The Military Thread

Hopefully this is the case.

It's because "something something New World Order something something Revelations something something"

The EU army story seems to be only on the Express. So I'd reserve judgement on that.

Taira: Says the person who voted for the man who swore he would drain the swamp and instead flooded prime farmland filled it with alligators and invasive species.

In case you missed it Taira it was never a concern before because the big man with the pen has been ultimately been sane and reasonably intelligent. None of which applies to Trump or the majority of his cabinet.

And of course he's prioritizing defense spending instead of reforming HOW and WHAT we spend on.

But, whatever, fuck it.

Apparently John Mc Cain had plans for that that have already been revealed, but that proposal has to go through Congress, so it's probably going to be mangled beyond belief when it's put into law.

re: EU command structure - wow. Putin's Pillowbiter keeps talking about how obsolete NATO is and then uses it as a cudgel when the time to create a European command structure comes. What a fucking toad.

edited 22nd Jan '17 3:20:23 AM by math792d

Speak for yourself about UN being useless, UNICEF does a decent job in making sure children in my shithole don't get the short end of the stick more often than they already do.

UN sucks at solving conflicts because their members don't want it to, but the other works the UN does through its branches are priceless.

Figured I'd cross-post this from the British Politics thread. In the UK, unarmed missile tests are usually publicised afterwards. This one wasn't (for obvious reasons), which is why the media broke the story.

May refuses to confirm whether she knew about Trident 'malfunction'

edited 22nd Jan '17 8:38:33 AM by Wyldchyld

• I first posted this in European politics but, does anyone know how likely an EU common defense (or even a French-German-Polish) one is? And how effective it could be with current European militaries? ^note  I did read your response, math792d. Just curious for more opinions and some comment about the politics behind it and other concrete steps.
  
  (And both of the links are somewhat old but offer more on the EU Common Defense project)...
  • The Germans seem to be investing in something
  • and the EU seems to be acting with foresight... albeit under British protest

edited 22nd Jan '17 3:22:42 PM by CenturyEye

Do you mean an EU army? Because the EU already has a common defence and security policy with an official in charge of the Common Defence and Security Policy.

Yes

For those who don't hang out in the European politics thread, I'm just going to give a brief summary of those thoughts, keeping in mind that this is an amateur on the outside looking in. Though I could probably finagle some friends who're serving into giving me their perspective:

I was speaking on the likelihood of a European Common Defense to supplement or supercede the NATO command structure, one that's built for the European Union rather than NATO, since there are some substantial differences between the two ^note  for example, Sweden is a part of the European Union but not a member of NATO, and Norway is part of NATO but not part of the European Union.

As I see it, the primary concern for creating a permanent European command structure is that it would make it difficult for individual member nations to wield the same kind of control over their armed forces that they do today, especially as a hypothetical ECD would probably be geared more towards checking Russian aggression than power projection and military intervention/adventurism (depending on your level of cynicism). Having to go through the Union to deploy national armies might be something of a sore spot for military powers like France, Great Britain or Denmark (I mean, for a given value of 'military power' given that the entire RDA amounts to a division) who do a lot of military intervention outside their countries. It would probably be less of a problem for Germany or some of the Eastern European nations since their primary concern is the defense of themselves and regional European allies.

So the two main points of political resistance I can see are a question of non-ECD deployment flexibility and standardization problems.

edited 22nd Jan '17 4:11:20 PM by math792d

Looks like Jammeh got himself some mercs for a possible standoff before he gave up. The navy declared him not to be the true president and sided with the Barrows faction.

I found it:

Mission-type tactics (German: Auftragstaktik, from Auftrag and Taktik; also known as Mission Command in the US and UK), have (arguably) been a central component of the tactics of German armed forces since the 19th century. The term Auftragstaktik was coined by opponents of the development of mission-type tactics. —Mission Type Tactics

Considered a pillar of the German military system, the Russians had a few things to say about that:

Discuss

I don't think there is much to discuss - there's a reason Western armies adopted the operational level. I will say that lumping Britain and America into the same frame as Germany as far as this discussion goes is a bit flawed, especially if we're discussing World War 2 - era strategic doctrine. There are some very noticeable differences.

But yeah, partially because of operational thinking, I would argue that the Red Army was the best army in the world at the tail end of the War, partially because of their newfound understanding of operational-level doctrine (their greatest contribution to military science moving forward, to the point where it was retrofitted by historians), but also because they had gained a great deal of experience in a very short time in modern warfare.

Is it considered a division if you have 16,000 men?

Quality Hands On Solar Training Provided to U.S. Soldiers For A New Career. Thought some of y'all might be interested ;)

Soviet-style "Operational Art" inherently assumes that one's opposing force is organized, occupies a discernible territory, and capable of maneuver likewise to one's own. While this is appropriate for approaching a mechanized war across a wide swath of territory, as it was originally intended to on the Eastern Front, it dramatically falls short when confronted with an insurgency more focused on outlasting an occupying force than outfighting it. In the latter situation, German-style "mission-type tactics" prevail, as that doctrine inherently grants field units a much greater degree of flexibility in achieving objectives beyond the destruction of enemy forces. Compare and contrast the differing COIN doctrines of the US Army and Marines in Indochina, and why eventually Creighton Abrams chose to adopt the latter en masse in the conflict's final years.

What I think is more fascinating is the divergent evolution of infantry equipment in the Soviet Union vs. mainland Europe vs. the US. And yes, in this case, there's a very discernable difference between the three.

Essentially, in evolving and iterating on their machine gun doctrines in World War 1, you can kind of see the emergence of three schools. For ease of reference, we'll call them the British School, the German School, and the American School.

The British School (not actually unique to Britain - the Soviet Union and a great deal of Central Europe would use this doctrine as well) emphasized light machine guns, equipping their regular infantry squads with these light machine guns to provide more mobile cover to advancing infantry and reducing setup and deployment time. While HMG's remained in regular service, they did so as specialized, company-level formations rather than squad-based ones. That's also why the British and the USSR stuck with their (comparatively) antiquated Vickers and Maxim machine guns.

The German School emphasized the general purpose machine gun, most famously the MG 34 and MG 42. Lighter than a heavy machine gun but almost 50% heavier than the LMG's in service in Britain and elsewhere (compare the 13 kilo MG 42 to the 8 kilo Bren), belt-fed, with advanced air cooling, a bipod for setup and a pistol grip. Of course, the GPMG was also famously the 'heart' of German offensive infantry squads, with the riflemen mostly being there to provide support and ammunition for the heavy machine gun.

Finally, we have the American School, which emphasized individual firepower. America was, of course, famously the first nation to adopt a semiautomatic rifle in regular military service, but in doing so, they neglected both submachine gun and light machine gun developments. The BAR simply wasn't a sustainable weapon for an LMG role - it was nowhere near maneuverable enough, nor was it capable of enough sustained fire to really be useful in that role. The idea was that a soldier equipped with a semiautomatic weapon would be able to provide his own suppressing fire, independently of a machine gun.

However, this school of individual firepower meant that an American battalion in 1943 would only have 8 machine guns, whereas a German would have 44, and a British would have 63 LMG's. They had a similar problem with a general distaste for the submachine gun. What made American divisions truly terrifying wasn't their rifle firepower - rather, it was the smashing American artillery doctrine that really helped the US along early (by American standards) in the War.

Not to mention a remarkable emphasis on logistics. All of the machine guns won't win a battle for you if you run out of ammo before you run out of enemies.

This is also very true. The British also leveraged their logistical advantages, namely in being able to move supplies relatively freely due to the support of the Royal Navy and, later, the American Navy.

A fully motorized army also didn't hurt the Americans, even if it did mean they needed a lot more fuel.

edited 23rd Jan '17 9:34:29 AM by math792d

Donald Trump to declare January 20th as National Day of Patriotic Devotion

So....

We are kind of fucked if we don't do something

Soon...

Russia claims US shared intel for Russian airstrikes. US and Coalition says it's bs.

Are the Russians lying or are we already having intelligence leaks to them?

Oh speaking of.

Tillerson is in as secretary of state despite his financial ties to the Russian government.

edited 23rd Jan '17 4:26:47 PM by LeGarcon

Or is the US administration full of shit?

The world does not know.