The Great War
Published on 21 Apr 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
April 22, 2018
Hunting – Dreyfuss Affair – Equipment Modifications I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Comments Off on Hunting – Dreyfuss Affair – Equipment Modifications I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
April 20, 2018
Food for thought on those “second US civil war” comments
Tom Kratman, Mil-SF author and former US Army officer responds to a Quora article titled “Why does the 2nd Amendment bother Europeans so much?” and shared some of his answer on Facebook:
More fun on Quora:
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-2nd-Amendment-bother-Europeans-so-much/answer/Pietro-Del-Buono#
A Sample: And here; since you’re not apparently ambitious enough to read it, I’ll copy you what I sent Stafford on just this question:
The Viet Cong, the Taliban, and the Iraqi resistance would all, at this point in time, be terribly surprised to learn of the omnipotence of the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps (retired lieutenant colonel, Infantry, former faculty of the war college, to boot; yes, I’ve had a varied and fun life). It isn’t, remember, a million citizens with arms, it’s probably over 80 million, just to begin with, most of us armed to deck out the wives, children, grandchildren, and no small number of the neighbors. I can, personally, outfit at least one short platoon while my former law firm, when I was in practice, could have fielded a company, less mortars and anti-tank, yes, to include with automatic weapons (machine guns, which are also legal here, though pricey).
How they would do this is perhaps more detailed and more bloody minded than you want, but, basically, tanks do not move when small arms dominating the roads mean they don’t get fuel delivered (no, aerial resupply is highly problematic). Neither do aircraft fly when no trucks or rail bring aviation fuel. Police, who are actually the decisive arm of counter-insurgency (see your own Sir Robert Thompson), pretty much require a disarmed citizenry to exercise control. Facing an armed citizenry willing to kill them, their risks and losses are too great for effectiveness. And then there’s sheer terror: “Nice family you have, Officer Quigley; be a damned shame if, say, you didn’t look the other way when we tell you to and they all ended up dead, don’t you think?”
Most of the US military preponderance is technological. Martin van Creveld has an interesting observation on that, which goes to the effect that high tech really only works well in very simple environments, air, open desert, at sea, and that a) it tends to fail badly when the environment gets more complex, while b) the human heart is the most complex environment of all. In other words, the forces of government would rarely know just who their enemies were in order to bring that tech to bear.
And then there’s the last aspect, an aspect, I think, Euros have the greatest difficulty understanding. Our police and armed forces are simply not reliable, over most of the country (remember, too, we have no real national police force or gendarmerie, not of any size and power, anyway) to the federal government. No, I don’t mean only the state based National Guards; the _regular_ forces actually draw most of their personnel from areas where folk revere the country and the constitution, but tend to detest the federal government. Called on to suppress a rebellion with which they by and large agreed, they’d defect in droves.Indeed, they might be at the forefront of rebellion. You may recall Obama talking about a civilian force, equal in size, budget, and power to DoD? I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that he had Pinochet and Allende in mind when he spoke those words, because he knew, deep down, that he and the left (our left, which is, of course, to the right, generally, of the Euro left) could not rule out a coup in the event of their pushing their agenda just that little bit too far.
Comments Off on Food for thought on those “second US civil war” comments
Knocking Out The Hejaz Railway I THE GREAT WAR Week 195
The Great War
Published on 19 Apr 2018While the Germans are still advancing in Flanders (Operation Georgette), the other fronts are not always quiet. In Palestine, the British forces and the Arab Revolt are taking the initiative again. T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and the Arab Revolt are attacking the vital Hejaz Railway, a major transport factor for the Ottoman Empire.
Comments Off on Knocking Out The Hejaz Railway I THE GREAT WAR Week 195
Great Blunders of WWII: The Pilot Who Bombed London 3
Anthony Coleman
Published on 4 Nov 2016From the History Channel DVD series Great Blunders of WWII
Comments Off on Great Blunders of WWII: The Pilot Who Bombed London 3
April 19, 2018
“Blitzkrieg” – What most people get Wrong – Myth vs “Reality”
Military History Visualized
Published on 18 Aug 2017“Blitzkrieg” is probably the most wrongly used word when it comes to Military History. Its buzzword effect is widely known. The question is what was “Blitzkrieg” actually and is it used “correctly” at all? Additionally, the question if “Blitzkrieg” was something unique to the Wehrmacht will be answered?
Military History Visualized provides a series of short narrative and visual presentations like documentaries based on academic literature or sometimes primary sources. Videos are intended as introduction to military history, but also contain a lot of details for history buffs. Since the aim is to keep the episodes short and comprehensive some details are often cut.
» SOURCES «
Citino, Robert M.: The German Way of War
Hughes, Daniel J.: “Blitzkrieg”, in: Brassey’s Encyclopedia of Land Forces and Warfare, p. 155-162
Ong, Weichong: “Blitzkrieg: Revolution or Evolution?”, in: RUSI December 2017 – Vol. 152 No. 6, p. 82-87
Harris, J.P.: “The Myth of Blitzkrieg”, in War in History 1995 2 (3), p. 335-352
Frieser, Karl-Heinz: The Blitzkrieg Legend
Frieser, Karl-Heinz: “The war in the West, 1939-1940: an unplanned Blitzkrieg”. In: Cambridge History of the Second World War, Volume I: p. 287-314
Comments Off on “Blitzkrieg” – What most people get Wrong – Myth vs “Reality”
April 17, 2018
Storm of Steel – Author And Officer Ernst Jünger I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 16 Apr 2018Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) by Ernst Jünger is one of the most harrowing German accounts of World War 1. The author was an officer on the Western Front and fought with the assault troops and stormtroopers until summer 1918.
Comments Off on Storm of Steel – Author And Officer Ernst Jünger I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
April 16, 2018
Tank Chats #27 Light Tank Mark IIA | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 17 Oct 2016A British two-man light tank from the early thirties.
The first British light tank, the Mark I, evolved from the Carden-Loyd Carrier. The Mark II was produced in larger numbers and issued for service. Light tanks were regarded as an alternative to armoured cars with a better cross-country performance.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1952-27
Comments Off on Tank Chats #27 Light Tank Mark IIA | The Tank Museum
April 15, 2018
Canada’s military – the difference between fighting wars in the 20th Century and fighting wars today
In a post from earlier this week about defence spending priorities for the Canadian military, Ted Campbell looks at how wars changed between the first half of the 20th century and the post-Cold War situation we face today:
Is the 2% goal wrong?
No … it’s a pretty sensible level of defence spending for countries that really want to maintain a world at peace, as opposed to those, like Canada and many of its allies, that just want to hope for peace. But 2% is not a magic bullet … 1.5% of GDP, spent carefully, will do more than 2% spent as a job creation slush fund. But spending too little, cutting defence spending again and again and again just because it is unpopular can leave a country with what I have described as a Potemkin Village, a military that is more show than force.
The advent of a nuclear face-off circa 1950 changed the strategic calculus for the rest of the 20th century. We suddenly had the “come as you are war” which meant having regular, professional forces in being and not being able to rely upon time and space to give us time, as we had in past wars, to mobilize our reserves. We would do well, 101 years after the battle of Vimy Ridge, to recall that it, in April 1917, was the first time since war was declared (in the summer of 1914) that the full Canadian Corps, of four infantry divisions, was in battle as a corps ~ it took us over 30 months to get from a tiny standing army backed by small but eager reserves to a full corps composed of about 100,000 of the Canadians who served overseas during that war. We went to war again in the late summer of 1939 and it was not until the summer of 1943, over 40 months later, that we had a small corps, of only two divisions and an independent armoured brigade, in battle, in Italy. It takes a long time to mobilize and equip and train an army. The operational doctrine of the long and expensive cold war said that we could no longer have that time.
It is not clear that we must or even should still have small reserves and a relatively larger permanent force. Perhaps the time has come to re-examine the assumptions that underlie our force structure ideas. Maybe we need 150,000 uniformed people but, maybe, the split should be 50/50 or 75,000 full time and 75,000 part time sailors, soldiers and air force members. Maybe a country like Canada, with a population that will, in 2050, approach 40 million, should have a larger force: say 75,000 full time and even 150,000 part time military members … maybe our reserve force “regiments’ should have 500 or 750 soldiers and be required to “generate” a trained company (125 soldiers) rather than having only 150 soldiers and being hard pressed to “generate” a platoon of only 30 soldiers. I have my own ideas, but someone who has the necessary information at their disposal needs to look ahead at our strategic situation and develop a force model and a sane budget for 2050. That should be a job for skilled civil servants in the defence policy staff.
Our strategic priorities for the next 30 years or more need to be:
- Containing and reducing threats to global peace and security by helping to maintain alliances like NATO and groupings like AUSCANNZUKUS and supporting global peacemaking and peacekeeping efforts, even the generally worthless United Nations efforts;
- Confronting current threats to peace ~ like Russia ~ and deterring (by matching the growth in military power of) potential future threats ~ like China;
- Cooperating with the USA in the protection of North America; and
- Securing the land we claim as our own, the waters contiguous to it and the airspace over both.
When we work out the costs, of people, above all, but also of ships, tanks, guns and aircraft, and of ammunition, food and fuel and everything else, of doing those four things ~ and of doing them well enough ~ then we will know what what sort of forces we need and how much we must budget to build and maintain them. But no matter what the size and what the cost, I guarantee that people will still be the biggest single expense if we keep our priorities straight: and the overarching priority is that people cost more than machines because they matter more than machines.
Comments Off on Canada’s military – the difference between fighting wars in the 20th Century and fighting wars today
Stalin in WW1 – Quebec – Scottish Home Rule I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 14 Apr 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
Comments Off on Stalin in WW1 – Quebec – Scottish Home Rule I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
April 13, 2018
India and the “Quad”
At Strategy Page, Austin Bay discusses India’s position, both geographically and militarily with respect to China:
As the Cold War faded, a cool aloofness continued to guide India’s defense and foreign policies. Indian military forces would occasionally exercise with Singaporean and Australian units — they’d been British colonies, too. Indian ultra-nationalists still rail about British colonialism, but the Aussies had fought shoulder to shoulder with Indians in North Africa, Italy, the Pacific and Southeast Asia, and suffered mistreatment by London toffs. Business deals with America and Japan? Sign the contracts. However, in defense agreements, New Delhi distanced itself from Washington and Tokyo.
The Nixon Administration’s decision to support Pakistan in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War [Wikipedia link] embittered India. Other issues hampered the U.S.-India relationship. Indian left-wing parties insisted their country was a “Third World leader” and America was hegemonic, et cetera.
However, in the last 12 to 15 years, India’s assessments of its security threats have changed demonstrably, and China’s expanding power and demonstrated willingness to use that power to acquire influence and territory are by far the biggest factors affecting India’s shift.
In 2007, The Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), at the behest of Japan, held its first informal meeting. The Quad’s membership roll sends a diplomatic message: Japan, Australia, America and India. Japan pointed out all four nations regarded China as disruptive actor in the Indo-Pacific; they had common interests. Delhi downplayed the meeting, attempting to avoid the appearance of actively “countering China.”
No more. The Quad nations now conduct naval exercises and sometimes include a quint, Singapore.
The 2016 Hague Arbitration Court decision provided the clearest indication of Chinese strategic belligerence. In 2012, Beijing claimed 85 percent of the South China Sea’s 3.5 million square kilometers. The Philippines went to court. The Hague tribunal, relying on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea treaty, supported the Filipino position that China had seized sea features and islets and stolen resources. Beijing ignored the verdict and still refuses to explain how its claims meet UNCLOS [Wikipedia link] requirements.
That is the maritime action. India and China also have mountain issues. In 1962, as the Cuban Missile Crisis diverted world attention, the two Asian giants fought the Indo-Chinese War [Wikipedia link] in the Himalayas. China won. The defeat still riles India.
Comments Off on India and the “Quad”
The Battle of La Lys – Operation Georgette I THE GREAT WAR Week 194
The Great War
Published on 12 Apr 2018A year after the US entry into the war, the German Spring Offensive 1918 continues with operations Archangel and Georgette. The Portuguese Expeditionary Corps has to pay the price while the British manage to orderly retreat.
Comments Off on The Battle of La Lys – Operation Georgette I THE GREAT WAR Week 194
April 12, 2018
LANDSKNECHTS – most brutal mercenaries of the Renaissance | IT’S HISTORY
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 11 Apr 2018Today we are going to tell you about The Landsknechts – German mercenaries from the 16th century with a very formidable reputation.
Comments Off on LANDSKNECHTS – most brutal mercenaries of the Renaissance | IT’S HISTORY
April 10, 2018
France Before WW1 – La Belle Époque? I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 9 Apr 2018The time between the French defeat against Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of the First World War is often described as the Belle Époque. But it certainly was a turbulent time for one of the major world powers too.
Comments Off on France Before WW1 – La Belle Époque? I THE GREAT WAR Special
April 9, 2018
Tank Chats #26 Peerless Armoured Car | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 23 Sep 2016In 1919 the British Army found itself short of armoured cars when many were needed quickly to police various trouble spots around the world.
In reality it did not make a very good armoured car. It was too big, too unwieldy and slow while the crew got a rough ride on solid tyres. However it was durable and quite a few were still in service when the Second World War began.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1949-321
Comments Off on Tank Chats #26 Peerless Armoured Car | The Tank Museum
April 8, 2018
Pioneers – Legend of the Kraken – Redeployment of Troops I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 7 Apr 2018In this week’s episode of Out Of The Trenches, Indy talks about Pioneer Battalions, how a Sea Monster allegedly sunk a German submarine and the redeployment of Austro-Hungarian troops after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Comments Off on Pioneers – Legend of the Kraken – Redeployment of Troops I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
