The Military Thread

Arleigh Burkes, at least, are called destroyers because that’s the lineage they draw most directly from. Technically they’re “guided missile destroyers”, but that’s typically just shortened to destroyer.

That said, tradition is a huge part of most naval customs. We still use age of sail terms for a lot of stuff. Don’t discount tradition, especially in military circles.

My favorite was what I called “bureaucratic ping pong”: being told by two different people that the other one is the one who can help.

They should have sent a poet.

Tell that to the US military officers and enlistees who keep tearing their hair off over the US Senate's adamant insistence on adding even more tanks and such to the military's increasingly growing surplus of such hardware just to fill the relevant senators' pockets with defense contractor money, instead of allocating that part of the military budget to fix their increasingly worsening issues with maintenance and other essentials.

I'm not saying that tradition as a whole has no place in military culture. I'm just saying that this specific case of calling it "tradition" is just using the concept as an excuse (and not a good one, at that).

Edited by MarqFJA on Aug 11th 2018 at 9:39:04 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Is what ships are called even that important?

Oh really when?

I do all the time . Those military personnel know perfectly well how messed up their military bureaucracy can be even without the civilian masters messing with the budget, it's in the nature of a military organisation. When confronted with a crisis or war, that's when things start going "smoothly".

No. Conventions are conventions. We're looking for new mine layers, but the new ones would have a heck of a lot more capabilities than the name would imply.

Edited by TerminusEst on Aug 11th 2018 at 11:50:20 AM

Si Vis Pacem, Para Perkele

It does if you want people to quickly understand what kind of ship you're talking about. Saying aircraft carrier immediately tells the other guy that this ship you're talking about carries aircraft, and from there it's a simple and reasonable logical step to further assume that these aircraft serves as this ship's primary "weapons" rather than guns or missiles.

It also matters if you don't want to look like a stubborn fool who insists on using names that are no longer appropiate for the thing they're assigned to. Destroyer made sense back when the ship type in question served the purpose of hunting down torpedo boats, i.e. it was a convenient shortening of "torpedo boat destroyer". That purpose has ceased to exist decades ago simply because torpedo boats themselves have been forced out of blue waters and into coastal areas due to the pace of technological advancement being very biased against them (they don't even call them "torpedo boats" anymore).

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

You go by what class of ship it is, not whether it's a frigate or a destroyer or what have you.

You know an Aerleigh Burke class is a Aegis craft. You know a Kirov class is a massive fucking dreadnaught and you know a Trafalgar class is a hunter-killer sub.

Oh really when?

Marq: You're going a bit overboard here. It's quite simple. The ship classes are called whatever the hell they are called. It changes from era to era you really have no choice but to go with what is used for that era. It is easier to ask what are ships of X-Era called or what are their ship types. Tradition in terms of naming of ship types is largely aimed roles the ship types that inspired the vessels played in earlier days. It isn't a direct or concrete tie but one that is a matter of convenience for the people who not only created the ships but the Naval forces in the first place. Since we don't practice Naval warfare the same way even a century ago things changed. The current modern trend is largely decided by ship weight and general role. The lines of what roles ships play have been fuzzed over by the advances of technology and shared capability but weight class and overall role and capability still fit in there. Destroyers are smaller and less heavily armed than Cruisers. Frigates are smaller still. Then we have an array of specialized small craft in even smaller sizes like PT boats. At the top end of the scale, we have Aircraft Carriers and are really the only large surface combat ship currently in use. Submarines occupy their own special niche because of how they worked and they have drastically changed from their first widespread use in WWI and have their own general classifications.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Aug 11th 2018 at 4:43:08 AM

Who watches the watchmen?

Yeah, I don’t think the name “destroyer” is inappropriate for our current craft. It makes a lot more immediate sense than “cruiser”, given that they are meant for surface warfare.

The argument that they should be called cruisers is a weak one, in my opinion. Guided missile destroyers draw their lineage directly from torpedo boat destroyers, even if modern technology and demands have increased their size and firepower.

Edited by archonspeaks on Aug 11th 2018 at 3:33:26 AM

They should have sent a poet.

Speaking of evolution of military things....

Is it just me or are tanks essentially the modern evolution of the knight? A heavily armored, highly mobile (to the point that it surprises people) breakthrough unit that requires specialized equipment and tactics to neutralize.

To the point where in some militaries they retain the lineage of old cavalry units.

"Yup. That tasted purple."

Immy: Yes and no. European knights themselves had a number of evolutions that start roughly before the fall of the Western Roman Empire and continue forward from that point. There is further technical division in Western and Eastern European knights due to threats and challenges the respective regions faced and how they chose to use, arm, and equip their cavalry. In broad terms yes. They fill a similar broad niche only we are a lot more offensive in our use of tanks. Tanks like knights are highly protected mobile forces that can possibly project a lot of force.

Also, no knights from the view as a weapons platform were not able to keep up with the firepower of infantry and had to change drastically for cavalry units to remain viable. While modern infantry can kill a tank with an assortment of weapons, the main weapon of tanks is capable of doing significant damage to even Naval vessels. Tanks have assorted technological edges which obviously no knight could ever have and they can also act as ad-hoc artillery.

The armour units still draw a lot of their tradition and history from the knights and their latter cavalry successors but they are not an exact replacement or a one for one filling the exact same role.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Aug 11th 2018 at 6:36:21 AM

Who watches the watchmen?

Re: One of my infodumps being "quite informative", Mark FJA, that's the nicest thing anyone's said to me in days! :D

Speaking of tradition, I still maintain that the US Air Force should claim their birthdate as 1 August, 1907, with the establishment of the Aeronautical Division, U.S. Signal Corps (first organization dedicated to manned heavier-than-air flight in the US military). We already claim the Army Air Forces and the Army Air Corps, so we might as well keep going back as long as there is service continuity (fun fact, General Hap Arnold, the first and only five-star General of the Air Force, was taught to fly by the Wright Brothers.)

I mean, we could do what the Marines do re: the Continental Marines and trace back to an unrelated earlier example of our mission, and call dibs on the American Civil War as the birth of the US Air Force (first use of military aviation in US history), but that would be absurd.

Also, I maintain that "Destroyer" is just as valid description as "Cruiser", given that Destroyers are meant to destroy the enemy. They just diversified over the years, going from destroying torpedo boats to destroying presumably anything within reach.

I like that in some sci-fi settings, such descriptions are fuzzy and vary based on who is talking, like how the Republic and Rebel Alliance in the Star Wars settings have "Star Cruisers" which are oftentimes as big as or bigger than the Imperial "Star Destroyers" that they face off against. Some of those Star Destroyers were in fact just Republic-era Star Cruisers with a new paint job and management. New brand, same friendly service.

Meanwhile, in Star Trek, you never hear the Federation describe their starships as "Cruisers" or what not, but the Klingons definitely describe Kirk's Enterprise as a "Battlecruiser" on at least one occasion. The Federation simply has peaceful exploration ships with enough firepower and trained crew to go toe to toe with a Proud Warrior Race like the Klingons off and on for decades. Meanwhile, the Federation is perfectly content to call Klingon Battlecruisers "Battlecruisers" because they don't dispute what the Klingons claim to use them for.

And then there's Babylon 5, where the classification is all over the place. There are about five different names for the setting's equivalent to The Battlestar: Big starship with lots of firepower and an embarked force of small fighters. The Minbari have War Cruisers, the Narn have Star Cruisers, the Centauri have Battlecruisers, and the humans have Destroyers (with the Interstellar Alliance's later heavy-hitting starships being similarly described as they were initially built by the humans). At one point we see an Earth Force officer describe an Omega-class Destroyer in dialogue as a Cruiser, at another point a flotilla of warships tied together by an Omega as a "Carrier Group."

Re: Evolution of cavalry:

It's kind of neat to see how many ways that one branched. You have Armored Cavalry (tanks), Air Cavalry (troops carried on and supported by helicopters, sort of like historical Dragoons), Attack Helicopters (less armored like a knight, but very mobile like mounted cavalry), and of course fighter planes and bombers (maybe less of the old Army tradition, but same cocky attitude and mission set of outflanking the enemy and wreaking havoc in their rear areas).

Coast Guard Officer Saves Drowning Teen Moments After Saying ‘I Do’

...That sounds like something out of a cheesy movie.

Reality does not give a shit about critics or audiences or ratings. It can be as cheesy as it damn well likes.

Reality may or may not be stranger than fiction, but it definitely does not have to live up to the expectations people impose on their fiction.

Disgusted, but not surprised

We had a Dragoon Squadron. It trained MP's mostly and shrank to non-existence as time went on. Most of its functions were put under the Army War School (which also has its own garrison).

Edited by TerminusEst on Aug 11th 2018 at 9:44:30 AM

Si Vis Pacem, Para Perkele

It can be argued that, in the First World War, fighter pilots became the modern equivalent of the knight. Pilots had to be officers, because flying was considered a "gentleman's sport." They often painted their aircraft in distinct colors, like medieval heraldry. And they dueled each other one-on-one, like a jousting tournament.

This Space Intentionally Left Blank.

Did knights ever have a maneuver warfare role outside of pitched battles, though? The way I understand it, heavy cavalry fully relied on having adequate fodder for their warhorses, which meant they had to march along the main body of the army while light cav dealt with scouting and raids. In contrast, modern armoured formations have the raw power and mobility to perform recce, engage in raids and strike at the enemy's rear areas pretty much on their own.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

@AFP: I believe the technical term for the Groom in this case is "a keeper"

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

While the chivalric image of two daring pilots duking it out in a one-on-one fight over No Man's Land is popular, it was actually a lot more common, especially by the end of the war, to see planes traveling in massed formations. If two pilots working together are more than twice as effective than one pilot, imagine what a dozen pilots or more working together can accomplish.

By 1918, most Allied offensives were preceded by Allied airpower massing to sweep Central airpower off of the battlefield, to prevent them from observing or interfering with movements of ground forces, or to spot for artillery.

I don't know, my favorite image is the enemy staring in horror as close air support planes flood the sky.

I'm not sure how big CAS got in WWI. They had bombers, and fighters would do bombing and strafing runs as well, but I don't know if they'd really developed that particular tactic very far yet (mind you, they didn't have radios for the planes yet).

I feel like the bigger danger when you saw enemy aircraft in the air was that one of them would loop back towards friendly lines and drop a note with your position for the artillery batteries.

There was a wireless telegraph which had been in military use since about 1910. Not exactly handy but it could a possible way to pass instructions for preplanned positions or missions.

Who watches the watchmen?

The primary Danish tank regiment is still called 'Jydske Dragonregiment' (Jutish Dragoon Regiment) because it retained that role as a fast, mobile formation.

The armored infantry are mostly concentrated in the Royal Life Guard and the Guard Hussars.

We have a lot of fun names.

Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.