|
Fangz posted:The whole point of treason is whether the state approved your secession, desertion, or defection or not. The legal term for this is ex post facto.
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2013 14:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 19:34 |
|
|
zoux posted:Here's kind of a silly question: Was the F-14 a particularly good dogfighter? Yes this comes from thinking about Top Gun and wondering why they would spend time training pilots to dogfight when I thought the F-14 was designed as essentially a missile platform. There is a real Top Gun program right? Do they still teach pilots dogfighting skills? The F-14D was probably the best pure knife-fighter of all of the "teen" fighters. The variable geometry wings gave it a huge maneuverability advantage and the more powerful engines made a big difference in what was the A model's main weakness (power/weight ratio). Ironically enough the A model, especially when carrying the Phoenix rails, was easily the least capable teen fighter in a dogfight. "Top Gun" is still a course, the official title is "Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor". It is now held in the absolute toilet city of Fallon NE now, instead of at Miramar. The USAF has a similar but much longer course.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2013 17:11
|
|
|
HEGEL CURES THESES posted:Oh come on. The entire nation is kamikazes? That language is ridiculous but the theme isn't far off. I'm a fan of using Okinawa as a small-scale example of what would have happened during an invasion of the home islands; the combination of conscription and mass suicides (as ordered/suggested by the Japanese government/military) generated civilian casualties to a degree that really wasn't seen many other places during the war, and nowhere else on that scale. Also it is pretty ridiculous to argue that the Japanese were seriously contemplating an unconditional surrender prior to the atomic attacks. The only real fact you need to refute that is that the council was gridlocked after Hiroshima. And why on earth would we not discuss this monumentally important milestone in military history in the military history thread?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2013 14:16
|
|
|
Fangz posted:In both cases, the case being argued is that the atomic bombings (or at least, the Nagasaki bombing) was not a decisive factor, that it was both unnecessary and indeed insufficient for a Japanese surrender. The atomic attacks were so not decisive and so insufficient that they were the only events mentioned explicitly as a reason for surrender in the Emperor's surrender broadcast.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2013 14:49
|
|
|
Fangz posted:The broadcast is not necessarily representative of the actual decision making process. This is a really terrible argument. I'm sure we're all aware that the Soviet entry was also a critical factor in the decision but it is laughable to say that the atomic attacks "were not a decisive factor". That's revisionism on a Turtledove level.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2013 15:01
|
|
|
Fangz posted:'Your argument is laughable' is not actually a counterargument. I'd offer that my counter-argument was the Emperor's speech. You really didn't offer much of an explanation as to why his words "did not represent the actual decision-making process". To be honest, I'm kind of curious what you'll come up with. I've seen this argument several times before and it can be very interesting.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2013 15:15
|
|
|
Also voting in support of a history subforum. Like, a lot. I'd totally write the OPs for the ACW, WWI, the Enlightenment, aviation history, probably others because YES
|
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2013 19:39
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:I'd like to ask for info about the US Army Combat Command. What is it, who came up with the idea, what the context behind the idea, and how effective were they in practice? On the surface they sound somewhat equivalent to a Kampfgruppe, except as a deliberately formed combined-arms unit instead of an ad-hoc reactive formation. Are you asking about the Unified Command Structure? I'm not familiar with the term "Combat Command".
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2013 17:47
|
|
|
[quote="SkySteak" post="418779886"It mentions the concept of a heavy, long range fighter was a 'compromise in all things'. [/quote] Aircraft design is basically a series of compromises. Every ounce of performance gained comes at a cost of capability, every ounce of survivability comes at a cost to performance, etc etc. As far as "long range fighters" went, you're starting from a difficult position in that you're going to have to fight short range interceptors over their home territory. So, you've got to provide a lot of extra fuel, which requires more airframe, which requires more engine power, which requires more fuel....and so on. The aircraft you're having to fight, however, don't need to carry nearly as much fuel, so they're free to shrink the airframe and maximize performance. The P-51's design was exceptional for two reasons. First, it was easily the most aerodynamically advanced prop plane of the war. It was so aerodynamically efficient that it was able to get far better performance out of its power/weight ratio than any of its competitors, which meant that it could have a larger airframe and thus carry more fuel than its contemporaries while still maintaining excellent overall performance. This allowed for the second exceptional design feature: a massive amount of internal fuel relative to the size of the aircraft. While its internal capacity was quite a bit less than, say, the P-47, it was far more fuel efficient and thus got way better "mileage". All that being said, the P-51 was not a particularly exceptional dogfighter. It was fantastic in its assigned role (high altitude, high speed escort), but if it lost speed/altitude and had to knife-fight with a Bf-109 it was at a significant disadvantage in most respects.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2013 22:34
|
|
|
General China posted:The other main reason was its engine design, the plane was built around the engine. It actually wasn't at all. So much so that they switched to a new engine type completely between the A and B variants. Also that was a really long thing I wrote. bewbies fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Aug 25, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2013 23:19
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:Since the creation of good ship-borne missiles, naval strategy has shifted to have a bunch of smaller ships bristling with missile tubes. They're much more combat effective, smaller targets and put less naval personal at risk than a battleships with a few thousand sailors on it. Believe it or not the US is seriously examining putting HIMARS launchers on ship decks. I dunno.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2013 23:50
|
|
|
Fangz posted:As a segue... how do people run these wargames within the military? As it happens I've been doing a deep future wargame all week so I'm just going to bitch a little bit. It is awful and tedious and boring and people get in HUGE fights (the best part). ... Nowadays everything is done on computer sims, obviously. There are a zillion different sims and probably 75% of the manpower for a given exercise is spent on tying them all together. They are never well tied together though, which means that the first few days of sim are usually given over to unfucking the architecture. Once that is done you can get after what are called "learning demands", which is how the exercise is framed. For example, a "learning demand" might be "how do we conduct entry operations in contested littoral waters across a large geographical gap" or something like that. Then you do an exercise wherein you try and do a contested entry op in littoral waters, etc etc. The red force guys are usually all retired generals like that Riper guy who all think they are hot poo poo and they know best because of the couple of weeks they spent in Kuwait during the first gulf war and "checkpoint charlie", which usually means red is way overpowered and can do all kinds of fantasy stuff whereas blue is dealing with any number of sim issues, plus no one on blue really gives a poo poo. As a result, blue almost always loses. The retired generals then give lengthy soliloquies during the AAR process wherein they explain the way the military was in the Cold War was better, and why did we get rid of the Crusader anyway, and cut your hair young man, and Obamaphones. All of this costs millions of dollars. I won't say they are useless because sometimes you do really learn stuff, but I am also not a huge fan of the things in case that was not obvious. What they are NOT are exercises just to flex muscles and create a predetermined outcome and then run around cheering. Quite the opposite in fact.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2013 23:55
|
|
|
Bacarruda posted:With that said, he (sorta) had a point about the vulnerability of modern warships to unconventional attacks and/or saturation attacks. Not really. The Navy is fanatical about security around the blue water ships, especially when they're in relatively hostile waters. Remember, a strike group can see everything on the water and in the air for a long way in every direction, and anything that even sort of looks like it is even thinking about taking a vector that might be kind of near the strike group gets first eyes, then guns and then torpedoes and missiles and aircraft all pointed at it before it gets anywhere near the strike group. I don't know what their protocol was like before the Cole but nowadays it is borderline excessive. Ironically people are still quite convinced that "asymmetric" attacks are the way to go after carriers while meanwhile over here in China they came up with what looks to be a scary effective conventional system that not many people outside of the USN really seem to even know about.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2013 03:22
|
|
|
I blame Shelby Foote for this persistent notion that Civil War-era (and earlier) firearms wounding mechanics were worse than a modern FMJ bullet. In Ken Burns' doc he said something like "a modern jacketed bullet will just clip your bone whereas a Minie ball would shatter it" or something. It drives me crazy. A 7.62mm round hitting a torso will immediately yaw; if it hits a rib or the spine it will most likely do so at a perpendicular angle. This does not "clip bone", whatever it hits will be badly shattered: it is delivering a massive amount of energy into whatever tissue it hits. The soft tissue will move outward (temporary cavity) and the bullet will tumble through the target, probably exiting at a very different angle from the one it entered. The round and any hard tissue will cut through arteries and whatnot to create bleeding (which is the primary mechanism by which gunshot wounds are lethal). It is a nasty business. The NATO 5.56mm round has a slightly different mechanism; it is designed to fragment upon entry, creating a similar effect but through multiple channels from several bits of the bullet moving through the target. I think the primary misunderstanding people have is not really knowing why bullets are lethal. As I said above, the vast majority of gunshot wounds are lethal due to the bleeding they create, not due to any "shock" effect or due to some sort of magic transfer of energy. As such, maximum lethality is generally achieved by creating the largest possible wound channel (permanent cavity) followed by an exit wound. The main driver of this effect is energy (NOT the size of the bullet), and at combat ranges a modern 7.62mm round carries around twice the energy of a .58 minie ball fired from a ACW-era rifled musket. Due to the very poor ballistics of the big rounds, it isn't terribly likely that an ACW-era weapon will fully penetrate a target at a distance past 150m or so, as the round sheds energy through the air at roughly 3 times the rate of a modern round (this is why its trajectory looks like a football being kicked). A minie ball DOES have a significant expansion capability (like a modern hollow point round, though less predictable), but unless you were VERY close to your target, such expansion isn't going to be reliable, and doing so in part precludes full penetration of the target, which is suboptimal. I think the other element of this misinformation was the experience of the battlefield surgeons, who rightly so were pretty horrified at the effects of the conical balls versus the round balls they were used to. Compared to the smoothbore rounds the minie ball wounds WERE quite a bit worse (due to the higher energy at impact and the mushrooming effect); that coupled with the primitive medical technology and the preference to amputate has contributed to us thinking that the ACW weapons were far more destructive than they actually were.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2013 17:29
|
|
|
Obdicut posted:It seems like the ability of a bullet to fly accurately through the air and the ability of a bullet to cause a wound are kind of unrelated, except that speed helps in both cases in a pretty rough way. Is that accurate? Like with most things there is a tradeoff that occurs. You want a bullet that maintains its energy level for as long as possible (meaning, the best possible ballistic coefficient), but at the same time, you want a bullet that will either deform or tumble through the target in order to create the largest possible wound channel and thus give the best probability of creating lethal bleeding. On the one extreme, you'd have something like a fin-stabilized sabot round that is designed solely to penetrate whatever it hits while maintaining a stable trajectory at all costs. For a rifle bullet this would imply that you'd basically drill a hole through the target about the size of your bullet; some energy would damage surrounding tissue but most would just travel on out of the target along with the round. The other extreme might be something like shooting a ninja star out of a gun, which would cause a massive wound channel but would significantly decrease its effectiveness as range increased, to the point where it would not have sufficient penetration at a distance not very far from the shooter. People figured out that an optimal compromise between these two characteristics is a bullet that can be "artificially" stabilized by gyro forces while it travels through air, but as soon as it hits something more dense those forces break down and the bullet tumbles.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2013 22:06
|
|
|
European military observers were really interested in the rifled musket and rifled artillery and ironclads and so on, but didn't view any of them as being serious game changers in a conflict in Europe. They were right, none of them really were. They were also really interested in the politics for various reasons that aren't very exciting so I won't go into them, point being that they were really, really interested. The thing that they badly missed was the effects of industrialization and conscription. Never before had a nation been able to enlist, equip, train, move, and supply armies like that of the Union, and the CSA mobilized a greater percentage of its military-age population than any other modern nation had managed before (somewhere between 75 and 85%), then...sort of managed to equip and sustain them despite a relatively backwards economy. What they SHOULD have taken from this is that it was going to become unbelievably difficult to reduce a fully mobilized modern industrial nation by force of arms due to their ability to train, equip, sustain, and move unheard of numbers of soldiers. The takeaways from that conclusion is that the idea of a "quick war" was rather fanciful, that the ability for a modern army to reinforce itself was many times more efficient than it had been in previous centuries, and that forces were now many times more mobile than they'd ever been before. All that adds up to a fundamental change away from the "decisive battle" and towards the wars of attrition that would dominate the 20th century.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2013 02:11
|
|
|
Bacarruda posted:What reasons did you have in mind? I do know the European powers were certainly more friendly towards the South than the North for a variety of reasons (cultural similarities, cotton production,etc.) Each of the major powers had a different agenda. The UK's perspective was fairly complicated. First, the Trent Affair came somewhat close to sparking outright hostilities between the US and UK just as the war was kicking off, which was obviously a pretty significant event for everyone. The UK was deeply divided on the war; there was a very strong abolitionist block (remember, the RN had been actively fighting the slave trade for half a century) who were anything but sympathetic to the CSA. On the flip side, there were a lot of people, mainly industrialists dependent on cotton and a bizarre strain of race-based sympathizers that were kind of centered in Liverpool, who were very pro-CSA. In addition, British military strategists were not terribly thrilled at the rising military/industrial power of the US and they were pretty happy that the nation might be dividing in half. Palmerston tried hard to maintain neutrality, but the impact of the cotton shortage was pretty significant and there was a very strong movement to recognize the CSA prior to the Emancipation Proclamation which pretty much ended that debate. France was heavily involved militarily in Mexico at the time and had the same issues with cotton, so they were even more sympathetic to the CSA than was the UK. They thought that a CSA/French alliance would make their controlling Mexico and Central America much easier which is probably reasonable, plus the impact of the blockade was even more pronounced on the French economy. Despite that they too didn't really get far enough to actually recognize the CSA, mainly because they didn't want to alienate the US. Prussia was more interested in American politics than in the economic situation. Prussia was of course dominated by its nobility, and they viewed the ACW as something of a populist counter-revolution, which is actually sort of accurate. Given their designs for German unification and so forth they were very concerned at the implications for what they called the "blue mob", a populist army, versus what they viewed as a much more traditional aristocratic-led army, so much so that they sent more people to watch than anyone. They were really the only European power to grasp the implications of industrialization and conscription and that was what gave them the critical advantage in the Franco-Prussian war. Austria was more or less in the same boat. Sort of amusing sidenote: there's anecdotal evidence that Sherman (who I'd call the ultimate "modern" populist, industrial officer) and von Moltke (the oldest of the oldest of the old guard of European aristocratic military leadership) had something of a "feud" that went on for quite a while. Russia for some reason thought that the UK was going to jump right on the CSA bandwagon and since they really did not like the UK at the time they aligned themselves closely with the Union to sort of give the finger to the Brits. They were also somewhat concerned about the populist implications of the war but that was much less interesting that potentially annoying Britain.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2013 05:43
|
|
|
vuk83 posted:Any more on the feud between sherman an moltke? Take all of this with a bag of salt as it is more than likely made up, but, I think I've traced the thing back to an interview that probably happened as detailed in a really old biography of Sherman. Allegedly he was told that von Moltke called his army a "blue mob" and he responded by saying something like "von Moltke isn't enough of an rear end to actually think that". Allegedly this got back to von Moltke as "Sherman called you an rear end", and he was pissed because he had met and liked Sherman years before; it went so far as to have the Emperor saying "Moltke never said that!". Basically it sounds like a middle school girls type situation if actually happened.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2013 15:10
|
|
|
Baron Porkface posted:I was surprised when I saw in Wikipedia that the Union had twice as many casualties in the ACW. What are the causes of that? There are a lot of smaller things you might point to but the only one that really matters was that the Union was typically the attacking force, which usually means more casualties anyway but this was magnified by the characteristics of the weapons of the period.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2013 22:58
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:Sorry, I get annoyed at bullshit etymologies. Pet peeve. I don't mean to be rude but you're going to have to post some pretty serious credentials and/or evidence before you dismiss Bruce Catton as a legitimate source.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2013 04:34
|
|
|
jaegerx posted:When the US Air Force was born how did they break up the army into Air Force? Were people given a choice? Or was it a "Hey you're now in the Air Force. Make sure your checks say Air Force now". My grandpa went through this. Basically, if your branch was in both services, you were given a choice (to a point) which one you went to. If you were a fighter pilot or an infantryman though you were stuck. My grandpa was a signal officer and was a major at the time, there was a TON of debate between him and his buddies which branch to go with. He went with USAF because they promised to send him to France, which they did, which was totally awesome.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2013 23:49
|
|
|
Bacarruda posted:Perhaps less so with navies? Not really. Certainly there were a lot of RN officers who came from the lay classes, but all (or nearly all) commissionees had one thing in common: they were wealthy. Unless you had familial ties (ie, Nelson was made a midshipman by his uncle) or some other sort of rich patron (eg, Jervis) you had to buy a commission in both the army and the navy. That being said, the RN in particular throughout the early colonial period was about as much of a meritocracy as any organization you'd find anywhere, so your background as a member of the high nobility or whatever didn't necessarily get you as much in the way of career advancement, particularly when they actively started the weeding-out process of the "yellow admirals" and the like. bewbies fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Oct 25, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Oct 25, 2013 21:02
|
|
|
I liked the catch-all history thread in GBS a lot. I feel that should be reprised.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2013 15:10
|
|
|
Decades prior to WWI the big European powers realized that the "big war" that invoked all of the various alliances and treaties would pretty much decide who owned the world. When you threw in the naval arms race and all that implied for the various colonial ventures all over the world the stakes were raised even higher. They were right, as it turns out.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2013 14:34
|
|
|
Arrinien posted:This is kind of a broad question I guess, but how effective have paratroopers historically been? In WWII they were almost a complete disaster, but since then small-scale operations with very well trained professional units (Panama, Afghanistan, etc) have gone quite well. Large scale airborne operations in a full-scale maneuver war were never a good idea and likely never would have worked particularly well.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2013 04:54
|
|
|
Omi-Polari posted:What's the distinction between a missile (which is distinct from rockets because they are guided systems) and a maneuverable rocket system like MLRS? Why is a guided "smart" rocket capable of in-flight maneuverability still a rocket and not a missile? We actually had this argument at work this week. Something like GMLRS is a missile, we've just decided to continue calling it a rocket because of tradition or esprit de corps or some stupid poo poo (I don't know what the real answer is). GMLRS Inc 4 is basically designed to replicate the capabilities of ATACMS which we do call a missile. I lost the argument in case you couldn't tell. bewbies fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Nov 8, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2013 14:05
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Was there a clearly identifiable mistake in the German plan for Verdun? Wrong place, wrong objective, didn't pull out in time, wrong tactics, bad generalship? I've always thought that the strategy at Verdun was one of the more brilliant and forward-thinking plans of WWI, in that it was arguably the first plan that realized fully what that conflict was and was not. I think that the major mistake by the Germans was underestimating French artillery, particularly their counter-fire. They had decent reasons for their intelligence estimates: French artillery performance throughout the war to that point had been pretty terrible. I'm honestly not sure what changed with regard to the French counter-fire tactics but that was pretty much the decisive thing in the battle if you want to choose one single element.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2013 20:33
|
|
|
What forum will you guys post it in? I would have said GBS before but um not now. D&D? I kind of feel like it should be out of this one for reasons I cannot explain.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2013 21:34
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 19:34 |
|
|
I think I would prefer a catch all history thread personally. Why limit it to just military stuff?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2013 18:18
|
|