slower rate upwards applying a second force to the ship, it will collapse as it loses heat causing negative pressure and surrounding water to rush back in. This will apply sequentially an upwards and a downwards force and repeatedly flexing the ships structure which has a very good likelihood of snapping the ships back (It will actually do this several times, as the bubble collapses it overcompresses the water which then will turn to gas and expand outwards again and repeat, getting gradually weaker. The effect is called bubble pulse).  You can see in this image from a different test of the same torpedo that the ships back has been broken by the initial upwards force, the two sections are clearly disconnected. Ships are not usually constructed or armoured against this kind of flexing which is what makes it particularly dangerous. Your shockwave is hitting a big flat surface which is the underneath of a ship which is the absolutely worst thing to resist a big pressure force. Ships were designed to withstand explosions from the side and so they lateral design strength is likely to be much higher than their longitudinal one. You can design against this but its a pain in the backside. A flat hull is advantageous for seakeeping and other design elements like useable interior space, you could create a blast deflecting V hull but it would compromise other things. Same with creating much stronger longitudinal members or crumple areas to absorb the blast waves force. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 11:39 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 11:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:IIRC this is basically the mechanic that they think is also behind a bunch of rogue wave and other mysterious sinkings. tl;dr if the seas get just the right wavelength of waves your super-long container ship might end up straddling two peaks with an unsupported middle, which snaps the keel. Its actually not quite it, the void created by the torpedo itself itself isnt big enough to cause that effect, a torpedo will make only about a 50ft diameter void which isnt enough to create the same effect as a very long wave trough (typical warship might be 350-500ft long). It is very much the upward force of the explosion that causes the snapping, or the rapid flexing of the air bubble repeatedly forming and collapsing afterwards which will bend and flex the members till they break. (Its more likely to be the first initial force as that is the peak force).
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Dec 7, 2020 15:16
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Whatever happened to that spreadsheet of book recommendations someone put together? Here you go.
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Dec 8, 2020 14:25
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Elendil004 posted:Oh, can I add some stuff to this? I didn't actually create it i just had the link handy, i cant remember who originally did but i think its just editable by anyone with the link.
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Dec 8, 2020 16:17
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xthetenth posted:Out of curiosity, has anybody relitigating the morality of the strategic bombing campaign looked into the expected collateral damage of invasion or even blockade? Because a campaign to render Japan militarily incapable of resistance sounds fun and good until you realize that it's a country with highly regional food production, massive cities and a dependency on trade. Let's say the US tries to blockade Imperial Japan. First off, their armies in China are foraging, which is a cute euphemism for something hideous, but even if you decide that the poor put upon population of a fascist power are the only people who get to count as victims in this war, it's worse. The merchant ships that are being used until the end of the war are needed for civilian trade, the ports that the navy is operating out of until the end of the war that were mined and would be mined further in any blockade provided needed trade, and the same railways that would be used to ferry reinforcements to any invasion are necessary to ship food inside the country to prevent localized shortages that would have killed millions. I have, its Infact i linked to my post about this from milhist thread 3 a few pages ago now i think about it. For those of you without archives. Headline figures, of the likely cost of an invasion of Japan with accompanying blockade. (low end of the estimates) 400k US military dead, 900k wounded. (US estimates) Around 5 million Japanese military casualties. (US estimates) 10 million japanese civillian dead due to starvation. (Japanese government figures) Polyakov fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Dec 13, 2020 |
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Dec 13, 2020 03:11
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icantfindaname posted:Are there any popular audience, at least relatively, English language books on the Russo Japanese war? Rising sun and tumbling bear by Richard Connaughton
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Dec 30, 2020 11:34
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Solaris 2.0 posted:While I appreciate the usual glib responses that SA is lovingly known for. I'm being serious. Whens the last time that there was any major naval combat involving a major naval power post WW2? (Or even post WW1 to be honest). Even in those where navies were fighting inferior ones they still took losses. Argentina is stretching itself to attack the task force as it is, the falklands are not actually that close to Argentina. It realistically only has one way of preventing the UK doing what it wants and that is air attack. Its navy would get utterly demolished by SSN's if it tried to actually seek a surface action. Its not really a question of a bit more organisation it requires some serious altering. The Falkland islands task force was around 120 ships. 60 RN, 60 civillian, the argentines would sink 7 of those and damage several more. To call that "most of" is deeply misleading (6 of around the 40 or so combat ships that were in the area were sunk (of which 2 are landing and support so not directly combat ships)). These losses are mainly focused around the Battle of San Carlos and various attacks en route using their 100 or so planes that has the range. Their operations tempo was as high as it could be attacking the RN enroute, and it had failed to make a good dent to the point where you have the battle of san Carlos. We can talk about what if they had hit a carrier sure, but thats not really likely to happen, the reason Sheffield got hit is its doing radar pickets to stop that happening, theres a lot of ground they need to cover and not get shot down to get within range of a CV which gives them an extremely high risk of getting harriered. Radar pickets by definition are not well covered by the CAP, they are there to make sure the CAP can hit the plane before it hits the important ship. Even if a carrier does get hit theres no guarantee its going to go down, Exocet is quite a light missile. By the end of the battle of San Carlos the argentinians are out of Exocets and are having to do super low runs with dumb bombs (admittedly with some degree of success). However they have lost around a quarter of their airforce doing this because going in for a bomb attack on a modern ship is very dangerous, the RN cant deal that well with exocet attack but it can deal perfectly adequately with you having to physically drop something on them, Argentina are also suffering the usual attrition to maintainance that you get in a war as well as those being physically shot down. The reason they are having problems with their bombs detonating is that they are having to go in super low to lose themselves in radar clutter so they dont get picked off by harriers or missiles at range, they cant go higher without suffering unsustainable air losses so the dud rate of the bombs is not really a changeable quantity. Once we get on the island in general, Argentina cannot sustain its garrison at all, its ships cant make it past the RN's submarines even if the surface fleet isnt there. Their troops are cold, miserable and alone and really dont want to fight. If the UK gets any significant force ashore then its over for Galtieri, about half the attacks made by the UK was against the numerical odds with the rest being around parity and the Argentines generally speaking crumbled in relatively short order because their morale was gofawful. Even with the loss of more ships at San Carlos the soldiers are still there, there are more on the way (further major landings will take place over the ensuing weeks) and more support ships not in the immediate area and even if you destroy enough of the logistical tail to make a long term campaign on the Falklands difficult the Argentine army only has a couple of weeks of resistance left anyway. Though to address your question more directly, one thing we see is intense development and deployment of CIWS like Phalanx leading to things like CRAM etc. People were aware of the danger of AShM's but it brought it into sharp focus that you cant just rely on long range missiles to stop them. There were various implications for the defence of the island itself of course but the major thing was underlining the severe danger of missiles to ships. (Backed up by later the same decade the tanker war). Polyakov fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Dec 30, 2020 |
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Dec 30, 2020 17:35
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PittTheElder posted:Were any non-British warships lost to catastrophic magazine detonations in the WW1 to say, present day time frame? SMS Pommern - Torpedo hit secondary magazine. RM Leonardo Da Vinci - Unknown, probably poor propellant handling FS Suffren - Torpedo hit detonated magazine IJN Tsukaba - Poor propellant storage IJN Kawachi - Poor propellant storage RM Armando Diaz - Torpedo detonated magazine USSRS Marat - Aerial bomb detonated magazine USS Reuben James - Torpedo detonated magazine IJN Hayate - Shore battery hit detonated torpedos USS Juneau - Torpedo hit detonated magazine USS New Orleans - Torpedo hit detonated magazine (Ship not lost but everything forward of the number 2 turret was lost) USS Liscombe bay - Torpedo hit detonated magazine IJN Unryu - Torpedo hit detonated magazine USS Halligan - Mine hit detonated magazine USS Solar - Crewman dropped a hedgehog charge which detonated magazine USSRS B-37 - Fire in torpedo compartment detonated magazine IIS Sahand (ish) - Fire eventually detonated magazine RFS Kursk - Poor ammunition manufacture detonated magazine.
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Dec 30, 2020 22:10
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Pryor on Fire posted:Wait a minute, is the USS Hood which Will Riker famously served on named after John Hood? I find this unsettling. No its named for HMS Hood of the Royal Navy which was named for Admiral Samuel Hood.
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Jan 6, 2021 15:38
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:the economics of killing off a poo poo ton of slaves every year are extremely unrealistic Going to just burn my property for no good reason at all.
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Jan 7, 2021 14:46
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Theres an economic distinction between essentially wringing peak work out of your slaves then discarding them once they aren't able to do the work and just killing them at semi random when they could still do a lot of produictive work for you.
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Jan 7, 2021 15:17
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Not sure if there great results for light infantry forces deployed 8 weeks ahead of resupply or reinforcement. Not really sure what kind of objective requires a whole airborne unit to land somewhere but not any other part of an army The initial precursor to Desert Storm. The 82nd arrived in the KSA within 48 hours of kuwait getting invaded. This served several quite useful purposes. 1: It steadied Saudi Arabia and had the good optice for them and for the mission as a whole of the US turning up in significant force. 2: It put a significant block on the table for Saddam deciding to gently caress around and find out, you can convince yourself that the US wont go to war if there are no troops there, or a few hundred, but when there are multiple thousands there you have to know if you fight them you are going to war. 3: It let certain logistical and local communications and relations issues be encountered on a smaller scale and start to be resolved before the heavy forces started arriving and a snarl up would cost much more time. Everyone knew that the Iraqis could roll over them if they wanted to, but that wasnt really their point. To take a non US centric example, mountain fighting in the Himalayas between China and India are excellent places where having light infantry that can be supplied by air and are good at it is very suited to the terrain.
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Jan 14, 2021 00:56
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Of all places in the worlds, a high-altitude plateau filled with escarpments seems like one of the worst to conduct a paradrop operation Airmobile forces dont need to be dropped out of a plane, its more that if you have a group of people who are prepared to be dropped out of a plane they have light gear they are trained to use and to be able to operate with a minimum of resupply, which is fantastic if every ounce of weight you can cut helps get your resupply helicopter over that mountain ridge or makes room on your resupply drop plane for another box of bullets. Combat dropping is largely speaking silly in most circumstances, but the unit design that it creates is potentially useful.
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Jan 14, 2021 12:49
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:
Helicopter supply and airdrop supply was and is a major part of fighting in the himalayas so i dont quite know what to tell you. Im trying to point out that this is a very useful job that they can do, in addition to their other uses such as being able to go anywhere in the world on incredibly short notice. Yaks could best be described as ponderous in their maximum velocity.
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Jan 14, 2021 15:39
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MazelTovCocktail posted:This just popped up in my subs and is pretty neat. It’s a differently focus analysis on The Little Rock Nine and Operation Arkansas. I wonder what the chemical makeup of their “vomit gas” was? Because they distinguish it from tear gas, which they also had. So i covered the chemical action of tear gas in the previous thread incarnation. Here is the original. But to summarise briefly, tear gas as we know it today is CS gas which has the formula C10H5ClN2. I dont know about the specific changeover point but at some point this took over from CN gas, its predecessor, id suspect that at little rock they would be using CN because of when it took place, which has the formula C8H7ClO. The distinction between the two is that CN is more likely to kill you, its still not terribly likely either way. Both have the same mode of operation, the gas will be absorbed into porous membranes, the chlorine group will detach, producing hydrochloric acid which irritates them and causes the crying effect as well as difficulty breathing (Mucous membranes being concentrated in the eyes, nose, throat and lungs). It can also cause chemical burns on exposed skin in high concentrations. I will refer to CS and CN as Cx just for simplicity.  CS structure.  CN structure.  DM (vomit) structure I will point out at this stage that none of these are gases in their own state, they are usually dissolved in a solvent which is then used to disperse it as a gas, but its solid particles which are suspended in this gas. Or sometimes vapourised by extreme heat in a grenade (which is why tear gas grenades can set things on fire). At the time i believe that it would have been likely the first type of deployment. Now by vomit gas i suspect but i am not completely certain that it refers to Adamsite, or DM (Diphenylaminechlorarsine, or C12H9AsClN) I believe its that because i think it was the only one of the compounds im going to mention that the US army adopted. DM has a different structure, but a somewhat similar mode of action to the Cx gases. It was developed by a lot of different countries at the same time that we were also developing things like CN. The problem that DM and all other vomit agents have (DA, DC and PS) which lead to their discontinuation is that they are significantly more dangerous than the Cx type of gasses were while simultaneously being less immediately incapacitating. DM was very likely used against the bonus army in 1932, probably because use of the Cx type gasses had not been fully perfected but it remained in US army inventory for many decades afterwards. DM's incapacitating effect occurs in the same way, chlorine is released inside mucous membranes forming hydrochloric acid, irritating the membranes and causing pain. But the reason it is more lethal is suspected to be becaose of the arsenic group. As the compound is metabolised by the body the arsenic is released into the body and long story short destroys the mucus membrane at the area its in and chokes you to death by causing massive swelling that shuts down your body in those critical areas. (Typically neck, lungs and surroundings of both.) I say its more lethal, but there has only been a handful of cases that have definitely been linked to DM. Its believed but not proven that children died at the bonus army march because of its use, which is plausible, but it is not itself largely a lethal agent, it likely causes significantly more long term exposure problems but i cant speak to the exact extent. Cx gas can kill you in a similar way but its swelling/irritanteffect is less pronounced and severe so its less likely do because it doesnt have the arsenic group in. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Jan 21, 2021 |
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Jan 21, 2021 18:28
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Geisladisk posted:A smart Hitler would probably look a lot more like Franco and less like... well, Hitler. I mean in that situation it also assumes that german revanchist or expansionist attitude is only based in hitler, it was a sentiment held much more beyond just the one man and it would require hitler having the political capital and will to actively push against that sentiment from elsewhere.
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Feb 4, 2021 18:13
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HookedOnChthonics posted:are there any explicit examples from history of vanity calibers? there are a number of examples of numerology being baked into architecture and engineering projects; anything similar in guns? A .69 caliber musket ball weighing in at 420 grains is about right. (As might have been fired from the Springfield 1842, itself posessing a 42 inch barrel).
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Feb 5, 2021 12:17
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Previous posts. Introduction to the Nagorno Karabakh Conflict. Karabakh clashes intensify and governments start collapsing. 1989-1992. My website on which these posts reside. Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict: Irregular warfare, ethnic cleansing and governments still collapsing, 1992. So last we came to this we were just starting to get to the stage of military fighting. In as much as the semi formed largely amateur militias that scrounged weapons from the USSR’s depots could be called a military but that is the armies that both sides had. Armenia had more trained combat soldiers willing to fight for them for a number of reasons that we covered in the last post so their professionalism levels were somewhat higher, though we have former Soviet forces siding with both sides. We have Armenian strongpoints in Stepanakert which was the central hub of Nagorno Karabakh surrounded largely by Azeri ethnic villages and the country as a whole is a patchwork of ethnic areas dominated by one group or the other. This post will largely cover the end of the low intensity portion of the conflict which has been running since the turn of the decade. Khojali and Maragha Massacre  Yellow line is approximately the post war border of N-K. Armenia had cut off a large Azeri enclave in Khojali, an area that had been heavily resettled by Azerbaijani, this was previously supplied from Aghdam through a mountain pass land route, however this was closed by Armenia meaning that the enclave of around 6000 people was supplied only by helicopter over the hump of the mountains. Conditions there were miserable for the civillians who had no electricity, no clean water or heating oil in the winter. Some efforts had been made for the evacuation of the citizens but by the time of the 25th of February around 3000 remained with perhaps 160 or so lightly armed OMON police units commanded by Alif Hajiev, formerly commander of the airport garrison. Armenia would begin its assault on the fourth anniversary of the Sumgait pogroms in 1988. The attack would be comprised of Armenian militia units supported by armour from the Soviet 366th Regiment. They surrounded and quickly destroyed the defences of the villiage. Hajiyev would try to evacuate as many civillians as he could with what remained of his soldiers, they made for the woodlands and tried to escape via the Gargar river through ankle deep snow. Unfortunately for them as morning broke they were near the Armenian villiage of Nakhichevanik which was fortified by Armenian militia who opened fire. A horrifically mismatched fight ensued between the sparse Azeri OMON troops in the refugee cluster and the Armenians where the civillians were caught in the crossfire and hundreds died, not only of gunshots but of frostbite as they scattered and tried to get away. The precise figure will never be known but the subsequent Azerbaijani investigation is regarded as reliable and puts the toll at 485 with over 1000 taken prisoner. This would be the single largest massacre in the entire conflict. While there were armed Azeris in the group it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that there was deliberate murder of civillians by the Armenian militia, the possible defence that the Azeris fired first seems extremely unlikely given the vast disadvantage at which they found themselves. There was a certain amount of dissembling and evasion of responsibility on the matter in the aftermath, but among the Armenians were a significant quantity of people who had fled from the Pogroms in Baku and in Sumgait. In an interview after the war an Armenian militia leader Serzh Sarkisian had the following to say. “But I think the main point is something different. Before Khojali, the Azerbaijanis thought that they were joking with us, they thought that the Armenians were people who could not raise their hand against the civilian population. We were able to break that [stereotype]. And that’s what happened. And we should also take into account that amongst those boys were people who had fled from Baku and Sumgait.” Which speaks of a brutal attitude among the Armenians, that they had something to prove and that there were so many scores to settle that were among the causes for this massacre. Militia, as they so often are, comprised of angry young men with very little to lose. And that is depressing but not surprising given the amount of bad blood that had accumulated in such a short time. This massacre would trigger the fall of Azeri president Mutalibov. An account from a survivor Salman Abasov shows the negligence with which the situation had been treated. “Several days before the events of the tragedy the Armenians told us several times over the radio that they would capture the town and demanded that we leave it. For a long time helicopters flew into Khojali and it wasn’t clear if anyone thought about our fate, took an interest in us. We received practically no help. Moreover, when it was possible to take our women, children, and old people out of the town, we were persuaded not to do so.” In the four months that Armenia had the area under siege no significant effort had been mounted to evacuate the civilians or relieve the area. Video footage of the aftermath of the massacre was shown in the parliament building and Mutalibov resigned. This bolstered the hand of the Azerbaijan Popular Front who were widely regarded as a certainty to win the new presidential elections scheduled for June. In a war that involved hundreds of small-scale engagement there were many such similar incidents. At the village of Maragha there was the massacre of nearly four dozen Armenian villages after the Azerbaijanis overtook the area, international observers were to find beheaded and scorched bodies of many the villagers after the Armenians retook the village. 50 more were taken hostage and 20 of those would never return. Siege of Stepanakert For its own role in Khojali the 366th regiment was ordered out of Stepanakert at the start of March. However it was blocked from leaving with its heavy equipment by local Armenians. Eventually they would be airlifted out and their regiment disbanded but their tanks remained and were quickly claimed by the Armenians. They had many retired Soviet officers in their ranks who had experience with tanks. However they had some issues, the first was when they claimed the 8 operational T-72’s left in Stepanakert (Of an original 10 one had no engine and another had been disabled by the Soviets) they discovered that they had nobody in their ranks that had driven a T-72. Gagik Avsharian who was to oversee training had served in a T-64 and they didn’t have enough veterans with even that experience to crew the tanks and BMP’s that they claimed. However with Azerbaijan closing in they had little time, the crews went straight into battle on the 6th when the Azerbaijanis attacked at Askeran. They couldn’t work the autoloaders so had to hand load shells. The people they had crewing the BMP’s weren’t even that familiar, they didn’t know how to load the main gun so low comedy ensued when they sent a guy running to a nearby village who did know how to load it and brought him back so he could demonstrate the loading process. The Armenians would beat off the Azerbaijani attack at Askeran but the Azerbaijanis had command of the heights surrounding the city. As the siege started to establish the Azerbaijan Popular Front militia commander, Rahim Gaziev, would bring up two BM-21 Grads to those heights near Shusha and fired indiscriminately into the centre of Stepanakert. The majority of the architecture at the time was high rise soviet flat blocks which presented a very easy target with whole walls getting torn away from hits from the rockets. The 55’000 citizens of the city would spend their nights in bomb shelters and the day dealing with the hazards of a city with no power and little food and heat. However outside in the war of the villages the Azerbaijanis were being pushed steadily back by Armenia. Their positions as the spring of 1992 wore on were focused around the town of Shusha. Assault on Shusha  Shusha itself is a long standing fortress area, it had withstood the Persians on many occasions when they invaded and most importantly sat astride the major route from Armenia into Nagorno Karabakh and so enabled the ongoing siege of Stepanakert. However Shusha itself was in trouble, its own supply line went close to Armenian territory and could be easily cut off or harassed. Attempts at helicopter resupply were curtailed after Armenian AA covered the fortress. Attempts to sally out and secure nearby territory were bloodily repulsed, with an entire company of Azerbaijani troops being killed or routed in an attempt by Tajedin Mekhtiev, Azerbaijans second defence minister, to capture the village of Karintak. He was sacked shortly afterwards. Unity was a considerable problem among the forces there, there were four distinct groups there comprised of police, armed forces and militia, none of whom trusted each other or the commander that had been nominally put over them. Mekhtiev was replaced by Rahim Gaziev, who was not a soldier but a former maths lecturer, who would leave after a month to be appointed the new minister of defence and was replaced again by Elbrus Orujev, who was an army officer but had been given responsibility for 3 other towns as well as Shusha. (Lachin, Kubatly and Zengilan). As shown on the map that is an absurd quantity of front to give over to one man. Morale was such that columns of militia were observed leaving the area and the defenders were thinning out until the defence was hollowed out and consisting of only a hundred or so people. Nobody had taken responsibility directly for Shusha and as such the defence was pretty much doomed.  The Armenian commander, Arkady Ter-Tatevosian had a simple plan for taking Shusha, he was a veteran of the Soviet army originally from Georgia. The Armenians had taken the Khojali airstrip which enabled the landing of the neccesary supplies. The plan was to take the surrounding villages and hold them to draw the garrison out of the town itself in an effort to retake the villages. The skirmish at Karintak was one example of this plan functioning, another was an assault on the 26th heights just outside of the town itself. As the conflict went on into May Orujev would make a desperate appeal for help which went almost completely unanswered, his own brother would lead an attempt at a diversionary assault from Aghdam but it was too far out to make a difference. The Armenians scaled the cliffs around the town on the morning of the 8th of May. There was a tank battle between Gagik Avsharian (Armenia) and Albert Aguranov (Azerbaijan) near the TV transmitter when they came upon each other at a range of 350 meters. Avsharian would lose the fight managing to leap clear before his tank was destroyed, though his driver and gunner were not so fortunate. Assaulting Shusha was proving to be a very bloody affair on both sides. But as the days fighting ended Orujev found he had barely any troops left and with no sign of help incoming ordered a retreat that evening. Aguranov would be killed during this retreat by an unknown sniper. Armenia would move into the fortress unopposed the following day. They would discover huge stockpiles of weapons, including dozens of crates of Grad rockets which they simply had not had the manpower to use and certainly had they done so it could have made life very very unpleasant for the attacking Armenians. What they found was somewhat indicative of the ethnic cleansing that went on, and I don’t mean that purely in the sense of the death of the people who lived there, but in the sense that both Azerbaijan and Armenia were trying to wipe the others cultural influence off the map. As we established in earlier posts there is an intense cultural rivalry for whose the land is. They found that Azerbaijan had stripped the place of much of its heritage as it related to Armenia. They had destroyed the statues outside of the Christian church and sold off its bell (The bell would later be found for sale in a market in Donetsk in Ukraine and would be bought and returned). When the Armenian Karabakis took the place they would also try to wipe out the Azeri influence in return, they burned one of the two mosques and returning Armenian locals stood infront of the other to stop them shooting it with a BMP, while others barricaded themselves in the town museum to stop it being looted. However much of the town was burned regardless. The loss of Shusha itself was very much the end for Azerbaijan in this area of the front, it was their last significant holding in Karabakh as well as a place that held great emotional significance as a long standing fortress for centuries and one that had significant importance in Azerbaijani history. It also destroyed the chance at a negotiated settlement. Armenia and Azerbaijan had both been on the way to Tehran for peace talks, they had signed a general understanding for a peace agreement in Tehran on the day before the assault between Armenian leader Levon Ter-Petrosian and Azerbaijani leader Yaqub Mamedov. The news of the assault on Shusha however would destroy this effort and would plunge Azerbaijan into internal chaos. Azerbaijani coups and counter coups. Conspiracy theories roiled in Azerbaijan people blamed various figures for the loss accusing them of having been bribed or in conspiring to embarrass Mamedov and to bring back Mutalibov to power. None of these are particularly credible as the fall of Shusha is a simple tale of complete incompetence. However it gave the remainder of the former communists a pretext for what they were to do next. When parliament reconvened on the 14th of May 1992 the communists announced that Mutalibov was exonerated of all guilt into the events at Khojali and hence his resignation was unconstitutional. Mutalibov then returned to the chamber and accepted his return to the presidency and cancelled the 7th of June elections. This would spark a brief struggle, the Grey Wolves paramilitary group would spearhead an attack on the parliament building on the 15th of May with tanks that would remove Mutalibov from power. Isa Gambar who was a veteran politician and part of the opposition block would become head of state and Hamidov, head of the Grey Wolves would become interior minister. They dissolved the parliament, rescheduled the election for the 7th of June and vested its power in a different legislative body, the Milli Shura or National Council. In order to consolidate power however many forces had been withdrawn from Karabakh, back to Azerbaijan proper, this meant that Azerbaijani defences were even more depleted than usual, particularly in the last remaining obstacle between Nagorno Karabakh and Armenia, the town of Lachin. In theory it should have been well defended with nearly 3000 fighters in the area and the town being set up on a hill in a very defensible position, but again there was no commander in charge and so they evaporated and the Armenians largely let them vanish into the hills, on the 18th of May Armenian forces would take and burn the town and would finally link Nagorno Karabakh to Armenia proper. It would be one of the last easy Armenian victories of the war, which still has nearly two years to go. They had to this point been fighting largely disorganised and poorly supported Azerbaijani soldiers in a war that had been largely fought with light infantry with quite sparse heavy equipment, fighting around Stepanakert notwithstanding. Conclusions Azerbaijan has suffered from political inaction which has caused this but with the final settling of who holds political authority they will make a much better showing of their prowess in the coming war. It held so many advantages over Armenia that honestly if it had managed to get its act together even 6 months earlier than it did then it would have likely inflicted a fairly crushing defeat. But we will in the next post explore what exactly those were and what the affect that they will have in prolonging the conflict. Azerbaijans delicate political unity that it has achieved will not last long but will I think provide a good indication of how the war might have very plausibly gone different. Armenia itself is fighting quite a disjointed war, so far it has kept a reasonable hold on the N-K forces that fight alongside it, however cracks are starting to show, the burnings of Shusha and Lachin were not things ordered by Armenias government or military, nor speculatively was the assault on Shusha itself as that directly frustrated the peace agreement that they had just signed and deeply embarrassed Iran who was an important country that Armenia was courting. This lack of control would exacerbate the humanitarian effects of the war as it would stretch on, the massacres we covered here could be interpreted to be tragic accidents of war, but the deliberate cleansing of Azerbaijanis from occupied areas would intensify as the war continued. We will also explore the role of the newly emerging Russian Federation in this, as you may imagine they would be up to their necks in it. Much like the origins of the whole conflict, how it would develop would have its roots in the actions of the USSR stretching back the last 30 years. Russia itself is less than a year out from the 1993 constitutional crisis and its actions will reflect that, seeming disjointed and confused, largely because any hint of good governance had long since left. Which was a problem because they were really the only nation who were capable and willing to insert enough forces to keep the two nations apart and form any kind of peacekeeping force. The international response is very confused as well, we covered briefly the attempts by Iran and the RF to mediate, but there are also attempts from the Organisation for Secuurity and Cooperation in Europe (then the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe) had just admitted both Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1992 and as such also tried to mediate. There was also an attempts from the UN headed by former US secretary of state Cyrus Vance, these competing missions just added confusion and muddle and resulted in the entire process being used as a platform to launch bombastic press releases from either side with no real negotiation happening and zero chance of a negotiated settlement, this was a war that would end up being fought until it ran out of steam. Bibliography and Further reading Black Garden: Thomas de Waal The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: Heiko Kruger Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in the South Caucasus: Ohannes Geukjian. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Feb 8, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 16:30
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White Coke posted:What? Is RHA treated at a lower temperature? Both will be treated at give or take the same temperature, you heat steel to above its recrystalzation temperature in both cases, its how you cool it and what you do while cooling it that creates the difference. The key distinction is that face hardened (Krupp or other types) is subjected to the face (or case) hardening process which is a type of heat treatment but is not produced by the same process that RHA (Rolled homogenous armour) is treated with. The very short version is that Face Hardening only heat treats the "face" or surface of the plate, so you create the plate then you heat the surface intensely in the presence of carbon (A process called carburizing), typically by laying it on coke or in later strategies something like acetylene gas, this enriches the alloy with carbon which forms harder phases and creates a thickness of about 30% of the plate in this new harder selection of phases. The advantage of this is you have a hard face to break a penetrator and a ductile backing plate to prevent the armour shattering by flexing (Hardness and ductility are generally mutually exclusive, something very hard that flexes will shatter, but something that flexes will often have a shell go straight through it as it yields too easily). Face hardened armour works very well at stopping a projectile coming at an angle on the plate but has problems when trying to stop a projectile coming straight in at it. This is because a higher proportion of the energy of the shell is causing the armour to deform because its coliding more solidly, this is more likely to cause the hard face to flex, shatter, and let the shell through. Whereas at an angle, the hard face will cause the shell to skip off and deflect without causing more flexing than the armour can handle. So if you want to create "optimum" armour you have a layer of face hardening just wide enough to damage and disrupt the shell coming in backed with more ductile (or tougher in the metallurgical sense) steel which is still strong but not as hard to catch the fragments and allow flexing. Also if you bugger up the manufacturing process its a lot more likely that face hardened armour will fail catastrophically as you are introducing a lot of potential inbuilt stresses and flaws that weaken it, this is particularly notable in end war German tanks. RHA as homogenous implies is a consistent structure all the way through and is made by hot rolling, so you roll (or otherwise shape using forging) an ingot at high temperature so it cools at the same rate (ish) throughout so you have a consistent piece of armour with the same grain structure, not two distinct layers as you get in Face Hardened. After its formed its hardened through heat treatments to improve its toughness but wont involve carburizing, its heat treated to do grain refinement to improve the toughness strength and hardness. RHA will not be as hard as face hardened armour but will be significantly less brittle, hardness is a single component of armour toughness and doesnt neccesarily mean that the armour as a whole is tougher. Its not as easy as saying one is better than the other, its probably fair to say though that RHA is a lot easier to produce than face hardened armour is however and is a lot more reliable and consistent. It will be better against some forms of attack and worse against others. Its a lot lot more complex than this because shell design is a huge factor in this, as is like a million other things. How shells interact with amrour is not as simple as this is making it sound but this should give something of an idea of the engineering concepts involved. I havent gotten into things like alloying or additive elements either. Footnote in that modern tanks do not solely use case hardened steel because they have moved on to composite armour, they get their hardness from ceramics (which are pretty much the hardest and brittlest class of materials on the planet). Polyakov fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Feb 13, 2021 |
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Feb 13, 2021 22:13
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Cessna posted:The fact of the matter is that you don't know either. As it is, I worked on a US Fleet Boat as a curator for years, and was hired to consult on the restoration and preservation plan of a Type XI U-boat. Maybe I saw the only uniquely bad U-boat produced, but if it was at all typical, U-boats were garbage. I will say that u505 was started in June 40 and completed in August 41, this isn't a late war bodge job or a case of them learning production processes since that date is solidly in the time frame when they should have learnt all of this on earlier ships, if theres a time when they should be producing good ships it's this period and the fact that they aren't is I think fairly representative of their ship construction methods being crude at best.
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Feb 18, 2021 01:58
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Jobbo_Fett posted:No, NO! It's treading new waters, it's a NAVAL TERM GOD loving DAMNIT! Plumbing new depths.
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Feb 18, 2021 16:50
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Draft animals make it dooable, or lots and lots of porters, but those have been neccesary for armies to move for millenia.
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Mar 4, 2021 10:56
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One thing to bear in mind is that actual reliable information on Khalkin Gol at the time would have been as rare as hens teeth. Both sides fiddled their figures and everyone would be aware of that, its only since the fall of those regimes that we have started to get accurate data or accounts. All that could be said with any certainty is that the Soviets won and the Japanese lost. Even with that despite their significant advantage in men (outnumbering the japanese by between 2 and 3 to 1) and materiel quality and quantity the Soviets still took very bad losses and would try to spin that away as much as they could and amplify that victory for internal propaganda purposes, the Kwantung army was very good, especially in 1939. Compare that to the Winter War where you could get very good access to one side of the conflict (the Finns) and even observe it yourself given its only next door so its bound to weigh much larger in the minds of German analysts. Would they have still made the same assessments if they knew then what we know now? Yes i think so to be honest. The Soviets did not perform anywhere near as well as they should have done, and their victory was against the Japanese, who despite being Nazi allies were non-white after all. The winter war itself was much larger in scale and more close to the planning for Barbarossa than Khalkin Gol.
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Mar 8, 2021 15:10
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:What are you basing this off of? Why don't you think Japan would be willing to discuss terms at any point? Its a very big stretch that, were there not an active war going on against Germany and Italy at the time then there is sufficient basing capacity in Singapore to support projecting the majority of the royal navy from it for significant time. Millions were spent to make it so in anticipation of having to do this very thing. Japan is fundamentally unable to invade India and suddenly sea control in the SCS, particularly near the DEI starts looking a lot more uncomfortable for them if they have to fight the entire RN who has a much closer base than they do to it.
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Mar 9, 2021 12:34
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Can you explain the point you're trying to make better here? I'm having a hard time understanding it. I don't think it's a reasonable premise that Japan would have to fight the entire RN considering the rest of the UK's colonial commitments and engagements in Europe, even in peacetime. My comments are based on what i thought the hypothetical was, which is lets have a no other powers involved knock down dragout between the UK and the Japanese (if we are disregarding the US and Europe as getting involved), in which case Japan does have to fight the majority of the RN and indeed there is the war plan to send them out there. It wont be peacetime, it will be war for the future of the empire time.
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Mar 9, 2021 13:03
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Even assuming that the RN deploys 100% of its assets to Singapore in 1939/40, that looks something like: Does it? What does the RN need to do, screen Borneo and Malaya to prevent seaborn invasion and then interdict Japanese trade by distant blockade and wait for industrial advantages to swing things more in to the UK's camp. RN shipboard AA is significantly superior as is its radar both in terms of air search and gun laying and by extension nightfighting as the war goes on, we are fighting closer to RN bases than IJN bases which means that the reconnaisance advantage (something utterly critical in naval warfare) will be fully with the Royal Navy and the industrial weight is such that the UK will outproduce the Japanese long term very comfortably. Also the RN has major drydock facilities in Singapore (the largest in the world at this point), the Japanese drydock facilities are back on the home islands which are an entire other sea away, they have some on Taiwan but its not near the size they need to do capital ship repair. They cant take any closer bases without attacking the US or magically winning China, they dont get French airbases in Vietnam from which they sunk Repulse and Prince of Wales and threatened the South China Sea without dragging France in and adding another half dozen capital ships to the UK side, they also cant realistically invade Malaysia without holding Vietnam because their route from Hainan to the Gulf of Thailand is just not going to happen without getting spotted much much earlier in that situation and getting pasted by land based air from Singapore or Borneo. I also take some issue with your figures, I count 8 japanese carriers in 1940, 4 heavy (Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu) and 4 light aircraft carriers which are significantly smaller (Hosho, Ryujo, Zuiho and Shoho), Chitose and Chiyoda are still seaplane tenders at this point and dont become carriers until later in the war. If we are including carriers completed in 1940 to the count (as Zuiho was right at the end of 1940) then we have 6 large UK carriers (Courageous, Glorious, Furious, Ark Royal, Illustrious and Formidable) and 2 light carriers (Argus and Eagle) this numbers advantage will carry on even throughout OTL WW2, IJN airgroups on the large carriers are bigger sure but i would judge that as more of a wash in terms of relative strength. RN pilot training is generally excellent and as is the submarine force which has no qualms about going for merchant shipping. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Mar 9, 2021 |
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Mar 9, 2021 14:03
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Yeah fair enough, it probably works out a bit better to the RN in 39 than 41. The problem is that without Vietnam strategic surprise is just not happening even to the extent it did historically. It does not have the ships, air cover, or sea control to do so, Japan has range issues getting to Singapore and Malaya even holding French territories. Wars do not happen instantly and the RN was very aware of Japanese buildups in the area and as tensions rose would have swung out east in force. If war comes then we have the regiments from India going east rather than west and regiments from Australia and New Zealand going north rather than west which suddenly renders the japanese seaborn invasions a lot more risky. Actually paying attention to the defence of Singapore means that battle is incredibly unlikely to go the way of history even if they do get ashore. We arent dealing with obselete fighters because the demands of the home front arent so severe so we have modern planes in quantity based on land and significantly more troops with much better support to meet them if they do land. The Malaya and Borneo invasions were unbelievably dicey for the Japanese even historically, if POW and Repulse had survived, which in this situation there is nothing to actually kill them, then that invasion is absolutely and completely dead, their screening warships were at largest a Heavy cruiser Japan cannot in any reasonable universe take Malaya in this situation. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Mar 9, 2021 |
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Mar 9, 2021 14:51
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Pryor on Fire posted:Trying to play Battleship doesn't really work, the theoretical matchup between the IJN and the Queen's Navy would probably be decided by who was able to put more ground based planes into airfields nearby quickly. I don't think the Brits had a capability to win a massive air war that far away logistically though. Where is this massive air war happening and to what end? Japans nearest bases are Hainan Island and Taiwan. They can hit nothing critical from there whatsoever and the UK does not have a burning desire or really a capability to invade Taiwan, this is a war that will take place on the UK's colonies doorstep if anywhere, and on said doorstep japan has no basing capability. Japan doesnt have and never will have a credible strategic bomber program and if they try to get into a 4 engine bomber war with the UK its going to go very badly for them. The likely outcome of this is that the UK pours more aid into China through French Indochina and Burma and it probably escalates to a larger ground war in that area while RN submarines poo poo on the IJN's trade and navy at sea because their torpedos actually work.
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Mar 9, 2021 15:11
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Alchenar posted:If the Royal Navy sailed to Singapore then the IJN would have been granted the decisive battle with an enemy at the end of a long ocean voyage that it dreamed of. The RN is not going to be able to force entry into an area that's dominated by Japanese naval aviation (land and sea based) and even if it was able to trade evenly with the IJN, the UK does not have the same capacity as the US to replace losses and build capacity. We've just been over this at some length, the RN does not need to force entry to anything, it can deny the IJN from achieving anything with a great degree of ease, the Japanese are not taking the rubber of Malaysia or the oil of the DEI in the face of RN opposition. This is not Tsushima, the RN has one of the worlds biggest logistics base to replenish and sortie from in Singapore and the entirity of India and Australia from which to draw supply, the worlds biggest/second biggest shipbuilding capacity to fight the war on (A capability that far exceeds the IJN's). It doesnt need to give the Japanese a decisive battle because it wins the long war (with some echoes of the WW1 naval conflict) and Japan isnt successfully threatening anything that the UK considers vital, it loses Hong Kong and thats really about it. It has no bases to threaten even half the SCS from the air and honestly badly loses the long term air production war against the UK as well as the sea one. Their logistical and backup organisation is a lot less developed in the theater which means their actual ship readiness rates will also lower. Sending spitfires and hurricanes that are now not being used in Europe to base in SEA suddenly means that instead of making GBS threads on buffalos and vildebeasts they are now having to fight proper modern land based fighters with well trained and motivated crews which will quickly be backed up by the development of a radar network and has a far better training and replacement program itself. Their risky invasions are now suddenly facing multiple thousands more troops. Japan will very quickly start running out of resources and time as it feared would happen unless somehow the US starts up shipping resources again.
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Mar 9, 2021 17:11
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Raenir Salazar posted:On the other hand, this assumes Churchill doesn't decide to order the RN to go on the attack because holding back in a naval equivalent of Fabian tactics might not be popular at home with a populace that maybe wants the war won quickly? Distant blockade is how the UK has fought naval wars for centuries.
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Mar 9, 2021 17:39
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Raenir Salazar posted:I feel like comparing wars involving age of sail ships and 20th century aircraft carriers makes these very different problems and involves a large degree of oversimplification and generalization as to how Britain fought those wars and undersells problems they encountered. The distant blockade of Napoleon provoked war with the United States in order to sustain it. Also Britain failed to "distantly blockade" Revolutionary USA in the end. Where is the somme of this hypothetical war? An endless grinding land war with mounting casualties and no appreciable change in the front. Its just not there. Using a bunch of obselete capital ships to try and force the dardenelles does not somehow indicate that everyone involved would take leave of their senses and act like an absolute moron, even if he did somehow get it into his head he almost certainly didnt have the political capital to overrule the entire Royal Navy admiral corps. A better example from WW1 is that of RN strategy versus the Germans where its just keep them there and let their trade dwindle and choke them to death. The Germans sought a decisive battle because they needed to in order to win, time was not on their side, Jellicoe sought the opposite, he preserved his fleet, didnt seek silly engagements for the sake of his own ego (looking at you Beatty) because he had a very good appreciation of what he needed to do to win and an appreciation that if he took risks he might well lose. Similar strategies are adopted in the war of independence, the war of 1812, the Crimean war and indeed every single war that the UK fought against anyone with a coast even against vastly inferior naval opponents like Argentina, Russia or Venezuela. This is not just some invocation of Nelson from the early 1800's, this is systematic documented RN strategy that you see in each case and exists in the record of planning for a war with Japan in the far east in the 1930's. The Pax Brittanica century is in a large part based on the fact that if you wanted to go anywhere on the sea you did so because the UK could and occasionally did decide to just stop you if they didnt like what you were up to.
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Mar 9, 2021 18:15
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The home fleet doing double duty, you mean, due to proximity. A large fleet in Singapore doesn't do much to support your distant blockade force strung out in the central pacific. What exactly are they blockading from the central pacific? They arent getting anything from North America because Canada is commonwealth and the US is embargoing them, long range cruisers can be maintained out of New Zealand with stops in one of the innumerable small islands in the south pacific which can turn back ships coming from South America and these are well well outside the range of the IJN to do anything about in any reasonable circumstance, British naval intelligence is incredibly pervasive and knows where freighters are sailing from and too in most ports at around this stage because its their job. No trade is coming through the SCS at all, no rice from Thailand or Vietnam, oil from the DEI, or cloth from India because they have hacked off the various Empires. Whats neccesary is the ability to send submarines into Japanese shipping lanes in the east china sea which is very dooable because IJN ASW is atrocious, hell the Dutch submarines made utter fools of them let alone a navy continually building new ones. Japan had managed to almost blockade itself through various embargos which is why they cornered themselves inti having to resort to force to try and take the resources they needed.
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Mar 9, 2021 20:17
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Burma was absurdly difficult terrain compared to most of the terrain of the proposed route, I don't want to underestimate the challenge of the undertaking but I think they could have built out track quite a bit faster. Given the extent of the Russians ability to just utterly wreck a railroad (as they did very effectively in the West with less time and space to play with) its going to be a lot more difficult for them than this. They need to make several key changes. 1: Change production and design of their railway locomotives, you cannot depend on capturing enough russian locos and rolling stock. 2: Produce enough rail to repair damage and augment it, which also requires retooling to produce different rail dimensions (Japan is a 3ft 6 in gauge, russia a 4ft 8). Japan is not a big train nation for freight haulage and never really was, they used coastal shipping so this is not a trivial problem to overcome. I would at this point like to bring up that the modern japanese rail network is 18'000 miles of track total, the trans-siberian alone is 5'700 miles long. Its just not really a feasible problem for them to make the requisite resources quickly. They would struggle to maintain the existing track let alone lay another lane. 3: They dont have a great deal of experience in laying track quickly because they dont have a great deal of railroads themselves. The grain railroad chase was done by very experienced tracklayers and people just willing to poo poo resources up the wall and as was Burma as both had nations involved with significant experience in railroads.
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Mar 15, 2021 11:25
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Before the war is the key operative phrase there, doing something in 5 years of relative peacetime (assuming you mean before 1937 breakout of war from the 32 occupation to the 37 invasion of the rest of china) in a relatively compact area where you have labour sources living close to where you are laying the track is a very different question of scale. Its not that the Japanese have no experience of railroad, its that they have less than the people you are using as a comparison for speed so couild not reasonably be expected to achieve the same rates of laying. Every factory they have producing new rail material is one more strain on their manufacturing and materials capacity that they already do not have enough of.
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Mar 15, 2021 13:03
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Milo and POTUS posted:How effective was commerce raiding in the age of sail compared to later How do you define effective? Value chains of manufacturing were a lot less complicated, so the actual effect of commerce raiding or even its complete extreme, blockade, was proportionally less, theres no inability to get tungsten meaning you cant make AP penetrators in the 1700's for instance. If you are continental then you have lots of alternative means of getting stuff, usually less efficient, but its very difficult to actually cut off trade. However where it was relevant was in places like the new world, where there is no established economic network to replace seaborn trade. This meant that in the seven years war, both sides were able to raid each others commerce in their own back yard in europe very effectively, however privateers were so dispersed that it was impossible to destroy them all in port, and it was implausible to catch them all at sea so commerce raiding couldnt really be stopped. However the end result is that even though the RN couldnt stop the french from raiding, it was able to by consistent and repeated application of both the navy and also privateers to stop french trade from reaching North America. However what it cant do is stop neutral flagged shipping, largely spanish, but also American, Irish and Dutch, carrying supplies for the french (theres a whole dicy situation where britain really doesnt want spain to enter the war so is ignoring their activities). This means that the french are essentially cut off from their colonial posessions during this period, this hammers french port cities to a state of almost bankruptcy in the homeland, because merchants are losing ships at such a rate that they cant pay their bills, causing economic paralysis. However they arent able to cut off French forces completely so the war goes on. French activity which was largely based around privateers with only limited involvement from their navy is an inconvenience and does a lot of economic damage but doesnt manage to cause significant privations in british port cities or powerfully disrupt British trade or ability to acquire commercial credit. As we progress through the years we do see a lot of similar things happening, where commerce raiding doesnt really succeed in easily measured direct impacts on peoples ability to make war, in the napoleonic wars and in the war of 1812 what it does do however is divert a large quantity of ships to have to chase them down and stop them. This makes the idea of continuing the war not particularly appealing to Britain, because it still has to maintain a large fleet that costs a lot of money, its not really a winning strategy to cede control of the sea just because you cant beat the royal navy, because if you do nothing then britain will spend less on botes and more on soldiers to come in and force the war that way, and commerce raiding is a very easy way to make your enemy spend more than you to stop you impeding them. The same really happens in the US civil war, it forces the union to spend on ships and also makes many merchants transfer their ships to other nations which dents the amount of controllable shipping the US has. However as we move away from the age of sail, surprisingly, the ability of ships to stay at sea long term actually has more benefit for the countering of commerce raiding than conducting it, this is also due to the establishing of a system of international law and relations between nations which i will get onto in a moment. Sure we can look at the activities of the german asian squadron who got half way around the world before they got caught in WW1, but the ability to hang around off shore for a long time meant that in port blockade is far more feasible, quick and frequent patrol can bottle ships up in port with a lot more ease. You see this in the Russo Japanese war, where the Russians had very few ports to operate out of, China declared strict neutrality and interned any Russian warships that came into port, this mean the Japanese only had to deal with Vladivostok and Russian ports in the area and so protecting its own quite vulnerable trade was fairly easy. Privateers worked out of neutral ports all the time in the centuries prior, its why French privateering against the British was so enduring, you couldnt watch or control every neutral port a ship could come out of, your ship had limited endurance so eventually they would be able to slip out. Then there are a lot more targets than there are your warships out at sea. We also see the outlawing of privateering in the mid 1800's which meant that commerce raiding could no longer realistically be conducted for profit by private enterprise. You couldnt sell in neutral ports so you get things like the CSA burning down the vessels it took because they couldnt bring them to their home ports past the Union blockade. This is why you see the French doing stuff like talking about very fast torpedo vessels to raid commerce in the late 1800's, they have seen these issues and are talking about ways to combat them (hence why you see Guerre de course pop up, they really are the pioneers in many ways of thinking about this), they talked about small fast torpedo boats who would sink ships, ignoring the traditional practice of prize taking in favour of actually winning the war, this is part of the Jeune Ecole, or young school, a particluarly relevant passage is written by a sailor named Admiral Aube, though he built on many others, he wrote in 1885 the following very prescient passage. "Tomorrow, war breaks out; an autonomous torpedo boat—two officers, a dozen men—meets one of these liners carrying a cargo richer than that of the richest galleons of Spain and a crew and passengers of many hundreds; will the torpedo boat signify to the captain of the liner that it is there, that it is watching him, that it could sink him, and that consequently it makes him prisoner—him, his crew, his passengers—in a word that he has platonically been made a prize and should proceed to the nearest French port? To this declaration . . . the captain of the liner would respond with a well aimed shell that would send to the bottom the torpedo boat, its crew, and its chivalrous captain, and tranquilly he would continue on his momentarily interrupted voyage. Therefore the torpedo boat will follow from afar, invisible, the liner it has met; and, once night has fallen, perfectly silently and tranquilly it will send into the abyss liner, cargo, crew, passengers; and, his soul not only at rest but fully satisfied, the captain of the torpedo boat will continue his cruise" This is precisely what early U-Boats were, submersible ocean going torpedo boats, who could evade blockade in a way that cruisers could not, to do exactly what Aube laid out. This leads to a huge fight that goes on for decades in France over what course should the navy take, as you may imagine neutral countries were outraged, which ran against Frances experience that their wars at sea go best when Britain has no friends, and upsetting neutral countries means tthe formation of a coalition against them is very likely. On the contrary they cant outbuild the Royal Navy or commerce raid in the traditional way so what is the alternative? The fact that the technology wasnt really there until the 1900's was also of course a factor. The Germans on the other hand stuck to the cruiser strategy, long range ships that stopped and searched, however they get fairly easily swept from the sea and have minimal impact in WW1, they are of course aware of the Jeune Ecole but it is an affront to their sense of honour which pervades the officer class (note things like the Prussian declaration of "I make war on French Soldiers, not French Citizens" at the start of the Franco Prussian war), there is an argument going on about what form of commerce war they should conduct at the same time as there is on the french but what it ends up with is primarily planning and building for cruiser raiding warfare as they go into WW1. Germany doesnt really have the global infrastructure to support this so her vessels risk being interned at neutral ports if they stop for coal and germanies own ports can be taken or surveileld in fairly short order and as such we end with predictable results and they turn to unrestricted U-Boat warfare as the alternative. So post the age of sail commerce raiding becomes less feasible for the inferior naval power, but far more overwhelming for the superior one. The Entente was able to starve germany to death in WW1, it only sustained WW2 by taking huge quantities of land over which supplies could be shipped safely. We hardly need go into Japan and the efects of the US on that.
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Mar 24, 2021 14:40
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Alchenar posted:I'd say never. Commerce Raiding has often been effective for the person doing it and getting rich, but as a strategic approach to warfare the closest anyone has gotten to 'effective' was probably Germany in 1918. Commerce raiding has frequently been effective in increasing the cost to the other party of continuing the war, unfortunately from that its very difficult to point at it and say "this directly caused the end of the war", because you cant, it all feeds into complex political calculus, but we can definitely say that it often had an effect and indeed was effective. But the idea of raiding to the extent of inflicting complete blockade, and honestly i think the distinction between raiding and blockade is measured only by effectiveness is proven to be very effective, the germans didnt get there but it has frequently worked as a strategic approach.
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Mar 25, 2021 11:01
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Alchenar posted:Okay I'll note that I consider blockade to be the natural end state of conventional 'sealane dominance' whereas commerce raiding is an asymmetric tactic adopted by navies unable to directly challenge control of the seaways. They aren't two aspects of the same thing, they are tactics emerging out of navies in fundamentally different positions attempting to have some kind of warfare impact. I think this is also the conventional way of looking at this. By your definition commerce raiding can never be decisively effective, because if you raid enough you will stop or effectively stop trade which then means you have somehow nebulously shifted to sealane dominance at the very point it achieves its ultimate aim. Commerce raiding is almost always effective in making waging war more expensive for one side, infact it pretty much always has unless it was staggeringly incompetently implemented. This makes the enemy less effective at waging war, its an incredibly difficult task to quantify exactly how, but just because it didnt stop the war dead right that second doesnt mean it wasnt effective. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Mar 25, 2021 |
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Mar 25, 2021 13:03
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Alchenar posted:Well yes. The point of armed forces is to win conflicts. If you lose or are unable to compel a negotiated peace then you were ineffective. Wars are not about square feet conqured, K:D ratios, or tonnage sunk. They are about 'are you able to achieve your political objectives or deny your opponent theirs'. How does sinking an enemy transport ship full of war materials not impact the war? How does forcing your enemy to build more escort ships, run them harder, pay their crews and so on not impact the war? During the napoleonic wars french commerce raiding forced the royal navy to run at a very inflated size to deal with a much smaller quantity of french raiding ships. You have forced your opponent to spend more resources on countering what you are doing than you are spending on doing that thing. This is definitely A Good Trade and brings you closer to winning. He didn't eventually win but that is besides the point.
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Mar 25, 2021 14:15
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Alchenar posted:I mean if you are doing a thing and it causes a superpower to declare war on you then yes that is a bad idea if you aren't ready for the consequences. What if like in a huge quantity of situations you are at war with a superior naval power for other reasons but you too are a large power, do you. A: Do nothing, permitting them to deny you the use of the sea at a bargain price, resulting in economic pain for you at home, particularly in port cities with no evident reply from you. B: Engage in commerce raiding, causing them to have to spread out their fleet, spend more on boats, suffer some discontent and economic losses at home, causing them to expend more resources to stop you than you are spending to harass them? Still suffering some of the effects of A, but you are building and launching boats and actually getting something out of them. Why would you not do B? Particularly relevant in the days of privateering because you have a very low capital outlay as a state, because these are largely built by private investment but are chasing your strategic aims as a state? France basically lands on B as its solution to dealing with Britain for 2-300 years and honestly it was the best choice they could have made.
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Mar 25, 2021 15:20
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