The Military Thread

So, that's where The Coffee Mug became known as a perfectly usable weapon? I wonder what US Navy mugs of the period were made of...

Don't forget the foregrip(s). And a really bright flashlight.

Buckley; it tastes awful, but it works.

Are O-3 Captains allowed to command a squad?

Captains are usually in charge of nine squads, aka a Company.

I know that. To be specific, in battle, one captain is not allowed to command a squad?

There are situations where it could happen, but it'd be like a General leading a Company, they're supposed to command a larger force. If most of that force was eliminated, or the officer in question found themselves separated from the main force and with only the smaller force available, then they could command it.

Shit has hit the fan if the rank is commanding less than it should.

I'm about halfway through Samuel A. Southworth's book US Special Warfare. Not a bad read. His language is a little too casual at times for my taste, but it's a fairly well written book with a decent amount of basic information about the various types of special warfare.

The book is very much an entry-level "guided tour" type of analysis of the subject matter, which isn't a bad thing at all. He devotes each chapter to a single specific area (urban warfare, combat engineering, sniping, amphibious warfare), and you can honestly skip around without missing anything super important from a previous or upcoming chapter. He intentionally designed it that way.

If you want a more in-depth analysis of particular topics, look elsewhere, but if you want a good starter book that covers Special Warfare 101, give it a read. I can't recommend it to military and tech geeks who voraciously consume literature on the subject.

Is it available on Kindle?

Nvm remembered I'm an adult with internet.

edited 26th Dec '14 12:22:41 PM by QuestionMarc

I know this is a tedious piece of own-trumpet blowing, but after all the effort I put into it I don't really care: I made a thing on the Armored Vehicle Thread.

Wow. Great work. Excellent collection.

Coming back to the story of the USS Buckley, I was retelling the story to my wife, and she was only politely interested, until I got to the part with the sole casualty, where it occurred to me to more accurately describe it as "a sailor bruised his knuckles punching a Nazi into the North Atlantic."

In regards to a Captain commanding a squad, the only way I foresee that happening is if his unit gets hit so hard that he's not even in local command of the HQ platoon anymore, or if he just happens to be there with the squad (morale visit? Hitching a ride in their truck?) when shit goes pear-shaped.

edited 26th Dec '14 3:31:47 PM by AFP

Only place I've seen an O-3 command a squad is Special Forces.

Course, when your squad mates are E-6's and E-7's....

Re O-3 leading squad: It'd be extremely unusual to say the least. A squad is two steps down from a captain's usual command. It wasn't that unusual for a captain to take command of a platoon in the Soviet-Afghan War, especially for missions that required a lot of experience, but captains as squad leaders—no. The exception might be for a company-sized engagement when the captain has essentially lost control of his company and the sub-elements are fighting independently, in which case he might take impromptu command of the headquarters section for the moment.

An example of that latter case might be the fighting at LZ Albany in the Vietnam War, which took place a day or three after the fighting at LX X-Ray that was famously depicted in We Were Soldiers (and which takes up about a third of the entire book, in fact). An American Airborne was traveling via Leather Personnel Carriers away from LZ X-Ray, and more or less stumbled blindly into a North Vietnamese unit. The various elements were all strung out along the road and basically got pinned down in place without any effective unit-wide C2. One highlight of the battle was Lt. Rick "Hard Corps" Rescorla's company being sent in as reinforcements, with Rescorla leaping out of a Huey dual-wielding an M-16 and an M79 grenade launcher, because that's basically how he rolled.

Re: O-3 leading a squad: For contrast, watch Generation Kill and note that Sergeant Colbert (E-5), taking commands from pretty much everybody else, is a Squad Leader, with two humvees under his command. Sgt Patrick (IIRC) was leading the other squad, and Lt. Fick (O-2) and Gunny Wynn (E-7) and three other guys made up the Platoon HQ section in a single truck.

edited 26th Dec '14 6:46:05 PM by AFP

@Aprilla - I better check that book out. I still have pretty much no idea how special forces work. Seeing how I love to have spec ops operators as protagonists in my story, it should be helpful. XP

@Achameid - Damn, that was detailed. Kudos to you, mate.

Man, that thread is really active and fast-growing. Such is the charm of the armor, I guess.

RE: 0-3 leading a squad: We even have a trope for this.

You know, by now I find myself frown, especially in Anime, where there are officers whose rank is decided by how well s/he can fight by himself.

For God's sake, do Japanese really find nothing wrong with the concept of a Colonel or a General fighting in the front battlefield, past the samurai era?

d roy: The book Aprilla is talking about is not about special forces so much as it is basically a civilian run down of the field manuals and field craft of the US military in general. It is basically like a primer or intro the US forces method of operation in general.

No, it's still worth it. We're moving out of state for job reasons, but my fiance will probably be getting a civil service job, and I'll stay at least a weekend warrior, but I'll probably get a job as a security consultant for alarm systems.

Supposedly one of the reasons why massive airborne operations grew a precedent for having huge costs in comparison to gains is because that they easily led to en masse examples of this – the horrific German experience in the Netherlands and Crete and the Anglo-American examples in Normandy and the Rhineland (Operation Varsity) come into mind.

It’s mainly Artistic License – Military coming into play, although the proven leadership boost of an officer leading from the front also comes into mind. The fact that numbers of high-ranking Japanese commanding officers had actually made it Truth in Television, especially as the war went on, did it may additionally play a part. I recall reading an article about the Okinawa air campaign that had a paragraph mentioning an IJN aviation general who gave up the safety of his administrative job for the Honor Before Reason sake of having one last go at the enemy – needless to say he died leading a kamikaze attack on the USN.

In the Korean War, an American general left his post to hunt a T-34 through Seoul. IIRC, he killed the tank but lost the battle, so perhaps he should just have stayed in his CP and commanded.

Someone getting an Army Commendation Medal for internet trolling sounds like it would be a Duffelblog article, right?

Wrong.

/headdesk

(This Ain't Hell article where I got the above link, via Baen's Bar)

Well, it was for (hopefully) successfully dealing with some online that were soldiers, so it's somewhat less bad...

Well, it was for (hopefully) successfully dealing with some online that were soldiers, so it's somewhat less bad...

Calling people on being asshats is fine, that part I don't really object to.

Taking it up the chain of command? Kinda questionable, but I suppose technically correct if the asshats in question don't moderate their behavior, though it doesn't exactly refute the common perception that 1st Sgts have nothing better to do than fuck things up for others.

Getting a fucking ArCom for it? Fuck that with a rusty railroad spike.

I know that's hardly the first time a medal was given for really silly bullshit (see the Bronze Stars and similar medals given out to POGs who never left the base in Afghanistan or Iraq, and never faced anything more dangerous than a hangnail), but an ArCom for being an internet snitch?

(page topper context added)

edited 28th Dec '14 6:48:47 AM by Nohbody

It's also the fact that people were doing it with photos of them in uniform attached, which reflects badly on the service.

Yeah, the only part of this I've got an issue with is that she got a medal for it. Everything else she did seems perfectly acceptable to me. SNC Os should correct other military personnel who are acting like asshats in public. If they don't take the hint, let their chains deal with it. I've seen folks imply that the SNCO should have been too busy with SNCO duties to ever have any time to be online at all, ever. Which is just silly, let's be honest here.

That said, this comic is obligatory.