Man Whore posted:

Here is something I've always wondered. You always hear about the horse archers of the Mongols and the Hun completely devastating other armies of the time because they have no good defense against it, but what would make a good defense against horse archers besides other horse archers?

Man Whore posted:

Here is something I've always wondered. You always hear about the horse archers of the Mongols and the Hun completely devastating other armies of the time because they have no good defense against it, but what would make a good defense against horse archers besides other horse archers?

Man Whore posted:

Here is something I've always wondered. You always hear about the horse archers of the Mongols and the Hun completely devastating other armies of the time because they have no good defense against it, but what would make a good defense against horse archers besides other horse archers?

Nenonen posted:

air defense artillery

Frostwerks posted:

Ahh. Any functional difference between that and AAA or are they basically synonymous

AceRimmer posted:

ADA includes flak and SAMs?

Frostwerks posted:

Don't know why the question marks I was just asking.

P-Mack posted:

Question- is there a consensus emerging about why Soviet equipped armies in Middle East conflicts sucked so bad, or is that still in the process of frustratingly unproductive arguments about export models?

AceRimmer posted:

I'm not quite sure that's what the actual definition is.

AceRimmer posted:

Is that in the Untold Story sequel or something? I don't remember anything that stupid...well, besides the ending.

JaucheCharly posted:

It's not that trivial. Like somebody just said before, you can't win a conflict by defending. You can't hide indefinitely, your peasants get killed and your crops and lifestock are stolen and you'll run out of food eventually. How do you deal with nomads that have no fixed places? Since somebody already asked about logistics and Sun Tzu, yes, it's a logistical shitfest to occupy places in the middle of nowhere. Soldier peasants work for a while, until central power declines and they either join up with the nomads or get wiped out. Btw, Persia was a place that was dominated by nomadic tribes until the 1920s, when Reza Shah dealt with them by systematically blocking access to pasture lands.

No place really got rid of their nomadic neighbours for good until firearms and artillery got more widespread (mind other transformative factors). Everyone that you listed also used horsearchers as part of their armies. What you think of as organized state is more likely the odd chance that manages to kill them off for a generation or so, or fight these people to a stalemate and then arrange marriages. In the case of China, most of the time it was considered safer and cheaper to pay them off, spend some money to pit the tribes against each other or hire them as buffers. Charismatic leaders and these people learning to deal with fortifications, that's when the real trouble starts.

Or you deal with them like the Qing did with the Dzungars, but that's rather the extremely lucky case of having the gifted Qianlong Emperor and like you said a well run state, plus being a nomadic dynasty themselves. Armed with firearms and lots of horsearchers.

MassivelyBuckNegro posted:

'Armies of Snow and Sand'

https://www.scribd.com/doc/105643224/Armies-of-Snow-and-Sand?secret_password=zlcrkjq311abxta9b34

quote:

The Egyptians were also hindered by the mechanistic implementation of Soviet doctrine. For instance, before
1973, Soviet doctrine called for tank platoon leaders to designate a single target, which the entire platoon would
fire at until destroyed. The platoon leaders would then identify a new target to engage. The Soviets calculated
that, given the gunnery skills of their crews, it normally would take three salvoes from the platoon (nine rounds)
to kill an enemy tank at the preferred range of engagement. Rather than seeing this as a general guide for action,
the Egyptians turned it into a hard-and-fast rule and taught all of their tank platoons to fire three rounds at the
designated target and then proceed to the next. Egyptian gunnery skills were often so poor that often none of the
three salvoes hit home. Nevertheless, because they had been taught to fire three rounds and then move on, tank
platoon leaders would generally shift fires to the next target even though they had not actually destroyed the first
one. In this way, the Egyptians lost a great many tank duels to the Israelis.

MassivelyBuckNegro posted:

'Armies of Snow and Sand'

https://www.scribd.com/doc/105643224/Armies-of-Snow-and-Sand?secret_password=zlcrkjq311abxta9b34

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

Winning a war against nomads is a different question from being able to beat them in battle. To generalize what I was trying to say, there are cases of nomad armies being defeated by settled people, and these settled people often exist for some time without getting constantly overrun their nomadic neighbours. I don't know why a nomadic army would feel the need to enter a pitched battle, but in the end I suppose that for every Genghis Khan there's a Satraces.

Satraces being the guy in charge at Jaxartes, where the Scythians trapped themselves fighting Alexander the Great. His father beat the Black Sea Scythians as well, and that was with the pre-Persian Macedonian army without all those archers. I obviously won't say that this was the norm, or that it was easy to fight these wars, but there were ways for people to defend themselves against nomads.

Popular history acts as if horse archery was tantamount to an atomic bomb, and that nomadic leaders were re-inventing the idea each time a big invasion came from the steppes. It discounts the idea that maybe there was some sort of weakness in nomadic armies that prevented them from going from nuisance to cataclysm. It also implies that horse archers never fought for the recipients of a raid, which I don't agree with, but I might have given off a different impression.


Basically, reading Manwhore's question, I thought he had the impression that he thought horse archers couldn't be defended against, or were a tremendous force of nature by virtue of horse + archer.
I should elaborate that foot archers can still fight against horse archers without a physical wall separating them, just some sort of protection. The basic idea is that there are going to be more foot archers, they're on more stable footing, and that horses are vulnerable because most nomads couldn't afford the glitzy cataphract armour.

Frostwerks posted:

Ahh. Any functional difference between that and AAA or are they basically synonymous

AceRimmer posted:

ADA includes flak and SAMs?

JcDent posted:

I'd say another thing about Communism is that it has to expand as a definition. Now, after Stalin's death, there wasn't much expansion to be done and probably even less honest to Lening Communists up high, but everyone on the down low were constantly reminded that the West sucks and we should probably liberate them one day.

xthetenth posted:

Isn't the US system to a major degree predicated on easy access to other countries' markets in such a way that you could argue that they were more reliant on ensuring friendly regimes than the USSR?

JcDent posted:

This is so, so cool. I wonder if I could apply that to Hearts of Iron III (no, no I couldn't).

A pity that all Cold War games are produced on 1998 production values...

AceRimmer posted:

quote:

However, Iraqi pilots proved unable to perform Western dogfight tactics, and thus leaned heavily on GCI (ground-controlled intercept) guidance (that was frequently inept). When coalition jamming disrupted GCI direction, Iraqi pilots often failed to react, simply flying straight ahead, or fled the battle. American fighter pilots were astonished at how slowly and clumsily the Iraqis maneuvered, at their simplistic tactics, and at the fundamental nature of their mistakes. Iraqi fighters were shot down almost effortlessly, and several were killed because their GCI controllers guided them into the ground.

Cyrano4747 posted:

1) I'm not even going to touch the troublesome lumping of "Communism" into one monolithic entity here. Suffice it to say that there are many, many different and highly divergent schools of Marxist-Leninist thought under the label 'Communism'

2) The notion of perpetual expansion of marxist socialism is kind of correct if you accept marxist historical thought and the base presumption that history is an unstoppable progression of different relationships between the state, economic means of production, and the individual. However no less a man that Joseph Stalin himself realistically put an end to the idea that Marxist-Lenninist Socialism had to expand by its very nature with the doctrine of 'socialism in one state.' From that point on every major socialist state decoupled foreign policy from some kind of imperative to force a Marxist vision of historical progress in nations that weren't, from their point of view, as highly evolved on the economic front as they were. Stalin's actual devotion to Marxist principles is questionable, at best (which I'll touch on in a moment) but everyone else uses his solution for the extreme problems caused by the notion of perpetually expanding revolution and runs with it.

Note that this doesn't prevent them from engaging in robust and even aggressive foreign policy based on the same international power politics as any other nation. Brezhnev in particular keeps that ball rolling.

3) Stalin's death actually represents a very real return to Socialist-Leninist roots, at least on an ideological level. If you want ideological cynicism you should probably look under the hood at the Stalin years more than anything else. Stalin is really where the system gets hijacked and stops being about the economic theories of Marx or the politics of Lenin and becomes all about the cult of personality built up around Stalin. Look up Khrushchev's reforms for a bit on that. His denunciation of Stalin marks a very striking return back to the ideologies of the 20s. If you want a bit more of the robust foreign policy and Stalin-style power politicking Brezhnev's pushback against the Khrushchev thaw stands as a pretty good example. But while Brezhnev tried to re-balance the internal power struggle back towards concentrating power and authority in one man's hands, his foreign policy could be best described as "very aggressively defensive." The Brezhnev doctrine stated that the Soviet state had not only the prerogative to intervene on behalf of any troubled Socialist regime outside its borders, but the duty. Depending on how you interpret this it can mean crushing the gently caress out of someone else's dissidents Prague Spring style or dumping military aid onto every tiny rear end in a top hat insurrection around the globe that will at least call itself marxist and give the US/NATO a hard time.

Finally, even at the end they had devout Marxists in the top offices. Andropov and the other gerontocrats had a list of flaws a mile long, but secretly not being marxists wasn't one of them. Gorbachov, if anything, was the most dangerous thing of all - a true believer who wanted to return the USSR to its ideological roots, similar to Khrushchev. He just royally hosed up his attempt to reform the system, probably because he didn't fully grasp just how deep a lot of the flaws ran and how much had been papered over by the boom economy of the 1970s.

Tomn posted:

How does that even happen? Is it just much harder than it sounds to tell what any given set of instructions will do, or to tell what's happening to your plane relative to the ground?

steinrokkan posted:

If anything it's the other way around - the US is less dependent on foreign trade than other market economies because of its sheer size, and so lesser capitalist nations need to ensure friendly relationship with the US: If the US decided to tighten the screws on trade policy, it would be an effective way of punishing insolent trade partners, while the US would suffer relatively less severely.

Tomn posted:

How does that even happen? Is it just much harder than it sounds to tell what any given set of instructions will do, or to tell what's happening to your plane relative to the ground?

Nenonen posted:

R&D Dept. Fails: Finnish Javelin anti-tank 'missile'

In the spring of 1944 Finnish Army's major Eero Utela from Panssaridivisioona represented a new gizmo that would surely give Soviet tankers nightmares: a one metre long spear with tail fins and a hollow charge tip. The innovation was rejected by Finnish GHQ's Invention Office. First of all you couldn't throw a javelin without exposing yourself and getting a MG burst through your chest, secondly the accuracy of such weapon would have been abysmal compared to eg. a Panzerfaust, and finally sources don't say how heavy the warhead was supposed to be but let's suppose the warhead is similar to Panzerwurfmine which weighed 1.36kg. A modern men's javelin is over two metres long and weighs 800 grams, so our anti-tank javelin would have weighed closer to two kilograms. If you could throw it with any accuracy to 30 metres then bravo, you have a very awkward and less penetrative alternative to Panzerfaust 30!

Nenonen posted:

R&D Dept. Fails: Finnish Javelin anti-tank 'missile'

In the spring of 1944 Finnish Army's major Eero Utela from Panssaridivisioona represented a new gizmo that would surely give Soviet tankers nightmares: a one metre long spear with tail fins and a hollow charge tip. The innovation was rejected by Finnish GHQ's Invention Office. First of all you couldn't throw a javelin without exposing yourself and getting a MG burst through your chest, secondly the accuracy of such weapon would have been abysmal compared to eg. a Panzerfaust, and finally sources don't say how heavy the warhead was supposed to be but let's suppose the warhead is similar to Panzerwurfmine which weighed 1.36kg. A modern men's javelin is over two metres long and weighs 800 grams, so our anti-tank javelin would have weighed closer to two kilograms. If you could throw it with any accuracy to 30 metres then bravo, you have a very awkward and less penetrative alternative to Panzerfaust 30!

Trin Tragula posted:

100 Years Ago

If you've been following closely the progress of the Austro-Hungarian army into Serbia, you could be forgiven for thinking that they might actually know what they're doing. Don't worry, we can now correct that impression. By the end of today, their right wing is bravely running away from a mass counter-attack while their left wing is literally holding a triumphal parade through the streets of Belgrade.

Meanwhile, a different A-H army attacks Russia and manages not to tie its own bootlaces together (yet), and the original Mess o'Potamia develops further at Qurna. Oh, and apparently the Germans are "Fighting for Existence", according to today's paper. Yeah, not so much.

Nenonen posted:

R&D Dept. Fails: Finnish Javelin anti-tank 'missile'

In the spring of 1944 Finnish Army's major Eero Utela from Panssaridivisioona represented a new gizmo that would surely give Soviet tankers nightmares: a one metre long spear with tail fins and a hollow charge tip. The innovation was rejected by Finnish GHQ's Invention Office. First of all you couldn't throw a javelin without exposing yourself and getting a MG burst through your chest, secondly the accuracy of such weapon would have been abysmal compared to eg. a Panzerfaust, and finally sources don't say how heavy the warhead was supposed to be but let's suppose the warhead is similar to Panzerwurfmine which weighed 1.36kg. A modern men's javelin is over two metres long and weighs 800 grams, so our anti-tank javelin would have weighed closer to two kilograms. If you could throw it with any accuracy to 30 metres then bravo, you have a very awkward and less penetrative alternative to Panzerfaust 30!

Ensign Expendable posted:

The natural evolution of the German magnetic mine on a stick!

steinrokkan posted:

Both are steps up compared to the Japanese "ordinary mine on a literal bamboo stick".

steinrokkan posted:

Both are steps up compared to the Japanese "ordinary mine on a literal bamboo stick".

PittTheElder posted:

What's the racial makeup in the command structure of those Indian battalions? Is it Indians all the way down, a white officer corps leading Indian enlisted, or somewhere in between?

Tomn posted:

How does that even happen? Is it just much harder than it sounds to tell what any given set of instructions will do, or to tell what's happening to your plane relative to the ground?