NS Military Realism Consultancy Thread Mark IX Spitfire

[The Kievan People]

And brutal, violent hazing is known to be conducive to making people better fighters-

Oh wait.

It seems to happen regardless.

[Allanea]

And brutal, violent hazing is known to be conducive to making people better fighters-

Oh wait.

It seems to happen regardless.

Hazing exists in every military culture.

But sane countries try to reduce it to less dangerous forms, not legitimize and encourage it.

[Pharthan]

It seems to happen regardless.

Hazing exists in every military culture.

But sane countries try to reduce it to less dangerous forms, not legitimize and encourage it.

Insane countries try to rid it all together to the point of only allowing supervised "hazing," and eliminating anything and everything that could be construed as hazing.
I may or may not be talking about America.

Wartime training typically gets worse because there's less resources to train people and less time to train them.

This is actually one of the things America gets gloriously right. They capitalize on finding skilled individuals in wartime and send them back as instructors. You may have fewer resources, but you wind up with highly skilled people with as-relevant-as-possible information, skills, and experience, which beats out a lot of the negatives of wartime training.
This is also why you see fewer American aces pilots, tankers, lauded snipers, et cetera. Germans used them as role-models for propaganda, and America pulled them early on to ensure their survival so they could train the following groups of soldiers.
This (and superb artillery) are often lauded as why America won WWII. Better trained soldier instead of better motivated soldiers.

The best training, hands down, is actual experience. For infantry, this has the possible and largely negative side-effect of "death."

[The Kievan People]

Hazing is not a military specific problem. It exists in basically all organizations with a strong corporate identity, and we know from anthropology and history its roots stretch far into the past.

It's probably not possible to eradicate it.

[Allanea]

It's also not possible to completely eradicate murder, theft, and bank robberies.

[Imperializt Russia]

German training was originally like two years long.

Wasn't that before the re-armament phase where they wanted an intensely-trained hard core of forces that could rapidly train conscripts?

[The Greater Aryan Race]

Wasn't that before the re-armament phase where they wanted an intensely-trained hard core of forces that could rapidly train conscripts?

Wasn't the Reichswehr an all-volunteer force prior to rearmament?

[Imperializt Russia]

Wasn't that before the re-armament phase where they wanted an intensely-trained hard core of forces that could rapidly train conscripts?

Wasn't the Reichswehr an all-volunteer force prior to rearmament?

As I recall, the intention was a force of 100,000 highly-trained volunteers (conscription was presumably banned along with everything else), and the idea was if they ever had to go to war they'd just start conscription anyway.

[The Greater Aryan Race]

As I recall, the intention was a force of 100,000 highly-trained volunteers (conscription was presumably banned along with everything else), and the idea was if they ever had to go to war they'd just start conscription anyway.

Ah yes that does seem to be the case. I seem to recall reading somewhere that upon the commencement of rearmament, the existing Reichswehr divisions divided themselves into three divisions, all of which were to be staffed by conscripts and recalled officers from the old German Army.

[Gig em Aggies]

Just a simple clarification is it or will it be feasible to bring a military submarine with super cavitation abilities across the Pacific in under 2 hour ?

Reason being I read a story telling about how the Chinese "supposedly" have in the works a sub that could do just that.

PS I know it's very highly unlikely but it just sounded weird

[Prosorusiya]

So, I have a question regarding military organization: For historic reasons, my country uses more or less the same rank structure as Soviet Russia, with Lt. Gen (OF-8) being the highest rank. Would the civil Minister of Defense have a rank, or not?

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Just a simple clarification is it or will it be feasible to bring a military submarine with super cavitation abilities across the Pacific in under 2 hour ?

Reason being I read a story telling about how the Chinese "supposedly" have in the works a sub that could do just that.

PS I know it's very highly unlikely but it just sounded weird

https://m.reddit.com/r/askscience/comme ... nderwater/

[Dostanuot Loj]

yeah you can have the bestest most awesomeest aryan child army maneuvers ever however some d-bag from the bronx with his map-grid artillery system will be able to call for fire on karl and his band of plucky, quirky youth of kiddies within minutes of them stepping on the field of battle

its all fun and games until 36 105mm M101A1s shell your position with WP and HE and you watch your best friend jager von smithenhem get blown to bits

M101A1 uber alles

This is legit the best explanation of why the US beat German troops in 1944-1945.
I request your permission to re-use it in the future, with credits pls San.

[Gallan Systems]

The fascist powers had the best training standards of the war and almost entirely as a result of their political philosophies.

The USA was near the bottom even by liberal democracy standards, American soldiers were near incompetent morally and physically, if their ability as infantrymen says anything.

IJA training was terrible.

It included such gems as...

1. Literally stabbing soldiers with sharp sticks to teach them to injure pain and injury in the name of the Emperor.
2. Literally refusing to teach officers about Japan's defeats.
3. Instructing officers that unsheathing your sword and shouting Banzai had the firepower equivalent of a dozen men with rifles. [Again, literally.]

The fap that fascist nations [and especially japan] had to DEFEAT THE ENEMY WITH SHEER IRON WILLL AND BRAVERY lost time and time again to a hail of mortar rounds.

fascist dogma regarding moral superiority trickled down into liberal democracies though

before it did the democratic armies had glorious military boners like korea and vietnam

after it did they had glorious boners like OIF/Afghanistan

but at least they didnt lose afghanistan/OIF out of being so cowardly/weak to not even occupy the entire country or whatever

[Allanea]

And none of the problems of Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Iraq have anything to do with the quality of US soldiers.

[Gallan Systems]

Well no, the fascist-style reforms never bothered to affect the political apparatus that controls the military.

The USA needs a JFC Fuller.

One who will institute a military junta and make America truly great again.

Stimulus package is five massive tank and gunship manufactories for Detroit. Small arms ammunition factories for other major cities, and dedicated arsenal grounds for major US Army research labs.

[The Akasha Colony]

Just a simple clarification is it or will it be feasible to bring a military submarine with super cavitation abilities across the Pacific in under 2 hour ?

Reason being I read a story telling about how the Chinese "supposedly" have in the works a sub that could do just that.

PS I know it's very highly unlikely but it just sounded weird

No. Not without something that's outright FT.

The distance between San Francisco and Tokyo is over 8,000 kilometers. Even an SR-71 at Mach 3+ could not cross this distance in 2 hours.

[Kazarogkai]

The fascist powers had the best training standards of the war and almost entirely as a result of their political philosophies.

The USA was near the bottom even by liberal democracy standards, American soldiers were near incompetent morally and physically, if their ability as infantrymen says anything.

By facist you just mean Japan, which was arguably fascist, and Germany and not counting Italy of course right?

[North Arkana]

The fascist powers had the best training standards of the war and almost entirely as a result of their political philosophies.

The USA was near the bottom even by liberal democracy standards, American soldiers were near incompetent morally and physically, if their ability as infantrymen says anything.

By facist you just mean Japan, which was arguably fascist, and Germany and not counting Italy of course right?

The Italian soldier was a good fighter. The Italian command structure was a fuck-up.

[Gallan Systems]

The fascist powers had the best training standards of the war and almost entirely as a result of their political philosophies.

The USA was near the bottom even by liberal democracy standards, American soldiers were near incompetent morally and physically, if their ability as infantrymen says anything.

By facist you just mean Japan, which was arguably fascist, and Germany and not counting Italy of course right?

Italian alpine and cavalry troops acquitted themselves well enough, ans the North African troops were rather gritty.

Their problems were more or less related to Italian equipment being outdated and rather incapable compared to Allied weapons. Italy's weapon manufacturing peaked about right before the war, when everyone else was just getting started, and it wasn't stupendously great or anything before that.

They made one or two decent planes I guess too.

Italy's problem in WW2 is that half its army ended up fighting each other during the Civil War, which makes any sort of defense of the Italian Peninsula a bit of a fool's errand outside the Germans, who were still in one piece, but on the Eastern Front and in North Africa they were served well enough by their training. They fought just as hard as anyone else anyway. The only cowardice comes in not fanatically throwing themselves at the enemy like Germany/Japan did, but Italy was hardly as unified under Mussolini as either of those countries were, which is rather the point of the Civil War.

They're akin to an Evil France (redundant?) I guess, where one half fought the allies and the other half didn't, and they have an undeserved reputation for cowardice, but they started out on the fascist side and ended up on the liberal side, rather than vice versa.

Anyway I imagine the physical standards were quite high, too, given that a core tenet of almost all fascism was the near worship of the human body and its capabilities.

[Kazarogkai]

Hazing exists in every military culture.

But sane countries try to reduce it to less dangerous forms, not legitimize and encourage it.

Insane countries try to rid it all together to the point of only allowing supervised "hazing," and eliminating anything and everything that could be construed as hazing.
I may or may not be talking about America.

Wartime training typically gets worse because there's less resources to train people and less time to train them.

This is actually one of the things America gets gloriously right. They capitalize on finding skilled individuals in wartime and send them back as instructors. You may have fewer resources, but you wind up with highly skilled people with as-relevant-as-possible information, skills, and experience, which beats out a lot of the negatives of wartime training.
This is also why you see fewer American aces pilots, tankers, lauded snipers, et cetera. Germans used them as role-models for propaganda, and America pulled them early on to ensure their survival so they could train the following groups of soldiers.
This (and superb artillery) are often lauded as why America won WWII. Better trained soldier instead of better motivated soldiers.

The best training, hands down, is actual experience. For infantry, this has the possible and largely negative side-effect of "death."

I would argue the main reason for america winning the war has to do with numerical advantages in both manpower and resources which the Japanese and Germans lacked in comparison to their enemies. Aka as Uncle Joe once more or less stated "Numbers is a value in of itself". Though they may have had quality, atleast in the beginning, they lacked the required quantity to win a proper total war.

Another thing to consider is that atleast in the case of Japan they honestly believed that the war would be rather quick, that it would end up like the Russo-Japanese war with them once again getting their battle of tsushima. In a quick and decisive war like that quality actually does matter a hell of a lot more, and in a war like that the Japanese would have excelled at if their early war success is any indication.

[Gallan Systems]

Hazing exists in every military culture.

But sane countries try to reduce it to less dangerous forms, not legitimize and encourage it.

Insane countries try to rid it all together to the point of only allowing supervised "hazing," and eliminating anything and everything that could be construed as hazing.
I may or may not be talking about America.

Wartime training typically gets worse because there's less resources to train people and less time to train them.

This is actually one of the things America gets gloriously right. They capitalize on finding skilled individuals in wartime and send them back as instructors. You may have fewer resources, but you wind up with highly skilled people with as-relevant-as-possible information, skills, and experience, which beats out a lot of the negatives of wartime training.
This is also why you see fewer American aces pilots, tankers, lauded snipers, et cetera. Germans used them as role-models for propaganda, and America pulled them early on to ensure their survival so they could train the following groups of soldiers.
This (and superb artillery) are often lauded as why America won WWII. Better trained soldier instead of better motivated soldiers.

The best training, hands down, is actual experience. For infantry, this has the possible and largely negative side-effect of "death."

Americans didn't do this in WW2, though. Or Korea. Or Vietnam. You're confusing them with the Germans.

The US Army trained its soldiers in WW2 for about a month (four weeks) and then sent them to cover some very basic infantry training. Eventually, it got to the point where soldiers were given four weeks of cursory instruction in battle and sent to the front.

A fantastic system for racking up a body count and not much else.

Liberal democracies, while getting economics right (i.e. capitalism is superior to fascism if we're assuming pre-transistor technology), were wholly and shamefully incompetent at managing the human aspect of war. This isn't surprising since it was the age of scientific management and other literally autistic ideologies running rampant in America. Soldiers were poorly trained, poorly led, and generally incompetent to varying degrees in the American case. They won mostly through weight of shell, which is fine, until you run out of manpower due to liberal capitalism's victory over state conscription and the individual compulsion/psychic rape of free will known as "patriotism". Or until you simply don't have weight of shell to throw.

Thankfully, the USA was able to conquer its inability to fight battles by adopting fascist norms into its army decades ago. Now it has two problems: it has no men, and it can't afford to buy artillery shells. At least the men are well trained and capable of attacking without needing to ask for thirty battalions of artillery to turn whatever objective into the moon. Won't stop them from asking, though so RIP operational tempo when your artillery is the finest guns this side of the Yalu River instead of something that is useful.

The whole "USA is incompetent/poorly led/incapable of doing <basic military function here> in <war>" is a running theme though. OIF was probably the first time the US Army was ever successful in urban combat on the first try, were it not for Grenada/Panama, but a first for heavy forces equipped with AOE mechanized battalions certainly. Mostly enabled through the co-opting of fascist legacies of "training soldiers to fight in war" or something so silly as that. A proud legacy indeed.

america dead empire, etc.

German training was originally like two years long.

Wasn't that before the re-armament phase where they wanted an intensely-trained hard core of forces that could rapidly train conscripts?

It was before 1940.

The intensely trained German conscript could do 60 km/day marches if he was filled with Nazi spirit. This is about fast enough to keep up with a tank division. Maybe the fastest straight leg marches were done by fascist soldiers in training or on maneuvers. Unfortunately [for Hitler], Nazi infantry divisions naturally marched slower than the infantry regiments because pack animals cannot be encouraged by patriotic speeches and cadence due to being afflicted with the stupid.

Beyond that, the training included extremely thorough study of things like ballistics theory and fieldcraft, and German soldiers were able to sustain favorable loss exchange ratios the entire war, even with the cut down program they were using by the end. If Germany had the industry of the Americans, we'd all be saluting Hitler and the Jews would be a footnote in history.

Or if the Luftwaffe just had the training and expertise of the RAF, perhaps Europe would be saluting Hitler alone.

Circle Trigon irl.

[Gallan Systems]

TBH, McNair was probably the best US Army general of WW2 really.

Devers might be 2nd or 3rd.

Depending on where Devers lies, Eisenhower takes up the slack.

And sorry "Viky" but Patton doesnt even make the top 5.

No room for combat generals in a list of nothing but logisticsperg managers.

[The Kievan People]

It must be hard to go through life being so wrong.

[Pharthan]

It must be hard to go through life being so wrong.

OMG yes military history is such an important part of my everyday life. My wife has threatened to leave me because of it and it has so much relevance in my day-to-day job.

Sarcasm aside, funny thing is that it actually probably has more relevance to my day-to-day job than anyone else in NSMRC, so fml.
Pretty much all of my military history knowledge comes from my officers, not books and historians. So meh, it's whatever. As much as I'd like to be educated on it, I can live with that ignorance.

Though I am fairly certain I was right about the US pulling skilled individuals (perhaps I'm overstating it because it's partially the policy the US has now - i.e. the Navy did their best to keep their claws in me, whereas lesser sailors they just kinda of let go off and do whatever bs menial jobs, and greater sailors they clawed to put in even more critical training commands, as opposed to the "logical" thing which would be to reward the great sailors with bs menial easy jobs, instead of the other way around) whereas the Germans left them on the front lines, seeing as it was part of the reason they went so hard into developing the Tiger, King Tiger, and Maus because of the exploits of Michael Wittman giving them credence - at least in Hitler's eyes - to the notion "bigger is better." Heck, German aces and snipers were practically movie stars to some degree, and Germans emphasized their aces quite heavily - partially proven in the fact they actually had tank aces.

Americans didn't do this in WW2, though. Or Korea. Or Vietnam. You're confusing them with the Germans.

The US Army trained its soldiers in WW2 for about a month (four weeks) and then sent them to cover some very basic infantry training. Eventually, it got to the point where soldiers were given four weeks of cursory instruction in battle and sent to the front.

I don't believe I said anything as to timeframe, rather, more to focus on bringing back good instructors.