Hammer of the Pervs
Without seeing a photo, I'd guess it's either foreign or a National Guard/Reserves patch. I can't think of any that I've seen that fits the description.
Aruba has a four-pointed red star on its national flag. Maybe it's from there?
edited 16th May '12 6:55:31 PM by Martello
"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.
I'm gonna say it's international, surplus stores have so much random junk when it comes to patches. I remember one halloween in high school I was a commissar, and I had about as many accolades as two Josef Stalins.
@Martello:
Also, while corrupt as fuck while we're here, I can see the ANP folding into the superiorly trained and influential ANA when we leave, bolstering their numbers of dudes with guns and training.
And the locals who aren't with the Taliban, who are now a minority, hate the Taliban, who are all busy jerking eachother off in Pakistan for the most part. I think the Talibs might just stay in Pakistan aside from the occasional probe, even after we leave. Simply setting foot in Afghanistans tribal areas, even if they aren't violent, will get them slaughtered on sight. They were lynching Talib supporters in the streets when I was there. Some of our guys thought that meant the locals were starting to like us, but I always knew it was because they hated them almost as much as they hated us.
Kandahar is a violent ass place sometimes with some very weird politics.
edited 16th May '12 7:51:05 PM by Barkey
Indiana Solo
"I had about as many accolades as two Josef Stalins."
![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
edited 16th May '12 7:51:05 PM by Joesolo
I'm baaaaaaack
Sigged.
edited 16th May '12 8:05:52 PM by Balmung
lol people are going to misinterpret that and think I'm bragging about my real ribbons.
I do catch shit for having a huge ass ribbon rack for my rank though. I've got a few decent ones on my top 2 rows, and then everything down there is worthless. It's just that I keep an eye on what I'm qualified to have, and keep a relentless vigil and timeline on what ribbons I'm about to qualify for.
So I've got like 3 different ribbons that are basically "Thank you for being in for 4+ years!" One for the Air Force... One for Reservists specifically.. And another one for reservists with slightly different wording.. Yeah. I'm a ribbon whore. Being an E-5 with 5 rows of gingerbread is the shiz sometimes.
But yeah, then there's one for boot camp, one for enlisting in a time of war.. One for scoring expert with pistol and rifle.. One for deploying to the middle east despite getting a better ribbon for the same thing.. and then shit like drill attendance, outstanding unit award that we all have, and then a state version of good conduct.
All the other ones I actually did something for, but those are all the useless things. I used to catch shit for it, and then the unit made me the Awards and Decorations monitor, so now I hook everybody in the unit up for the shit they are supposed to have.
edited 16th May '12 8:23:31 PM by Barkey
Yeah, sorry about forgetting the ellipsis. It'll probably be back to normal in a few days or if you ask me to change it.
On the other hand, that was the point of the Quote Mine.
edited 16th May '12 8:28:23 PM by Balmung
I was going to say that it's smart to stack your fruit salad as much as you can, because that helps with rank testing, then I remembered that you're not AD, and Guard/Reserve do things differently for ranks, from what I hear.
Ich bin nicht schuld! 's ist Gottes Plan!
Well, you'll get more and different people over in YF.
Maybe I should head over there to see about brainstorming for Seafoam's really combined arms doctrine.
Hammer of the Pervs
You'll get more advice from people who actually know what we're talking about over here. Quality over quantity. Also, this is a blessedly Tom-free zone.
"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.
Yeah, aside from the people in this thread who also post in YF, I wouldn't trust any tactical advice they gave me beyond "Crawl into the fetal position and pray someone saves me when I realize I can't block bullets with a katana."
Mostly true. Sometimes you really do have to move ASAP, but it's common doctrine to always know when you take a piece of cover exactly where you would advance to, and that the location has cover. It's equally important to remember that if you need to fall back, you have a clear line to do so that also has cover.
This means that suppressive fire - throwing lots of Dakka in the general direction of the enemy to prevent him from leaving his cover - is very important as well; it uses up many more bullets than the shots which are actually intended to hit something.
True. The western doctrines for infantry mobility warfare absolutely depend on this. Pretty much every American plan involving small arms combatants, once you take away the complexities, results in "Pin them down, get some of your people to one of their flanks, and use an L shaped base of fire to shred them."
Tanks are big, powerful and scary things, but they're easy targets for anyone who brings a bazooka or similar weapon.
Sometimes. Handheld anti-tank weapons are rather difficult to use at a distance(Talking the RPG and AT-4, not high tech guided anti-tank weaponry like the Javelin) In Urban combat, you're completely right. But it also pays to remember that in a professional army, a tank is never alone. It always has Infantry advancing near it, using it as cover and specifically hunting for people with anti-armor weapons. If you're looking down a block and see a tank coming at you, remember before you stick your neck out that on both sides of the street there are probably grunts kicking down doors and clearing all the buildings to either flank of the tank.
Machine guns trump just about everything that isn't heavily armoured.
Not necessarily. Machineguns are also big ass targets. They are loud, have tons of muzzle flash, and in general when you start laying down fire you become priority #1 for the enemy, and are especially vulnerable to snipers. Machineguns also aren't heavily mobile. If an MG nest has a street locked down, you can bet that rather than brave your machinegun, the enemy is going to try and just plow through the terrain in a different direction to come at you from a side that you don't have covered.
Air support can be a real Game Breaker if left unopposed, but Heaven help your pilots if the enemy has brought AA guns.
Sometimes. The huge boner that the US Air Force has for stealth? It's to negate this as much as possible. The F-22 for example, flies so frigging fast that you would be hard pressed to find commonly available AA that can take it down. If you can even see it on your radar. Helicopters, however, are extremely vulnerable to ground fire. Especially if they are roping down troops, a la Black Hawk Down/Operation Gothic Serpent.
Artillery fire can be traced, so put wheels on your guns and move them around a lot if you don't want the enemy to return your serve.
Not so much in the modern age. We've got guns that can fire on you from miles and miles away. You've usually got two worries: A counter-battery (Enemy artillery zeroing your position based on where your own shots are coming from) or attacking by air(Artillery usually has AA capabilities nearby for this reason) It's really about who is better equipped. In the sandbox, an insurgent fires a hand mortar at an American base with an Army Artillery unit, there's a really good chance that the computers in our artillery will track the trajectory of the shell, and then turn a 300 square meter space where the shell came from into a cratered hell. That's why insurgents fire a handful of rounds and then run away like hell.
A bunch of jerks with Kalashnikovs can bring the mightiest, best-equipped and best-organised armies to their knees. Then again, sometimes they can't.
Insurgencies bring large armies to their knees, not assholes with kalashnikovs. In Afghanistan, for example, the Mosin Nagant and Lee Enfield rifles probably cause more small arms casualties than AK's and RPK's do. And above those rifles are of course, IED's, which have nothing to do with assholes who actually fight, and more to do with cowards who do nothing but booby trap.
Easy Logistics is averted hard in Real Life. Vehicles need fuel, weapons need ammunition, and soldiers need food, water and sanitary facilities. Ensuring that all these basic needs are met can be a much greater pain than actually fighting the enemy.
This. It's why all the greatest empires throughout history had so many casualties to this. Alexander the Great lost more people to sickness and disease than he ever did to actual combat. It's one of the USA's strongpoints, we have the most powerful logistics system and projection in the world, and that's honestly, in my opinion, our most valuable asset if you had to pick one trait of ours.
Although Martello is our expert here, so he can confirm or deny that anything I said is right or wrong. I'm just a self-educated pseudo grunt.
edited 17th May '12 6:33:59 AM by Barkey
Well I at least agree with everything you wrote there. :P
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Ich bin nicht schuld! 's ist Gottes Plan!
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Thanks for the input. About the 'jerks with Kalashnikovs', I was using those words to mean 'guys with crappy training, equipment and organisation', i.e. a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits.
And what you said about Alexander the Great - I've read in several different places that all wars of the pre-machine-gun era had more casualties from disease than from fighting.
Mache dich, mein Herze, rein...
Pretty much true. Hell, even WW 1 there's the possibility disease was an even greater enemy than a Maxim gun. Those trenches were filthy pits.
OMG NO NOSECONES
Shoot, move and communicate.
There is a disturbing lack of discussion about proper radio/telephone usage.
If possible, use two-wire phones. Hide the wires good, and that stuff is pretty much undetectable and immune from jamming. Yes, you can encrypt two-wire signals.
However, telephones are limited by the wires. Great for defensive positions. Radios allow for mobility. To ensure you are not targeted by direction-finders and on the receiving end of some artillery fire, or simply listened in on, use the following techniques to ensure mission success:
- Have a signal operations plan (SIOP)!
- Change frequencies often, typically when the SIOP dictates, or when you suspect your channel is compromised.
- Use code-words, not plain-speech.
- Use the lowest possible transmitter power needed to perform the mission. If you can get by with half a watt, use half a watt, not forty watts.
- Limit transmission time to no longer than seven seconds at a time. Brevity is paramount. Break long messages up as needed.
- Use encryption, change it when the SIOP dictates. Encryption alone does NOT prevent direction-finding or jamming, so limitinig transmission length is still important.
- If possible, use frequency-hopping to assist in preventing direction-finding and jamming (very very resource-intensive to mass-jam an entire band of frequencies).
There's probably some more stuff that's good to know, but it's been a long time since I've actually had to DO this stuff.
Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.
Show an affirming flame
Speaking about disease, I posted a link to this before, but now's a good time to bring it up again: Epidemiologic Lessons Learned in the Soviet-Afghan War
by Lester Grau.
The important thing to note is that the Soviets were fighting under an extremely constrained logistical environment; everything they had either had to be moved in on one road, or flown in to Bagram. That, plus several cultural reasons specific to the Soviet Army (e.g., lack of a professional NCO corps, widespread corruption in the commissariat, extreme optimization for high-tempo war instead of counterinsurgency), meant that
The vast majority of the diseased troops survived and returned to duty. However, the manpower losses for combat formations were considerable—enough to disastrously affect readiness levels in the 40th Army. Similar stories played out in Chechnya. So, severe disease losses aren't entirely a thing of the past; if the army in question isn't doing a good job of keeping its troops supplied, you will see heavy losses from disease even in a modern war zone. (It'd be interesting to compare similar figures for the US forces in Vietnam.)
edited 17th May '12 12:40:40 PM by SabresEdge
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.
True, I'd get a pure military standpoint from here, but the last time I brought up Seafoam and what it was about, the thread died for like a day and a half. Also, given the nature of Seafoam's combined arms, a non-military perspective might provide some surprising insights.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
I believe I have, they look very similar to masks that I've seen crew chiefs on Pave Hawks for Para Rescue use. They wear them because the risk of hostile ground fire to an exposed gunner on a Hawk is pretty high.
They paint designs and shit on them. Not sure if this is the same thing, but it looks like it.
Prima Donna Director
Not sure if I'm starting a shitstorm or not, but what is y'alls opinion on the Zumwalt destroyers and Gerald R. Ford carriers?
"Urge to thump... rising." -Fighteer
Not a boat guy, so I guess I don't really care. The Zumwalt is ugly as fuck though, just like the LCS.
edited 17th May '12 5:15:03 PM by Barkey
Prima Donna Director
I was just going off you guy's reaction to the F35.
While the F35 is universally hated, I'm in the Air Force, so I guess it kind of concerns me.
Well, not really. What I do has fuck all to actually do with aircraft. Besides parking next to them and counting all the rivets when I'm bored.
Boats suck. We need to invest in flying Aircraft Carriers like in the Avengers movie. I want someone to make joke schematics that look convincing, just so I can hear the sound of the Secretary of the Navy's ass puckering from all the way in Los Angeles.
edited 17th May '12 5:17:17 PM by Barkey
I was wondering if you guys could help me identify a patch I found at my local surplus store. It was in a bin of both domestic and international patches for $1. I thought it looked interesting, so I got it, but I am not about to use it for anything unless I know what it is:
It is exactly 2 inches in diameter, a perfect circle black. In the center is a red four-point star with two red rings incircling the star like an atom formation. The point where the rings overlap are perfectly in line with the points of the star.
If I had the means I would post a picture, but that's not in my ability now, sorry. Otherwise the patch looks brand new, or at least it's never been sewn on.
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur