THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO WIN!
https://go.getenteredtowin.com/forgottenweapons
DEADLINE to ENTER is TONIGHT 07/26/24 @ 11:59pm (PST).
The first squad automatic weapon used by the US Army was the French Mle 1915 Chauchat, which was the primary LMG or automatic rifle for troops in the American Expeditionary Force in World War One. At that time, the Chauchat was a company-level weapon assigned where the company commander thought best. In World War Two, the Chauchat had been replaced by the BAR, and one BAR gunner was in each 12-man rifle platoon. The BAR was treated like a heavy rifle though, and not like a support weapon as light machine guns were in most other armies.
After Korea the value of the BAR was given more consideration and two were put in each squad instead of one, but the M14 replaced the BAR before it could gain any greater doctrinal importance. The M14 was intended to basically go back to the World War Two notion of every man equipped with a very capable individual weapon, and the squad having excellent flexibility and mobility by not being burdened with a supporting machine gun. The M60 machine guns were once again treated as higher-level weapons, to be attached to rifle squads as needed.
After Vietnam, experiments with different unit organization – and with the Stoner 63 machine guns – led to the decision that a machine gun needed to be incorporated into the rifle squad. This led to the request for what became the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, and its adoption in the 1980s. At last, the American rifle squad included an organic supporting machine gun.
Today, the USMC is once again going back to the earlier model with every rifleman carrying the same weapon, now an M27 Individual Automatic Rifle. The Army may also change its organizational structure with the new XM7 and XM250 rifle and machine gun, but only time will tell…
IAN, From WW II until the adoption of the M16 in Vietnam, the United States Marine Corps had 3 BARs or M14s with the automatic fire selector switch in each squad, one per four-man fire team. I had the “pleasure” of being a BAR-man for 18 months in 1961-1962, until we were issued the M14 late in 1962.
I have to give Ian credit for the attempt, but…
Small unit architecture and nomenclature is possibly even less clear than the equivalent for the machinegun. If such a thing is possible…
For one thing, there’s a difference in usage: Section in the UK and most Commonwealth armies is equivalent to the term “squad” in the US forces. In US usages, “section” is generic, except in certain non-infantry units where the term will be used, just to confuse the shit out of everyone involved.
As well, there are vast differences between the Army and the Marine Corps in terms of structure at the squad level. The Marines have run with a three fire-team structure since WWII, taken up by the Marine Raiders at first, and then spread out to the entire Corps infantry. This structure came out of the experiences that Evans Carlson had with the Chinese Communists before WWII, and which he put into place when he was made commander of the Raiders. The Marines had three identical four-man teams, with a BAR assigned to each one. The Army, by way of contrast, had a two fire-team structure, sometimes with just one BAR, and sometimes with two. The informal modification to the weapons loadout usually left them with at least one BAR per fireteam, but they’d sometimes have a team with two, a team with one, or put two into a base-of-fire element and have the other team doing scouting with no BAR and just rifles… The variation was incredible in practice, because virtually nothing you hear from actual veterans matches what was in the manuals. Some of the actual on-the-ground mechanized infantry units had every single man on the vehicle armed with a machinegun; the halftracks looked about like hedgehogs, with barrels poking out everywhere. All scrounged, all kept off the books. There’s a classic account I’ve seen where they’re trying to turn in weapons at the end of the war, and the Ordnance unit accepting them is just outraged that they had all these machineguns, and wanted to know where they’d gotten them…
Actual practice differed vastly from what was in the books, and improvisations usually increased the longer a unit was in combat, so long as the veterans were still there.
I have to give Ian credit for sticking his toes into the excrement on this issue, but… God almighty, I lived this issue for most of my adult life, and I’m here to tell you that this is one of the less well-defined and discussable arenas you could venture into.
There’s a really valuable work out there, which grew out of a doctoral paper written by a Canadian Army Major, one John English. It’s entitled On Infantry, and goes over the full range of squad/platoon level organizational attempts from the late 1880s onwards. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a very poorly studied subject, and a good starting point for further study. It’s absolutely shocking how little real work has gone into this stuff, or how little attention gets paid to it by the average person, but these lowest-level units are absolutely about the most important on the battlefield… As one of my commanders put it, “…good squads will pull the shittiest plan ever out of the shit and make it work; the best plan ever will collapse under the weight of badly led and incompetent squads…” Actually overheard the man tell one of my lieutenants that it didn’t matter what the LT said or did, with the squad leaders he had, he was always going to be the best platoon in the battalion, and he’d better remember that, because if he screwed up his squads, the commander was going to personally end his career with a vindictiveness that would make the gods weep. The actual wording was a bit more graphic and brutal.
What had engendered that was the LT making an attempt at asserting himself that included threats of reduction in rank for two Staff Sergeant squad leaders, which did not go over well, at all.
That’s another difference, as well: The US Army has staff sergeants slotted to run squads, stemming from the infantry manning crisis of late WWII, where they had trouble getting enough men and leadership in the infantry. To incentivize men moving from support branches into the infantry, they made the squad leader a Staff Sergeant, which had been strictly a platoon-level rank before that. Where Corporals had been fire team leaders and assistant squad leaders, the Army then pushed that position to a Sergeant rank. Marines were offered the opportunity to do the same, but because they didn’t have the money in the budget to support this increase in rank and pay, they said “No, thanks… We’ll stick with tradition…”, which is why you can, to this day, make the general assumption that a Marine of a given NCO rank will generally have an experience level and position of someone in the Army who is a grade higher…
The entire subject is full of weirdnesses like this, and possessed of so much ephemeral esoterica that I can’t fault Ian for being confused; been there, done that, myself. I’m still not too clear on what the UK and Commonwealth call a fireteam, officially. There’s been a lot of bleedover from working with the US, and the entire nomenclature is just totally assed-up, especially when you start working within all the official NATO designations with all the different forces involved, who’ve been cross-fertilizing for the last seventy years…
You really need a damn book on the subject, but aside from John English, few have written about it with any clarity, and he’s out of print. The version that’s been rewritten by Bruce Gudmundsson isn’t as good as the original, which goes for a few hundred bucks on the used book market…
There was some analysis of the business back in the Eighties, but a lot of people missed it because of where it was. Namely in two gaming magazines, Strategy & Tactics and Wargamer’s Digest.
Before you start laughing, most of the articles in those two were written by “gamers” who also happened to be active-duty personnel, most of them training officers. One series in WGD was written by three of the trainers responsible for the classroom part at Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
Most all of them agreed that U.S. Army “SAW” doctrine was basically nonexistent. Because (A) the M60 sucked and therefore tended to be left in the armory during exercises and (B) the West Point ring-knockers (who had the final say on basically everything) were still all-in on “marksmanship tradition”.
To them, it was still the riflemen in the squad and platoon who were the base of fire. The SAW (if there was one) was reserved for “points of resistance” that would otherwise require a heavy weapon section be called to take them under fire, usually with an 81mm mortar.
That BTW was the only thing referred to as a “section” rather than a “squad”, and at that time it was generally one mortar team, one or two M60 teams, and one ATGW team, usually the Dragon, plus an NCOIC, total of 7-9 men. So it wasn’t a squad- not enough warm bodies. Its vehicles were usually a pair of CUCVs, as opposed to the three M151s the book called for. The CUCVs (Chevy Blazers to us civilians) were probably more all-around useful than even a quartet of “151s” would have been.
(An ex-Chem Recon friend of mine [Ft. Lewis] still has an abiding hatred of those damned little things even thirty years after mustering out.)
The thread of “marksmanship tradition” runs through everything the infantry does, in both the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps. The Corps forsaking the M249 for the new M27 for everybody is simply a reiteration of the Marine mantra (“This is my rifle…”) in post-modern terms.
Yes. Everybody would be better off if (1) we had an actual honest-to-God GPMG in the infantry squad, as opposed to having a sort of/kind of/not-quite-entirely-thought-out-one or two in the HWS.
And (2) if the troops were properly trained in how to use the bloody thing.
Neither one of which has ever happened in the U.S. military and I now doubt that it ever will.
I suspect that the “threat” of such a change in doctrine is what doomed the SiG MG338 project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIG_Sauer_MG_338
As well as its FN-made competitor
https://athlonoutdoors.com/article/true-velocity-lightweight-machine-gun/
Instead of being standard issue, only SOCOM will get either one. A GPMG lighter than the M240 that can reach out effectively to over 1,500 meters would be the ideal thing to build the squad base of fire around, especially on a proper tripod like an MG42’s. But it’s not going to happen the way they’re planning it now.
SOCOM wants it on a bipod, period. They see it more as a DMR-cum-LMG than a SAW. And the PBI are never even going to get a look at it.
As to how they are planning it for said PBIs, with the M27 Heckler and Koch have once more played their old game. Using their reputation to get the DoD to pay them through the nose for something that could have been procured from domestic sources (hackcoughRUGERacck) faster, in larger quantities, and for half as much per copy.
I still have to agree with Larry Correia.
https://monsterhunternation.com/2007/10/09/hk-because-you-suck-and-we-hate-you/
And not just for their attitude toward “civilians”.
clear ether
eon
@eon,
I was around the Army during those years, and the one thing that struck me as a private undergoing training was that nobody, whether you were talking about officers or NCOs, really seemed to be able to explain how it was all supposed to work as a systemic whole.
Even the Vietnam vets that were still in the ranks did not seem to have a holistic grasp on the whole “how we fight” thing. They had pieces of it, like the machinegunnery bits, down pat, but… How the ‘eff it was all supposed to integrate? How the rifles, grenade launchers, and machineguns were supposed to work together? It wasn’t really laid out or clearly expressed… Nobody was saying “You use the 7.62 MG to do this, while the rifles do that, and the grenade launchers do this other thing…” You got taught each weapon as a separate piece, and were somehow supposed to just figure out how it all worked together, and hopefully, your leadership would be able to figure out how to do the whole command and control piece through some form of osmosis. You didn’t have training ranges set up to where you could see and participate in things like “Take out a sniper with live fire”, or “Reduce an enemy strong point”.
It did get better, over the years, but… Man. What I felt like they should have explained clearly and concisely from the beginning was confusing as hell up to the point where I was squad leader/platoon sergeant, and most of what I knew by that point came from a long succession of “Well, that didn’t work for shit… Maybe we try this other thing?” The manuals weren’t always all that much help, because they were written from the standpoint of someone starting two levels up, at around company/battalion, and if you were the team leader there going “OK, what the hell do I do to learn my trade…?”, there wasn’t a lot of help.
Part of the issue is that the majority of the enlisted folks are not abstractionist thinkers; they don’t put things down on paper, nor do they take them up easily from that paper when someone else does it. Likewise, the people who do create the paper world of the Army are not very good at the “out at the coalface” sort of thing, and what winds up happening is that an awful lot doesn’t get documented or recorded. That’s how we lost much of what was learned in combat during WWII; the tribal knowledge more-or-less evaporated with the demobilization, because much of the actual knowledge of how things had been done was strictly in the heads of the participants, who were not necessarily Regular Army soldiers.
It’s the little things that matter; possibly one of the most effective units fielded by any army during WWII was the First Special Service Force under Frederick. Did anyone try to “bottle that lightning”? Nope; the FSSF was dissolved before the war was over, and all that institutional knowledge just went “Pffft!” with the soldiers that made up that unit.
The US Army has a really nasty habit of completely fucking that sort of thing up; the institution does not, at its core, understand how effective units are built, how to maintain them, or what the important bits of things like uniform items and heraldry really are… Or, how to effectively use them. They have an idea that these things are important, but… The half-ass way they go about it? Things like taking the Ranger black beret and just handing it out to all and sundry…? Thinking that would even work, as a “morale enhancer”? Yikes. Talk about being “people blind”. It’s like most of the people that make these decisions and who are running the place have never seen an army, and have zero idea how one works. It’s really bizarre, but there you are.
Part of it boils down to the general human tendency not to pay attention to our environment. Few observe what goes on around them on a daily basis, and try to wrap their heads around how those things “going on” impact human behavior for good or ill; it’s a collective blindness. I mean, I think that General Shinseki really thought that the beret thing was a brilliant idea, but… He had zero idea how it would play out in reality. Had the man just talked to a reasonably aware mid-grade NCO, he’d have likely gotten lied to, but if managed to pick a truth-teller who didn’t give a rat’s ass about their future career prospects…? He’d have gotten an earful.
So many things that crash and burn on the organizational scale have people somewhere in that organization who could see clearly that the ideas sucked, and wouldn’t work; the problem is that nobody ever seeks those people out, they don’t even get heard, let alone listened to, and the next thing you know, it’s folly.
A lot of the issues with the tactics spring from this same source; there are guys out there who know how to use the weapons, but they’re not the ones making the decisions. Hell, I could probably do a much better job of running the MG procurement process than the people doing it, but there was no way I was ever going to allowed to influence that crap because… Well, because I was never properly “connected”. I mean, I tried, but… Fact is, none of the decision-makers were the sort of people I had access to, and none of the people I had access to cared to involve themselves in the issues. It’s very much a game of rank and influence, when it really shouldn’t be.
I mean, if you want to solve the issues there surrounding the supposed “overmatch” issue, you really ought to have engaged the talents and skills of the senior NCOs out at the level where those things were experienced, and you should have made sure that the people you were talking to actually had half a damn clue about the weapons and the tactics… Which ain’t always a given. It has struck me, down the years, that most of the people discussing this crap are junior officers, guys whose entire experience of military life consists of a couple years running a platoon and a company, and they’re the ones that the Army usually taps to write doctrine at the platoon/company level. Odds of ever seeing a real subject-matter expert, some crusty-ass NCO who ran rifle squads in the Rangers and line platoons in the various other formations? About zero. Which is why that crap is usually so badly out of touch with reality at the squad/platoon level.
Most of our doctrine and field manuals are written by officers at the branch centers, who’re usually either freshly graduated from the company commander’s courses or waiting to go to them. The NCO contributions are usually coming from guys who were failed drill sergeants, or who were otherwise broken and wound up working staff at the branch school center. You rarely run into people who’re at the top of their game, and the horror stories I could tell about how those people half-assed and totally screwed up key manuals would make you weep.
The wonder isn’t how badly things work, but that they work at all. Most of the “working” comes down to people improvising and throwing the manuals out once the shooting starts… Which, although it’s a classic American tradition, ain’t no way to run a railroad to my way of thinking.
Kirk,
During WW2 some German general (I think von Seekt but don’t quote me) said that the trouble with studying American combat doctrine as written in the manuals the way you’d study French or British doctrine was that American troops showed no inclination to do what the manuals said, and most ignored the whole “doctrine” thing entirely.
This general concluded that the “Ami” just didn’t understand the whole concept of “doctrine”, and so just fell back on their “native intelligence and intuition” to figure out what to do.
Well, I think he was full of s#!t.
Talking to my uncles who were “there” (North Africa, Italy, Normandy and points east, plus the Navy and Marine issues in ETO and PTO both plus, later, Korea), they all pretty much agreed that doing it the “West Point/Annapolis/Quantico” way failed to achieve the objective and incidentally got your troops, and you, killed.
Granted, two of them “worked” for Patton and Abrams directly, two officers rather well known for not paying much attention to the Holy Writ of Doctrine. The one in North Africa and Italy was high enough up the pecking order (LTCOL) that he got to see more-or-less up close what following the doctrine did to Gen. Mark Clark’s career. (Anzio, anyone?)
“Doctrines” tend to be conceived by theorists in magnificent isolation. It’s often the academic ivory tower syndrome on steroids. Yes, we have officers who like academics dream of living “the life of the mind” in the f**king Army or etc.; a place where you’d think everybody understood that “life” is going to be as real as it gets when you are actually doing what you’re being trained to do. In the words of Trevor N. Dupuy, the job is killing people and breaking things.
(A great line once said to West and Gordon by an army officer in an episode of The Wild, Wild West; “Gentlemen, I’m an artilleryman. My job is demolishing things.” Bingo.)
The few “doctrines” that actually worked (like J.F.C. Fuller’s armored warfare theories that became the German blitzkrieg twenty years later) were conceived by men who had seen first hand what did not work. (Remember, Fuller’s armor theories were designed around tanks like the Vickers Medium D, considerably slower and shorter-ranged than even what the Wehrmacht had in 1939, which were mostly obsolescent then.)
Even in spite of Fuller and Rommel, the Germans went to war the same way everybody else did. With fast “cruiser” tanks for breakthrough followed up by slow “infantry” tanks. And it worked as long as they were up against armies with the same “doctrines” they’d practiced “in Flanders fields” two decades earlier.
Then they ran into the Russian Army, and got a bad attack of cognitive dissonance. Even with the results of Stalin’s purges and general idiocy, the Russians still managed to attrit the Germans into defeat even as they were being pushed back by them.
Followed up by those “doctrine challenged” Americans landing in North Africa, Italy, and France and proceeding to beat them senseless at 4/4 time.
The times the Americans followed “doctrine” resulted in Kasserine and the Gothic Line. After those two, everybody pretty much 86’d anything that remotely resembled “doctrine”.
What this has to do with the infantry squad is the old saying “as above, so below”. Senior officers who go By The Book written by the military equivalent of an ivory tower academic will expect the same fealty to The Book from those under their command.
And when it’s “real”, and no longer a peacetime field exercise, and they fail and everything dissolves into snail snot, they will instinctively blame their “stupid” subordinates. And the hierarchy will close ranks behind them.
(Fictional note; The Florida NG Colonel in A Deeper Blue by John Ringo was a nearly textbook example of this. Right to choking in the IA because “I…I don’t have orders”. I still wonder which actual LTCOL or above ex-Ranger Ringo based him on.)
That’s the problem. Too much “doctrine”, not enough “reality”.
We just spent two decades fighting and basically losing a war By The Book. Pretty much the way we did in the Philippines a century and a quarter ago, and against a remarkably similar enemy (the Moros).
But The Book has been preserved, right down to the squad level. Which is “why” the M27, and “why” the MG338 only has a bipod, not a tripod.
It’s also “why” the next time it gets real, we’re going to take a lot of casualties we could have avoided.
And “why” we might just end up losing again.
clear ether
eon
Joke post:
I have a bad idea of what’s to come if China does declare war on America over the Taiwan issue. Both sides are going to get slaughtered for practically no gains. Why? America will bring the wrong tools to the fight because of “rifleman’s tradition” and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, which has done nothing but bully unarmed civilians for the past forty years, has no idea how to actually fight. Consider the Chinese have been hampering their own population with the “one-child policy.” That means every Chinese soldier is an only child. If a Chinese soldier dies, his family line TERMINATES PERMANENTLY!!! So, if I’m going to be cynical about it, the People’s Liberation Army is an army of useless cowards who will only know how to impress the bureaucrats in Beijing.
I could be wrong.
They’re already “impressing” the bureaucrats in Beijing.
Thanks to the One Child policy and a generation of “quietly disposing” of girl babies so that the legal One Child would be a son to carry on tradition (and care for his elders in their dotage), Red China now has an imbalance of roughly 10:1 M/F in the under-fifty population. (WHO doesn’t want to talk about this; they say it’s “only” 6:1. Only?)
Meaning, not enough marriageable young ladies for the young gentlemen. And more importantly from a demographic standpoint, not enough wombs to produce the next generation of taxpayers.
See Connections (1978) by James Burke, specifically Chapter 4. The Western Roman Empire collapsed in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries AD in just that way.
As the population decreased generation by generation, but the bureaucracy didn’t (many posts were hereditary by that point), taxes were raised to support the bureaucrats. Higher taxes=less money for people to support families, so the population was smaller in the next generation. Smaller tax base, taxes raised again to compensate (they weren’t going to cut the bureaucracy, no way, no how), wash, rinse and repeat.
“Rome” collapsed under the weight of its government before the “barbarians” got around to sacking it. And those barbarians under Alaric were in reality mercenary border guards who hadn’t been paid in ten years. They were essentially collecting back wages owed.
Red China has pretty much the same problem. Where are the next generation of taxpayers going to come from?
And what do they do about an entire generation of restless young men with no chance of marriage, because there are not enough women to go around?
(Check out Nature sometime. A pride of lions, a herd of horses or cattle, whatever. One male plus multiple females; it works to ensure the survival of the species. The opposite, multiple males to one female, doesn’t. Mother Nature is not a feminist.)
Faced with this problem, the Beijing Boys are falling back on the old formula. What W.H.B. Smith called handing each young man “a uniform, a rifle, and a demand for obedience”.
Then pointing them at a likely target for loot, pillage…. and potential wives or at least concubines.
The Napoleonic Wars started as much because France was broke, and Bonaparte knew it, as on the basis of “Liberte’, Egalite’, Fraternite'”– which he didn’t believe in anyway.
He fell back on the old axiom of “Gold will not always get you good soldiers, but good soldiers can always get you gold.”
Beijing is following the same playbook. The Belt and Road initiative was just the start. The objective is rebuilding the ancient Imperial “tribute empire”, except with EFT replacing the need to send a “treasure fleet” to collect every year.
But you can be sure there will be “cruise ships” to carry the “new brides” to the homeland. More cost-effective per ton/mile than widebody jets.
The technology of war may continue to evolve (drones with frickin’ laser beams might be next…) but the actual reasons for going to war haven’t changed since the time of Cyrus the Great of Persia.
As Tom Clancy said, war is a mugging writ large.
We want it.
They have it.
Let’s get it.
clear ether
eon
I’d analyze it similarly, eon, but with a couple of caveats that are going to have impact to one degree or another.
Firstly, the Chinese do not have a retirement system, at all. The main reason that sons were favored over daughters during the One-Child years was down to them being the sole likely support of a Chinese couple in their elder years… Those “surplus” young males are the sole hope of Mom and Dad for a survivable old age.
Now, posit the likely effect of a CCP government “expending” a swath of those young men in some idiotic conflict somewhere, and then having to deal with the aftermath…
It won’t be pretty, that’s for damn sure. They’re either going to have to step in and pay big money to do the job those young men were literally born to do, or… Yeah. Pay the price, which will likely include getting strung up by outraged parents who just saw their futures burnt up.
The other factor is, just how good a soldier some young lad is going to make, when he’s been coddled and catered to all of his life as the “favored only child”? Think he’ll be as inured to suffering as his mid-20th Century forefather was? As willing to “die for the cause”?
China entered into some very unexplored territory at the behest of Malthus and Ehrlich; I don’t think that they comprehend all the second- and third-order effects that their decisions will have, ringing down the generations. Not to mention, all the lies that are endemic to the system; there’s some doubt that the numbers reported to the central authorities are accurate, anywhere in the system: Since they get money doled out by head count, the incentive is to lie your asses off to the central authority to get more money and power. Nobody really knows what the true Chinese population actually is, and when you look at all those empty cities, you have to wonder who the hell signed off on building all of them when the people weren’t there to actually live in them?
China is in a lot of trouble; the question is, how much trouble are they going to cause, as they go about dealing with all of this?
I kinda-sorta doubt that they’re going to be going out on the road, conquering everything. The root problem is that they believe a lot of their own lies, and they can’t trust a damn thing anyone internally is telling them. I’ve a friend who worked with China a lot, back when everyone wanted to do business there; his experience was that even a lot of the Chinese businesses they were dealing with had no real idea about numbers, because lying was endemic. They’d go out and audit stuff that was being put up for collateral, like materials stockpiles, and the stuff simply wasn’t there. As in, where there was supposed to be X tons of ores, they’d go out and actually look at the stockpile, and discover that the “ore” was actually a big pile of gravel with a strategically-placed layer of actual ore… His company wouldn’t hear of anyone naysaying the “Chinese Market”, and he left his job at high velocity, propelled by the boot of the idiots running the place. I understand they’re bankrupt, these days…
China is going to be lucky to survive the next few decades as even the facade of a “successful nation”, given what all is going on behind the scenes. Same with Russia, TBH… Huge demographic mess, hidden by lying totalitarians.
Kinda the same way our politicians keep lying. Notice how the jobs reports keep getting “adjusted” downwards, these days? You literally can’t trust any of the numbers, and when they’re basically making policy based on those lies, well… Yeah. Do the math.
Personally, I’m not looking for a war anywhere. None of these idiots could manage such a thing; the greater likelihood is that the entire shambolic system of “international order” is just going to cave in under the weight of it all. Smartest thing they could possibly do? Just write the whole thing off as a huge mistake, and start over again. Do like the the ancient Hebrew kingdoms do, and declare a Jubilee year, where all debts are cancelled, public and private…
Anything else? Don’t even like thinking about it.
@ Kirk,
You just described my “rose colored binoculars” scenario.
The best thing that could happen to Asia would be Red China going down, not with a bang, but a whimper. And it’s kind of likely for all the reasons you cited.
Another possible scenario is China breaking up again like it did after the 1925 revolution. With former Imperial (or in this case PLA) generals becoming local “warlords”. Since some of those warlords would almost certainly have control of nuclear weapons and delivery systems (with even less positive control than Russian systems….), the results could look a lot like some of the “Yellow Peril” SF from Amazing Stories or Air Wonder Stories a century ago. (You can find all of those and lots more, for free, at Luminist Archive.org, BTW.)
I don’t expect an amphib of Taiwan. I see the PLAN building a lot of capital ships but next to nothing else. I’ll believe they’re serious about Taiwan and force projection in WESPAC when they start building serious UNREP supply ships and fleet oilers. So far they don’t seem to grok the whole concept.
Mostly what I expect is China continuing to try to intimidate everybody else with their huge army. That can’t really even feed itself. To borrow a concept from Eric Flint and David Drake’s Belisarius novels, they’re looking like the Malwa army on steroids. Another concept they don’t seem to “get”.
Quantity may have a quality all its own, but beyond a certain point…..
cheers
eon
Eo, I’d say Rome collapsed because domicile population/citizens saw living under barbarians more meaningful and tolerable, then under the corrupt roman imperial bureaucracy, who were robbing them with taxes probably more then all these Vandal and similar roaming bands, and giving nothing in return, no public services, and no security.
There is an agreement by historians that the material situation of small peasant and his life and freedom actually improved by some degree when Rome collapsed.
@ Storm;
Here’s what Burke said;
–Connections, 1978, p. 84.
It was a two-stage process. First the actual Roman power structure was replaced by one of Romanized locals. Then the Goths came across the Rhine once they realized they no longer had legions to contend with. And curb-stomped the local levies, what few there were.
We’re seeing a similar dynamic in Western Europe right now, except that the “barbarians” are coming up from the south and east this time around.
cheers
eon
Wholeheartedly agree with all of that analysis of Rome and its fall, along with the parallels to today.
There’s a pithy comment I once read, written by a very jaded historian: “Success breeds failure, on a generational scale…”
Dude was on to something, I fear. How do the cynics put it, about the newly-rich? “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations…”? The same thing is true of civilizations, whether or not you like to admit it.
@ eon
The “prime motor” of the barbaric invasions had been the Huns moving to the west. In front of them, terrified Germanic tribes fled westward to not be enslaved of canceled, and all that flood ended up crashing on the limes.
The Empire saw it’s military expenses increase steadily, both because it needed more soldiers, and because it needed to pay them more and more (otherwise, the soldiers could find another Emperor). But it was still not enough. Over the centuries, the German tribes of August’s time conflated in powerful federations, and the Empire couldn’t fight all of them at once. It had to decide who where romanized enough to be welcomed into the limes, and who had to be left outside.
This strategy collapsed first at Adrianople (378 AD) where, for the first time, the Romans had to leave a tribe that was not romanized, and was not a tributary of the Empire, to enter into the limes.
Then it came the worst blow. The Vandal conquest of Africa (429-442 AD).
N. Africa was the bread basket of the Empire. Without imports of cheap grain from there, it was “every man for himself”. For the common people, it was no more convenient to maintain the Empire’s army and complex communication system. it was easier to live in the Romano-barbaric kingdoms.
But yet it was not necessarily the end (and infact it had not been for the Eastern Empire, that experienced the same difficulties)
Once the Huns had been finally defeated, the Empire had a moment of relief, and it was still, military, the most powerful actor around. Emperor Majorian managed, in only two years (457-458 AD), to defeat a Vandal expedition in Italy, then the Visigoths, the Burgundians and the Suevi in Gaul and Iberia, returning the Empire, in western Europe, to pretty much the dimensions it had under August.
But he knew he needed to regain Africa, and his expedition in Africa failed (the Vandals managed to burn his ships still in port). He was killed before having the possibility to try again.
That had been the real end.
@Dogwalker
Thank you for connecting the dots between Vandal invasion of North African lands, cereal production and its impact for the Western Roman Empire.
It’s a point often missed in History class in school.
@CG,
I have seen the argument made that while the Vandals did a lot of damage to things, the other major issue was that the Romans had depleted all of the surface water sources across the region, and that the cyclic “drying of the Sahara” was entering into its end-stages, which further damaged Roman agriculture in the region. It was, more than anything else, climate and desertification per the paper I remember reading. The Vandals were just the icing on top of the cupcake…
Of course, you can also make a case that the destruction of the water infrastructure via actual mindless vandalism and lack of maintenance had something to do with it…
In the end, we don’t really know enough about climate trends other than to be able to say that the Sahara has been awfully green in the recent geologic past, and has gone awfully dry in a repeating cyclic pattern going back as far as they can say. There were once shallow seas where whales frolicked in the surf, which are now deep into the deserts…
The Western Roman Empire may have died more due to climate shifts, more than anything else.
@CG
Thank you.
Yeah. To maintain the complex communication system and military force of the Empire was convenient as long as it guaranteed more things for most of the people, and that was possible with production specialization. Wine from Gaul, grain from N.Africa and Sicily, precious metals from Iberia, and so on.
With the loss of N.Africa, if any territory had to produce its own grain (and so could produce less of the rest), to maintain roads, ports, Army… was no more convenient. The warrior elite of a Roman-barbaric kingdom was less expensive to maintain than the Imperial taxes.
And still we see a drastic loss of population in western Europe. It was no that much due to massacres or plagues (the first real medieval plague had been the black death of mid 14th century) it was due to the fact that those territories couldn’t sustain that much population as the Empire could do transferring resources.
In this regard we have to remember that, yes, Roman N.Africa was more fertile that it’s now, or even a millennia ago, but not THAT much. It was that Roman (and classic in general) farming methods favored loose and semi-arid terrains. The methods to cultivate effectively the heavy terrains of central Europe had been devised only during Middle Age (out of necessity) and that led to a new population rise.
I know its a historical fact, but I gotta admit its very hard to imagine and accept, looking from todays perspective, that northern africa was such an agriculture heavy region in roman times. Maybe it was a thin strip close to the sea (like in California), maybe not.
@Storm,
That’s got to be one of the most difficult things about history to really wrap your head around. You grow up in the land you live in, and you think that it’s immutable, unchanging… Then, with a bit of education, you learn things that flatly blow your mind.
In my little home valley in North Central Washington, there are residual features left over from the last ice age, things I’ve walked over and lived among most of my life. It wasn’t until studying some geology on my own that the realization hit me that the gently sloped side of the valley across from my parent’s house was once where the floodwaters from Glacial Lake Columbia had a shoreline for long enough to deposit enough material to make for a really nice beach… Or, that the line which looks like a bathtub line around the valley actually indicates where the water reached its highest point. You see that, and you’re kinda like “Oh, OK…”, until you realize that there were almost certainly people around who could have seen that lakeshore for themselves, and who would have also been there when the ice dams breached and the whole thing drained.
We exist in a blink of geologic time; what we see today is ephemeral, and constantly changing. Nothing is really fixed; the climate you know and are accustomed to? It isn’t at all a permanent thing, even within your own lifetime. If you dig through the historical archives, you’ll find that even within historical times, the weather has been vastly different in some respects, and effectively unchanging in others. You can find newspaper articles dating back to the early 1900s bewailing the receding glaciers and rising seas, yet you can also look at pictures of things like Gibralter, and observe that there’s been no change to where the shoreline hits…
All too much of this crap is illusionary; we think we know these things, but the actual reality is that our lives are too short to really observe, as well as the fact that we don’t really remember the reality of it all accurately. I know there was one year when I was a kid when the temperature was 30 below zero for weeks, but when I go back to look at the historical records…? Can’t find that corroborating information, at all. Are my memories false, or did someone fudge the records? Contemporary newspaper accounts all say I’m right, but…?
In the Great War, the rifle platoon was considered in the US Army the basic combat formation. It had squads, but these were mainly administrative. When going into combat the platoon was divided into two half platoons (sections), one commanded by the platoon leader and the other by the platoon sergeant. The platoon had 3 automatic rifle teams (either chauchat or BAR). The platoon leader allocated his AR teams, his rifle bombers, hand bombers and rifle men among the two half platoon as he saw fit. The AR team was three men, gunner, loader and scout who carried extra magazines and provided flank and rear security. Typically the the platoon was march into the line of departure in two or more columns and deploy into two loose lines at the LOD. Sometimes the front section was in an arrow formation. The AR teams were usually two in one section and one in the other. Where they went was up to the platoon leader. Sometime they had two on the flanks of the leading section and one in the rear. Often if using the arrow formation, the AR team was at the apex. If the leading section bogged down the following section could move up to reinforce or attempt the flank the enemy. How do you dear with a German MG in the shell hole where they displaced after the opening or creeping barrage? The AR teams in conjunction with the rifle bombers suppressed the MG long enough for the riflemen and hand bombers to close and finish the MG off. Today people sneer at the “square” organization, but it works well for the US Army in the Great War. As a unit would bog down or become expended. The following sister unit would move up and through or around the leading unit and resume the offensive. There was no room for great sweeping flanking maneuvers on the wester front. By 1917 and 1918 everybody had figured out how to integrate infantry combat at the squad/platoon/company level. The US had the advantage of benefitting from everybody’s experience that the 1914 people did not. The AEF published a manual in 1918 “Instructions for the offensive combat of small units” (based on a heavily edited French manual)that explained how to do this, as well as other manuals. Even if you couldn’t read the illustrations showed how to do it. The illustrations kept showing up in US manuals well into WW2. These older manuals are better that what they published today. The older manuals assumed you could read well or if you couldn’t you could follow the pictures. Current manuals written like comic books and assume everybody reads at a second grade level and is stupid to boot, so why should be write a good manual. Having read a lot of manuals going back to 1860’s, after the 1960’s the quality of US Army manuals become abysmal.
The literature of the military is a lot like the mastery of language… If the literature is unclear and chaotic, lacking conciseness, clarity, and care…? The reality is that you’re looking at an organizational expression of the same syndrome you run into when talking to someone whose language skills show the same signs. Current politicians exhibiting this sort of thing? Kamala Harris comes to mind, if you’ve ever heard her speaking extemporaneously.
The problem with the US Army and its manuals is that they exhibit a lot of these signature vices. Lots of paper, lots of verbiage, and a minimum of what could be termed “clear advice to the soldier”.
Mostly because the people who wrote them weren’t all that bright, to begin with.
Case in point… There’s a basic Field Manual, FM 20-32, Mine Countermine Operations. Were you to look at a historical set of these manuals, which ohbytheway, is nearly impossible to do at the Engineer School library there at Fort Leonard Wood (‘cos there ain’t no need to keep old obsolete manuals on hand…), you would note that the 1968 version of this manual has three full chapters on the subject of “Route Clearance”, accompanied by copious illustrations and much valuable guidance. The version produced just after Vietnam is slightly less useful, and has only a single chapter on the issue, with somewhat less illustration. The manual rewritten for the mid-1980s has a couple of paragraphs, no illustrations, and seems to be of the opinion that proper Army gentlemen do not need to concern themselves with such routine cares as the maintenance of routes of communications…
Were you to examine the Staff Officers Planning Guide for those eras, you would find that the numbers therein given for clearing routes were never updated, and indeed, dated back to WWII and Korea. Never mind that the MTOE (Modified Table(s) of Organization and Equipment) had changed innumerable times for all units listed in that Field Guide, and that, indeed, some of those units no longer existed as a part of the Army.
Thus we operate, and thus we went into Bosnia, bereft of any real historical guidance from days of yore.
Around the time of OIF I, when we went into Afghanistan and Iraq, a friend of mine was tasked with re-establishing the Vietnam-era Mine Dog capability that we’d shut down. Now, we’d fielded entire companies of these dogs and handlers in Vietnam, even had manuals written about how they were organized and managed.
Not a single fucking copy of those manuals existed in the official Army system. Not in the library, not in the historical references, and my friend had to reinvent the wheel from first principals while desperately searching for a copy of the original manuals and references. Which did not exist. They finally found, after about six months, a very tattered and torn copy missing many, many pages in a historical display held at a state-level museum somewhere in the Midwest. My friend was very heartened to discover that he’d managed to mostly replicate the same “best practices” of the Vietnam era in his own efforts.
We had that conversation several years after the 24/7 effort he’d had to put in over several months, and of which I’d been entirely unaware. I never had the heart to tell him that I’d had a pristine copy of that manual in my research papers for years, and could have gotten him a full copy of it without too much trouble…
Ahistorical. That’s the word I’d use for the US Army; they literally do not keep old manuals around, even in the branch school libraries where you would think they might; I had to resort to the militaria market, when I was looking for old versions of the FM 20-32; paid over $300.00 for a ratty copy of the 1968 version. Week after I had it in hand, someone locally dumped a dead relative’s collection of manuals off at a surplus store I frequented, and I could have purchased five or six pristine copies of the same manual for a couple of bucks…
You bring this sort of thing up as an issue? LOL… The responsible parties just don’t get it. The librarians? Clueless. The officers? Even more so… “Why would we need old manuals? We don’t do things that way, any more…”
They literally pulp them, not even keeping reference copies around. Utter fucking moronicism, expressed on an institutional scale.
Had a conversation with a British Army exchange NCO, there at the Engineer School. His comment, in reference to the much-heralded and vaunted US Army Center for Army Lessons Learned was something to the effect of “…you really can’t call it a “Center for Lessons Learned” when you don’t ever demonstrate that you’ve learned anything, now can you? Your lot would be better off calling that place “the Center for Army Lessons Identified and Then Bloody Well Ignored”…”
I ruefully have to acknowledge that the Sergeant Major was a lot more “right” than I’d like to admit.
I feel your pain. It’s gotten to the place where the best source for manuals from back when they were meant to actually be useful is online.
At sites like Project Gutenberg or Faded Page, devoted to out of print books, or hobbyist sites devoted to preserving old military manuals “just because”.
Gutenberg has manuals going back to the Civil War. Why? Because people there love history.
I find myself wondering if the next time we’re in what a certain Lightworker called a “kinetic” situation, if we’ll have time to go on a scavenger hunt for books to tell us what to do.
clear ether
eon
If you like sleeping well at night, do not, I pray you, go looking at what all of our sainted “library scientists” have been up to in the last few decades.
All over the world, not just in US Army reference collections.
Bastards not only did away with the card catalogs, they did away with the books they referenced, and all we have now are easily “lost” and “edited” digital copies for a bunch of truly important references that no longer exist in a physical manner.
One of these days, the librarians of today are going to be held in the same contempt we hold the Taliban for blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and with far more cause.
Also, do not go looking into what the hell happened to all the modern equivalents of the old-school WWII “morning reports”. All of that was held digitally, and they conducted wholesale erasures of any and all classified hard drives before redeployment. I used to work at a desk directly in front of the 101st Airborne Division’s Command Historian, and it was truly disturbing to observe how hard he had to work just to get the minute fraction of the digital resources preserved and brought back to the US. Most of it was classified, so it could not just be turned over to the museum… And, baby…? They were classifying everything.
Future historians ain’t going to be able to determine shit from the pitiful fragments left over. Along with a bunch of guys who might happen to have to verify and validate their wounds for the VA… The records simply were not preserved.
Never forget that the Regular US Army is and was never intended to fight a war. Their mission is to raise, train, equip and lead the actual army that does the fighting. (WW1 National Army, WW2, Korea and Vietnam: the Army of the United States (AUS). Which stood down when in 1973 when the draft ended. The regular army is 99% bureaucrats in uniform (Beamter in German) So if somebody attacks, they hope that somebody will hold them off for the 2years it takes to get the fighting Army organized.
I would like to see a collection of U.S. Army manuals from the period that McArthur was top dog. Back when money was limited, and they opted to have more well trained soldiers as a training Cadre in case of emergencies instead of shiny new equipment.
Were the manuals better then, and could we get back to making them that way, if so?
The ones you want to see are the manuals produced by Marshall. Douglas MacArthur was more of a perfumed prince than an actual, y’know… Soldier.
GEN George C. Marshall was the man who truly did the heavy lifting for the Army which won WWII. I’d be hard-pressed to point at anything lasting that MacArthur accomplished in that Army; most of his decisions, like the one to turn the Army on the Bonus Marchers, were profoundly poor.
Marshall took over the Infantry School in 1927, and one of the key things he did was to put Edwin Harding in charge of writing a lot of the manuals; Infantry in Battle was the end product, and it was a seminal work still in use today.
Marshall knew his stuff; he was a consummate trainer, and an outright genius at organization. The poor bastard was so good at what he did, that he never got out of Washington DC during the war; the European theater command that Eisenhower got was supposed to be his, but FDR persuaded him that his duty lay in DC.
There’s a most excellent little book out there by one Geoffrey Perret, titled There’s a War to be Won, that goes over a lot of this ground, and far better than I can.
In all too many ways, I fear that the stuff written under Marshall during the 1930s was a lot better than today’s regurgitated and politically corrected crapfest.
The problem there is that those manuals were mostly written by the likes of the “pony soldiers” of the Indian Wars, and even veterans of the Civil War (on both sides).
We’re talking actual soldiers who had been there, done that, and had the scars to prove it. (“Oh, that big puckered thing like an asshole on my shoulder? I got that from a near-miss at Antietam.”) Men who knew what did and didn’t work because they’d learned the hard way.
Semi-modern example; Ever wonder why the German Leopard I tank was the Chevy Blazer of MBTs for half a century? Never broke down, could go anywhere, and had a gun system that could kill anything else around? Made the (2x as expensive/copy) British Chieftain look like a PoS by comparison?
Answer; Because it was designed by the same designers who had designed the WW2 Panzer IV and Panther, and was done to the specifications of the Bundeswehr colonels and generals who, a decade and a half before as captains and majors in the Wehrmacht, had fought their way across Europe, North Africa and half of Russia with those tanks. Men who knew from their own experience what did and more importantly did not work in tank warfare.
The Leopard I was designed to eliminate the known faults of PzKw IV and Panther, without creating entirely new ones in the process. And it worked well enough that a couple of armies (notably the Canadians) took them into Afghanistan in 2001. Thirty years old; still better than 9/10s of the other tanks in service.
It’s called “institutional memory”, and manuals are the way we used to transmit it to new generations, after the guys who got it first hand were hoisting tankards in Valhalla.
As Kirk has related, “we don’t do it that way any more”. The “old” is discarded and those who could be writing the “new” are either clueless, or being ignored because what they’ve learned the hard way doesn’t mesh with the system’s self-regard.
Hint; If you want to now whether or not a senior officer has any actual experience, look at his left top pocket on his Class Ones. If he has one or at most two lines of ribbons and a couple of bits of metal hanging below them, he’s somebody who is an expert in actual soldiering. He got those for being a hands-on specialist in killing people and breaking things, and he’ll top out as an O-6 at most.
OTOH, if he has stars on his collar and his left pocket is a billboard bigger than the pocket, and looks anything like Idi Amin Dada’s;
https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/amin-dada-idi-1925-2003/
You’re looking at a perfumed Pentagon prince. And those ribbons are mostly awards for just “Being There”, (“You’re where you should be all the time…”- “You’re So Vain”, Carly Simon 1972) and get traded back-and-forth between members of that club like baseball cards used to be traded by kids. (“Recommend me for this one, I’ll put you in for those two.”) Milley is their present High Priest, likely to be succeeded by Brown (Gen. USAF, CJCS).
And yes, they’re the ones who supervise and approve “training” these days. And manuals are approved by them. After having been written by staff officers, or even non-military academics, who are at best theorists and at worst just don’t like the military.
Now you know why there were and are so many flagpole-guarding Fobbits around. They’re these types proteges’ and they all want to be just like them.
So that’s why modern-day “manuals” aren’t really much use. Those who write them don’t know, and those few who know aren’t allowed to write them.
I don’t expect that to change. Except maybe to get worse.
And PS;
If you think military “manuals” today are bad, you really, really don’t want to look in a modern-day law enforcement training manual.
Trust me on this.
clear ether
eon
The Leopard 1 was never used in combat in till now in Ukraine and this is against seconde generation tanks. The Israelis went in the opposite direction to the Leopard with the Merkava. The only nation that used Chieftain in combat was Iran. The HESH round give the Chieftain a 5000 m effective range. In the pre-spaced armoure days this gave the Chieftain in an open desert a significant advantage. In Ukraine only the summer month can be effectively used for mobile opperations. It seems that the T-80 is beter suited for the mud and ice conditions in Ukraine than other Western tanks. Maybe it also the case with the lighter Leopard I. In Ukraine because of drones, cluster ammunition and anti-tank missiles, tanks is relegated to artillery support. That is why they bring back the T-55 with rifled barrel. When I fighting a defensive battle I will be more comfortable a Chieftan than a Leopard.
I am not sure I can agree with the ideas you’re stating about the Leopard I, or Chieftain.
There are three factors going into tank design: One is protection, another is firepower, and the third is mobility. Visualize a triangle, with the length of each side being equivalent to the amount of emphasis on each factor going into a tank; The Leopard I was a tank that emphasized two things to the express reduction of the third, which was “protection”. Leopard I was meant to be a highly mobile, heavy-hitting sort of tank. Chieftain was meant to be a heavily protected, heavily armed, not-so-mobile tank that even the Brits described as the most effective tank on the battlefield, so long as it managed to break down in a good defensive position…
I don’t think the Germans got the Leopard I right; it was too light of a vehicle to really do what they needed it to do, which was survive dealing with an onslaught of Soviet armor coming across the border. Were they taking their Leopards on an adventure into Eastern Europe, re-fighting Barbarossa? It was the perfect tank for that sort of fight. Supposing the crews kept up on maintenance and the logistics worked, this time around…
The ideal tank is the one you’ve got with you, at the moment. If it ain’t there, you’re screwed. This has been the reality since the end of WWI, and it is only recently that the entire proposition has come into question. Myself, I think that the tank is really the modern equivalent of the ancient chariot; devastating in its time, but doomed to obsolescence and relegation to ceremonial usage once the tactical environment changed sufficiently. I suspect that we’re going to be looking at the “Golden Age of Tanks” as having run from about 1939 to sometime in the early 2030s, before being reduced to the ceremonial role due to increases in anti-tank system lethality. About the time that the land mine gets up and follows you back to the resupply point, noses around for the fuel and/or ammo trucks, and then calculates the most destructive way to detonate…? I think we’ll be done with “Big Armor”. We aren’t too far from that sort of thing happening, right now.
I think it’s interesting that the Russians’ brand-new, “ultimate” MBT, the T-14, hasn’t been used so far in Ukraine, and neither has the advanced IFV (also called a T-14 just to confuse things) that goes with it.
To make up their armor losses, the Russians have even been sending in refurbished T-54s (no, not a misprint) instead.
The T-14 supposedly has everything; unmanned turret, automatic loading, multiphasic armor (Their version of the armor on the Abrams, I guess), turbine engine, etc. But so far, it’s only showed up in parades in Moscow.
My SWAG is that either it isn’t all it’s said to be, or else it’s so expensive to build and/or operate that they can’t field them in worthwhile numbers. (The “Tiger II” syndrome, IOW.)
Instead, they’re resurrecting tanks that have been sitting around since before I was born (the 1956 Hungarian revolt was the T-54’s moment in the sun)- and getting them blown up by drones, too.
Along with the “Death of the MBT”, I suspect we’ve seen the end of the helicopter gunship. Again, drones just find them too easy to kill. (Which was predicted over two decades ago; see Sea Fighter by James H. Cobb. “The coward’s kamikaze, sir; you gotta love it.”)
I’m inclined to suspect that a future battlefield will consist of infantry sedulously practicing H.M. Government Public Service Film No. 42, How Not To Be Seen, while acting as forward observers for artillery and other assets a long ways behind them.
Which sort of calls into question the whole concept of “taking and holding terrain”. It was said of the North African campaign that doing that in the desert made about as much sense as taking and holding stretches of ocean at sea. The real centers of gravity in North Africa were towns, especially ports (Tobruk), and the roads which allowed transport to stay out of the deep desert (whatever you do, try to avoid the Qattara Depression).
In Europe a couple of years later, everybody learned once again that you can’t ignore towns. (Caen and Bastogne come to mind.) And roads through forests are bad places to get sandbagged; the Hurtgen Forest proved to be as big a problem in 1945 as the Teutoburg Forest was 1,936 years earlier.
Ukraine may be showing us that the future battlefield may look a lot like a TV show;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_(The_Outer_Limits)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0ZLP9D1Qtg
It wasn’t a pleasant one.
clear ether
eon
The T-14 was, I suspect, a scheme to separate the Russian government from as much money as possible. Nothing else really makes sense, given the choices they made, which were basically “check the box” exercise in satisfying all the pundits about what was necessary in a next-generation tank.
Whole bunch of weird choices made, all along the way. Biggest one being the engine; they picked an engine format that’s never been produced successfully, whose heat management has proven to be problematic for everyone who has ever tried it. Then, instead of saying “Yeah, that thing’s a moonshot, let’s design the hull so it can use other engines that we know work…”, they went ahead and built something that could only accept that specific engine and that specific engine alone. Same with the rest of the systems… Rational designer would have said something to themselves like “Yeah, this vehicle is predicated on all this foreign technology that might be cut off… We ought to design with alternatives in mind…”
They did not.
The Russian military-industrial complex ain’t what it was under the Soviets, and the Soviet complex didn’t live up to advertising. All too much of the production machinery and equipment was imported, and they never managed to overcome that. The number of really successful Soviet/Russian factories out there can be counted on the toes of one hand; everything is imported from either the US or Western Europe. Absent the various idjits selling them stuff, the Soviet “war machine” would have been a literal “flash in the pan”. They’ve never managed to build a damn thing themselves, using their own resources. They can’t buy it? They can’t build it. The sad reality is that even the nuclear weapons complexes were reliant on things like imported klystron tubes, and getting those tubes (a consumable item, BTW, which go bad when exposed to radiation) was a constraining feature on the whole thing… If WWIII had come, we’d have basically have been guilty of selling them precisely what they used to blow our cities up. Brilliant, eh?
At this point, I think we have to evaluate the Russian Federation as a criminal conspiracy stacked on top of a bunch of other criminal conspiracies, wearing a trench coat, and masquerading as a modern nation-state. None of what you see in their military-industrial complex is what it is said to be; they’re putting wooden planks into the plate pouches of the body armor they’re issuing out to the troops, while the money that was supposed to be going to those winds up buying some connected person in the defense ministry a new dacha or a yacht…
Almost all the “X” engines did born as doubling of known and reliable V engines. In theory it seems a good idea. In practice the added complexity and doubling of torque on the same crankshaft rarely worked well.
In this case, many similarities (angle of the banks, bore, general dimensions…) had been noticed between the T14 Armata engine and a double UTD20, the engine of the BMP1-2.
Probably it can be replaced by an “H” 12. “H” engines (double flat) are not that common either, but have a far better record.
“(…)advanced IFV (also called a T-14 just to confuse things)(…)”
IFV derived from T-14 is actually called Т-15 or Объект 149 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2-15_(%D0%91%D0%9C%D0%9F)
They are bringing back the T-55 because that’s what they have left in storage. Had the Russians had the Leopard I in storage, they would have brought back them. Even the Pershing at this point.
When the “Heritage Center” at Carlisle Barracks still was the US Army Military History Institute, older Field Manuals could be easily downloaded as PDF file.
This capability was removed long ago. I wonder what the intention was. Today, even entering “Marksmanship” in the subject index field yields 0 hits.
The US Army is, as I’ve said, at its core essentially ahistorical.
They like to tell you that they aren’t, but that’s as much self-deception as it is anything else. There is zero actual regard or attention paid to anything that’s gone before, and I think a lot of it comes down to the way they evaluate and assess officers.
Nobody is ever given credit for doing “something old”. It all has to be “new and improved”, and if you’re the newer thing, you’ll get lauded for that and promoted. Nobody gets promoted based on how well they kept things ticking over…
If you read stories about the “Old Army” of the interwar years, as well as actual memoirs, you can see clear evidence of this syndrome. If you read From Here to Eternity, James Jones recounts a change of command for the company commander, wherein the new company commander issues an order to revamp the barracks by getting all the footlockers off the floor and up on racks hanging off the end of the bunks. All the privates and junior NCOs are aghast at the work they’ll have to do, to build the racks and install them. The company First Sergeant simply sighs, and takes a detail up into the attic of the barracks, where he pulls out a set of racks already fabricated for the entire company… All they need is dusting and some fresh paint. Seems that the previous commander had come in and “improved” things by having the racks removed, and the First Sergeant had had the foresight to recognize that he’d likely be putting them back into use once that commander had left…
“Newer and better” always trumps “Same old, same old”, because that gets you all the plaudits and “excellent” ratings. Never mind that you’re just moving the deck chairs on the Titanic around, and that you’d be exponentially better off looking out for those icebergs you’re steering into…
There’s a huge problem with the Army, in that it was set up with the idea that the officers would all be doing the “Big Picture” sort of thing, and that the senior NCOs would just keep things ticking over. Officers weren’t supposed to be intruding into daily life in the barracks, but that separation didn’t live past WWII and the transition to a full-time large professional force. We’re largely still operating on the heavily modified software that was installed back during the early 1800s, in all too many ways.
One issue I noticed over the years, and looking back is shared by the vast majority of our institutions. The US military and much of our civilian organizational entities operate on the idea that all you have to do to change anything or fix something is write a memo, send an email, or pass a law. This is such a gargantuan fallacy that we all subscribe to, and yet never notice ain’t working.
The usual run of things is that some figure in the hierarchy sees something that they see as a problem. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t… But, how they go about “solving” that problem almost always comes down to what I’ve come to term “diktat“; they tell someone not to do that thing that’s a problem.
Having published their memo, passed their law, or whatever, the hierarchist sees the problem as solved. Nine times out of ten, they won’t even bother to do any sort of post-diktat assessment, to see if the problem still exists… Most often, it is still there.
Why? Because the numpty never went out and examined what was actually going on in the environment surrounding that problem, in order to understand why people were doing that problematic thing in the first place. All too often, the diktat solution will have created even more perverse incentives, and possibly made the problem even worse.
Every single situation that you experience on the daily grind of things can be evaluated as a naturally-occurring Skinner Box. It’s all a conversation between you, the organism, and the environment you live in. If someone wants to effect a behavioral change, then they have to first be at least aware of what the environmental cues are, the ones that encourage or inhibit the behavior being displayed. You want to stop people from doing Action “A”? Instead of writing a memo telling them to stop, you really need to go out and examine the “why” before you do anything.
I used to work for a commander who, on paper, “encouraged” everyone to stop smoking. Wrote endless “guidance” about the Army “Smoking Cessation” program, and had all these people coming in to talk to us about the evils of tobacco. Over the course of his command tenure, this guy actually succeeded in creating more smokers than he had when he took command…
How’d he do that, you ask? Well, for one thing, he was such a total asshole and raging egotist that he was constantly verbally abusing people and generally creating all sorts of stress. I had a platoon sergeant over me that went from a really annoying “former smoker” who’d possessed the zeal of the convert, and was on-board with the new commander. In the course of six months working for that asshole commander, he went from “successfully stopped smoking” to being a two-pack a day man, just to try and deal with the stress of working with the guy.
Next commander came in, he was the diametric opposite, and a joy to work for and around. Probably 50% of the company smoked or dipped when he took over, and by the time he finished his tour as commander, it was down to about 10-15%.
You want to effect change in the world? You have to examine the specifics of why people are doing what people are doing. Nobody anywhere in the Army or the outside world ever really teaches this concept, or evaluates anyone on it. If they did, it’d be a much different world.
B.F. Skinner was a misunderstood genius, and behavioral science is a tool we should be teaching more about. The absolute best, most informative book I ever encountered for learning principles of leadership that worked? Wasn’t anything ever written by anyone in the military; it was a book entitled Don’t Shoot the Dog by an animal trainer named Karen Pryor. I got more out of that than I ever did anything else, and the wonder of it all…? It worked.
Always did get funny looks, though, when I recommended it to others.
In the Facilities Business we used to you get your name on a new building, but never on a renovation.