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Weka posted:This list is a lot longer than I could quickly find, so thanks. It looks like I've got some reading to do. As a fellow dumb guy we gotta help each other out. Thomamelas posted:Peru, Laos, Afghanistan, and Nepal can be added to the list. Lol can't believe I forgot Afghanistan. I'm not really aware of what's going on in Francophone Africa in the 70s and 80s except Mobutu being a monster, it's a gap in my knowledge I'd like to fill. Also if anyone has book recs on Mozambique or Angola's anticolonial wars please please please lmk.
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Jul 26, 2020 02:37
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Milo and POTUS posted:The modern world is insanely loud as it is and I imagine the modern battlefield is even worse. Really it's a miracle more of us aren't totally deaf For armor crewman there is some hearing protection. You wear a CVC helmet which blocks some of the sound (and provides headphones and a mike for the intercom and radios):  Also, being inside a heavy vehicle helps a bit too. That said, it only does so much, and you're going to end up with some hearing loss.
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Jul 26, 2020 03:05
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Also if anyone has book recs on Mozambique or Angola's anticolonial wars please please please lmk. Al Venter is a South African journalist who covered them for the BBC at the time, and he wrote "Portugal's Guerrilla Wars in Africa: Lisbon's Three Wars in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea 1961-74" He also wrote "Battle For Angola: The End of the Cold War in Africa c 1975-89 ", about the Angolan Civil War afterwards.
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Jul 26, 2020 03:46
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:As a fellow dumb guy we gotta help each other out. The communist revolution in Afghanistan dove tails into the Soviet invasion pretty neatly so it's kinda easy to forget. Coup in April of 1978, civil war, then proxy war, then the Soviets invade in December of 1979. The same month they install Karmal as the head of the government. He lasts till 1986 when the Soviets depose him and replace him with Mohammad Najibullah who maintains a degree of power base until 1992.
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Jul 26, 2020 03:59
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Thomamelas posted:The communist revolution in Afghanistan dove tails into the Soviet invasion pretty neatly so it's kinda easy to forget. Coup in April of 1978, civil war, then proxy war, then the Soviets invade in December of 1979. The same month they install Karmal as the head of the government. He lasts till 1986 when the Soviets depose him and replace him with Mohammad Najibullah who maintains a degree of power base until 1992. What kicked off the coup?
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Jul 26, 2020 04:09
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Lawman 0 posted:What kicked off the coup? If someone has a better understanding, feel free to correct me. A member of the communist party, Mir Akbar Khyber was assassinated. The government at the time was made up of a few groups and I'm not sure I'd say it was communist but communist sympathetic. It had been making overtures to the USSR but wasn't very comfortable with the foreign policy requests. Most of the PDPA is convinced that Khyber was killed by the anti-communist part of the government. The government blames the PDPA. And they follow it up with mass arrests of the PDPA. Then you get a coup.
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Jul 26, 2020 04:42
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Are there any good books on the WW2 Eastern Fron campaigns that have made it to audio? The only things I've seen on Audible are Deathride and a bunch of memoirs. I'd love to get something like When Titans Clashed even off of my sub.
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Jul 26, 2020 14:32
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Necros posted:I found an old picture and a couple people pointed me in the direction of this thread. The quality is terrible so I'm sorry, but if someone could tell me anything about some of these decorations I would really appreciate it. Trying to get my brother to request his service record since hes the oldest grandchild but he's working a shitload of hours right now. Mostly what I know is he served in the 175th Infantry Regiment in the 29th Division for almost 30 years and retired an E-9. If you’re trying to figure out the ribbons etc you might also try GiP
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Jul 26, 2020 15:03
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Are there any examples of the use of fabian tactics that weren't immediately met with opposition from idiots convinced that decisive battles were the way to go? Fabian got countered and that led to Cannae, Dowding got fired after the Battle of Britain over the debate between the Dowding System and Leigh-Mallory's Big Wing nonsense. You would think with how effective Guerrilla warfare has proven to be over the centuries at loving up conventional armies that more people qpuld be enthusiastic about employing those tactics. I mean, plenty of countries and organizations do use those tactics and they're a primary cause for decades long hellwars that humiliate imperialist nations with their big guns and huge numbers. Is it like the rich's inability to comprehend how the poor survive? Modern military branches just fail to understand how guerrillas with pipe bombs and kalashnikovs continue to operate even after thirty trillion dollars of explosives are dropped on them? Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Jul 26, 2020 |
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Jul 26, 2020 19:50
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Arcsquad12 posted:Are there any examples of the use of fabian tactics that weren't immediately met with opposition from idiots convinced that decisive battles were the way to go? Fabian got countered and that led to Cannae, Dowding got fired after the Battle of Britain over the debate between the Dowding System and Leigh-Mallory's Big Wing nonsense. Guerillas tend to have the thing in common that their country is or soon will be ash and a lot of them will die. Are you willing to take the damage that comes from employing hit and run tactics? In the battle of britain Big Wing has more of a chance of stopping the raid dead in its tracks before it hit the cities for instance and would likely have lead to lower casualties overall in the groups. (Whether its effective or not is neither here nor there in the discussion).
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Jul 26, 2020 20:03
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Guerilla warfare isn't effective at all, adopting it means accepting a 1:10 casualty ratio against you. Its successes are all about the political decision of being willing to accept the cost of that ratio rather than concede defeat. Fabians tactics are not the same thing as guerilla tactics, and the Battle of Britain was not fought with fabian tactics.
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Jul 26, 2020 20:10
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Arcsquad12 posted:Are there any examples of the use of fabian tactics that weren't immediately met with opposition from idiots convinced that decisive battles were the way to go? Fabian got countered and that led to Cannae, Dowding got fired after the Battle of Britain over the debate between the Dowding System and Leigh-Mallory's Big Wing nonsense. It's really easy to say, "well obviously we should just concede all this ground to the enemy and retreat until we can find a better time to fight them" if you are looking at a campaign purely through lines and colors on a map. But when you're ceding ground to the enemy, you are giving up your countrymen, your towns, your economic production centers, your cultural sites. If your country works on any kind of representative basis, the constituents of the places you're advocating to abandon will certainly not be as casual about throwing away their own friends and family as you are. This isn't a class thing. There will be plenty of poor people who will not survive in the areas you're advocating to abandon to the enemy. Also, it's pretty dismissive to describe the guerrilla forces that have succeeded against larger armies as only having pipe bombs and AKs. Most successful insurgencies (and the vast majority of them do not succeed, and tend to die horribly) have a neighboring state providing a safe haven and generally supplying them weapons, training, facilities for camps and bases, all of the things you need to able sustain your guerrilla force after "thirty trillion dollars of explosives" are dropped on them. The insurgents that only have improvised pipe bombs and AKs tend to be the dead ones. Grenrow fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Jul 27, 2020 |
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Jul 26, 2020 21:26
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The other problem with Fabian tactics is that you have to coerce a bunch of your population into giving up their homes and livlehood for the "greater good" of the war effort. One of the major criticism of Fabian and the reason for going for a decisive battle is that Rome's Italian allies were getting understandably pissed off at Rome allowing an enemy army to roam their land unchallenged and opponents of Fabian were worried about the long term consequences.
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Jul 26, 2020 22:38
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So it seems that in order to use Fabian tactics successfully, you should be fighting on someone else's land? I am surprised the British did not try them in WW1, then!
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Jul 26, 2020 22:43
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In a broader sense, the whole point of a state is to defend the people within its boarders, and if you can't do that, the whole endeavor is a bit pointless. There may be some wisdom in not risking your army, but their entire purpose is to risk their lives to accomplish goals, so there's a limit to how safe you should play it.
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Jul 26, 2020 22:46
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SlothfulCobra posted:In a broader sense, the whole point of a state is to defend the people within its boarders, and if you can't do that, the whole endeavor is a bit pointless.
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Jul 26, 2020 22:50
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I think the nature of history tends to overstate the success of guerilla warfare. There's maybe a survivorship bias going here, where to even get written down as a guerilla campaign at all, there has to be some level of success. A failed guerilla campaign is likely to just be written as "the defenders collapsed". Or "a few holdouts fought on for a few years afterwards".
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Jul 26, 2020 22:53
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Fangz posted:I think the nature of history tends to overstate the success of guerilla warfare. There's maybe a survivorship bias going here, where to even get written down as a guerilla campaign at all, there has to be some level of success. A failed guerilla campaign is likely to just be written as "the defenders collapsed". Or "a few holdouts fought on for a few years afterwards". Guerilla warfare historically also gets more successful when 'genocide' stops being a commonly accepted counter-tactic.
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Jul 26, 2020 22:58
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To some degree, guerilla warfare requires more modern nations that have some purported valuation of life. I can't imagine guerilla warfare would have worked so well against the Mongols, where they would not have any compunction about just killing everyone in each village. Or look at the Warsaw ghetto. Noble, but when the other side is willing to just literally murder everyone and level the city, well, it's a different story as to how things turn out. You could, for example, perhaps claim that Native American resistance to white settlement and takeovers was a form of guerilla warfare. Again, doesn't work as well when the other side literally sees you as savages and has no political problem just eradicating you. I think modern guerilla warfare, in a Vietnam versus the U.S. sort of way, does depend upon the far superior military force having a political principle that it won't simply eradicate the entire country.
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Jul 26, 2020 23:02
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Alchenar posted:Guerilla warfare historically also gets more successful when 'genocide' stops being a commonly accepted counter-tactic. I don't think there's evidence to support that.
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Jul 26, 2020 23:02
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Nessus posted:So it seems that in order to use Fabian tactics successfully, you should be fighting on someone else's land? I am surprised the British did not try them in WW1, then! French national morale was very much a concern for the Brits in WW1
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Jul 26, 2020 23:04
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You probably also have to define guerrilla as opposed to banditry or raiding or so on. Like the idea of small military encounters instead of a Decisive Battle is one thing, but what defines a particular battle as guerrilla as opposed to "cagey and unwilling to fight outside of advantageous circumstances"?
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Jul 26, 2020 23:06
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SlyFrog posted:To some degree, guerilla warfare requires more modern nations that have some purported valuation of life. Guerilla warfare was effective vs the Mongols in, for example, their invasion of Champa (modern day Vietnam) in 1282. quote:Or look at the Warsaw ghetto. Noble, but when the other side is willing to just literally murder everyone and level the city, well, it's a different story as to how things turn out. Don't see how that's guerilla warfare. That's just straight up urban warfare between unequally armed opponents. Actual guerilla warfare would be stuff like the partisan war in Eastern Europe and in China, both of which had some degree of success against genocidal opponents. quote:You could, for example, perhaps claim that Native American resistance to white settlement and takeovers was a form of guerilla warfare. Again, doesn't work as well when the other side literally sees you as savages and has no political problem just eradicating you. Sure, but white encroachment on America took *hundreds of years*. If you want to view it as a tactical question, then surely their resistance was much more effective than trying to fight the colonists in conventional field battles. Really, there's a whole trope about how the proper way to deal with guerillas is just to do lots of atrocities and that guerillas are only a problem because of the media and soft bleeding heart types. But this to me looks a lot like injecting modern politics (especially regarding Vietnam and the War on Terror) into the analysis. From a historical perspective, doing mass murder often serves only to galvanize resistance.
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Jul 26, 2020 23:15
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SlyFrog posted:To some degree, guerilla warfare requires more modern nations that have some purported valuation of life. "Guerrilla" warfare in Vietnam involved regular invasions by regiment+ sized maneuver forces of NVA troops. Westmoreland is much maligned for not really giving a poo poo about winning hearts and minds but there *was* a reason he was preoccupied by literal invasions of South Vietnam by major army units.
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Jul 26, 2020 23:22
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Nessus posted:So it seems that in order to use Fabian tactics successfully, you should be fighting on someone else's land? I am surprised the British did not try them in WW1, then! Not an option when you're a very junior coalition partner to the French, who have just lost most of their industrial heartland and would quite like some of it back; and you came into the war ostensibly to defend Plucky Little Hand-Chopping Belgium, of which 95% is currently suffering under the Teutonic yoke. Also not the greatest idea if, were it necessary to sue for peace, your enemy's opening line would be "right, we're all here, what are you going to give us to make us go away again?"
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Jul 26, 2020 23:55
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I guess Fabian strategy isn't the right word i should have used, as it really doesn't apply to the Battle of Britain. More that I don't understand the frequent desire in history for decisive battles as opposed to asymmetrical strategies to engage conventional forces. Insurgencies, guerrillas and so forth fight the way they do for a reason and it baffles me that, in a modern context, American intervention wars feel like they react the same way every time by inundating a target country with a huge occupying force or by bombing it to oblivion and acting surprised when that doesn't stop determined guerilla groups from fighting.
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Jul 27, 2020 00:28
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Arcsquad12 posted:I guess Fabian strategy isn't the right word i should have used, as it really doesn't apply to the Battle of Britain. More that I don't understand the frequent desire in history for decisive battles as opposed to asymmetrical strategies to engage conventional forces. But it generally does. It's just that the moment you leave the battlefield country the people there can go back to doing whatever they want. There's a pretty good book on Afghanistan I read a while back that starts with the myth that Afghanistan has never been conquered. It's been conquered several times, but the secret was that each time the conquerers stayed and lived there. The problem with American intervention isn't that we don't win wars it's that we have no loving clue what winning looks like and that leads us to making stupid decisions and then blame everything but our lovely lack of foresight. edit: also, not all of our interventions have been failures. There's enough successes or 'good enoughs' to encourage determined policy makers to stay the course and assume things can be made to work out. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Jul 27, 2020 |
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Jul 27, 2020 00:44
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Arcsquad12 posted:I guess Fabian strategy isn't the right word i should have used, as it really doesn't apply to the Battle of Britain. More that I don't understand the frequent desire in history for decisive battles as opposed to asymmetrical strategies to engage conventional forces. Because often winning by these strategies sucks more than losing in a quick decisive fight and swapping some territory or money or whatever.
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Jul 27, 2020 01:13
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Arcsquad12 posted:I guess Fabian strategy isn't the right word i should have used, as it really doesn't apply to the Battle of Britain. More that I don't understand the frequent desire in history for decisive battles as opposed to asymmetrical strategies to engage conventional forces. For large parts of history, ability to effectively and quickly wield military force is a political act. If you aren't willing to risk an engagement, that gives all sorts of room for people to attack your political position later, so you want to avoid that as much as possible. This translates right down to individual soldiers, who won't not want to be perceived as cowardly. There's also a huge information assymetry problem. I would wager that for much of history a commanding general does not have better information than whether the enemy force is much smaller, approximately equal, or much larger than their own. And sometimes you don't even know that. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Jul 27, 2020 |
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Jul 27, 2020 01:23
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Fangz posted:Because often winning by these strategies sucks more than losing in a quick decisive fight and swapping some territory or money or whatever. Yeah guerilla warfare might look like the winning strategy on paper but most people aren't really fond of, say, being gone when the occupying invader rolls into their neighbourhood. Similarly most civilians don't look fondly on the perception of being abandoned by their ostensible defenders. You need a convincingly desperate situation for people to accept it. I mean, for a very dumb war, look at Houston during the Texas Revolution. He won the war by retreating for months while others died in useless, heroic boondoggles like the Alamo and Goliad, and engaging only at an opportune moment. In doing so he permanently tarnished his reputation to some, and bled more than half his army to men going home to salvage their harvests and evacuate their families towards Louisiana.
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Jul 27, 2020 01:53
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ISU-122 and ISU-122S Queue: ISU-122, Object 704, Jagdpanzer IV, VK 30.02 DB and other predecessors of the Panther, RSO tank destroyer, Sd.Kfz. 10/4, Czech anti-tank rifles in German service, Hotchkiss H 39/Pz.Kpfw.38H(f) in German service, Flakpanzer 38(t), Grille series, Jagdpanther, Boys and PIAT, Heavy Tank T26E5, History of German diesel engines for tanks, King Tiger trials in the USSR, T-44 prototypes, T-44 prototypes second round, Black Prince, PT-76, M4A3E2 Jumbo Sherman, M4A2 Sherman in the Red Army, T-54, T-44 prototypes, T-44 prototypes second round, T-44 production, Soviet HEAT anti-tank grenades, T-34-85M, Myths of Soviet tank building: interbellum tanks, Light Tank M24, German anti-tank rifles, PT-76 modernizations, ISU-122 front line impressions, German additional tank protection (zimmerit, schurzen, track links), Winter and swamp tracks, Paper light tank destroyers, Allied intel on the Maus , Summary of French interbellum tank development, Medium Tank T20, Medium Tank T23, Myths of Soviet tank building, GMC M10, Tiger II predecessors, Pz.Kpfw.IV Ausf.H-J,IS-6, SU-101/SU-102/Uralmash-1, Centurion Mk.I, SU-100 front line impressions, IS-2 front line impressions, Myths of Soviet tank building: early Great Patriotic War, Influence of the T-34 on German tank building, Medium Tank T25, Heavy Tank T26/T26E1/T26E3, Career of Harry Knox, GMC M36, Geschützwagen Tiger für 17cm K72 (Sf), Early Early Soviet tank development (MS-1, AN Teplokhod), Career of Semyon Aleksandrovich Ginzburg, AT-1, Object 140, SU-76 frontline impressions, Creation of the IS-3, IS-6, SU-5, Myths of Soviet tank building: 1943-44, IS-2 post-war modifications, Myths of Soviet tank building: end of the Great Patriotic War, Medium Tank T6, RPG-1, Lahti L-39 Available for request (others' articles):  T-60 tanks in combat SU-76M modernizations Shashmurin's career ISU-152  HMC M7 Priest GMC M12 GMC M40/M43 NEW  15 cm sFH 13/1 (Sf) Oerlikon and Solothurn anti-tank rifles German tanks for 1946  AMR 35 ZT
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Jul 27, 2020 01:53
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Today I just learned about the spanish maquis against Francoist spain and they really fall in the "you don't hear about unsuccessful gurellia wars" category.
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Jul 27, 2020 02:43
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raverrn posted:Are there any good books on the WW2 Eastern Fron campaigns that have made it to audio? The only things I've seen on Audible are Deathride and a bunch of memoirs. I'd love to get something like When Titans Clashed even off of my sub. Glantz's Stalingrad is on Audible.
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Jul 27, 2020 03:53
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I'd say history is full of instances of less direct, more guerrillaish strategies. For example using North American natives as allies in the borderland wars, using privateers in general, funding and training and arming various insurgent factions during the cold war, today's cyber warfare and so forth. In many cases it's preferable that you don't have to fight an unconventional struggle against your enemy on your soil. Rather, if you can find a poor sod already occupied by them, then you can help them cause trouble against a common enemy. Now I'm reminded how Germany let Lenin return from exile to Russia during WW1. Some times the smallest unconventional maneuvres have the longest ranging consequences!
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Jul 27, 2020 21:10
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The other key issue is that decisive battles simply work in a way that insurgent campaigns rarely do. Take the American Revolution as an oft-cited "the winner was smart enough to fight from the trees instead of lining up all pretty to get shot at" example. Except that the harassing and skirmishing parts of the war had very little real effect on the outcome. Yes, being continually harassed on the road to Lexington after Concord stung a lot, and Francis Marion is famous for keeping up the fight in the Carolinas, but the British accomplished their mission at Lexington, and were not expelled from the Carolinas until after the conventional battle at Eutaw Springs. Meanwhile Saratoga took an entire British army off the board, which humbled the British enough for the French to openly enter the war. Yorktown took another British army off the board, causing Parliament to decide that the war was lost.
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Jul 27, 2020 22:24
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In that era in particular you need a strong regular force to supplement your guerillas to be effective. They compliment each other.
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Jul 27, 2020 23:01
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WW2 Data We're almost done with German rockets with a slightly smaller update today, but no less interesting! Why was the 38cm H.E. Rocket notable? What kind of 50/50 Amatol was used? What exactly is the R 100 Rocket, what was its purpose, and why wasn't it used? Is it the German equivalent to the Beehive round? All that and more at the blog!
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Jul 27, 2020 23:23
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Jobbo_Fett posted:What kind of 50/50 Amatol was used? You can't trick me, Amatol is just gunpower + potassium nitrate so its always expressed as a fraction of the two so you're talking ratios, not type 
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Jul 28, 2020 02:39
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Nebakenezzer posted:You can't trick me, Amatol is just gunpower + potassium nitrate so its always expressed as a fraction of the two Ah but the entry refers to it being poured, as opposed to the solid type of Amatol!
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Jul 28, 2020 03:47
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Cessna posted:Here you go. That was worth it, thanks for the link.
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