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This thread will represent a revolution in milhist posting discourse
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Dec 6, 2020 20:31
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Cyrano4747 posted:Figure 1: Ye Olde Milhist Discourse 
CommonShore fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Dec 6, 2020 |
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Dec 6, 2020 20:42
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How probable is it that the helmet-wrapper-supervisor positions and similar superfluous spots existed as sinecures of sorts? A supervisory position to hand to a political ally who lacks any actual skills as a way of rewarding them and keeping them close but also without giving them any real responsibility
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Dec 6, 2020 23:40
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To what extent could caracole vs sabre shock be something of a (for lack of a better term) metagame tactical decision? i.e. Infantry with pikes who have experience and expectation of being sabred at are going to be an extremely difficult target, perhaps verging on a wasteful one, for a heavy charge. Over a longer period infantry who haven't been charged might start carrying fewer pikes (or have fewer ready fixed bayonets) proportionally, and perhaps be less armoured, and then become good targets - both psychologically and materially - for the shock tactics.
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Dec 8, 2020 15:55
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Cythereal posted:German geopolitical planners were very afraid that Russia's enormous growth and military improvements were aimed directly at Germany for lack of anywhere else to direct them, and the feeling that Austria was Germany's only real ally left. "Everybody hates us. Better start a war!"
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Dec 27, 2020 15:54
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It looks to me that it would get the undercarriage hung up on the hill there if it just kept driving forward.
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Dec 29, 2020 05:43
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Anyone have a good relatively recent citation - article or book whatever - on Spanish and Portuguese warfare 1570 to 1590 or so, especially ca. the Iberian succession crisis? I'm looking for info both on tactical stuff and martial cultures. I'm as interested in contemporary perception as in reality here, so anything that slips into Black Legend stuff is actually a-ok, so long as it's not crossing its own wires.
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Dec 29, 2020 22:57
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I seem to recall this was at least in part because the survivor did not have his shield, meaning that he'd ditched it to flee the battle faster. If you've ever heard the phrase "come back with your shield, or on it", that's what it means: either die honorably in battle and be carried back on your shield by your compatriots, or at least do not run away. That it's apocryphal doesn't stop tons of people from misusing it as a figure of speech w/r/t MMA/boxing. One of the UFC broadcast teams' catch phrases when a fighter is going full defensive and just trying to hang into the fight and make it to decision without getting stopped is "Looks like so and so just wants to go out on his shield..." whereas someone who is fighting like that is really doing the reverse.
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Jan 3, 2021 16:31
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SlothfulCobra posted: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? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump North American plains tribes came up with some pretty good tactics for handling herds of bison which probably could be adapted for the "stampeding herds" questions. Other hunting techniques they used included putting up visual barriers which would funnel them into killing areas. There is also video out there of how African bush tribes hunt elephants. In short, they sneak up on them, wound them (the example I saw featured an axe stroke to calf), and then harrass them until they die.
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Feb 8, 2021 17:25
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Cessna posted:And here's the helmet from Colchester: I'm imagining that this had a whole bunch of organic material features that are now gone that made it look entirely different, perhaps like those hats from the 90s that had ridiculously long brims, and then some kind of floppy ears.
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Feb 8, 2021 20:26
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Bicycle troops are dragoons. Also you can certainly bring that generator on the bike. Don't even need straps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PkTwJ347Vk
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Mar 4, 2021 15:42
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I went for a walk today! Anyone want to play "guess the milhist site"?      
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May 9, 2021 21:55
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It's in western Canada, actually!
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May 9, 2021 22:53
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Ok another hint then - it is medium dry, but this site is actually in a geologically and biologically unique location.
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May 9, 2021 23:47
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A winner! This is a consistently smart thread - good guesses all around!  There's lots of first world war trenches there, all wonderfully overgrown and eroded. It's a neat spot. The unique biome is the Carberry Spirit Sands / Spruce Woods, which is a mixed woodland on a large prehistoric sand bar that has a combination of animals and vegetation that aren't found anywhere else on the planet (as a set). It literally always looks dry as bones, because there's only about 1 inch of fragile topsoil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1RnH68U02Y
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May 10, 2021 02:55
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I was a bit disappointed when this week I was listening to Fall of Civilizations podcast and he gave the same "North America started agriculture later so they never had a chance" argument w/r/t to the Aztecs, nearly word for word actually. I furrowed my brow at it then, and then when I saw it again in this thread it really popped for me.
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May 14, 2021 15:14
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Cessna posted:That's a laughable statement. Aztec (better word: Triple Alliance or Mexica) agriculture was quite advanced. Right? And I was really perplexed when I heard it on the podcast because he had just spent like 10 minutes describing how great Mexica agriculture and/or subsistance strategies were. It stood out like a sore thumb becuase it wasn't even necessary for the argument he was making about the decline and fall of the Aztecs - the factors of diplomacy, disease, internal corruption, and external pressure as he framed it don't need some kind of "progress bar" argument about how wild teosinte had only been domesticated for 3000 years vs barley which had blah blah blah to explain how things turned out for them and the rest of the Americas.
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May 14, 2021 17:44
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Also technical sophistication is not such a factor in conquest/conflict that it necessarily follows from "Americas didn't have ~civilization~ for as long" to "they weren't as good at it" and "they never stood a chance". It just makes so many weird and unnecessary counterfactual assumptions, and in doing so ignores a far more interesting set of factors and details.
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May 14, 2021 20:15
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Phobophilia posted:The opening shot of the Spanish-Incan war was the Spanish essentially ambushing the Incan Emperor during a parley and shooting unarmed attendants. And there that's where the Spanish had tens of thousands of native allies. What are some specific examples of battles where the Spanish successfully dealt with huge numerical disadvantages?
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May 15, 2021 14:13
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Sure, if you exclude enough examples ahead of time then there won't be any examples because horses are cheating or ambushes don't count or whatever. Lol at Cajamarca the Incas weren't even armed because they were there for diplomacy. e. rephrasing to be a bit more productive and less toxic - This is what we've been talking about : there are very few battles where when you interrogate what happened that the Spanish won because of the technological advantage. Either it's something like Cajamarca, where it's better described as a massacre of unarmed enemies, or other battles where there are tens of thousands of indigenous allies. It's not that the Spanish didn't win these battles, it's rather that these battles don't support the claim that horses, steel, and gunpowder allowed the Spaniards to steamroll the indigenous population CommonShore fucked around with this message at 01:00 on May 16, 2021 |
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May 16, 2021 00:56
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You wouldn't even need to wheel the battalion 45 degrees. You could just have every individual solider rotate 45 degrees relative to the line and march so that the battalion remains parallel while each individual's shoulders are angled. Again would require drilling but that would have to be way easier to drill and more intuitive; oh and more able to absorb weak links.
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Jun 8, 2021 15:21
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I just realized that I've been making a lot of assumptions about why all of this marching/deployment stuff matters for commanders and how it can contribute to success and failure on the field. But Alchenar posted:One of those weird interesting things about Military History is that there's this process of evolution from everyone shuffling around in groups and forming a shieldwall when told to, to the full drill manual of 1850. 'How do people walk properly' is actually an incredibly complex problem that a huge amount of time and effort was spent on over a few hundred years. So just to make sure that I'm not working from false assumptions... Does this matter because less efficient models of field deployment can 1) Leave certain batallions exhausted from walking huge distances to get into place and 2) Leave a still-deploying army and formation (perhaps catastrophically) vulnerable to attacks from a faster prepared and more efficient enemy Am I wrong on these? Am I missing anything?
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Jun 8, 2021 16:54
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Cool thanks! I think I had a good sense of the problems but not at the scale - I hadn't connected the lengths of the columns to these problems of deployment.
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Jun 8, 2021 20:45
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Toasted dandylion root makes something that tastes vaguely reminiscient of coffee, too. Perhaps halfway between coffee and tea? A big portion of the coffee flavour is just "vegetable stuff toasted and soaked in water," hence the overlap with these other beverages.
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Jun 16, 2021 19:31
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Jobbo_Fett posted:The V1s and V2s were also not as inaccurate as one might think, its more due to effective counter-intelligence work fooling/convincing the Germans that they were accurate or needed modiications that then made them ineffective. I was under the impression that British behavioural psychologists defeated the rocket campaign when they figured out how to predict the impact pattern of V1s and V2s by feeding dogs immediately after nearby impacts and then monitoring their saliva production to give early alerts,  so I'd like to hear more about this
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Jun 30, 2021 22:22
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I'd also appreciate a detailed explanation of the need for "unconditional surrender" and I don't really have a potato in this fight. It's just the least-explained part of the story right here.
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Jul 4, 2021 01:32
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bewbies posted:There were a litany of reasons ranging from leverage between tenuous allies to the domestic political landscape, but the real reason everyone agreed the surrenders had to be unconditional was that negotiating with fascists legitimized them. Thanks! Can you expand on the "tenuous allies" bit a little, please?
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Jul 4, 2021 02:14
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skeleton warrior posted:There are two other reasons there was a demand for “unconditional surrender” that I haven’t seen brought up yet: gracias. That's all interesting stuff that comprises a coherent picture. e. Was there any red scare calculus in it? Like "If we don't beat and occupy the Japanese now there's a chance that they could end up as a Soviet state"? I'm envisioning a scenario where a war weary US is unable or unwilling to complete a siege or invasion of Japan for the reasons detailed upthread and then the USSR comes in and mops up the remains. I'm not sure how likely that was, but if I'm looking at it as a possible outcome, they could have considered it then, too... e.2 What I'm really mining into here in my head is the full decision tree of the options available to the US/Allies at the time and the probable outcomes of each of those options, ranging from full blood thirst to unexpected pacifism: 1 - Literally pack up and go home war is over 2 - Negotiate 3 - Blockade 4 - Invasion 5 - Conventional bombing campaign 6 - Atomics With each of these having various unilateral/coalition versions. And you're right: given the constraints of unconditional surrender, the reasons for those constraints, and the climate of Japanese leadership, literally every probable outcome is a loving humanitarian atrocity on a historical scale 
CommonShore fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Jul 6, 2021 |
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Jul 6, 2021 00:14
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skeleton warrior posted:Pretty much. For the U.S. to stop prosecuting the war against Japan, the Japanese government or people would have had to somehow convince the U.S. that they were done, had learned their lesson, and would never start another war again - even as a large portion of the Japanese government was screaming that the war wasn't over, that victory was just around the corner, and as a large portion of the U.S. government and populace considered the Japanese people and government to be dirty [racial slurs] who sneak attacked them at Pearl Harbor. If we stretch he sense of "possible" beyond "politically acceptable back home" and simply look at it in the sense of "can be executed on a practical and material level," short of the US/Allies doing a 180 and saying "ok war is over we are now friends, here is shitloads of food right now for your people," is there any course of action that could be taken, even with the benefit of hindsight, that doesn't result in incomprehensible heaps of corpses? Alternatively, how many gay black Hitlers do we need to throw into the pot to get outcomes that are not the peri bathos of misery? (even if the US wasn't think of it in terms of a decision tree, I often find it helpful to work through a decision tree and contrasting counterfactuals when wrapping my head around something like this).
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Jul 7, 2021 14:53
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skeleton warrior posted:I mean, sure. If the U.S. says "no, we're okay with conditional surrender, you get to keep the Emperor and no serious war crimes tribunals" - which is largely what they said after the surrender - then maybe there's a negotiated peace well prior to August. But again, that assumes that a) the U.S. knows these are the sticking points; b) the Japanese government doesn't react to that with a counter offer to see what else they can get, delaying the peace process by months; and c) the U.S. no longer cares about preventing future aggression by Imperial Japan because they have foresight as to how the Cold War will develop and so their strategic goals are completely different. Yeah I was contemplating the subject peoples in this as well. A light hand against the Imperial core would probably lead to at least as much terrible in the occupied (or even iberated) territories outside of the home islands.
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Jul 7, 2021 16:54
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To what extent is there actually room for improvement in military small arms anyway? They already seem (from my not-extremely educated perspective) to be accurate, reliable, and more than sufficiently lethal, or at least extremely in the realm of diminishing returns there. Like, you could concievably increase the projectile's muzzle velocity, for example, but is that going to meaningfully improve the weapon's contribution to achieving tactical and operational objectives? They also seem to take minimal training to achieve meaningful efficacy. Wouldn't future improvements be instead on the manufacturing and logistics side? Or another way of phrasing the question: what is it that current small arms can't do or can't do well that users/stakeholders wish they could?
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Jul 12, 2021 17:54
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Fearless posted:This recent counterfactual wehraboo fever dream diversion reminds me of someone I went to university with who ardently believed that the Great War would have been over in a matter of months if the BEF was equipped with English long bows, and that the Macedonian phalanx would have swept the field at Waterloo. ok you have to fill in a few more details for these arguments.
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Aug 17, 2021 23:25
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Aug 18, 2021 00:36
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the funniest thing about the longbows is that even if you accept all of his premises his conclusion still doesn't work Sure lets concede 1) That you could get the longbows and supply the arrows 2) that your recruits could use them (despite Edward III's remarks about training longbowmen) 3) that they'd have enough range for the indrect fire into the trenches 4) that the indirect fire into the trenches would cause casualties as expected and even give a few extras like 5) The longbows would be able to handle the conditions without breaking 6) that they wouldn't get shot in the head while standing up to shoot these extremely tall weapons Even if you give them all of these points, and assume a succesful longbow volley, the Germans would just go "ok lets put a roof on the trench now" and it's over. Like, it would have been less effort to adapt to the longbow tactic than to gas.
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Aug 18, 2021 03:35
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Tulip posted:AFAIK English soldiers considered longbows inferior to firearms by the late 16th century so even by Waterloo its pretty ludicrous. What's interesting about this though is that in the late 16th century, some English theorists were still arguing for the supremecy of the longbow. Like, this was an open debate through the 16th century. From what I've seen though it's largely armchair theorists deciding that the longbow is part of some fundamental English way of making war that has always worked consarnit and then stretching for reasons that it's true, and the veterans of the French Wars of Religion saying "just get guns gently caress." I'm actually planning to go down this rabbit hole, or at least a connected one, fairly soon, but I have a few other things I need to read first. If I find anything threadworthy I'll post it.
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Aug 18, 2021 15:57
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:the other thing is that a lot of subconcussive and concussive force is rotational and a helmet of any kind does basically nothing for that And the rotational force - specifically the deceleration from the rotational force - from the most recent commentary I've encountered, is actually the worst and most disruptive for the brain. That's why KOs that snap the head to the side or up and back in some way tend to be the nastiest.
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Sep 14, 2021 15:12
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Groda posted:Who was that historian / statistician who trolled the poo poo out of everybody by combining violent deaths from murder and war in his statistics, over the course of human history? Pinker? Yes but he was sincere and a pedo
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Sep 24, 2021 14:44
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Re insulting language in translation - I've seen first-hand how French clumsily translated to English can be inadvertantly insulting and hostile and cause shitloads of problems - the common French world for "ask" is "demander," and Francophones without enough English to understand connotations will translate "Je demande" as "I demand" instead of "I ask" or "I request." And poo poo goes downhill from there. There are other such tension points but that's the one I always remember.
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Oct 25, 2021 20:16
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I'm imagining a Bismoodamaran
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Nov 1, 2021 06:07
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Well if you're going to use a sword in supersonic aerial combat I think those will be just as good as any other
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Nov 12, 2021 15:19
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