The Military Thread

Taira, I think that's exactly what AFP is saying, with the added bonus of "if you add a bunch of poorly-disciplined, poorly-motivated conscripts to the military, that rot will spread to the others".

Historically, military conscription has had more of an impact on class consciousness than it has had on political leanings. There has been a major cultural shift since the rise of modern representative democracies, but even then, there were troubling schisms between the officer ranks and those legally forced into the military via conscription.

You have a corps of high-pedigree aristocrats who have been groomed to be officers, knights, samurai or whatnot, and these people were given direct command of peasants who took up a shield and spear at the last minute. It's not too surprising that some non-trivial disdain will be afoot when you have a baker's son taking suicide orders from a nobleman who has arbitrarily decided which lives will be sacrificed in the execution of his strategies.

As you all know, modern technology, the expansion of the education system and further development of democratic principles eroded this relationship without totally deleting it. World War I was a major turning point in the necessary redevelopment of both the enlisted ranks and the officer ranks.

All Quiet On The Western Front and the poetry of Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen do a good job of capturing the dangers of forcing young men into dangerous situations that they themselves have little political control over. Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est does a wonderful job of illustrating how the horrors of modern mechanized warfare totally shatter the glory and beauty that many non-frontline officers and civilians promoted.

For example, instead of the idealized vision of a bunch of valiant officers charging into the midst with sabers drawn, galloping on beautiful horses, you have a young painter, poet, chef or violinist with zero combat experience and zero interest in the war effort choking to death on poison gas as he fumbles around with his shitty gas mask.

edited 24th Jan '15 7:14:54 AM by Aprilla

My friends in Afghanistan said half the shit in their kits was never used or wasn't able to be used because it was the wrong thing. These were guys who did patrols as well as repairs and other jobs.

We don't need anyone running around with 100lbs of gear. That is fucking retarded. We need to either design a better system or stop wasting money on fucked up aircraft so that we can invest in lighter and safer gear so we aren't killing our soldiers from the inside out.

One of my friend's mom sent him body armor because he wasn't issued any even though he was on foot patrols in Iraq. My sister's ex was a supply manager. He had all sorts of stories to tell about how gear wasn't given out right or how shit gear would be sent to scrimp money.

Its stupid. We have enough money going into the department of defense to make better arrangements. If nothing else, I rather drop a few thousand per solider for lighter and better gear then the several thousand dollars needed for a knee replacement and disability payments.

Soldiers are currently treated as disposable tools. They should be treated as long term investments

Part of the reason for so much gear is that you don't know what you'll need until you return to base. If it's a quiet patrol and nobody shot at you, all you needed was water, Oakleys, and sunscreen. Unless of course nobody shot at you because they decided the armor-clad fellows with assault rifles, LM Gs, mortars, and sophisticated radio equipment weren't worth the suicidal fight to challenge.

edited 24th Jan '15 7:50:41 AM by AFP

AFP:That is true.

A 70lb pack which is everything you need for the field has very little extraneous junk at all. That load alone taira already covered a lot of the basics. That is all your spare changes you are going to need, food, water, ammo, batteries, munitions, first aid kits, body armor, etc. It adds up pretty quick.

A trooper being a bit too cavalier about cutting things from their load for being "extraneous" was hard lesson learned in Mogadishu when several of the troops involved decided they didn't need all that extra stuff. That is also not the first time in military history where letting troops decide what is needed bites them in the ass when they don't have it. It really bit them in the ass when things went pear shaped.

The gear loads are not arbitrary they are calculated. They contain basic subsistence and war fighting items for a multitude of missions.

A nice light short range patrol load isn't all that bad. But when you have to do long hauls with long patrols where you are out for days or weeks also common in Afghanistan you are carrying a lot more around.

The 70-80lb average load has been pretty consistent since WWII.

Scrimping and saving aside the weight issue is not completely ignored. This is why technology aimed at providing both lighter ammo and weapons has been a thing ongoing for a long time. There are some serious practical limits in making weapons too light currently that will tech change in the future. Same for the quest of light weight high protection body armor. Same for new technologies like the military exo-skeleton to help take some of that weight off the troopers. The same goes for smaller lighter weight radios and batteries. Same goes for a lot of the gear.

Weight reduction seems to be appropriate for special operations forces for some fairly obvious reasons. As a highly specialized and more mission-specific fighting force, commandos are going to have more flexibility in terms of mission kit. It's not really practical to allow regular forces to pick and choose what they want to the same level as special operations forces. As Teufel explained, some of the Rangers saw Delta operators donning rolled up sleeves, fully grown beards and a lack of body armor, but they misunderstood why the Delta operators dressed the way they did.

Hourai Rabbit once referred to a situation where an officer tasked with advising a SEAL team insisted that they carry body armor despite the team making the logistical decision that this was unnecessary given their mission parameters, topography and distance to cover ^note  a long-range reconnaissance patrol under the cover of darkness and tall vegetation with a team consisting of no more than 8 men, two with grenade launchers, two with DMR kit, two squad automatic weapons and each man with a set of explosives and satellite radios - already getting kind of chubby given the speed and stealth needed . Considering orders must be followed, they did wear their body armor, and after traveling a long distance through the mountains of Afghanistan, they suffered casualties during an ambush because they had been prematurely fatigued from the excessive weight and therefore lost a lot of energy and speed needed to adequately counterattack.

edited 24th Jan '15 10:00:27 AM by Aprilla

Time and time again even in ambushes like that the body armor is allowing more people come back more intact than they would without it. What would have been serious or lethal hits turn into comparatively minor injuries with the trooper often being able to shrug them off and keep fighting. Most cases you only need the front and back plates which thanks to those ceramic inserts doesn't break 30lbs vs heavier armor grade steel inserts of equal protection.

Take your pick. Have back, ankle, and hip problems or take a bullet to your far more vital bits. Taking a round to the vital bits often does damage a lot worse then weight strain injuries by a long shot with a good chance you won't live to complain about your injuries later. The lingering and long term impact of near fatal injuries is also a lot worse and more deeply impacting then weight strain injuries.

You ditch the body armor to save weight you get people bitching about not having armor and wasting lives instead. The way I see it, it is a no win situation. Better to make them wear the damn vest so they at least live to bitch about the kit being too heavy then have them comfy and wind up shipping them home in plastic.

Aprilla, we also just mentioned a case where Army Rangers elected not to take body armor with them for a short mission where they wouldn't need it anyways, and several ended up dead due to lack of body armor in the ensuing Battle of Mogadishu.

I find myself idly wondering if they could prevent injuries by having troops wear joint braces? They'd probably just be uncomfortable, would become a source of sweaty funk and possibly related fungus/hygiene issues, and the troops would try to get rid of them.

edited 24th Jan '15 10:46:07 AM by AFP

While some things are very situational, turning serious/lethal wounds into light/moderate wounds is one of those things that's really good to have when everything goes wrong.

To clarify, I'm agreeing with you guys, not disagreeing. I was only pointing out that more specialized units will sometimes go without the heavier armor that larger, more regular forces really need. The problem with the younger, less experienced Rangers in Mogadishu was that they were mimicking the behaviors of the Delta operators without fully grasping the importance of those behaviors.

You've probably heard of people wanting to wear Oakleys, walking around with the safety off and growing out beards to look cool, but this misses the point that the men who operate this way are going to spend a good 80 percent of their time not being seen by the enemy. Dressing like a member of DEVGRU with only a boonie hat and a web vest doesn't make much sense when you're going down the streets of Somalia in broad daylight. Another example I can think of is with ghillie suits. They look really cool, but snipers don't wear them as often as some works of fiction proclaim. They can become very hot and cumbersome.

edited 24th Jan '15 11:13:45 AM by Aprilla

Fair enough. From what I have learned Ghillie suits are well pretty funky in smell. Not just from muck they crawl through either.

Another point about the load, touched on by the last paragraph of this post by Tuefel, is that if you don't include all the shit, someone is going to bitch about "not doing everything we can for the troops" if it can be even vaguely argued that the lack of a certain piece of kit maybe, possibly could have contributed to a fatality.

I'm not saying we should go all General Ripper and just send them out with nothing more than a smile and a ka-bar, but the focus on safety above all else (see reflective belts) is part of why I say that it's no longer considered acceptable to fight to win.

And on the subject of reflective belts: What's really needed to defeat ISIS.

The military needs a mix of technology, structure, and even cultural change to fix this.

The other problem is not so much the weight of the kit but how that weight and the associated load is distributed.

Well that is the other part of the problem. Even with it evenly distributed a 100lbs + is still a lot to be hauling around.

What is you guys' joke motto for Heckler and Koch again?

Because you suck and we hate you

Thank you. Mind if I use that in a fanfic?

It isn't ours. It comes from a blog entry by Larry Correia IIRC is the origin for its use on this site.

We didn't invent it, go right ahead.

Food for thought:

Wikert: Has Joni Ernst broken military protocol?

The Senator has had some choice things to say about the President of the United States, which normally would be hunky-dory (free country and all), but here has an interesting twist because she is also a commissioned officer in the United States Army National Guard. Wonder how far that shit would fly if she was any other supply officer calling her Commander in Chief a dictator.

Speaking of Joni Ernst...

Sen. Joni Ernst learned to 'live within her means' -- on the taxpayer's dime

Her family has received nearly half a million dollars of Federal Farm subsidies from her Uncle Sugar over the last 20 years. Brings this scene to mind:

I hate to say but at this point should we ever have any surprise over this news anymore?

Some thoughts on American Sniper:

Not a horrible movie, but insufficient. I recommend just reading the book, but the movie is not abysmal or anything like that. The editing was choppy, and I didn't like the flow of the narrative(s). The parenthetical plurality comes to mind because it feels as if the movie is trying to tell two different types of stories, hence my problem with the editing. Interspersing Kyle's tours of duty with his home life seemed to be an attempt to juxtapose his actions as a combatant with the psychological aftermath of those experiences. Honestly, I wanted a more meditative character study, and instead of bringing the book to a film format (with some obvious artistic liberties I could have done without), the story would have been more effective and emotionally powerful if it had focused more on Kyle's post-service life. There is a distracting tug of war between the character introspection and the macroscopic events of the war effort, and it ends up being a weak and hollow pastiche of a Navy SEAL's life and duty.

Descriptive violence can be an effective storytelling device, but given the oversaturation of the subject matter's action, this is one case where the violence would be better put to use through allusion and background exposition. I would prefer a movie primarily about Kyle's work with the veterans rather than his experiences in Iraq, and I agree with other critics that this element of Kyle's life was a missed opportunity. To put it differently, Eastwood probably should have made a Gran Torino-esque film where a veteran comes to terms with both his past and present as he works with those who share his experiences. The action sequences were good on a superficial and visceral level, but it still felt like Bradley Cooper sitting on a rooftop with a rifle. Gran Torino was an intellectually and philosophically superior film, so I'm a little disappointed by Eastwood's work this time around.

The movie met my expectations, and I can't really say it's that good, but definitely worth a watch. As I said before, the movie has a formulaic copy-and-paste narrative that doesn't do justice to Kyle or the Iraq theater.

edited 5th Feb '15 11:05:52 PM by Aprilla

Politicians love farmers as much as they love big corporations. The reason for the huge investment in biofuels and ethanol subsidies? The Iowa caucuses and farmers voting as a block. The DOD sank billions in "biofuels" for little return on the investment.

Sure, most jet engines can burn biofuels, heck an M-1 Abrams will burn hairspray if it's flammable. But biofuels are a bust for now. And yet the subsidies (and DOD grants) continue.

Just because developing ethanol fuels worked in Brazil doesn't mean it'll work anywhere else. Mostly because it's not a pain in the ass to grow sugar for ethanol production in Brazil.