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Supposedly intelligent people can make decisions that look grossly incompetent in hindsight. For a good example of this in the context of war, read The Guns of August, which is a classic about the start of WWI. Every power at the start of WWI thought the conflict would be over in a few months, and that they would be the victor. Japan thought that Pearl Harbor would scare the US into giving them a free hand in the Pacific. The US thought that they would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqis when they deposed Saddam Hussein. Hubris and nationalism play a part in these decisions, and there is an incentive to put on rose colored glasses. No matter what kind of government you have, there are different factions that need to be convinced to go to war, and it is a lot easier to sell a brief, decisive war than it is to sell a protracted conflict. People with negative views are marginalized, when you're trying to rally the troops you don't need some guy going on about how the leader's grand plan is wrong.
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Apr 29, 2010 08:11
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torsoboy posted:Seeing as the US has a great deal of trouble occupying Iraq, how could Germany in 1940s have hoped to occupy the vast Russian steppes? It seems to me that there aren't enough Germans, let alone soldiers to appropriate the land. They would have to murder entire populations to safekeep it (I guess they did try though). In general, their plan was to manage the Slavic population through outright genocide, enslavement, and expulsion to Siberia. It was called Generalplan Ost, Russia was supposed to be a key part of the Lebensraum Hitler wanted, which is a big reason why he decided to push the Eastern front rather than invade Britain.
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May 2, 2010 20:51
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Well, the end of WWII would have been different, the Soviets would have had much greater control over Japan due to participating in the invasion. I'd also envision a very costly conventional WWIII between the two major power blocs, without nukes there is little reason why Korea or Vietnam couldn't have turned into global conflicts. The West would probably win that war or series of wars, but it would take a huge amount of resources to do so, and the major technological advances of the second half of the 20th century probably wouldn't have happened nearly as quickly.
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May 7, 2010 18:56
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kinkster posted:
It's vitally important to get accurate estimates about exactly what units have been shot down, sunk, or disabled, and eyewitness accounts are very unreliable. If you can't be sure you sunk that ship, you still have to account for it in your future plans, and that gives an advantage to the enemy.
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Jun 2, 2010 06:51
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Yeah, I remain convinced that had we gone ahead with Operation Downfall, we'd be pretty much forced to commit genocide and sustain massive casualties of our own in order to 'win'. Another question, in WWII, the Royal Dutch Navy in the Pacific fought with the Allies long after the Netherlands were occupied by the Germans. How, exactly, could this happen? Why didn't the Germans just send a communication saying something like "We will hunt down any family that any officer of the Navy has on the mainland and throw them in the prison camps unless they surrender to the Japanese immediately?"
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Jun 20, 2010 05:51
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You have to remember that Barbarossa was, at it's heart, a racial conflict. The Nazis planned to murder and enslave a huge number of Slavs as a part of Generalplan Ost, and the Russians knew this. Both sides believed that losing the war would probably mean the extinction of their people, that is why they fought as hard as they did.
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Jul 26, 2010 20:29
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lilljonas posted:The only thing I might roll my eyes over is that the role of the Chinese resistance to Japan seems to be glossed over by Americans due to post-war antagonism. If Japan hadn't been bogged down in China since '37, it would have been more difficult for the US to start dealing with Japan four years later. But just like Americans are prone to gloss over the effort of the Soviet Union on the east front, they are prone to gloss over the effort of the Chinese. Because communists can't win wars after all. Which is odd, because from what I've read it was the Nationalists that did most of the fighting. If anything, the Communists were a hindrance to the war effort, looking to push their own agenda while the Nationalists were otherwise occupied.
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Aug 11, 2010 22:47
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Can someone recommend a book about the occupation of Germany from 1945-49? It's an interesting study, I'm sure many westerners don't know how we treated German civilians during that period, for obvious reasons it isn't usually covered in history class.
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Sep 5, 2010 09:58
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How did Russia maintain sovereignty over so much land in the 18th and 19th centuries? They have always been the largest 'western' country. What kept the locals loyal to the Tsar when Moscow was thousands of miles away? Also, how come they didn't expand more in the Far East? It seems that they could have taken Mongolia, northern China, and possibly Korea and made them Russian colonies during the mid 19th century before Japan became a world power.
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Nov 28, 2010 04:45
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:There are these great metal birds in the sky these days, you may have seen them yourself. People climb on the back of them (I think?? Someone help me out here) and if you feed them the right food they can take you great distances. Supplying an entire military operation the size of the coalition forces in Afghanistan entirely by air is extremely expensive. I don't think we have enough cargo planes for an operation of that scale. They drive it across the borders from friendly countries, that's part of the reason why we are so worried about angering Pakistan, since it is the only way to get things there by sea without going through clearly hostile nations (Iran) or thousands of miles through Russia and central Asia. Edit: Some quick googling and math shows that coalition troops eat about 655,000 pounds of food every day. The cost of flying all of that in adds up very quickly, even if we could do that. Konstantin fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Dec 4, 2010 |
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Dec 4, 2010 08:17
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Japan went well for several reasons. First, many of the people were starving. It's kind of hard to mount an insurgency when the only source of food is aid from the foreign occupiers. Second, the Emperor was allowed to stay on the throne and gave his full support to the occupation. In a monarchy, this is a huge deal, going against foreigners is one thing, going up against the monarch is likely to get less popular support. Finally, the structure of the nation was kept intact. The vast majority of potential insurgents were in the military. After the surrender, the Allies were able to account for them, disarm them, and manage them. Contrast that to Afghanistan, where there wasn't even a structured military that could surrender, so young men simply melted into the villages with their guns.
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Mar 14, 2011 12:36
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iTunesU has a couple of podcasts of history courses. One I particularly recommend the Columbia University course "History of the Modern Middle East" taught by Richard Bulliet.
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May 23, 2011 01:16
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The Red Army tried something like that when they were first established in 1918. By around 1919 to 1920 they had "categories" which were like ranks, except they were purely functional titles like "brigade commander".
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May 29, 2011 11:07
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I wouldn't say that, today people are convinced to become suicide bombers in the name of God. It's not that much of a stretch to convince someone to charge into machine gun fire in the name of their country. I doubt the living conditions and education of your average European in 1914 was much better than that of someone in a remote area of Afghanistan in 2011, and the same social indoctrination was used.
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Sep 14, 2011 10:25
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AgentF posted:What if Hitler had never been born? What would we even talk about in this thread? Some other tyrant would have rose and started a war. The Weimar Republic was unsustainable, Hitler was just in the right place at the right time to seize power.
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Oct 12, 2011 04:11
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lilljonas posted:Another issue is that the worst war crimes of Japan was committed against other Asians, and Western countries didn't care about that as much as Germany's atrocities against white people. Having stayed for long times in both Tokyo and Germany, it is stunning how big the differences are between the two countries when it comes to reconciliation for WW2. I don't think your average westerner in 1950 would consider Jews to be "white". Still, Europeans and Americans do care more about what happened in Poland than what happened in Nanking.
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Oct 22, 2011 12:19
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Well, if we are going to be discussing Japanese perceptions of WWII, and since someone else already mentioned anime, I would be remiss in not posting the chart. (slightly  ) Keep in mind this was actually released in America as well.
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Oct 22, 2011 16:28
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The navies of WWI were quite an advance in naval technology, but it didn't matter much since naval thinking among all the Great Powers was something like "Look at my shiny boat with all these big guns. What? You want to send her into battle where she might be sunk? Surely not old chap, our navy is the pride of the nation, we can't afford to get any ships sunk. Besides, we need to show her off to visiting dignitaries so that the world knows how great our navy is."
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Oct 25, 2011 21:35
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Amused to Death posted:^ That is part of it, but the thinking of the Royal Navy and Kaiserliche Marine was incredibly risk-averse to the point of absurdity. The best example of this would be the pursuit of the SMS Goeben, where during the first days of the war the Royal Navy followed a crippled German battlecruiser for days without engaging them, when the RN could have probably won the battle had they chosen to attack. Churchill is partly to blame here, since he gave the ambiguous order that the ships were not to engage 'superior forces'. The Goeben ended up sailing into Istanbul, where it was symbolically handed over to the Ottomans and was probably the deciding factor in getting them to side with Germany. It was probably the most important naval voyage of the 20th century, since the closing of the straits utterly decimated Russian trade, contributing to their revolution, and after the fall of the Ottoman Empire the middle east was divided into the current borders, which has huge effects even today.
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Oct 26, 2011 03:01
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Keep in mind that naval services are very big on tradition, even more than other sections of the armed forces. US Navy officer candidates had to spend significant amounts of training time learning how to navigate with a sextant and star chart until 1997.
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Nov 11, 2011 05:58
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I would say Israel has a reasonably professional conscript force that doesn't have many of the problems other conscript armies have. Of course, a lot of this is due to the fact that they have the resources needed to properly equip and train their troops, plus they actually need a large army relative to their population due to their geopolitical situation.
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Nov 27, 2011 02:06
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Still, I'm surprised that a tank like the one shown would even be worth repairing, in terms of cost and time spent. Is the hull really valuable enough to have a bunch of skilled labor replace everything else manually, as opposed to just building a new tank at the factory?
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Dec 22, 2011 06:01
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I have to say the title goes to the Ohka. It was a Japanese plane designed for kamikaze pilots. It may not qualify as a plane, as it attaches to a Betty for takeoff, then detaches when it is near the target and has rockets to propel it to its' destination. Of course, the bombers that carry it were sitting ducks for Allied forces, especially since the Ohka only had a 20 nautical mile range. The biggest ships they sunk were two destroyers, and 852 were produced.
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Dec 26, 2011 04:59
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Alchenar posted:John Churchill's march to Blenheim in 1704 was noted specifically for the fact that he provided gold to his soldiers to purchase everything they needed from the villages and farms they passed on their march, avoiding looting and alienating the population. This was considered very unusual at the time. I'm surprised this worked. In a city gold can buy food at a fairly constant price, but out in rural areas there is a cap on supply, since people won't sell food that they need for sustenance unless they know they will be able to buy more. Unless you are marching across very productive agricultural land or have a relatively small army I doubt the 'spare' supply of food will be enough. If there is a significant market economy for food, the farmers may sell to the soldiers anyway, but in that case the non-farming local population will be unable to afford it, which leads to massive riots and civil breakdown.
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Feb 2, 2012 18:34
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Schitzo posted:In Stephen King's newest one he imagines an alternate timeline where Kennedy survived Dallas. This timeline basically played out with minimal US involvement in Vietnam (defending Saigon, mainly, and injecting cash instead of troops). Saigon ends up surrounded and isolated like Berlin all over again. A very right wing hawk is elected president as a result of the popular backlash against JFK, and this president actually pulls the trigger and uses nuclear weapons on Hanoi. Nuking Hanoi would certainly provoke a nuclear reprisal from Moscow, which would lead to all out nuclear war. Any president would know this, they would have to be absolutely insane to give that order, and it would probably not be followed if given.
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Feb 20, 2012 16:26
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Farecoal posted:What was the largest surrender in military history by number of troops? Google isn't giving an answer. It depends on what you mean by 'surrender' and for that matter 'troops'. Almost every able-bodied Japanese was actively supporting the war effort in WWII, and they were preparing to fight with whatever they had if the Allies invaded the home islands. I would have to say that counts, even 'just' the entire regular Japanese military was the largest mass surrender.
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Apr 8, 2012 08:10
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Bagheera posted:In fact, it seems that, for at least the last 150 years, logistics (including procuring supplies, moving troops and equipment quickly, and just building up a strong economy) have mattered much more than battlefield engagements. Logistics is hugely important, even before the US entered WWI, the fact that they were a huge supplier of the Allies gave them a major advantage. American factories that were safe from bombing were a key reason why they won both World Wars. The only western hemisphere power that was aligned with the Axis was Argentina, and they were much less developed industrially and were under US pressure.
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Apr 12, 2012 15:04
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Another issue is that Cold-War era stockpiles are nearing the end of their useful life. In order to maintain their arsenals, nuclear weapons states will have to build new warheads to replace those going out of service due to age. This is a tricky political issue, as it is certainly against the spirit of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and Russia probably can't afford it anyway. Plus, in order for any new design to be considered reliable enough it will probably need to be tested, which hasn't been done by the large nuclear powers in two decades.
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May 9, 2012 00:03
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That makes me wonder, at the end of the Korean War, did the South consider changing their capital to a city that is more defensible, such as Busan? While I am sure everyone important has an evacuation plan in the event of war, relocating the entire government would be a massive undertaking in a wartime environment.
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May 9, 2012 15:27
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Medieval Medic posted:How prevalent have war animals been throughout the ages? I know about war dogs and war elephants, have there been other noticable animals(war bears and rhinos, I want to believe The US Navy uses dolphins in mine clearing operations.
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Jun 2, 2012 11:55
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even though they most definitly weren't)? Were they more of a gimmick or could they be reliable to help a battle?
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Nenonen posted:Now, one day within this century USA is going to have a president that speaks English as a second language and that day will be wonderful. Just the fact that Mitt Romney can speak French makes him unelectable to some. It has already happened, a lot of early US presidents would be completely unelectable today for a whole host of reasons.
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Jun 5, 2012 16:47
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bewbies posted:I don't know if the randomness is as much of a contributing factor as the constant presence of danger. Up through the first half of the American Civil War life as a soldier was pretty predictable and not terribly dangerous outside of battles, and most battles themselves were pretty straightforward. Not that it was pleasant or anything, but at least you didn't have the constant pressure of danger drumming on your psyche. There was a massive danger to noncombatants in premodern armies, but it was a different kind of danger. Until WWI, the biggest killer of troops in every war wasn't the enemy, it was disease. You were far more likely to die of dysentery than you were from a sword or bullet. It's interesting that the risk of disease back then was worse than the risk of being blown up by an IED now, both of them are essentially uncontrollable, yet the mind deals with the risks in different ways.
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Jun 21, 2012 05:16
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Keep in mind that in WWI, a lot of British Army units were made up of people from the same area serving together, in an effort to improve morale. This led to certain villages having almost all of their young male population killed or wounded in one battle.
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Jul 2, 2012 03:05
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Cjones posted:Quick question-- which countries had the best trained average infantryman in terms of hand-to-hand combat? My guess would be the modern US army. Practical unarmed combat has developed extremely rapidly in the last twenty years, and the US places an emphasis on it in their military training. Add in better physical conditioning, and a modern infantryman would destroy any of his counterparts from any era in hand to hand combat.
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Jul 2, 2012 03:15
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The Confederate Navy does have the H.L. Hunley, the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel, although the Hunley itself sank immediately afterwards. It also sank twice during testing, killing a total of twenty-one crewman despite only having a crew of eight.
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Jul 17, 2012 00:22
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:It's similar to how Canada of all places ended up having the 3rd largest Navy in the world by the end of WWII. It was basically their title by default since the Japanese, German, Italian, and French navies were all at the bottom of the ocean. Behind the enormous US Navy and the large but battered Royal Navy there was basically nothing. The Canadians had a bigger Navy at the end of WWII than the Soviets? I knew they don't exactly have a naval tradition, but they had ten times the population of Canada. Plus, they needed to control three theaters that would be trivial to isolate from each other in the event of war.
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Jul 18, 2012 11:45
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SeanBeansShako posted:I suspect there was quite a bit of assumption with the older types that Warfare was just the same was it was in 1880 with everyone wearing more brown. Not even that. In France, the very idea of giving up their trademark red trousers was absolutely unacceptable to the higher military brass early in WWI.
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Aug 10, 2012 22:12
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Alchenar posted:When that didn't happen, the Germans were left in the very awkward position of having achieved their goals (indeed, having achieved far more than their initial goals) and yet not being able to conclude the war. There's an interesting parallel between that and the Japanese in early 1942. They achieved the territorial gains they wanted with a lot of speed, but they had no way to turn those gains into an exit strategy, and they had a huge disadvantage in a long war. They hoped to get the Americans to capitulate by attacking Midway, and we all know how that turned out.
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Aug 20, 2012 19:13
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One thing about WWII that I've always wondered about is that Dutch ships in the East Indies fought on the side of the Allies long after the Dutch mainland was occupied by the Germans. How, exactly, did they get away with that? I have to figure that surrender of those ships to the Japanese was one of the terms of the occupation, and while they couldn't directly enforce such an order, they certainly could find out who was commanding those ships and round up any family those officers had on the mainland.
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Aug 23, 2012 00:06
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That's omitting the biggest contribution the Ottomans made, which was closing the Dardanelles. This move, more than any other, utterly crushed Russia, considering that over 90% of Russia's imports and exports went by that route. The utterly crippling supply shortages this caused were a major contributor to the Revolution.
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Sep 14, 2012 00:31
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