The Military Thread

The number of people disqualified by rising obesity is offset by falling crime rates, better high school graduation rates and less young people with dependents. Right now somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of young people are ineligible for service, which sounds bad until you realize that number has historically sat around 60% and among the eligible percentage interest in service is actually climbing.

New Dutch military action show about fighter pilots. And maybe soldiers? I can't understand Dutch.

So, turns out a Swedish officer of 20 years had completely faked his credentials. He hadn't even finished high school with the required grades for officer school and forged an officers cerrificate with a fake colonel's signature. He still served in Afghanistan and as an administrator of encryption keys in military intelligence (among other things).

Literally nobody has any idea how he wasn't caught earlier.

Now I'm curious if he actually performed his duties well, of if he faked that to.

Though it is impressive, in a perverse sort of way, that he managed to pull it off at all, let alone for two decades.

Edited by Rationalinsanity on Jan 13th 2020 at 11:16:38 AM

So how was he finally exposed?

That just reminds me of Suits.

He managed to fake himself into a leadership position in the coast guard by forging a political sciences degree and a drivers license. After three years they noticed his background was faked in that regard and then told the armed forces who discovered the rest.

Even after the initial discovery they were thinking of making him a CO of the Swedish Mali contingent.

Edited by TerminusEst on Jan 13th 2020 at 8:01:11 AM

You bet your ass that somebody is writing a bio pic about him right now.

Which may or may star Leonardo Di Caprio.

While doing some contemplation regarding the Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series fanfic Tiberian Eclipse, I hit upon several important questions that may very well apply to a lot of sci-fi military stories that involve an interstellar military organization.

1. It would be not only perfectly logical but a necessity for an originally planet-bound military like the GDI from Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series to establish a separate branch (or whatever they'd call their top-level domain-specific subdivisions) for their space forces and operations once they achieve reliable interplanetary travel capabilities (and especially if they go beyond that to interstellar capabilities), right?

2. Would modelling this space force's organization on after the navy be the most plausible course of action?

3. If the military is expected to wage interstellar warfare on a regular basis (whether offensively or defensively), then joint operations would be the prevalent norm, and thus it would be logical for it employ something similar to the US military's unified combatant commands and make it a requirement that the senior commanders of such commands are extensively trained in joint warfare, right?

4. In an age of interstellar warfare, would naval forces be rendered essentially obsolete with the existence of space forces capable of Orbital Bombardment, and be effectively reduced in status to a glorified/blue-water version of coast guard forces?

Edited by MarqFJA on Jan 13th 2020 at 3:55:59 PM

1. Yes

2. Who knows

3. Yes

4. That's entirely dependent on the ability to project actual boots on the ground and whether dropping them from orbit in massive numbers on land is easier than on water or projecting aircraft from orbit that can operate in atmosphere.

4) Fuck no, blue water naval assets are probably your best planet based option for dealing with a space based threat from the planets surface, unlike mountain guns which are going to rely on fortification to try and live through bombardment, submarines can hide reasonably well from space craft, and worse.... its quite easy to lunch an orbit bound missile from a sub.

You might see less SURFACE vessels, but I can assure you that the oceans would be populated with boomers just waiting to ambush any careless orbital asset with a volley of anti-orbital missiles before they sink back into the depths and scoot away, with there ability to run deep not only providing an option to hide, but also some defensive resistance to just being slugged back out of the sea (water depth provides reasonable protection from high velocity munitions like spacecraft would use)

Edited by Imca on Jan 13th 2020 at 5:13:59 AM

Masers work from underwater.

How one organizes the military branches depends much more on the political balance of power within that nation, applied from within the constraints imposed by historical legacy, than it would be by logic or science.

Sort of related, but Iran announced that some people from the IRGC will be detained for firing on the Ukrainian jet that was shot down.

Is there any objective sources on the quality of the Russian Air Force, their fighters, and their pilots?

Modern or Cold War?

Modern

Well there's been a lot of good OSINT kinda stuff from watching them in Syria, Ukraine and Georgia. They've also done a lot of demonstrations and new models in the usual vein of Soviet-era flexing but you can't ever take those at face value. That being said they're still helpful in their own way.

Whether someone's gone and compiled all that into a few consolidated sources I don't know.

Yeah, you’re not gonna find all the information you need in one place for something like that. You’ll have to do some research.

Air power is also probably one of the areas Russia struggles most with, as a rule they’re going to be lagging behind modernized Western equipment there. Like China their efforts are focused on things that will give them more bang for their buck strategically speaking like A2AD systems, those things sell well and represent one of the few ways to effectively counter the US. Overall their military is more defensively focused, they’re not really equipped to project power outside of be small deployments.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 14th 2020 at 12:09:35 PM

A trailer for a remake of a legendary training film by the FDF that literally every soldier here has seen:

Plot: Finland ends up in a war with the mysterious enemy of Not-Russia. What follows is basically a dramatisation of the unfolding events, from the mobilisation of the reserves and actions of different service branches+units.

Edited by TerminusEst on Jan 14th 2020 at 12:21:02 PM

Another advantage of blue-water naval defenses is that they provide a threat to orbital forces without the collateral damage of any nearby towns like military bases tend to get.

Old news, but this came from Filipino Foreign Secretary Teddy Locsin after Soleimani was taken out by air strike.

Lot of local media carried the news. Locals condemned this for... consideration of our relations with Israel being one of them.

PS - League of Filipino Students protested the air strike in Manila and called Soleimani a hero against Western imperialism. There's been some protests near the American Embassy. Not sure if they're gone since it started weeks ago.

Edited by Ominae on Jan 15th 2020 at 5:21:44 AM

And this is why I have issues taking "Anti Imperialism" seriously

Although it is worth noting that the Philippines used to literally be part of the US's overseas empire. There were a couple of wars over it, so I'm not exactly surprised that folks take that angle when unhappy with US foreign policy.

Edited by AFP on Jan 15th 2020 at 4:23:01 AM

Locsin isn't so much an "anti-imperialist" as he is a dumb edgelord out to offend everyone with his thermonuclear takes.

That.

And that.

Anti-imperialism, when applied to not only pointing out the genuine harm that America did but also opposing the European colonial empires, China's own current imperialism, Japan's crazed rampage in the 1930s-40s and the Soviets attempting to treat the whole world as their pawns, works beautifully.

The racism experienced by the Filipinos as an American protectorate is damned bad. Of course, there are those which exceed it; the Belgian Congo under Leopold II's direct royal management, Japan being so bad that the Filipinos regarded having the Americans as an improvement, the Soviets claiming to oppose imperialism while enslaving Eastern Europe, the French cruelty in Algeria, the apathy of the British administration in India, China's insistence that Hong Kong accept its 'inevitable' nonexistence into just another mainland Chinese city subject to the party's will.

The main issue is when people twist a perfectly good belief into "America and all its people = bad", and focus on only America rather than the other current and former great powers. Which is what you see tankies doing.

Which is why I take the ideology and concept very seriously, albeit I choose to concentrate on it in its broadest definitions rather than letting Lenin and Che dictate it for me.

Edited by TheWildWestPyro on Jan 15th 2020 at 3:58:03 AM