When the drone program was created, it seemed to promise to spare soldiers from the intensity (and the danger) of close-range combat. But fighting at a remove can be unsettling in other ways. In conventional wars, soldiers fire at an enemy who has the capacity to fire back at them. They kill by putting their own lives at risk. What happens when the risks are entirely one-sided? Remote warfare erodes “the warrior ethic,” which holds that combatants must assume some measure of reciprocal risk. “If you give the warrior, on one side or the other, complete immunity, and let him go on killing, he’s a murderer. Because you’re killing people not only that you’re not necessarily sure are trying to kill you — you’re killing them with absolute impunity.”
Tag: military
Worse Tanks are better
In April of 1945 the Germans have 90 tanks on all of the Western Front. All tanks, everything, Panthers, Panzer IV, Tigers. They had a handful of Tigers. They had 400 other armored vehicles, assault guns, Stug III and things like that. So they had 500 armored vehicles on the entire Western Front, from the North Sea all the way down to Bavaria and Southern Germany. At that point in time the United States had 11k tank and tank destroyers. One reason there is 11k US tanks and tank destroyers is because the US decided to concentrate on a tank that was extremely reliable and relatively economical to build. And I don’t think anyone would claim that the Sherman was the best tank from the perspective of the tank crew, it didn’t have the best armor, it didn’t have the best gun, but from commanders perspective it was an excellent weapon. There were just lots and lots of them, so they gave the commander a lot of battlefield power. That can’t be said for a lot of the better German tanks because they simply were too expensive to be built in large numbers and they weren’t reliable enough, you couldn’t count on them.
The Second World Wars
The subtitle is How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, and the author is Victor Davis Hanson. I loved this book, even though before I started I felt I didn’t want to read yet another tract on WWII. Most of the focus is on the logistics and management side:
By 1944, the US Navy was larger than the combined fleets of all the other major powers.
At the start of the War, the United States accounted for 60% of world oil output.
The US soldier was treated for psychiatric disorders at a rate 10x that of German troops. The average hospital stay for an American soldier was 117 days and 36% were not returned to the front. Supplies for a typical American soldier exceeded 36 kg per day.
The German army killed ~1.5 GIs for every German soldier lost.
The highest American fatality rate was in the Pacific, at 4%, still a remarkably low rate for the war as a whole. America did so well because of high gdp and remarkably efficient supply lines and equipment and air and naval support.
Useless special ops
special ops haven’t turned around a single conflict in 15 years, but no one is questioning their effectiveness.
Colombia is hardly an anomaly when it comes to US special ops deployments—or the results that flow from them. For all their abilities, tactical skills, training prowess and battlefield accomplishments, the capacity of US Special Operations Forces to achieve decisive and enduring successes—strategic victories that serve US national interests—have proved to be exceptionally limited, a reality laid bare from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen to the Philippines. The fault for this lies not with the troops themselves, but with a political and military establishment that often appears bereft of strategic vision and hasn’t won a major war since the 1940s. Into this breach, elite US forces are deployed again and again.
Snuff
you ain’t seen nothing yet. with always-on recording, war reporting and snuff become indistinguishable.
A photo taken by a US Army camerawoman of the moment she and 4 Afghans were killed in an explosion has been released by the American military.
Lion King
Wow, quite the story
The group of conspirators was so close with Francis that they all nicknames, according to the indictment. The team called Fat Leonard Lion King, L.K. or Boss. “Defendants referred to themselves collectively … by terms such as ‘the Cool Kids,’ ‘the Band of Brothers,’ ‘the Brotherhood,’ ‘the Wolfpack,’ the ‘familia’ and ‘the Lion King’s Harem,’” the indictment added. For a few years, the Lion King’s Harem tore up the Pacific like a group of rowdy teenagers. The 7th Fleet’s Judge Advocate General sent an ethics message to the 7th’s leadership warning them to remember that taking gifts, especially gifts from contractors, was a no-no. The Cool Kids forwarded the message to the Lion King so he knew to keep their relationship a secret. “The next day,” the indictment stated. “During the [command ship] USS Blue Ridge’s port visit to Hong Kong, [the Cool Kids] and others dined and drank at Francis’s expense at the Petrus Restaurant in Hong Kong at a cost to Francis of $20435.”
South Korea War Games
This seems to be something of a regular occurrence now. In the recent past, several foreign countries have celebrated how stunningly real video game graphics have become by using them to pretend they are really great at war. The Egyptians did it to pretend that Russia was fighting ISIS, the Iranians did it to pretend that their forces could shoot people from a really long way away, and the North Koreans did it to pretend that they could deliver a nuclear ICBM to our soil. Well, perhaps there is some synergy to be found over Korea’s DMZ, because the South Koreans recently released footage detailing how super-awesome their new fighter jet program is, and that footage included several clips from both Battlefield 3 and Ace Combat.
this should be more widely adopted, so we can replace super-expensive pretend programs like F35 with the much cheaper just pretending.
Military Futures
The US Marines have tried to project trends and scenarios 15 to 30 years into the future. They had guidance from professional science fiction writers. They created a detailed baseline projection of a more urban world population and then had 2 alternate scenarios. Then they created narrative stories that considered conflicts within the baseline or alternate projections. They projected demographics and then they projected technology. The alternate scenarios are
- a world of water scarcity
- a world where China and India are near peers in economic and military power
Russian malware in Ukrainian military app
Ukrainian Android app for speeding artillery calculations for a particular field gun seems to have contained Russian malware that may have assisted in targeting those artillery units
Dressing for cold
The system is best used in varying combinations and is not meant to be layered sequentially, meaning one garment on top of another, on top of another, until you’re wearing all 7 levels. The conditions of your operating environment and the requirements of your mission will determine not only what you wear, but also what you stow in your pack for later use. The wind shirt (Level 4), in particular, is a very versatile garment meant to be sandwiched between your various layers. It allows for a more stable internal temperature to be managed, as well as reducing friction between insulation layers.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 