The Military Thread

It was from a US army report on the losses of there armored vehicles, so I would assume generally Shermans? I am not sure if something else made up the bulk of the forces and the Shermans were more iconic?

Either way I have to agree with the T-34 probaly being around there as well if not worse, to say nothing of german engineering....

I knew famine was a big killer for WWII, but desise in that one as well?

Edited by Imca on Nov 18th 2020 at 3:25:46 AM

That's curious. Yeah, that would be Shermans.

Which makes it even more dire, because generally speaking, the Sherman was the most reliable armored vehicle built by any major belligerent in the war. I shudder to imagine what the numbers look like for everyone else. Do you happen to have a link to the report? Sounds like interesting reading.

Edited by math792d on Nov 18th 2020 at 3:36:21 AM

Its been a long time which is why I am a little lost on what the exact numbers were, I just remember it being a bit more then half.

But my source was from a "Military History Visualized" video on the ratio of tank losses in WWII that was in the segment explaining how losses due to enemy fire were actually the minority of tank losses, I can go dig up his source tomorrow but I think he is pretty reliable.

Edit: Good news is I found it much quicker then I expected too, I was off, it was only 40% of losses due to mechanical issues, my bad, but the source is.

Which to be exact, puts "non enemy causes" at 13% for a hard documented figure, but then goes out of its way to explain how said documented figure is very wrong because of the fact that very few people were concerned with tank losses due to non-combat issues, and that only the US marine corps and the Canadian army bothered to document them, and if you adjust for that with there numbers, the figure actualy comes back at 40% instead of 13%, which would put it at the biggest individual loss of tanks, but a bit less then the other ones added together.

Edit Edit: Other neat outliers in its data, is that hallow charged weapons only account for 7.5% of total tank losses, but that's because they were introduced late in the war, if you only count the losses from after they were introduced onward, they actually make up about a third of all tank losses.

Edited by Imca on Nov 18th 2020 at 4:00:31 AM

WWII was when things turned around. Between advances in weapons tech, vaccination, medicine and transport/logistics, we started to see battlefield deaths decisively outpacing deaths from illness for the first time. Which isn't to say that the war didn't kill tons of people through diseases: there were deadly typhoid epidemics in the USSR and the Middle East that killed many people on both sides, as well as the cocktails of horror that concentration camp inmates went through.

As recently as the '80s, in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Soviet Army had 13,500 combat fatalities, 1,000 dead from diseases and accidents... and over 400,000 personnel, two-thirds of the entire force, hospitalised for serious illness at one point or another.

Part of the reason was that the Soviets didn't expect to stay for long; the plan was to stop the Afghan communists from purging themselves into oblivion, stabilise the government until it could deal with the insurgency on its own, and then be Home by Christmas. So a lot of their bases were bare-bones temporary facilities with the resulting poor sanitation. Soviet combat units also tended to be light on tail and heavy on tooth as a result of their doctrine, which made quality health care on the field hard to come by. And Afghanistan's utter poverty and lack of infrastructure didn't exactly help.

If nothing else, at least, it beats having a plague scythe through your capital, bonk your head of state and nearly tank your war effort before it could even get off the ground. *cough* Plague of Athens *cough cough*

Makes me glad we don’t usually see that much deliberate biological warfare

I’m assuming

The reason we don't see bio-warfare are:

• Cost - it takes effort to develop a reliable pathogen and a delivery system.
• Containment - COVID-19, EBOLA and AIDS all began with people taking a bite of things they shouldn't have. If someone develops some nasty bug, a breech of containment isn't just an "oops".
• Blowback - even if the enemy is far away, there is nothing to stop a bug from spreading back to friendly territory. Chemicals can be stopped by gas masks and suits. A pathogen can linger -or worse- mutate.
• Every civilized nation has renounced bio-warfare. The nation or group to use it is just painting crosshairs on themselves.

To my understanding, and I could be wrong about this, germ-based weaponry (such as a hypothetical smallpox attack) is essentially the most illegal weapon of mass destruction and using one is basically seen as crossing the Moral Event Horizon, even when compared to something like nuclear weapons.

To use a comparison: A nuclear weapon will cause long-term and inhumane destruction to whatever city you drop it on. A biological weapon, however, has a nearly unknowable capacity for collateral damage. Drop a nuke on Beijing, you destroy Beijing. Drop a smallpox bomb on it? You might kill thousands of people in Mecca and London.

Dropping biobombs on Seatle was considered to be immoral even for the IJA...

The IJA? The International Juggler's Assocation?

Edited by Protagonist506 on Nov 18th 2020 at 4:46:19 AM

Though they were more than willing to unleash malaria(?) on occupied Asia. But both they and the Germans (very rarely) used chemical weapons on non-Western Allies, so it is on brand I guess.

Since when has any ones morals ever made sense? I mean I know that much, but I am also serious about the whole "It was considered too imoral to use them on the Amercians" thing.

I... kind of want to say racisim given that was the order of the day back then.

Maybe there was pragmatism in play? The Germans were convinced (incorrectly) that the British had a well developed nerve gas program, and that was one of the reasons while they only pulled it out (and only during a few cave battles, IIRC) on the Soviets. Of course, there's also a practical issue of everyone and their dog having access to protective gear.

For their part, the Japanese knew the US was a juggernaut, but I have no idea what their perception of American biological/chemical weapons programs was.

But racism is always a factor, considering the players involved.

Still strange that biological weapons (on Western targets at least) was, for the most part, the one atrocity Japan considered beyond the pale. Huh, TIL.

Edited by Rationalinsanity on Nov 18th 2020 at 10:08:12 AM

They were scared that if they used chemical weapons on the Western Allies openly, terrible retribution would follow. They couldn't risk enraging the Western public - especially the Americans - in such a manner. The Chinese were too poor to retaliate and so chemical weapons were used regularly against them, as were bioweapons.

Of course, the Allies contented themselves with flattening the place conventionally, up until Oppenheimer and friends finished up their little assignment...

I believe chemical weapons were on table for at least some of the Operation Downfall scenarios, with the justification that while Japan hadn't used them on American/Commonwealth forces, they had used gas on an Allied nation (the Republic of China).

Hard to say how the Allies would have reacted to biological/chemical attacks...but I suspect the reaction would have remained the same routine of "reduce their cities to rubble with normal bombs, and bring in the nukes if they haven't capitulated by the time they are ready".

Chemical weapons would've been likely used during Downfall, and i suspect whatever bioweapons they had.

The report from the investigation into alleged war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan is out. Chief of the Defence Force Angus Campbell offered an apology to both the Afghan and the Australian people; announced that the 2nd Squadron SASR will be struck off the order of battle and replaced; asked to revoke the meritorious unit citation awarded to the Special Operations Task Group in Afghanistan; addressed the special operations forces' "warrior culture" and relative isolation from the rest of the ADF and praised SASR personnel who came forward to expose the misconduct.

Its the Canadian Airborne Regiment all over again.

Here's hoping the reform process ends well.

Kinda awkweird that the only two things I could really name about the Canadian Airborne are 1) being trained to use 84mm HEAT rounds on squishy foot targets, and 2) war criming so hard they got nuked off the registry. Aside from being, y'know, Canadian and airborne.

And honestly, the reason modern militaries don't put that much stock in chemical weapons is because they're quite useless against any half-decent modern military. It costs a few hundred dollars to equip an infantrycritter with a military-grade gas mask. Modern armoured vehicles and military structures are already NBC-proofed by design.

You can get some mileage out of them by using them as terror weapons on a poorly-equipped non-state foe or civilian targets, who might not enjoy the same protection. But against military targets, it's nothing that an equivalent mass of high explosives can't do far better. Plus a lot of chemical agents are volatile; you'd have to store the precursors in special facilities and then mix them just prior to deployment, which puts another layer of headache into the scenario.

eagleoftheninth - The problem with the Aussie's SAS is mirrored in the US SOCOMM: The War on Terror made Special Forces rock stars.

And we all know how rock stars behave when those who write the checks can't say no.

The US Navy SEALs have a problem with drug use.

Didn't a pair of them straight up murder another servicemember who found out about the drug thing?

And Germany had to dissolve a KSK company earlier this year for straight-up turning into a Nazi cult and planning to murder a politician.

Here's a pretty interesting article from earlier this year (though I don't agree with all its conclusions) that partly discusssd how the high degree of independence demanded from low to mid-ranking personnel on the field in pacification/counter-insurgency operations has the unfortunate tendency to elevate Colonel Kurtz types to positions of power.

Army Maneuver Officials Want to Buy Ammo Resupply Drones and Give them to BCTs.

Eagle: That seems to be a perpetual problem with groups like this. It's difficult to have oversight and control.

That drone resupply idea sounds similar to the Marines using a K-Max Droned helicopter to deliver supplies to mountain top outposts. It did pretty well in the role and shifted a good bit of material.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Nov 19th 2020 at 5:15:53 AM

News on Australian-Japanese military cooperation. It's significant since Australian and Japanese soldiers can be stationed in either country for training or do joint SAR ops. This also includes what to do in case someone from either country commits a crime.

Edited by Ominae on Nov 21st 2020 at 4:06:31 AM

We're gonna have Evas ripping up the bush at Shoalwater, neato.