Quotulatiousness

June 19, 2020

What Actually Is Blitzkrieg? – WW2 Special

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 18 Jun 2020

When the Nazi war machines tears through Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, people will call it Blitzkrieg. But what is Blitzkrieg and is it anything that unique?

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Adam Adkins
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig… (edited)
Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations – https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
Musvage https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Klimbim https://www.flickr.com/photos/2215569…

Sources:
Portrait of Basil Liddell-Hart, courtesy National Portrait Gallery
Portrait of Douglas McGarel Hogg, courtesy National Portrait Gallery
IWM H 20697, Q 6337, D 1966
Bundesarchiv
from the Noun Project: Target by RITASYA, documents by DinosoftLab, Tank by mbok sumirna, Armored Car by Martin, Plane by Graphic Enginer, transceiver by Eucalyp
Breaking A Wall Down (With A Hammer) by scampsie https://freesound.org/people/scampsie…

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johannes Bornlof – “Last Man Standing 3”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Hakan Eriksson – “Epic Adventure Theme 4”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Johannes Bornlof – “Death And Glory”
Bonnie Grace – “The Dominion”
Bonnie Grace – “Imperious”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

National Defence Headquarters needs to go on a crash diet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell knows how Canada’s NDHQ got into the state it is in, and has some suggestions for getting it out of its critical state of administrative morbid obesity:

Major General George R. Pearkes Building in Ottawa, home of National Defence Headquarters on Colonel By Drive.
Photo by DXR via Wikimedia Commons.

National Defence Headquarters is a HUGE place with diverse functions. First: it is, simultaneously, the management centre of the Department of National Defence, which is a very large (and complex) department of government that includes the Canadian Armed Forces (but the CAF is just one of DND’s “arms”), and it is the national command centre for the Canadian Armed Forces. Second: it is one of the biggest budget departments in Canada. Defence spending supports many hundreds of thousands of jobs in the military, in the civil service and all across the spectrum of Canadian industry from the highest of high-tech enterprises through to janitorial services. It is never surprising when things fall through the cracks in any large, complex organization, is it?

But there are two other problems:

As defence spending has declined, year-after-year, always in terms of GDP and often in terms of its share of the public accounts and sometimes in real, dollar terms, too, the headquarters, especially the military’s command and control (C²) superstructure, has grown. A bit of growth is not surprising when one must “do more with less” as I well remember being told during the rounds of budget and staff cuts in the 1990s. Although to their credit, defence ministers in the Chrétien-Martin era imposed a series of staff cuts on the HQs in Ottawa, there was a bit of growth in the (largely civil service) policy and financial management areas. But in the Harper era that all changed. Budget pursestrings were loosened by governments after 2001 and, under e.g. Conservative Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor the Canadian Forces began to receive some much needed new equipment including the big CC-177 Globemaster III transport planes, new CH-147F Chinook transport helicopters and Leopard tanks ~ all procured on sole-source contracts, over the objections of many. But then O’Connor was replaced by Peter MacKay and, it appeared to me, the generals and admirals took over and the HQ went from lean to overweight and then to downright fat. Then, in the Trudeau era, the HQ went from simply being fat to being morbidly obese. There are, now, hundreds of admirals and generals, managing a military force that numbers in the (too few) thousands. Even serving flag and general officers have told me that cutting the highest ranks by ⅓ would do no harm and some retired officers and civil servants (with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the HQ at the highest levels) say that a 50% cut would be healthy. The simple fact is that the Canadian Forces have too many very smart, very able senior officers with too little real work to do. They, not surprisingly, fill the time available with “work” of their own devising which, often, involves creating new and more complex command structures which require more and more general officers. The process seems unconstrained from the top.

Why? What happened?

Well, it started with the very best of intentions. I recall being told by one very, very fine general that we, the Canadian Forces, must, above all else, be “interoperable” with our American allies and that, he explained, meant adapting to their command and control system, poor as he thought it was. He said, and he meant, adapting, not adopting. But he retired and a new generation of officers entered the most senior ranks and some of them seemed, to me, to be more interested in adopting than in just adapting to. We seemed, in the 2000s, to be seized by a giant case of military penis envy and we seemed to want to have a local version of whatever the Americans had. The result was a proliferation of new command and control organizations, all put in place as the combat elements were actually shrinking. The end result was an unconscionable GOFO [General Officer/Flag Officer] to combat sailor and solder ratio and a bloated and, in my opinion, weak and inefficient command and control superstructure.

“Hill 3234” – The Soviet-Afghan War – Sabaton History 072 [Official]

Filed under: Asia, History, Media, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 18 Jun 2020

It happened during the last stage of the Soviet-Afghan War.

Already withdrawing its forces, Soviet High Command needed to display its might one last time by recapturing the vital Satukandav Pass. But to achieve that goal, the commanding heights surrounding the pass had to be held against continuous Mujahideen attacks.

In the Battle for Hill 3234, an outnumbered force of Soviet paratroopers held their own against relentless attacks from the Afghan rebels.

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Listen to “Hill 3234” on the album The Last Stand here:
CD: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandStore
Spotify: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandSpotify
Apple Music: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandItunes
iTunes: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandItunes
Amazon: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandAmz
Google Play: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandGooglePlay

Watch the Official Lyric Video of “Hill 3234” here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1Xkp…

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory

Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

Sources:
– Abramov Andrey, ALDOR46, Fdutil, P.Fisxo; from Wikimedia
– E.Kuvakin
– Erwin Franzen
– Archive of S.V. Rozhkova
– Photos of 350th airborne regiment, courtesy of the 5th airborne company trooper Sergey Novikov
– Archive of the 345th airborne parachute regiment
– Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

From the comments:

Sabaton History
1 day ago
They were only 39
They were told to hold the line…

I’m sure most of you know the rest of those lyrics. And after watching this episode of Sabaton History, you also know the real historical events behind those words.

What some of you might not know though, is the story of the guitar solo in Hill 3234. As usual when Joakim had written the song, he sent it out to the rest of the band. Much to his surprise though, this time Thobbe Englund – lead guitarist at the time – sent a file back within the hour. Thobbe had just plugged his guitar in and hit play. He was literally listening to Hill 3234 for the first time when the solo spontaneously popped into his head, and he recorded it on the spot. And to make this solo even more special: it is that very first recording Thobbe made that ended up on the album!

Not one single re-take.

Talk about a blessing from the Muses…

The economy isn’t all huge corporations and government

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paul Sellers reminds us that the economy is far more than just the big names that get mentioned in the financial pages:

An example of the kind of one-man businesses Paul is talking about.

Independents in micro-businesses are few and far between and often hard to discover, despite the internet’s ever-increasing web of enterprises. The backbone of British industry is made up of small, independent people striving to retain a measure of individualism, independence and entrepreneurialism in their lives. Statistics from 2019 show that in Britain there were 5.82 million small businesses responsible for 99.3% of the total business output in the UK.

Small businesses here comprise those with 0-49 employees and digging deeper still into what might at first seem more irrelevant than relevant is that the niche that small businesses fill in the real world of enterprise. Over 76% of businesses are operated by one-man bands; single-person enterprises who operate alone comprise almost 4.5 million men and women. With an additional 1.15 million micro-business (1-9 employees) around 95% of businesses here operate on a strength of under just 10 people. So over 99% of small to medium business enterprises, that’s zero to 249 employees, but only 0.6% have a workforce of 50-249 employees. Less than 4% are small businesses with 10-49 staff members and get this, over 95% operate as micro-businesses with 0-9 employees. What does this tell you about businesses output? What it tells me is how little of this is newsworthy by the mass media manufacturing companies (Like BBC News and ITV, Sky and so on) who constantly tell us about how many this massive company or that massive company is laying off and how little this really affects our economy because the little guys still get out into their little micro-shops and make what cannot work work.

Anglo-Dutch Wars | 3 Minute History

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jabzy
Published 25 Apr 2015

First, Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars. I left out the Fourth War because it really wasn’t connected to the previous 3.

Also – I hope you don’t mind I used ‘Netherlands’ throughout the video despite the fact the term didn’t come until much later.

QotD: We call it the Corded Ware culture, not the Battle Axe culture to make it less interesting to boys

Filed under: History, India, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

India played a large role in the development of European conceptions of race. In 1786 British judge William Jones delivered a lecture in Calcutta suggesting that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were all descended from the same lost language, a ghost tongue now called Proto-Indo-European.

Jones went on to hypothesize that an ancient invasion of Dravidian-speaking India by Proto-Indo-European-speaking Aryans from Iran could help explain the curious distribution of language, skin color, and caste within the Hindu world today.

Jones’ ideas had unfortunate influence. Reich writes:

    To the Nazis and others, the distribution of the Indo-European language family, linking Europe to India … spoke of an ancient conquest moving out of an ancestral homeland, displacing and subjugating the peoples of the conquered territories, an event they wished to emulate.

Hitler thus culturally appropriated the Hindu swastika.

Since 1945, the notion of Aryan invaders has been unsurprisingly unpopular.

In Europe, anthropologists have promoted the “pots not people” theory to argue that trade and changes in fashion must explain why Corded Ware pots suddenly showed up all over Europe about 4,900 years ago. (So did battle axes; indeed, early scientists called this the Battle Axe Culture. But that sounded too awesome. Hence, more recent academics renamed it after its pottery style to make these brutal barbarians sound dweebier and thus less interesting to boys.)

In India, the notion of Hindu culture as a giant conspiracy by Aryan invaders to enshrine their descendants at the top of the social order for the rest of eternity perhaps struck a little too close to home.

Steve Sailer, “Reich’s Laboratory”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-03-28.

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