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Cjones posted:Guessing this will never get answered? The link that Rodrigo Diaz posted does a good job of explaining what the Spanish army during the 15-16th century looked like and how it operated. During the period it was probably the most effective army in Europe because of its discipline and professionalism. For example, the late-period battle of Rocroi ended in the defeat of a Spanish army (made up of Spaniards, Germans, and Walloons) by the French. The French defeated the Spanish cavalry and then bombarded the remaining pike squares with cannon until the Germans and Walloons fled, but the Spanish tercios remained in formation and continued to beat back French assaults all day in spite of the heavy bombardment. Finally the French offered to let them leave the battlefield with their weapons and flags, rather than continue fighting them. And this was in 1635, quite a while after the best days of the tercio in the 16th century. I know less about the Spanish Navy. I know that at the beginning of the period you're asking about it was pretty technologically advanced, but they fell behind as time went on. This was partially because their ships were designed to suit their strategic requirements, which demanded large ships to carry lots of cargo over huge distances. The English fleet defeated the Armada in large part because their ships were more maneuverable--their cannons were also longer-ranged. One thing to note is that after the failure of the Armada, the Spanish actually just went ahead and rebuilt their fleet. The decline of Spain was tangentially unrelated to the Armada and was due to strategic factors. France was probably more directly responsible for Spain's decline than Britain. Their strategic dilemma was that they had to use limited resources of Spain proper to control their enormous empire outside Spain, which was where they made most of their money. Like today, Spain was not particularly populous by comparison to other European countries. This led them to become completely overextended. The Spanish Armada was large and advanced even after being defeated off England, but it had to be strung out across the planet defending their dispersed possessions and transporting their income back to Spain. This meant they couldn't take any more risks like trying to invade England, so the Armada was a defensive, reactive force afterward. The Spanish Army was also very good but it was also dispersed to defend possessions or fight wars in Italy, North Africa, the Netherlands, the Americas, and Germany. They managed to do this with a remarkable degree of success considering their limited resources until the Franco-Spanish War of 1635-1659, which overlapped with two other wars the Spanish were heavily invested in, the Thirty Years War in Germany and the Eighty Years War in the Netherlands. France and Spain fought each other to a standstill, Spain went bankrupt (twice, if I recall correctly), and finally they signed a treaty which adjusted the border slightly. During this war Spain lost control of Portugal and its colonies, as well as the Netherlands (excepting Belgium). This hurt, a lot, and they dropped from the predominant military power in Europe to a progressively more distant also-ran. A big part of this was that their bankruptcies and substantial loss of income from the Netherlands and Portuguese colonies happened at the same time that important military and governmental reforms were taking place in other states. Sweden, France, England, and the Netherlands were becoming more consolidated and better administrated, and their armies advanced rapidly (e.g. Britain's New Model Army). Spain was not only exhausted but mostly relied on its external territories for its income, so little investment was made either in infrastructure or administration in Spain itself. They just used Spain to farm soldiers and taxes, which made a lot of Castillians leave. The population of Spain actually declined seriously during the 17th century, down to 5 million by 1700, IIRC mostly due to New World emigration. Also, Spain had an oversized military establishment, which meant their budget went to maintaining rather than modernizing their army and navy. There was also the problem that people pointed out earlier in the thread, which was that the Spanish Habsburgs were hilariously inbred and bad at running their country. All of this is really bad for a country, especially as a military matter. Napoleon invading and wrecking up the place for eight years didn't help. Being conquered by France also eventually resulted in practically all its colonies except Cuba and the Philippines becoming independent. Spain also became a political basket case with regular conflict and more than one open war between conservative and liberal factions. So Spain was already kinda crappy by the time Napoleon invaded it, but still considered a great power. After Napoleon, Spain wasn't really a great power anymore. As for how tough Spain's military was in different centuries: 1400s: tough, maybe toughest 1500s: definitely toughest 1600-1660: tied for toughest with France 1660-1700: second place and declining fast 1700-1808: second tier power (behind England, France, Austria, Sweden, Russia, etc.) Napoleonic Wars: took six year vacation from even being a country 1815-1939: to busy fighting each other to fight anybody else tl;dr Spain was the most powerful country in Europe during the 16th century but tried to do too much with limited resources and ended up wrecked by other more up-and-coming countries
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Sep 8, 2010 20:53
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dividebyzero posted:2) I remember hearing in middle school that during WWII (or Korea), Japanese (or Chinese) soldiers would wear bulky coats and wrap themselves in chicken wire, take painkillers and amphetamines, and go charging into human wave attacks. The idea allegedly was that .50 cal. U.S. machine gun fire wouldn't as quickly rip body parts off the soldiers, the chicken wire/coat contraption would keep their bodies largely intact to allow them to be somewhat combat effective for a little longer. I kinda' doubt this was the case, but it makes a good story. This is a pretty ridiculous story but potentially fun for kids. The two problems are that (A) bullets, especially WWII/Korean-war era ones which mostly went straight through your body, don't actually dismember you to the extent that you'd need a chicken wire cage to hold your body together and (B) if you were dismembered badly enough to need such a device to hold your guts in, it doesn't matter how many pills you took, you're going to lie down. Additionally, where would the People's Liberation Army get so many pain killers and amphetamines that they could just hand them out? This sounds like an exaggeration of the old saw about bullets failing to stop Chinese infantry in the Korean War because they were wearing heavy winter coats, which is unlikely but remotely possible if we're talking about long range shots from a .30 Carbine. quote:3) A fun hypothetical for which I'd love to hear your takes: what would happen if the U.S. erupted in a popular insurrection? How long would it take before the Army basically crushes such a revolt? The idea here is that many a gun nut friend insists [SNIP] ...what chance would Billy and his friends with their hunting rifles and pipe bombs stand against the full force of the U.S. Army? This fantasy usually relies on the assumption that a substantial portion of the U.S. Army would go over to the rebels if conditions were bad enough to spark a major "gun nut" based popular revolt. This assumption is vital because, to answer your question, the gun nuts have no chance whatsoever without mass defections of regular troops to their side. This is because the army has vehicles and heavy weapons, while militias can have only a limited selection of small arms and possibly IEDs. The Hutaree training videos that you can still find on youtube are a good example of how good their chances are. The video implies that Hutaree thought that when the gubmint/UN came for them, the fight would take the form of small-unit ambushes where they would never face an enemy they couldn't defeat with aimed rifle fire. This is of course totally insane and has been since the Boer War. A government attempt to exterminate a militia cell would more likely take the form of a night attack (night vision is a big advantage for regular army troops) supported by attack helicopters, armored vehicles, and artillery. They would have practically no means to resist this kind of assault. As for IEDs, a major reason that those weapons killed so many soldiers in Iraq is the insurgents' access to unsecured munitions dumps from the Baathist era. In addition they were probably assisted by organizations with experience in bomb-making, like the Quds force or the famous "foreign fighters"--for example the sudden appearance of EFPs in Iraq implies that somebody from outside taught them to use them and provided them with the necessary components. Compare the casualty record from IEDs in Iraq to Afghanistan, where expertise and materiel is harder to get. American militia types would presumptively be less expert and would definitely have poorer access to materials since explosives are for the most part tightly controlled in the US. In the case of a general uprising the militia would probably be unable to make any impact on urban areas. The population of those areas would be unsympathetic to a revolution based on right wing rural militias, and worse yet, American cities have large and relatively well armed police forces. It's possible that right wing militia-types could form the core of a guerrilla movement and take control of hinterland areas like the Adirondacks, backwoods Michigan, and areas of the Rocky Mountain states, but they'd still face serious problems. In contrast to, say, Afghanistan, the infrastructure of the United States is extensive enough that nearly the entire country is easily accessible to military forces. There's not a lot of space for them to hide, and what spaces there are are so isolated from the rest of the country that they'd be inconvenient to stage raids out of. quote:4) I'm looking for good accounts of the Iran-Iraq War, too. What happened there, from a tactical perspective, where Iraq so quickly lost the offensive initiative and ended up getting its rear end handed to it. I've only read a little about this, but basically Iraq's initial success was aided by the fact the Iranian army was in disarray with its officers mostly in prison. After it became clear that the Iraqis were kicking their asses, the ayatollahs released many officers to repel the invasion. They also had the advantage that are more than twice as many Iranians as Iraqis. Additionally Saddam could only be sure of the loyalty of a small part of his population; so mass mobilization could be dangerous for him. The Iranians exploited this advantage by using human wave tactics against the less numerous but more professional and better equipped Iraqis. IIRC the basic plan is that frontal attacks by lower quality troops would pin the Iraqi army in place and deplete its reserves, while the units of the Iranian army that didn't suck (mostly leftovers from the Shahist period) would move in more safely and smash them. This worked really well and eventually the Iranians were in a position to invade Iraq. This turned out to be a bad move. Shi'a Arabs in Iraq weren't very supportive of Saddam's invasion, but they proved more willing to defend Iraq from foreign invaders (they were less sympathetic on religious grounds than the Iranians expected). Also the threat to his regime caused Saddam to deploy chemical weapons, which had a vicious effect on Iran's poorly equipped troops. quote:Just how effective were chemical weapons in the conflict? Iran's penchant for using dense waves of infantry who lacked any kind of protection from chemical weapons made chemical weapons pretty effective for stalling their offensives. In the absence of adequate equipment to protect them, it pretty much doesn't matter how many soldiers you have when you're facing chemical weapons. quote:When and how often was Iran able to respond in kind with chemical weapons? Hopefully somebody else knows more about this. Given that Iraq's chemical weapons were mostly supplied by US companies, and Iran had a negligible chemical industry and minimal access to the arms market, I doubt they were able to get much poison gas together. Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Sep 12, 2010 |
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Sep 12, 2010 05:36
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JoeCool posted:I am extremely interested in the history of Chechen rebels ( especially their armament) and would like to know more about their tactics during battles. If I wanted to learn about the Chechen conflict I would probably pick up something from Anna Politkovskaya. She was a famous opposition journalist in Russia who made her reputation in Chechnya. She also made a lot enemies, survived a poisoning attempt in 2004, and finally was assassinated in Moscow a couple years ago. I don't think her work focuses overmuch on the military aspect, though. In terms of armament the Chechens used basically the same weapons as the Russians, since they both worked from Soviet stockpiles. Chechen forces were generally limited to infantry, so you're talking about AK-74 and SVD rifles, PKM and RPK machineguns, RPG-7s and -18s, mortars for indirect fire support, and the like. There are copious internet resources to learn about Soviet military equipment. Chechen success was due to Russian troops having extremely poor morale and leadership, sort of like the Winter War in Finland. The initial major victory in the First Battle of Grozny happened because the Russian commander assaulted a built up area with tanks and other AFVs without sufficient infantry escort. Since I'm a big nerd I'm going to go back to Soviet military history to explain why this was very stupid. Red Army military doctrine was centered on something termed "deep battle." To use WWIII as our example, after operational deception to confuse NATO as to what they were doing and where the blow would fall, Soviet tanks supported by mechanized infantry mounted in BMP IFVs and BTR APCs would conduct mass attacks in the North European plain. Using heavy artillery support (possibly including tactical nuclear weapons), superior numbers, and superior speed they would outflank, envelop, and overwhelm NATO forces in their way while bypassing anything they couldn't immediately destroy. For example, any built-up urban areas that they didn't need to capture in order to advance would be bypassed. Infantry divisions following in the wake of the spearheads had responsibility for reducing surrounded strongpoints. Taking into consideration the size of the Red Army, NATO planners generally estimated that the Soviets would be washing their feet in the Atlantic pretty quickly--which is why the American plan for WWIII considered Europe indefensible and relied on mutually assured destruction to deter the Soviets from invading. Now at the same time that D-Day was happening in France, an Eastern Front battle called "Operation Bagration" which we don't hear nearly as much about in America was taking place in Belarus. Bagration was the classic deep battle and it resulted in the total disintegration of Army Group Center, the most powerful element of the entire German Army. Germany lost something like a half million men including a large portion of their total remaining tank forces. David M. Glantz is the guy to read if you want to learn about deep battle or the Red Army in WWII generally. I personally find it super interesting, which is part of the reason I brought it up. Glancing at wikipedia they actually have one of their unusually non-lovely articles about this topic, which is a good primer. My reason for the digression is that the Soviet army and their tank units especially were designed for the kind of fight described above. Soviet tanks were typically less well protected than NATO models like the Leopard 2, M1 Abrams, or Challenger, especially from the flanks and rear. Fortunately they were cheaper and therefore more numerous, they could hit just as hard, and they had some special characteristics. In about 30 minutes the crew of a T-72 could mount a snorkel to the engine and seal the hatches and drive right through a river, while a NATO tank wasted precious hours waiting for engineers to set up bridging equipment. They also used autoloaders, which were slightly less efficient than a human at loading ammunition, but eliminated the need for one more crewman and wouldn't be fatigued by extended firing. Another important idiosyncrasy of Soviet armored vehicles is that the crew has an exceptionally hard time seeing out of the vehicle when they're buttoned up. IIRC the BMP series has something like a 25 foot blind spot, where if you're within 25 feet of the vehicle, the crew couldn't simply can't see you. The Soviets also favored very low turrets, which meant their cannons have very limited maximum depression and they have a hard time assuming a "hull-down" position and/or firing at targets at a lower elevation. Since Soviet forces planned to be duking it out against NATO in enormous maneuver operation on the North European plain, this isn't too big a problem. On the other hand, if you decide to just hop into your tanks and drive into the middle of a built up city like Grozny without infantry support, it's a huge problem. The Chechens holed up in buildings throughout Grozny and devastated the Russians armored vehicles with RPG fire to their side and rear armor. The Chechens particularly liked to fire from basements, where the Russian crews had an especially hard time spotting them and often couldn't even return fire, since their cannons can't depress very far. The Chechens kicked the Russian's asses really badly and forced them to retreat in disarray, which opened up the First Chechen War. The Chechen access to Soviet munitions stockpiles made them maybe the best equipped insurgent army ever, their leaders and many of the rank-and-file soldiers had served in the Soviet Army so they knew exactly what kind of fight they were in for (this was why they knew to use basements as prime anti-tank positions), they were very familiar with the lay of the land (important for fighting in a mountain range like the Caucasus), and they were much more motivated than the Russian soldiers. Their tactics reflected these advantages, and in the first war they were able to seriously outfight the Russians. Basically they used surprise attacks and ambushes to maximally exploit their superior knowledge of local terrain and confuse the demoralized Russians, so that they outmaneuvered them completely and neutralized their force advantage. In this way they were actually able to retake Grozny by surprise after the Russians finally captured it. The Chechens won the first war. Of course, the Russian learned their lesson and came back in 1999 and systematically deployed overwhelming force. The best example of the change in their strategy is the fact that rather than rush into Grozny they informed the population that they were going to bombard it, allowed them to evacuate, then destroyed the city and occupied the rubble. Since the defeat of the Chechen separatists in 1999 a partial political settlement has been effected and Chechnya is mostly secured under a pro-Moscow government. There's still an insurgency but it is marginalized and contained by the efforts of the current president, who is Putin's buddy and has no respect for human rights. The Chechen separatists know that they're militarily totally outmatched, so they've resorted to terrorism. Their most spectacular efforts were at a theater in Moscow in 2002 and a school in Beslan in 2004. Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Sep 14, 2010 |
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Sep 13, 2010 09:14
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Chade Johnson posted:That's actually not true at all. The North Caucasus is ablaze, I see. I was working from what I read last time I saw Chechnya show up in the American news, which is stuff like this CNN article from June. The last I heard, the situation in Chechnya had improved such that the Russian military had ceased active military operations and relaxed the security regime by mid 2009. I guess it's not surprising that the situation has worsened since then without the American media really caring, but I did not know that. Anyway, now I'm interested. Would you care to elaborate on what's happening there presently? quote:and the insurgents recently suicide bombed the Moscow subway. Terrorist attacks by themselves aren't a great benchmark. The insurgents also staged a major attack on Russian territory in November 2009, at which time most observers, evidently including the Russian army, considered the security situation in Chechnya itself mostly secured. Terrorist operations have very low resource requirements, which is why they appeal to groups like the Chechens. It's worth noting that Caucasian separatists began to carry out terrorist attacks in Russia only after they suffered serious military defeats--that is, only after their actual operational strength sharply declined.
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Sep 14, 2010 05:35
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DarkCrawler posted:Hasn't the main point of action switched from Chechnya to Ingushetia & Dagestan? http://www.jamestown.org/programs/ncw/single/?tx_ttnews[/url][tt_news]=36826&tx_ttnews[backPid]=24&cHash=9775b65a0d Indeed so, according to the organization to which Chade Johnson linked. It makes sense. Many of the Chechen Separatists had always planned on controlling the mostly Muslim region of the North Caucasus (their invasion of Russian Dagestan was the immediate cause of the Second Chechen War). It seems that with Chechnya itself on lockdown their military leadership pulled up stakes and moved to less secure neighboring regions. Fortunately for Russia it seems they don't have the same degree of popular support or strength, so they're limited to terrorist attacks instead of the full-scale military actions like the Chechen Republic was capable of. edit: bbcode doesn't like their URL format Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Sep 14, 2010 |
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Sep 14, 2010 20:32
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As to my brief discussion of IEDs, I couldn't claim to know much about them in particular (I have only an amateur interest in military history). What I was trying to get across was that Iraq arguably represented an environment in which IEDs were maximally effective. Afghanistan wasn't intended to be an example of how useful (useless?) IEDs would be to an American insurgency, but just as example of a place where the tactical environment, for the reasons you stated (and additionally because of the tactical orientation of Taliban fighters), did not favor IEDs to the same extent as Iraq. It's likely they would be less effective in America than in Iraq for a number of reasons.Veins McGee posted:The expectation that American militia types would not have expert access to bomb makers is false. Any combat engineer worth anything could construct a variety of explosive devices both with/without military grade munitions. See Timothy McVay(graduate of Army Sapper school, a combat engineer course). The materials and the knowhow exist in America to produce IEDs and, almost certainly, in greater quantities than in Afghanistan.(The US pop is over 100 times larger than Afghanistan's) But what proportion of that population would support an insurgency based on right wing militias? And what sections of America's home territory are conducive to the deployment of IEDs? American city streets might seem ideal, but people planting IEDs would be spotted much more easily by police, military garrisons, and friendly civilians than in Baghdad. Also new laws have made the components for a McVeigh-style bomb harder to get together than they were in '94. As for cooking bombs from freely available precursors, I'll admit that it's possible, but do you think the government would continue to allow open access to such materials in a time of widespread domestic insurgency? They'd tighten access and closely watch those chemicals in a heartbeat, and the militias would be left with whatever stockpiles they had. Bombs could still be cooked up despite the greater difficulty of production, but even with much greater effort they'd still be a supplemental weapon at most. INTJ Mastermind posted:What exactly prevents the US military from doing what the Russians did to Grozny. Give the civilians a week to evaculate, then level the whole loving city from a safe distance, and burn the rubble for good measure? Hoping the artillery runs out of ammo before a shell lands in your basement? Didn't we wind up doing that in Iraq to one of the more trouble-some cities during Gulf War II? My own answer to this question is that the US military wouldn't even need to do that, because an American insurgency would presumptively be based around reactionaries who are strongest in suburbs and rural areas, and the main cadres would supposedly be formed from the armed militias who are hiding out in the hinterland like Hutaree. Most cities would probably side with the government if the other option was joining forces with vengeful woodland crackers. edit: clarified myself in the first paragraph Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Sep 15, 2010 |
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Sep 15, 2010 07:17
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Godholio posted:I like the example of the Tet Offensive. In every meaningful metric of military performance, the only thing they did well was the initial deception. After the communist forces lost the advantage of initial shock, they got HAMMERED. The Viet Cong were virtually wiped out, along with tens of thousands of the best trained conventional and semi-conventional forces, which ultimately forced the NVA to adopt a more western-style approach to warfare, where they were completely outclassed by American forces with better training, equipment, experience, and logistics. And yet...who won the war? Your example actually proves the point that INTJ Mastermind was making. Until the Tet Offensive, the VC employed tactics of ambush, opportunistic raids, and terrorism against supporters of the US. These failed to make any real impression on the US presence in South Vietnam. Only when the VC took the field and mounted large-scale direct attacks did they get anything done. Sure, it proved that you can succeed strategically even if you fail tactically, but had the VC continued with the guerrilla warfare strategy they employed up until Tet (which much more closely resembles the kind of thing INTJ Mastermind was talking about), they would have accomplished pretty much nothing. Additionally, the North Vietnamese only achieved final victory through a conventional military campaign against South Vietnam, after the US withdrew. Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Sep 16, 2010 |
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Sep 16, 2010 02:24
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wins32767 posted:There were a ton of wars in the 18th century in Europe itself. Nothing like the bloodbath of the 30 years war to be sure, but still plenty of bloodletting. This website, conveniently an early result from Google that is grounded with copious citations, is instructive. The Seven Years War, which was the first significant global conflict with widespread combat in the colonies, killed between 900,000 and 1.5 million (the website guy averages the estimates to 1.3 million) people. Almost all of these deaths were in the European theater. The death toll from the American theater is probably less than 20,000 (or about 1.5% of the total). If I had to guess at when wars started to involve less large scale actions against non-combatants, I would say that the first big change was during the 18th century. Wars were now waged for reasons of state, which made civilians less of a target. Armies also became more professionalized and disciplined than ever before, so they were less prone to go nuts. A further improvement happened after the Napoleonic Wars, as modern logistics allowed armies to operate on their own supply lines without having to resort to requisitioning civilian property for their needs. Improvements in agriculture, transportation, and medicine also made famine and epidemics less deadly, although they were still a problem after national infrastructure became exhausted by the conflict. This trend reached its peak with WWI, where very few civilians were killed directly by military operations, and most noncombatant deaths occurred from collateral causes like famine, the Spanish Flu. There are of course exceptions; the Ottoman forces killed a lot of civilians in ethnic cleansing/genocide operations, and reportedly lots more civilians died as a result of combat in the Eastern and Balkan fronts. In WWII civilian populations again began to be heavily targeted, particularly by Japan and especially by Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front, and in relatively smaller but still quite large numbers by the Allied bombing campaigns. Wars after WWII on up to the present have tended to be civil conflicts, with guerrilla and terrorist tactics driving up the civilian share of wartime deaths, although as share of the total population the death tolls are usually lower than earlier conflicts. Iraq is a good (or awful, depending on what you mean  ) example of what this means: a minimum of 100,000 civilian deaths (almost certainly many more) and millions of people displaced as internal or external refugees, against under 5,000 Coalition deaths and about 11,000 Iraqi military and police deaths. Against the total population of 30 million, this is hardly the 30 Years War in Germany, but hey, we should be proud that we value human life more than we did in 1640.
Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Sep 17, 2010 |
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Sep 17, 2010 21:52
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Spartan421 posted:Iraq is not exactly your conventional war. Civilian deaths here are for the most part caused by radicals self-detonating themselves in crowded markets and unlucky people passing by bombs on the roadside. And lots of shootings. After looking at this website, I'm surprised anyone has the will to keep going. Random acts of terrorism going on every day no one hears about. Of course civilian to soldier deaths are going to be skewed if it's mostly people that don't fit the description of a soldier doing all the killing and dying. Definitely. Post-WWII civil conflicts--as long as they stop short of outright civil war--have tended to be less intensive than conventional military campaigns, leading to smaller numbers of dead overall. But since the war is civil the targets are, too. During the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq lost 160,00-240,000, most of which were probably military deaths. This is probably more than they've lost over a similarly lengthy civil conflict. This is important to remember: conflict in Iraq has killed way more civilians than soldiers, but as I pointed out it's not so many people relative to the overall population. It's actually surprising that estimates on the dead are so low, considering how endemic the violence was for a time. There's also the differences in mobilization to consider. The destruction of Carthage killed only like 3 civilians for each soldier, but that was only because the Carthaginians mobilized a quarter of the city's population for its defense. The Romans actually killed >75% of the populace and enslaved the remainder.
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Sep 18, 2010 01:15
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This bit about the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols is from a few pages back but I felt like elaborating what bewbies said:bewbies posted:This event is often cited as the end of the Islamic Golden Age, in much the same way as the Bonfire of the Vanities is seen as the end of the Italian Renaissance. I've experienced two different intepretations of this event. The first, from a middle eastern historian, is that the IGA was well in decline by this point anyway, due to Crusades, the loss of power in by the Caliphs, increasing xenophobia/religious conservatism, etc, and that this particular event was not only not significant as a bookend, but that it almost certainly would have happened anyway with or without the Mongols. Western historians almost always take the opposite view, that the Mongols crushed the flower of intellect which was still in full bloom, and this was the singular event that started the downfall. I don't know enough on the subject to have a strong opinion of my own. It's also important to remember that Baghdad itself was really just the most westernmost and most important city in the vast cultural complex of Muslim Persia. Much of medieval Islamic culture has firm roots in Persian culture--Abbasid literature like the "Thousand and One Nights" was heavily influenced by Persian literary traditions, the characteristic domed mosques are based on pre-Islamic Sassanid architecture, many important scholars of the Islamic Golden Age were Persians (i.e. al-Khwarismi, the father of algebra, and al-Bukhari, collector of the most authoritative collection of the prophet Muhammad's words and deeds), and so on. Baghdad's library itself was modeled on Sassanid libraries, though of course it exceeded any of them. By the time of the Mongol invasion the Abassids hadn't controlled most of Persia for centuries, and in fact the Caliph really had authority only over Baghdad itself. A little less than 40 years before they sacked Baghdad, the Mongols invaded and destroyed the Khwarezm Empire, which was a Turkic dynasty that control most of modern day Iran plus stretches of Central Asia. Until the Mongols got there, the Khwarezm Empire was one of the wealthiest and most powerful states in the entire world, possibly the most powerful considering that China was divided into two relatively weak rival states at the time. The Mongols completely destroyed Khwarezm, in the process annihilating several of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world at the time (Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv, etc.). Outside the cities, the Mongols killed possible 1/4 to 1/3 the population of Central Asia and Persia. So generally they rode into the core area of the Islamic Golden Age and wrecked it. The later sack of Baghdad was something in the character of a capstone on the destruction of Persia--though it was definitely it was the most significant cultural loss because of its fantastic library. After this the area of Persia was ruled by fractious Mongol hordes (first the Il-Khanate then the Timurids) and subject to regular instability and internal war for another 300 years (till the Persian Safavid Dynasty). So Persia, which was the center of the Islamic Golden Age, was out of action for several centuries and in many ways has never recovered its glory. Meanwhile, the rest of the Islamic world wasn't doing so hot, either. Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, which after the defeat of the crusades might have become possible centers of Islamic culture, were ruled by the Mamluks, a decentralized regime of foreign slave-soldiers, mostly Kipchaks from the Caucasus and Circassia. The Mamluks were okay at fighting (the only people to convincingly beat the Mongols on the battlefield!) but pretty bad at running a country. To compound this problem, not long after they defeated the Mongols the region was hit by successive waves of plague that killed something like 1/3 of the population. Interestingly, I just read a book about this by Basim Musallam. Population growth in Egypt was actually negative for the period of 1400-1800. Alexandria, the major metropolis of the ancient Mediterranean, was practically devoid of inhabitants in 1700, and generally the population in 1800 was as little as a quarter of the peak before the plague. Musallam argues that this happened because conditions under the Mamluks were so bad for common people that they used birth control to minimize their number of children, hence the demographic collapse (Islamic law allows the use of contraception and even abortion, unlike Christianity). So Egypt wasn't going to lead the Muslim world into the future. Islamic Spain centered around Cordoba had also been an important center of Islamic culture, but from the 12th-13th century onward it was under increasingly severe pressure from the Reconquista, by the mid-14th century only Granada was left. So really the only major Muslim power left standing and able to lead Islamic culture forward was the Ottoman Empire, with its base of power in the former Byzantine lands of the southern Balkans and Asia Minor (a general area which had been wealthy and populous since before Alexander the Great). One could say that the Siege of Baghdad was only the most notable event in a litany of serious reverses experienced by the Islamic World between the 12th and 15th centuries. Moreover when a limited recovery did occur, with the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman culture was as much based in Byzantium as it was in traditional Islamic culture. Persia somewhat revived under the Safavids, but it was never like it was at its peak, especially since one of the most important centers of Persian culture, the second heartland in Central Asia, was completely destroyed by the Mongols and subsequently colonized by Mongol and Turkic hordes (leading to the modern day rainbow of Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Turkmen, who squeezed the Persianate Tajiks into a corner of the region). Also, Safavid Persia is less well known in the West because communication with it was blocked off by the Ottoman Empire.
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Sep 21, 2010 06:23
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Phyzzle posted:I believe that there was a second strike/wave, but it was a net loss for the Japanese because of much more focused anti-aircraft fire. He's probably talking about the third strike, which would have been aimed at the naval yards and fuel dumps at Pearl. In theory, this would have neutralized Pearl Harbor as a base for the US Navy for a year or two. The Japanese commander, Nagumo, opted against it, for good reason. The intensified anti-aircraft fire was one reason. The main reason, however, was the American carriers, which the Japanese expected to find at Pearl Harbor but were no where to be seen. As far as Nagumo knew, Lexington and Enterprise might be just over the horizon, scrambling their aircraft to attack him. If he launched a third attack wave at Pearl, it would mean that when the Americans arrived his flight decks would be strewn with explosives and aircraft fuel, and he would have no planes available. In such a situation his carriers would be defenseless targets that would suffer serious secondary explosions and uncontrollable fires with even a minor hit. Even if any carriers survived, they would almost certainly be out of action and unable to take on planes, so any plane that returned from the followup strike would have to ditch in the Pacific, entailing the loss of all the aircraft and most of the pilots. So Nagumo's risk-benefit calculation would be something like: "I can destroy the naval yards and fuel dumps and seriously delay the possibility of any American counterattack, but there is a non-zero chance that in reply the American carriers will destroy practically the entire carrier arm of the Japanese Navy." This is not a hard decision, especially considering he had already achieved his primary objective. In fact the subordinate who asked for permission to mount the third attack wave was probably just trying on the not terribly well-thought-out hyperaggression that was the trademark of Japanese military action in WWII. In hindsight, it turns out that the American carriers were nowhere near Pearl, and the crazy guy was actually right, but according to the information that was available a third attack was an unacceptable risk. Hindsight perspective is actually a major issue with certain historical events, because we have access to a lot of information that historical actors didn't have.* That said, if the Japanese had attack Pearl again, they probably would have wrecked the place and drastically narrowed the USN's strategic mobility in the Pacific until it could be repaired. In one sense this would have meant no Midway and no Guadalcanal, but in another sense it just means that when the US finally got Pearl Harbor back into service and took the offensive in 1944 or so they would have had enormous force at their disposal already, and the war would have simply been a matter of applying it. It might stretch into 1946, but who had the advantage in the Pacific War was never in doubt. *One of the famous examples of the hindsight problem is Neville Chamberlain, who is basically known as history's biggest pussy because he decided to negotiate with Hitler at the Munich Conference. In hindsight, we know that this was a bad call because of what Hitler went on to do. Chamberlain made two assumptions, which were actually not at all unreasonable given the information he had: (1) peace was still possible and nobody wanted another Great War, and (2) the USSR was the most serious threat to world peace. Sometimes people wonder "Why didn't the British listen to Winston Churchill until it was too late?" and the answer is that Churchill was known as a bellicose jerk and they had no real reason to listen to him at the time, and moreover he was never actually as popular as people today think he was.
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Sep 21, 2010 21:14
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Lets say that Chamberlain did not appease Hitler and allow him to take the Sudetenland and would wage war on Hitler if he did. It is well known that Hitler had drawn up extensive plans to wage war on the Czechs to gain the area if he had to. My question is, would he have gone through with his plans if he wasn't appeased and risk war with the Allies? And if so, would the Allies have been in a position to defeat 1938 Nazi Germany? The Germans had some serious disadvantages around the time of the Munich Conference to which people proposing the counterfactual Sudeten War usually refer. First, a lot of people don't know this, but the Czechs were one of the stronger Eastern European states in the interwar period. Their border with Germany was heavily fortified and they had a remarkably good army, even including effective tank forces. Second, the German military was not even close to as strong in September 1938 as it was one year later. Their army overall was much smaller (like not even half as large) and they had only limited numbers of advanced equipment (the ME-109 and Panzer IV had only just entered service, while the Panzer III hadn't even begun mass production yet) which would have limited them in maneuver operations. Most of the German tanks at the time were Panzer I and II model, which were actually rather crappy--the Czech tanks of the same period were actually superior to them, which would have been a nasty surprise. Third, in 1939 Germany had all its diplomatic ducks in a row and could concentrate on one enemy at a time, first demolishing Poland with the connivance of the USSR while France and Britain stood by (having been deceived into thinking that the Rhine border was well-defended). This was not the case in 1938. While they certainly could have defeated Czechoslovakia, the weakness of their maneuver elements relative to 1939 and the stout Sudetenland fortifications would have made it a step-by-step operation rather than a blitzkrieg. Meanwhile, the Germans would have to worry not only about France but also about Poland, which had a large army and whose response to this situation would be hard to figure. Historically, Poland opportunistically seized a strip of land during the final annexation of the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia) by Germany, but if they were watching Germany get bogged down in an elephantine invasion of Czechoslovakia, they might have decided to jump in. It's not easy to say if they would have attacked the Germans or the Czechs, though. The Soviets also would have been interested, though their contribution is a little questionable considering how bad their army was at the time and the difficulty of getting forces to the theater of war, since they had no land access. Also, if the French had seen the German army struggling to defeat the Czechs, they might have been more game to mount an offensive. See below. Zorak of Michigan posted:I find it hard to summon up any love for Chamberlain, but it's also a fact that the UK got kind of a late start on mobilization. Not as late as the US, certainly, but they were behind the Germans. Chamberlain may have recognized that if war had to come, Britain would be better off if the war could be postponed. It's definitely true that Britain would have had a hard time making any serious contribution to the ground war for some time after the start of hostilities. quote:Production of Spitfires, for example, started almost a year later than production of ME-109s. The Me-109 hadn't yet been produced in large numbers. Planes of that generation (also including the Hawker Hurricane or American P-36) were only just entering extensive service in 1938. quote:I don't know exact dates, but I don't think the Chain Home radar system had gone fully operational in 1938. Meanwhile, how would France and England have done anything to protect Czechoslovakia anyway? France's entire system of defense relied on forts to deter an invader. For France to invade Germany would have required an overhaul of her entire strategic posture. Chamberlain did about as well as anyone could have with a crappy hand. France actually invaded Germany with 40 divisions in 1939 IRL--the Saar Offensive. They pulled out without meeting any resistance or really accomplishing anything, but they did have the ability to take the offensive. If Germany had been struggling to take the Sudeten and sweating over Polish intervention, they might even have found the will, particularly considering that the German army would have been much smaller at this time.
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Sep 22, 2010 03:58
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Trouble Man posted:Supposedly Stalin suggested that the Red Army could transit through Romania and Poland to help out the Czechs - whether Romania and Poland agreed or not. I didn't know that, but it sounds like a terrible idea that would have failed miserably. quote:One suspects that Britain and France did not view this proposal with excitement - bearing mind that Stalin had literally murdered millions of his own people, Stalin only murdered that many in the same sense that Mao did, in that it wasn't on purpose and he just made stupid decisions that got that many people killed by famine. To be totally fair to one of histories greatest monsters, he probably murdered (that is, shot or threw into prison camps designed to kill the prisoners) a high-end estimate of a million people, more likely somewhere in the high hundreds of thousands. Not that it really makes it better. Anyway, most of the world (including the majority of Soviet citizens) had only a very limited sense of what was happening in the USSR, most of which came from its press releases. Thanks to the Comintern, contacts with sympathetic leftists throughout the West, and their own fairly efficient spies, the Soviets had a much better idea of what was going on outside their borders than anybody else had about what was going on inside the USSR.* The Allies knew the vaguest outlines. For example, all they knew about the Great Purge of 36-38 was what Stalin actually publicized--they thought it was only a few hundred or thousand more-or-less important officials who got purged, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. They also knew that there was some kind of famine in the early '30s, but as for how many people actually died, that was a big question mark. The West actually found out about the appalling extent of Stalinist brutality at about the same time most Soviet citizens did, during Khruschev's deStalinization in the 1950s. Western antipathy towards the Soviet Union was more based on two things. First, the Soviets had killed or exiled all the Tsarist aristocrats and seized their property. The British and American governments, which were basically run by property-owning aristocrats (literally so in the British case), naturally didn't like that. This is possibly why France, which had no real aristocratic class, was the best disposed of the allies towards the Soviets. Second, they thought that Stalin still wanted to export Communist revolution. This is in part an artifact of the above point about how little they knew what was happening in the USSR. The triumph of Stalin represented a shift in Soviet policy towards internal development, and the abandonment of plans to incite Communist revolution in other countries, but everybody remained suspicious of them. Subsidiary reasons to hate the Soviets were that everybody at least knew about the Red Terror during the Russian Civil War, and they knew that the Comintern was a massive intelligence-gathering operation that had infiltrated their countries. Neither of which made them friendly towards the Soviets. quote:and Hitler had merely expressed the intention to maybe do so at some point in the future. The ironic thing about this is that Stalin was the only world leader to take Hitler's stated aims seriously, maybe because he knew they had something in common. *The outstanding example of this lack of good intelligence is that when the Germans invaded, they had only a hazy idea of how large the Red Army was, and not even the vaguest concept of Soviet mobilization capacity. The Germans destroyed what they believed was the entire Red Army in the first two months or so of the invasion, then again during the push towards Stalingrad in 1942, but the Soviets kept pulling new divisions out of nowhere, like a cheating AI opponent in an RTS.
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Sep 22, 2010 19:44
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Trouble Man posted:There's a probably apocryphal tale of a Barbarossa wargame at Sandhurst in which both the Axis and Soviet teams complained the game was unrealistically rigged - the Soviets couldn't stop the Germans blasting through every defence line they set up, and the Germans could destroy dozens of divisions with no apparent impact on the size of the Red Army. There's a similar story about US Navy wargamers being unable to replicate the Battle of Midway, because the historical course of the battle was too improbable. I file this kind of anecdote under "interesting if true." wins32767 posted:Quite literally the Soviets suffered as many losses in the first six weeks as they had men under arms at the start of the war. You're quite right that the Soviets rebuilt their entire army but the new formations were a lot worse in quality. In one of Glantz's books (I think it was When Titans Clashed) he shows that at any given time after Barbarossa the average Soviet division was at only half its paper strength, and these shortfalls were disproportionately in the area of mobile formations and heavy equipment. These deficiencies are probably best shown by the fact that even during successful operations the Soviets often suffered extreme casualties, and until late 1943 they generally lacked staying power (for example the failure of the Kharkov Offensive following Stalingrad).
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Sep 26, 2010 23:41
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Mr. Sunshine posted:I'm no expert on the exact events, but basically the US won at Midway because a fighter squadron got lost and happened upon three of the Japanese carriers as they sat helpless while refueling and rearming their planes. This. Midway was a crushing US victory because the USN was lucky with its spotting, and got the drop on the Japanese. This was a chance occurrence, so whereas wargamers could simulate their way to a US victory, it doesn't really turn out just the way it occurred historically. DarkCrawler posted:So the Red Army is the largest army that has ever existed, right? I'm guessing the current U.S. Army is the most powerful one in history, Are we talking about national military machines as a whole, or just armies? Because the US Army is extremely well organized and integrated in it's command, control, and intelligence structures, but it is rather small. The principal advantage of the American military is in its support arms, the Navy and Air Force, which can disrupt enemy forces to the point that they're only marginally capable of resistance. If I had to pick the most overwhelmingly powerful military force that ever existed, I would probably look at the US Navy, which is 3-4 times as powerful as all the other navies in the world combined. The US Navy could easily destroy any enemy or combination of enemies at sea. In most cases it could then use it's carriers in cooperation with the USAF to destroy the ability of those enemies to continue fighting. There are a few countries that could make an air offensive too expensive to contemplate (modern war planes are unbelievably expensive, so losing even a few is a blow), but most of our likely foes couldn't. The US military is something like a much more dangerous refinement of the 19th century British model, in that it's a small professional force backed by a practically invincible navy and air force for power-projection. The combination of all this is probably overall the most relatively unstoppable military force in history. In a sense the US Army is actually the limiting factor in American military power, because of its small size. For example, the US military could devastate the Iranian military and civilian infrastructure and contain them as a threat if a war ever occurred, but the army is probably too small to effectively take control of a country that size (we barely controlled Iraq, which is 1/3 as large and half as populous). Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Sep 28, 2010 |
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Sep 28, 2010 00:19
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DarkCrawler posted:I thought by current calculations the United States Army is one of the largest forces around. It is the largest active duty force around, but in historical and per capita terms it's small, because it's an all-volunteer force. Our losses in Iraq and Afghanistan are a big deal, but over ten years the losses are less than what we took in three months on Okinawa. It's obviously a completely different kind of warfare, on a much different scale. The US army is just sufficient to project American power anywhere on the planet if we need to do so. Compare Desert Storm to the current nation-building projects. The military was definitely sufficient to trash the Iraqis in 1991. Conversely, even though the occupation of Iraq has finally come to more-or-less successful "conclusion," the country was totally out of control for the first half of the occupation, and the effort strained the army's capabilities to the utmost, with some tragic results (e.g. the US military often blows up civilians by accident because insufficient manpower obliges us to use firepower instead). Vino posted:At the risk of driving politics into this wonderful thread, but I'd say it's probably a function of active recruiting and a huge defense budget. There are also more benign cultural factors like the currently sky-high prestige of the military, its reputation for instilling discipline and skills training in young men, and its nature as one of the few organizations in America where a degree of advancement is open to anybody of merit. Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Sep 28, 2010 |
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Sep 28, 2010 20:19
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:You're comparing two different militaries. Rumsfeld radically cut down the size of the military in 2001 and 2002 and moved away from boots on the ground toward planes in the air, which was exactly the wrong thing to do for the rebuilding of Iraq. This was, of course, at a time when the plan for Iraq was to topple Saddam and then ____________, so I suppose there was some logic in that decision. Still, the Soviet-invasion-ready military of 1990-91 was thoroughly different from 2003's force. Both are, again, different from the force we have with us today. No, you're right. I had known that as SecDef Rumsfeld had called for a transition to light mobile forces, but I wasn't sure about the extent to which it had actually been applied (esp. considering how little appetite the army itself had for the plan). Thanks for enlightening me.
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Sep 28, 2010 21:24
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dividebyzero posted:Judging by the NSA's account, we were able to get the drop at Midway because of the decryption and intercept of Japanese Naval comms; which I think is more likely explanation and accounts for the propitious size and positioning of the U.S. force. You're talking about different kinds of positioning. Superior decryption was why the US force was present at Midway at all, but Midway is in the middle of an enormous stretch of ocean (hence the name) which had a lot of room for the Japanese carriers to hide. The Americans did not know where the Japanese carriers were, beyond a rather general "near Midway", until they were actually spotted by aircraft.
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Oct 5, 2010 00:23
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Boiled Water posted:How did south korea go from under alliance occupation to military dictatorship to asian democracy? Repeated riots on a national scale. It's sort of a misnomer to say that South Korea was a military dictatorship until 1987. More accurately they were a series of slightly different anti-democratic governments strongly based in the military. South Koreans were often irritated by this and took to the streets to fight riot police and the military, which at best resulted in the current leading member of the junta turning power over to one of his buddies--"meet the new boss". This cycle eventually broke in the late '80s or early 90's for reasons that are not clear to me. Maybe everybody got tired of it? 1987 is often used as the year it changed because that year's national riots were supported by practically the whole population (as opposed to mostly just radical students who could be tarred as commie stooges), but to be honest the president from 1987 to 1992 was another of those junta guys--it was just that he left office when a civilian was elected. His power was probably broken by the 1987 riots. I'm pretty sure that South Korea still experiences a higher than average number of riots for a modern democracy; youtube probably has a copy of the famous video of their national legislature degenerating into a huge brawl.
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Oct 16, 2010 04:27
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It's also important to assess archery and early firearms as weapons systems functioning as part of a combined force. It's disingenuous to compare firearms to longbows because longbows were only used by the English, and their abilities were exaggerated by superior generalship. Battles like Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt showed the effectiveness of the longbow when English leaders carefully prepared and created the conditions conducive to its use. At the battle of Patay, the English messed it up and didn't have time to prepare the field, which resulted in their longbowmen being massacred on the run. Arguably the success of the longbow was due less to its superiority as a weapons system and more to the difference in ability between French and English leadership--the Plantagenets being very good, and the Valois and their deputies being indifferent at best and crap at worst. Anyway, most armies used archery only as a supplement to infantry and cavalry armed with melee weapons. Crossbowmen would advance at the outset of battle and fire on the enemy, hoping to inflict some amount of casualties and demoralize the enemy. Then, men-at-arms and knights, whether mounted or afoot, would advance and clash in melee combat. In this context the advantages of firearms (less bulky ammunition, greater killing power and armor penetration, ease of use, low cost) were even greater than might be indicated otherwise. The core of medieval armies was mounted, armored fighting men. The English army of the Hundred Years War was optimized specifically to deal with this kind of army, which is why, when handled correctly, it was able to inflict such severe damage on the French. Absent these conditions, the sheer mass of a cavalry charge would break the enemy, and their speed would ensure that men on foot wouldn't escape alive. The only way to prevent this was with a wall of spears, which the English provided by placing broken stakes in the ground, and others provided with big blocks of guys holding actual spears. Later Spanish tactics had troops armed with the arquebus acting as skirmishers. They lingered near the tercio pike squares, firing on the enemy to disrupt his formation, inflict the odd casualty, and prevent opposing archers from targeting the relatively unprotected pikemen. When the enemy threatened, they retreated behind the cover of the pike squares, and after the wave broke on the rock of the tercio, they advanced again to fire and prevent the enemy from reforming, etc. All the "work" was done by the pikemen, the arquebusiers just helped them out as a screening force.
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Oct 19, 2010 06:42
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MagneticWombats posted:Can you talk more about the evolution from lines to smaller group infantry tactics? Until the mid-19th century firearms were too inaccurate and slow to reload to be efficiently used by individuals or even small groups. Muskets were ineffective against point targets (e.g. a single man), only against area targets (e.g. a bunch of men). The only way to reliably inflict casualties on the enemy was to put large numbers of bullets into an area quickly, which given the technology, was only possible by mass numbers of musketeers formed up in close order. Close order drill also allowed large groups of men to be efficiently commanded by primitive means (flags, fifes, drums, and officers leading from the front), to keep up a higher rate of fire through firing by ranks, to resist cavalry by presenting a solid wall of bayonets, and to apply their numbers more effectively if the battle turned to melee. This picture began to change in the mid-19th century, with the adoption of muzzle-loading rifles and the conical Minie ball. An individual rifleman in the American Civil War could hit a point target as far as 300 yards with the standard-issue rifle, though I don't know how many men could be relied on to do so. This made each man much more lethal, but his weapon fired no faster, and methods of command were still largely unchanged. Thus infantry still ordered themselves in lines and shot eachother up, though in the ACW they were apt to rapidly inflict severe casualties and assaulting prepared positions became much more difficult than in the Napoleonic Wars. In a bad situation Civil War rifle work could chew up a regiment with astonishing speed. The real quantum leap, however, came a bit later with breach-loading rifles, particularly the French Chassepot. The Chassepot could fire 7 to 9 shots per minute rather than the 1 or 2 available to muzzle-loading rifles, and the rifleman could reload from a prone position if necessary. It also improved over contemporary breach-loaders by firing a small bullet at a higher velocity, improving its range. In theory, the Chassepot could engage targets at 1300 yards. In practice few people can hit a man-sized target at more than 300 yards, but the potential is still there. This meant that a well-trained soldier could fire on anything within his probably line of sight, making mass formations to concentrate firepower unnecessary. They were in fact a liability, because if a man on the battlefield presented an easily visible point target, he could be targeted by rapid-firing and accurate rifle fire from all over the battlefield. A group of men was even worse off. Still, French techniques of commanding infantry had not advanced to the point where these weapons could be used to their full potential. Ironically the Prussians were ahead in this regard, in spite of their more primitive weapons. After their defeats in the Napoleonic Wars the Prussians had realized that in order to compete militarily with more populous states, they had to field a larger proportion of their population. This led to the creation of the first modern military reserve system, in which men of military age were required to serve a short term in the military before returning to civilian life, until time of war, in which case they were called back up. This flew in the face of popular military theory, which held that only professional forces with discipline and elan maintained by constant drill and service could be effective on the battlefield. Forces would slug it out before closing to settle the fight with bayonets. Prussian reservists would not have the training or morale to survive this kind of engagement. This is in fact one major reason that the lessons of attritional warfare from the American Civil War were not retained, because the armies that fought in the ACW were unprofessional mass armies of hastily trained volunteers and conscripts. To compensate for the supposed deficiencies of their forces, the Prussians developed tactics that relied on maneuver and superior numbers rather than discipline and elan. Columns of Prussian soldiers moved independently to envelop enemy strongpoints, which would be surrounded and then reduced with the aid of breach-loading artillery (described below). Most battles unfolded with the French troops fixed and immobile while the rapidly moving Prussians outmaneuvered and destroyed them. When the Prussians were caught in a situation that favored the Chassepot's advantages, they took serious casualties, but the balance favored them heavily. The lethality of the battlefield reached an apogee in WWI. Magazine-fed bolt action rifles in common issue could fire 15-20 rounds per minute, accurate and lethal to 1000 yards (though in practice such ranges are mostly impractical). Defensive positions were equipped with machineguns with similar range and accuracy that could fire continuously. Artillery had become extremely lethal. Basically if you could be seen by the enemy, you would most likely be killed immediately, and the weapons in action could kill a group of dozens of men in seconds if they were assembled together. Cover and concealment were of paramount importance, and survival on the battlefield depended on each infantryman being able to operate autonomously as part of his unit. Training and doctrine had not exactly caught up to this reality, however, and officers didn't quite know how they would command dispersed groups of men. For the Somme offensive, the British soldiers were trained to advance in line at a specific rate of speed, so they could keep order and stay just behind the barrage. As bewbies explained, infiltration tactics developed to solve the problem of newly lethal weapons. Soldiers were organized into smaller fireteams, the members of which operated together but autonomously, so as not to present a single target. Soldiers had to be trained to work as an integral unit, but with individual initiative to seek cover and exploit opportunities. quote:And the changes in the use of artillery? Artillery advanced continuously during the 19th century. From the smoothbore field guns of the Napoleonic Wars, by midcentury armies were deploying rifled guns which could be fired quite accurately. They were still muzzle-loading, however, which meant they had a low rate of fire. The Krupp company in Prussia developed steel breach loading artillery by the Franco-Prussian war, which could fire more quickly, more accurately, and to a much longer range than its muzzle-loading predecessors. This artillery superiority played a major role in the Prussian victory, because their artillery could inflict mass damage from outside the range of French retaliation. In the couple decades before WWI, guns had sufficient range for indirect fire--basically shooting at a high trajectory to arc over obstacles and hit targets the gunner could not directly observe--and militaries developed training and doctrine for it. This allowed guns to be fired from behind cover, and to hit people at long range who were behind their own cover. Improved shells were also developed. Things like high explosive shells, shrapnel rounds timed to detonate over the enemy's head to shower him with lethal fragments, etc. More than anything else, artillery made movement in the open suicidal. The big change from WWI was that from that point on firepower totally controlled the battlefield space. Movement exposes soldiers to enemy fire, unless something is done to suppress the enemy's firepower--typically this entails using your own firepower to dissuade him from exposing himself by shooting at you. A squad moving 20 feet across a street in the face of enemy opposition could require hundreds of bullets to be fired to suppress the enemy, to survive even that little hop. You fire at the enemy to suppress him until he can't stop you maneuvering into a position from which he can be destroyed. quote:Basically the stuff that takes us from Napoleon to World War I if possible. I know stuff like the needle gun were important but when did people realize that "welp, now that we can shoot really fast and accurately maybe we DON'T need to be in a line!". As I said, a big factor in this was officers not knowing how they would command men if they were dispersed around a battlefield and couldn't see their officers or each other. At first they hoped to retain the system of junior officers leading groups of men from the front, by so overwhelming the enemy with shelling that he couldn't retaliate, but it didn't work. It was well into WWI before it was discovered that it was no longer possible to do it that way, and soldiers simply had to be trained for individual initiative. It is actually pretty hard to adapt to a completely new military paradigm, and the effectiveness of the Germans in WWI had a lot to do with the fact that they had a seasoned and innovative general staff and their doctrine even before the war was built around heavy firepower. They were better positioned than their enemies to adapt. quote:You also mentioned that modern artillery was the biggest new factor in WWI so how was it used more differently? Massive indirect fire. Say you launched an infantry attack on the enemy trench. The enemy could telegraph back and tell and an artillery battery five miles away behind a hill what was happening, and the gunners dial in the range and fill the entire pasture containing your unit with bits of metal whizzing around like supersonic razorblades. Also the huge number of shells produced by coordinated industrial action allowed armies to do crazy stuff like making parts of France look like the moon with HE shells. Your attack can only even dream about success if it's preceded by an artillery bombardment of its own to suppress the enemy, cut their telegraph cable to prevent them calling in the guns, and possibly even shooting at the enemy battery to suppress it directly (if you're lucky enough to know where it is). Artillery completely dominated the battlefield in WWI. Nobody moved without a pile of shells being fired, and it generated by far the most casualties.
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Nov 24, 2010 06:54
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Comrade_Robot posted:Naturally, this is a very simple mathematical model, but it is instructive. The problem with this model is that it seems to be formulated for meeting engagements without respect to defensive fortification, probably because it was theorized in 1914. It has obvious failings with respect to armor, namely that below a certain threshold firepower reduced in individual strength but increased in overall numbers is nullified. If each individual attack is insufficient to defeat earthworks/penetrate armor no substantial effect is registered regardless of the number of individual attacks. How many quick-firing 75's are required to defeat heavy earthworks versus how many 21cm howitzers? Comrade_Robot posted:That's not really true -- a M26 Pershing did take up twice the shipping space of a M4 Sherman. Further, a 76mm armed M4 Sherman was, as I said earlier, roughly equivalent to the T-34-85, and the 75mm armed M4 Sherman was slightly better than the 76mm armed T-34, so it seems a bit strange to call the Sherman junk and the T-34 better tanks than anything else produced. The T-34 is generally categorized as superior because it entered service in 1940, at which point it was by far the most advanced tank in the world, whereas the M4 was obsolescent by the time it saw heavy combat deployment in Normandy. There is also the matter that the T-34 was deployed as part of a whole complex of Soviet AFVs that filled in the gaps in its capability, whereas the M4 was the pivot of the US army's misconceived tank destroyer doctrine. quote:Shermans and T-34's met in Korea, and the Shermans preformed better. Disparity of crew experience and training between Americans and North Koreans being an insignificant factor, of course.
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Nov 28, 2010 21:51
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Comrade_Robot posted:In this case, the model serves to illustrate the importance of numbers. I am not convinced that this model is entirely unapplicable to armored warfare; German tanks may have had heavier armor, but could still be penetrated from the side or rear, where armor was thinner, so a simple threshold is probably not the solution. How does a mathematical model account for locally contingent factors of terrain, relative positioning, secondary equipment (gunsights, cupolas, radios, and the like), and crew response such as are critical to the outcome of tank combat? I'm of the opinion that this kind of modeling in warfare is only really useful in very specific conditions which eliminate extraneous factors (naval fighting or meeting engagements on equal terrain) or on such a large scale that such factors are "averaged out." They don't seem useful for comparisons of the type we're making here. quote:The Lanchester model was modified by Fiske for battleships (who found that, for example, a ten percent increase in firepower was worth more than a ten percent increase in armor), so I don't see why it couldn't be applied to tank warfare. Battleship operations are much more conducive to mathematical modeling because the site of the battlefield is the sea, therefore the effect of terrain is nil, and the ships are more or less similar--that is, equally vulnerable to each others' guns from all angles, so positioning is also less important except in rare cases of "crossing the T" or whatever. That said, practical experience with battlecruisers in WWI and WWII indicates that this model is to some degree false--their lighter armor caused substantially worse combat performance in spite of having equivalent firepower. Additionally, if this sliding scale of firepower versus mass is applicable to tank warfare, why were light tanks so useless at it? quote:I'm under the impression that when Churchill received his first shipments of Sherman tanks (which first saw combat in North Africa), he praised them as a Godsend, with thicker armor and a bigger main cannon than any British tank. This was certainly true of British tanks, but as we were talking about German and Russian tanks I'm not sure what you mean to get across. quote:If the argument against the Sherman is that it wasn't a heavy tank ... well, no, it wasn't. Sure, the fact that the Sherman was not a heavy tank is not in itself a flaw, except to the extent that the relative lack of American heavy armor or self-propelled guns meant for front-line service saw the M4 serving in combat roles fulfilled by a number of different specialized designs in German or Russian service. Hence the heavy losses of American armor versus the Germans. quote:As I've repeatedly said, on paper, the two tanks had basically similar characteristics. Again, "basically similar characteristics" means that by 1942 the Americans were deploying a tank that would have been pretty good in 1940. A more logical comparison would be the T-34 versus the PzKpfw IIIG or the M3 Grant, which answers your earlier question as to why the T-34 has such a great reputation while the M4 is generally disrespected. Anyway, I'm not sure what the point of discussing this on a theoretical level might be, since as a practical matter we know that the Sherman came up short against German armor in France and the Ardennes. American successes were in spite of the Sherman (thanks to the weakness of local German forces, close terrain preventing the superiority of German armor from full expressing itself, and American superiority in artillery and air support) rather than because of it.
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Nov 29, 2010 08:53
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Bulgaroktonos posted:I think saying that the Americans won "in spite" of the Sherman is a bit too harsh. The Sherman was obsolete and underpowered, but it fully fit into the US Army offensive doctrine; As I and others have said, US doctrine was not very good, particularly with respect to armored warfare. quote:it was a combined arms weapon. This is true of any weapons system, so it doesn't exactly excuse the Sherman for its faults. I should clarify what I've been saying. Though one must say the Sherman was adequate within the context of overwhelming American superiority, this does not mean that other doctrines and other tanks weren't better. German and Soviet armored vehicles could not always depend on overall superiority so they were were designed to perform tasks independently that American armor could only do with the aid of constant artillery and air support. Luckily the US Army had a surplus of these assets, and seldom had to give battle in environments that limited their effectiveness (as an example of one such case, see the performance of the first stages of the Battle of the Bulge, when air forces were grounded by weather). This means that although the American Army taken as a whole was not markedly inferior by nature to counterparts in Germany or the USSR, particular elements of it varied in quality. Armor is simply an area where where American forces were inferior. As an example of where US forces excelled, American dependence on fire support meant that their artillery and air support was possibly the best in the war; flexible command and communication gave quick and accurate responses to requests for support. Panzeh posted:Post war studies showed that of all the engagements a tank was involved in, 11% of them were with other tanks, and the most important factor in such combat, more than guns or armor was who fired first. Wouldn't this indicate that American tank destroyers, with their powerful main guns, quickly traversing turrets, high mobility, and open-top turrets for maximum crew visibility (e.g. spotting and firing first) were the best for armored battle? I wonder about the data set. Does it include all AFVs, or only the narrow definition of tanks? Does it include light tanks, known to be unsuitable for armored battle and therefore apt to avoid it whenever possible? I'd be more interested in statistics showing what accounted for most destroyed tanks: anti-tank guns, indirect artillery, infantry, air support, tank destroyers, other tanks... I wonder if such exists. It's also misleading to simply say that 89% of a tank's job was infantry support, given that it's the 11% that enables the tank to survive for the other 89%--like saying that the majority of sorties flown by the USAAF in WWII were ground attack missions, therefore air superiority isn't that important. Additionally and with respect to the Sherman, the "whoever fires first" metric isn't very kind to the M4, since its high profile made it relatively easy to spot. A better way to assess what kind of tank was best for the WWII environment is to look at the generation of tanks that entered service immediately after with the lessons of the war in mind, meaning first-generation MBTs like the T-54/55 and British Centurion. EDIT As a further bit, snooping around the internet leads to indications that the Ordnance Department actually perceived that the M4 was becoming obsolete as early as 1943 and commissioned a successor which never entered service because the army's misconceived tank destroyer doctrine argued that it was unnecessary. Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Dec 3, 2010 |
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Dec 3, 2010 06:39
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Bulgaroktonos posted:That's because Lesley McNair was an artilleryman. One could also argue that you're talking about an outcome that was contingent on the weakness of allied armor and armored doctrine, rather than an essential characteristic of the ETO itself. That is, armor was of secondary importance in the Anglo-American campaign because the Allies had poor armor they didn't know how to use, and the Germans' mobile forces were mostly committed to the eastern front, so it was an infantry war on the basis of what was available rather than what was suitable. As wins32767 pointed out, there's nothing intrinsic to Western Europe that makes it unsuitable for armored warfare. There's nothing saying that a better designed and better led force that relied more heavily on armor could not have fought the war just as (or more) effectively as the historical forces.
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Dec 3, 2010 22:17
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Ferrosol posted:Can anyone tell me more about the Toyota War between Chad and Libya? I came across it when looking for something else and would like to know more. I happened to read about this in Kenneth M. Pollack's Arabs at War, in which the author attempted to figure out Arab states have such a poor record in conventional wars since WWII (he basically attributes it to a lack of technical competence and bad morale). The Toyota War is one of the major defeats in this tradition. For background, Chad is one of those thrown-together colonial states that lacked any kind of real cohesion beyond the area being colonized by a particular European country, in this case France. Following decolonization the country descended into civil war along ethnic and religious lines, with the Muslims in the northern desert desirous of autonomy from the south, where people practice Christianity and traditional religion. In Libya, Qaddafi decided to intervene in support of some of the separatists, because he had designs on a section of Chad bordering Libya that was supposed to have uranium deposits (the Aouzou Strip), and also because he felt like stirring some poo poo to feel like an important man (this is half the reason Qaddafi does anything). Libya had something resembling a modern military, with tanks, artillery, and aircraft, and mostly what they did was to support their allies with these modern weapons. The Chadians, lacking heavy weapons, couldn't do much to the Libyans, which allowed the Muslim rebels to take control of most of the country by 1981. Unfortunately for Qaddafi, France continues to maintain an interest in its former colonies and does a lot of dirty covert work there to this day, so they intervened and forced Libya to back off. The Muslim rebels were not well unified or very good at fighting without Libyan assistance, and the southern Chadians retook most of the country, which brought Qaddafi back in for another go at it. By this time his allies in Chad were not doing well at all, and didn't even like him that much (nobody likes Qaddafi), so it was really Libyan troops tooling around Chad mostly on their own initiative. This time the French decided what Qaddafi needed was a good kicking, so they gave the Chadians lots of cheap, reliable, and speedy Toyota pickups and MILAN missiles for blowing up tanks. They also gave the Chadians access to their intelligence (France has probably the best intelligence operations in Africa) and mounted occasion airstrikes on Libyan forces. The traditional military tactics of the peoples of Chad emphasized high mobility swarming attacks, so they had a kind of intuitive grasp of maneuver warfare, and most of their leaders had been trained in Europe, so they knew how to get the most out of their troops and weapons. The Chadians piled men into the back of the pickups and maneuvered quickly around the desert, shooting up Libyan positions with MILANs, and the Libyans lacked the training or individual initiative to know what to do about this, so they most sat there and took it or ran away. The Chadians captured the main logistical base for the Libyans in northern Chad, leading Qaddafi to withdraw his forces to the Aouzou Strip and fight mostly by aerial bombardment. At the same time, France decided that it had got what it wanted out of the situation and told the Chadians not to keep up the attack, and cut off their intelligence when they kept going. Qaddafi also attempted, with some success, to replicate the Chadian's fast, swarming tactics. At this point the Chadian leadership made a masterstroke. The vast majority of Libya's population lives on the coast, and the interior of the country is actually a pretty empty desert. There was only one airbase in the interior close enough to Chad for aircraft to stage from, Maaten al-Sarra. The Chadians bypassed Libyan troops and sneaked through the desert without being detected, entered Libyan territory, and captured Maaten al-Sarra. They wrecked the base and the planes based there, and withdrew back to Chad without difficulty. This was hugely damaging for Qaddafi in both military and political terms, and essentially led to him giving up ever messing with Chad again, to the point that he agreed to international arbitration over the Aouzou Strip (which was reverted to Chad). In short, the Toyota War was a complete debacle for Libya, because their troops couldn't cope with the maneuverability of the Chadian irregular forces. Against a conventional army with adequate training and stable morale they probably would have been massacred, but they were fighting Libya.
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Dec 12, 2010 06:56
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Kenneth Pollack's Arabs at War took a variety of conventional wars fought by Arabs for case studies, and he makes a creditably specific argument about why they keep losing. There's a real temptation in books with this kind of topic to say that Arabs are bad at fighting because of their "culture," whatever that's supposed to mean, but Pollack is a for-serious expert in the Middle East (even if he was a major supporter of the Iraq War) so he doesn't bring the Orientalism. The short version is that the armed forces of the Arab states are all based on the colonial-era armies that the European imperial powers raised there. Colonial armies were not intended to fight in real conflicts, they were really just there to keep order. They tended to be despised by the locals, indifferently led with bad relations between officers and the ranks, and to be drawn from a poor selection of manpower which was illiterate and unenthusiastic, all of which led to a serious lack of discipline. On some occasions colonial troops acquitted themselves well, and some of them were actually excellent troops because their backgrounds prepared them for certain combat tasks (e.g. the discipline of Sikh and Gurkha troops, the superior fieldcraft of Rif Moroccans on the Fascist side during the Spanish Civil War). In the main, though, these troops were crap. However, they still gave a relatively good material and doctrinal basis to their successors after independents, but problems in their national infrastructure and political organization also resulted from colonization. They have poor education and social welfare systems, so their recruiting pool is low quality and undereducated. Their civil societies are weak and corruption is rife, so a lot of what goes on in terms of social or career advancement is based on influence-peddling and nepotism, with the result that NCOs and officers are often incompetent with further bad effects on troop training and discipline. Finally, most of their governments are authoritarian regimes which lack the support of the population, especially since political Islamism became a major factor in the late 1970s. This means that the prestige of the military is low and troop morale is generally very poor. Pollack shows that these systemic problems manifest at every level, to the point that Arab troops are even bad at really basic things like cleaning their personal weapons, because neither they nor their immediate superiors give a poo poo. As an exception that proves the rule, Pollack discusses the one area where Arab armies excel, which is logistics. To use Libya as an example, they fielded a (for the region) sizable army on the far side of the Sahara Desert from their population centers, with no connecting rail lines (meaning it all had to come via the air or trucks) without encountering supply problems until the Chadians began capturing their local bases. This is no mean feat, and other Arab armies have performed similarly. Pollack explains that this is likely due to the fact that the logistical service is a bureaucratic dead end, so in a nepotistic, authoritarian officer corps it is avoided by ambitious, well-connected men and accumulates officers who are advancing as a result of their own skills rather than their personal connections. DarkCrawler posted:That was a really good summary of the war. During the war with Chad, sure. Nowadays, no. Qaddafi's diplomatic isolation makes it harder for them to get the most modern weapons, and his regime is widely despised in Libya, and the army itself is a major locus of opposition to him. This is one reason that his personal bodyguards do not come from the army but are instead hand-picked from a pool of virgin women--he wants people who owe him everything and have no connection to other centers of power in Libya. (The other reason is that he is a disgusting perv). With no legitimacy or respect for his regime, Libyan troops can't really be expected to fight very hard for Qaddafi. quote:Because honestly, it's not hard to believe that Israel was constantly able to own every one of it's neighbors and United States was able to eradicate Saddam's army twice in a row without any trouble whatsoever. Prior to the first Gulf War Iraq actually had one of the better armies in the Middle East and calling them crappy is not really fair considering the forces arrayed against them. The theater was absolutely ideal for the deployment of air power, and Iraq had insufficient means to combat American air superiority. In the second Gulf War, the actual Iraqi army dispersed without fighting American forces and the only combatants were Saddam's irregular political forces, the Fedayeen. For Israel, it's worth noting that in the Yom Kippur war they were only a matter of days from total defeat, and it was only by holding the USA hostage (threatening to escalate to the use of nuclear weapons) to get the logistical support that they survived. quote:I assume Hezbollah and Iran are superior to the rest of the region - if not in level of the technology, then in morale and training? Hezbollah is an irregular army which has certain advantages that have led to superior performance against Israel as compared to Hamas. First, they receive material support from Iran, so they are well armed and probably have some real training. Second, the terrain in Lebanon, especially the southern hills and the dense urban area around Beirut, is favorable to defensive operations and goes a long way toward neutralizing Israel's main advantages in armor and air power. Finally, their troops are highly motivated because they consider themselves holy warriors. However, as an irregular army Hezbollah isn't capable of going on the offensive and if they tried, the Israelis would cut them down in droves. They do what they can, which is to prod Israel with rocket attacks then bloody their nose when they try to retaliate. It's hard to say exactly how good Iran's forces are in comparison to other regional powers. Iran is different because it has sufficient population and industry to produce a lot of its own military equipment rather than importing everything they need. As to their morale, relations between the Iranian regime and the regular army, and the population, are often strained. This is why the Supreme Council maintains large bodies of political troops, from the basij paramilitaries to the elite Quds Force (which even among special operations groups is regarded as pretty drat serious), so that they don't need to rely on the army to be reliable. If Iran was attacked by a foreign power (like, oh, the USA) most analysts agree that the population would promptly unify behind the regime. Iranian training is probably superior to that prevailing in other countries simply because the military forces of most other countries have fallen by the wayside. Arab states like Egypt, Syria, and Jordan have evidently given up fighting Israel so it's questionable what state of readiness their military forces might maintain. The North African states are mainly geared towards not fighting (Tunisia) or irregular and counterinsurgency warfare (Morocco & Algeria). The Gulf states basically rely on American force projection rather than their own armies (a smart choice all things considered). One might say that the Iranian military has more in common with Turkey or Pakistan, in that it is more of a modern military establishment than an updated colonial army. Compared to them Iran probably comes up short, but is miles ahead of most of the region. Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Dec 12, 2010 |
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Dec 12, 2010 20:41
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If your rifle experiences a serious enough malfunction that it actually needs to be field-stripped during a firefight, the relative ease of disassembling a Kalashnikov versus an AR is probably not going to make a difference in how screwed you are. The main things are how prone the weapon is to jamming and how easy it is to clear jams when they occur, and with the kind of basic maintenance that every soldier is supposed to perform on his weapon, the difference between the current iterations of the M-16 and AK aren't big. The AK probably has an advantage in that you could get yourself covered in mud and still be good to go, and also it's supposed to be tough enough to clear a bad jam by slamming the charging handle with an instrument. But in practical terms the difference between the weapons is pretty small. That said, the AKM is objectively a better weapon because it has sexy wood furniture.
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Dec 14, 2010 20:38
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Nenonen posted:Hermann Göring had 22 confirmed kills as a WW1 fighter pilot; compare this to US WW1 top ace Eddie Rickenbacker, who had 26 confirmed kills. Clearly he was good at something. Just not as a military mastermind. He also got himself shot during the Beer Hall Putsch, and addicted to morphine as a result. That probably didn't help his concentration.
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Dec 19, 2010 08:18
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SagatPunisherFanFic posted:OK, Roman legions! As far as I know Rome managed to take over so much stuff because, in part, they had that great army. The organisation and equipment they had let them get away with 10,000 Romans fighting 100,000 barbarians, and to do so reliably. Not really. There are cases like Alesia where Roman forces were able to defeat much large "barbarian" armies, but there are also cases like Carrhae and Teutoberg Forest where the opposite was the case. A great deal depended on the local conditions. quote:But what made the roman legions obsolete? Why couldn't a few legions tool around Europe and kick the poo poo out of all the English peasants and all the French peasants that were making up the bulk of armies? You're talking about a legion transplanted into the medieval period? The short answer is that legions didn't become obsolete, the society and government that made legions possible disappeared. The city of Rome had a million inhabitants during the time of Augustus, but during the medieval period it often had less than 50,000. Large cities weren't "obsolete," except in the sense that medieval society could no longer support a city like Rome. quote:Let's say this is around Joan of Arc's time. So question two! Were armies in those times actually just made of masses of peasants? No. European medieval armies were built around a core of aristocrats, each of whom maintained a retinue of men-at-arms--professional soldiers. These men would be as highly trained and as well-equipped with arms, armor, and horses as their employer could afford. In supplement to these forces a medieval army could also rely on a floating pool of mercenaries. Mercenaries would often specialize in supplying skills that a knightly army couldn't itself supply; the Swiss were famous for their pike-armed infantry, the Genoese for their crossbowmen. It was also highly useful because, though expensive, they were a one-time investment. Becoming a good man-at-arms entailed years of training and (sometimes obscenely) expensive equipment, while mercenaries brought everything to the table for a flat rate. In some places the ruling class had the right to enact a levy and press peasants into service, but this was rare because you can imagine what would happen an army of untrained peasants equipped with farming implements coming up against what I described above. Areas with populations of free commoners who were prosperous enough to afford some limited equipment could also assemble specialized troops, like the Swiss and Flemish pikemen or English longbowmen. These were exceptions to the rule of the full-time professional soldier.
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Dec 22, 2010 18:30
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bewbies posted:By the time of Petersburg things were pretty much done with, there wasn't much for him to do. Atlanta falling (and handful of other things) sewed up the election for Lincoln, which ensured there wouldn't be any peace negotiation. Even had McClellan won, presidential inaugurations at that time took place the following March. We're talking about that period between November 1864 and March 1865 which were maybe the worst five months in the lifetime of the Confederacy--Sherman's March and Nashville were a done deal, Petersburg and the Carolinas campaign would have been underway and nearly finished. McClellan himself ran against his party and intended to finish the war rather than negotiate a peace settlement, so I don't think it's probable that Lincoln would have taken the loss as a sign to cease operations. McClellan might have come into office with victory already in the bag.
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Dec 27, 2010 20:23
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bewbies posted:You're right, which is why things shook out the way they did. In my little alternate history I was proposing Cold Harbor taking place several months sooner (or one of the Overland battles being a similar catastrophe). I think this would have gotten McClellan elected, and though you're quite right he personally was in favor of finishing the war out, he and his party had run on a peace platform, My understanding was that McLellan openly ran against the party platform, which was one of the reasons he performed poorly against Lincoln.
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Dec 28, 2010 21:12
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Lascivious Sloth posted:What was the greatest influential battle in history that could have gone either way? Personally I've always thought that Waterloo was incredibly decisive in what would have shaped basically everything we know if Napoleon had won. But I'm interested to know what historians opinions are on that question. The British and Prussian forces were only the first to reach the field; even had Napoleon defeated them, much larger Russian and Austrian armies were on their way. quote:Off-topic I seriously think that the world would be a better place today if Napoleon had won Waterloo. With his position on aristocracy and the Napoleonic code he is pretty much the perfect dictator to unite Europe. Feel free to reject this statement and describe why. ? By 1815 Napoleon's bid to dominate Europe had failed, and after 25 years of civil upheaval and war France was too exhausted to make another attempt right away. If Napoleon had defeated the coalition and secured a peace treaty, it would have been limited to recognition of his rule over France, and France would have been isolated among a continent of hostile powers. The questions are (A) Napoleon would have been satisfied with this, or would he have mounted another attempt in five or ten years and (B) would the other powers have been satisfied with this, or would they have attacked France again after an interval to gather their strength. The answer to both questions is probably that Napoleon was too ambitious and the other monarchs hated him too much to let the matter lie, so instead of the period of relative peace between 1815 and 1848 Europe probably would have seen more bloody Napoleonic wars.
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Dec 29, 2010 20:15
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Lascivious Sloth posted:I read that if Napoleon had of defeated the British and Prussian forces then the Russian and Austrian had no chance. I'm not sure why, but this point was made quite adamantly. Maybe it was something to do with the supply routes that the British and Prussians were using, which ironically was part of Napoleon's strategy to divide the armies. I'd have to ask what your source was, because this doesn't sound credible. Between them Austria and Russia were sending twice as many troops as were present at Waterloo. Nationalist historians have been fond of making stuff up about Waterloo since the moment the smoke cleared for purposes of national aggrandizement, so my guess would be that you read someone who set out to prove that Britain defeated Napoleon once and for all, and only Britain could have done it (alternatively a Prussian meaning the same for Prussia). quote:I'm also pretty sure that had this battle been one it would not have been the end of Napoleons campaign at all. I doubt he would have made the same mistake of Russia, and I do not think a peace treaty would have been signed. I don't understand what you're saying here. Can I assume that your proposed sequence of events is 1) after winning Waterloo, which would certainly be a bloody near-run contest that would disable a good portion of his army, 2) Napoleon goes in spite of his losses to to defeat the Austrians, whose army will probably outnumber anything he can throw together, conceivably by as much as 2:1, 3) then Napoleon performs the exact same feat against the Russians, 4) then after winning three bloody battles against overwhelmingly large enemy armies, his forces will still be intact enough to take the offensive, bearing in mind that by 1815 the only remaining ally of Napoleon's in the entire world was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. You'll have to explain to me with some form of evidence how this makes sense.
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Dec 30, 2010 18:48
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The real comedy comes from people claiming that Roosevelt made the Depression worse with his massive deficit-financed government projects, and that only WWII ended the Depression. WWII being a massive deficit-financed government project, of course.
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Dec 30, 2010 23:29
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:So the argument goes that if they want to be descendants of Rus' they had better be willing to serve the Grand Prince. The two stumbling blocks you run into when you try to assert that Ukraine isn't a country are first that it isn't open to dispute that Ukrainians exist as a distinct ethnic/linguistic group, and second that the USSR effectively recognized the national existence of Ukraine by creating the Ukrainian SSR. Anyway, modern Ukrainian nationalism has more to do with legitimate feelings of victimization by Moscow during the 1920-1954 period than with Kievan Rus, which is more a founding mythology than a firm historical legacy. The main issue facing Ukrainian nationalists, and more broadly the issue facing many CIS nations, is that they are located in Russia's near abroad and large fractions of their population are Russophile. Personally, this makes me wonder exactly how good of an idea it would even be to incorporate CIS countries into NATO or the EU.
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Jan 3, 2011 22:41
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Chade Johnson posted:Ok this isn't strictly military history but I'm hoping some of the history people in here can help me out. I'm going to do a senior thesis in order to get my degree. I can pick any topic, as long as it is cleared by a professor. I like the history of the Ottomans, Russia, the Balkans, and the Mongols. I'm open to pretty much anything, but those are the four I think I would enjoy doing. Any suggestions on narrowing any of these down to a workable thesis topic? Please not military history, I can't do a thesis on that, my eyes glaze over when the discussions on tank variants and artillery come up. Thanks if anyone can help. Probably a better place for it.
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Jan 4, 2011 19:54
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Because they can sell that stuff to people we won't go straight up nuclear with. Right. To expand on this, apart from its claim to the entirety of Taiwan, China's real territorial ambitions are quite modest and limited to things like potentially strategic mountain ranges abutting India, and islands in the South China Sea which are useful for extending their EEZ. The PRC is doing very well with it's present policy (using currency manipulation to build their economy), which would only be derailed by a shooting war. The real danger that China poses in a foreign policy sense is their displayed willingness to make economic partnerships with pariah states, which undermines the ability of the international community to put pressure on places like North Korea, Burma, or Sudan. Their arms industry is potentially a big part of this, because they're not doing it for war-fighting purposes but for the export market. Anti-carrier missiles in particular are a big deal because those are obviously intended for use against the USN, whose carrier fleet are pretty much the core of American force projection. Any time a situation gets tense somewhere in the world, the USA can send a Carrier Strike Group to be intimidating. If the PRC starts selling anti-carrier missiles to anybody who wants them it can change this calculus. If the missiles are actually effective, then the US has to be more cautious about putting its limited and extremely expensive supply of CVNs to work. Even if the missiles are ineffective, they can still embolden a country to have a go at resisting the US in a situation where they would have ordinarily quailed at the sight of a Nimitz Class cruising around.
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Jan 6, 2011 20:22
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HeroOfTheRevolution posted:Countries like Sudan and Myanmar aren't even arguably the good guys. "Arguably" is an imprecise term. Ronald Reagan argued that the Guatemalan military was a force for good at the same time they were mounting a more-or-less genocidal campaign against unarmed indigenous peoples which eventually claimed 300,000 lives. The review of bad things America did/does versus bad things China does is pretty mixed. Guatemala was basically the worst US ally, but we had a wide selection of nasty friends. Meanwhile China has close ties of support to at least three states (Burma, Sudan, and North Korea) which are as bad as or measurably worse than Guatemala ever was. On the other hand, the US often actively encouraged crimes against humanity if we thought it would give strategic advantage against communism, whereas the Chinese and simply don't care what anybody else does. You might characterize it as the US being manipulative or even occasionally malevolent, whereas Chinese foreign policy is simply selfish and irresponsible.
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Jan 7, 2011 21:19
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IM FAT LETS PARTY posted:Not to derail this into politics, but clearly "evil" (insofar as this term means anything) allies of the US also include Central-Asian dictatorships, I was excluding mere allies and limiting the comparison to states which have an actual clientelist relationship with the USA or China. The fact that the US has basing and air transit agreements with Central Asian dictatorships in exchange for some kind of quid quo pro doesn't make the US morally culpable for their human rights abuses to nearly the extent that the US was responsible for Guatemala or El Salvador, or that China is for Burma or Sudan. US Compare bilateral relations like US-Turkmenistan or US-Kazakhstan to US-Guatemala or US-Chile (under Pinochet) and you'll see what I mean. quote:and, during the Cold War, a large number of disgusting regimes that were every bit as bad as Myanmar (mainly in Africa and the Middle East). Every bit as bad as Myanmar, you say? Which Middle Eastern or African client of the United States killed at least 100,000 of its own citizens and displaced at least a half million more as refugees? The Shah? Mobutu Sese Seko? The Saudis? quote:Also, the Chinese consider North Korea a liability. Their only real interest is to keep the DPRK somewhat functional so it doesn't collapse and cause a mass of refugees into China. At different times the US has considered various of its client states "liabilities." During the Guatemalan Civil War the US was so embarrassed by the behavior of the Guatemalan military that we briefly cut off military aid (so for a few years the Guatemalan commandos were massacring civilians with Galils instead of M-16s). Personally I don't think the slowly dawning realization that the DPRK is a liability makes much difference.
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Jan 7, 2011 23:54
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