NS Military Realism Consultancy Thread Mark IX Spitfire

[Gallia-]

Back to the original topic, there are good reasons to have sensible rules of engagement for your troops other than "being a liberal pussy".

For one, actually engaging known and suspected enemy positions rather than just pasting the town in explosives makes it easier to, well, actually destroy the enemy rather than expend ammunition in vain. It's simply cheaper to lay down a guided bomb (or even a pair of dumb bombs using modern targeting computers) on top of the enemy bunker than to drop out hundreds of tons of explosives on the town - not only in terms of the costs of the bombs themselves but in terms of aircraft flight time, avoiding endangering aircraft, etc.

Second, bunkers and other positions are actually very sturdy - pasting the vague area doesn't endanger them as much as, you know, actually dropping bombs on the position themselves.

Third, there are good foreign relations and propaganda advantages to having the moral high ground - or at least being able to pretend, tenuously however that may be, that you hold the moral high ground. Even vast superpowers can't ignore the international consequences of horrible war crimes, as the USSR learned in Afghanistan.

I will agree in part with the first and second, there really is no point to go around and terror bomb a city with little to no strategic value. Such things are a waste of time and resources which are better spent doing more productive things like you know actually defeating the enemy. On the otherhand going around and intentionally shooting up a bunch of civilians is stupid but if they get in the way well so be it though. I also support forces engaging in foraging and scorched earth tactics if the situation demands it(Sherman's march to the sea).

For the third, I am in effect an isolationist and have a rather poor opinion of my nations position in the world with me lacking any interest in being a "super power" and "leaders of the free world" honestly. I couldn't''t care less what a bunch of foreigners think, especially those who I hate(british, scandinavians, communists, etc).

Good thing no one who matters agrees with you, then!

[Allanea]

I hope your population enjoys permanent poverty.

Allanea of course does get away with a lot of shit but that's because we do have good relations with a few dozen nations that approve of the horrid shit we do and have free trade treaties with us.

[Sadism and Gommorah]

Stalin was worse than Hitler. Thats not to say I find the Nazis palpable, but the death toll under Stalin was much worse as well as the economic implications.

Both are worst than America and almost every Democracy so its a moot point regardless. However I do believe Communism caused much more human harm and damage than fascism.

[Allanea]

That's mainly because Communism was more popular and existed for longer.

[Sadism and Gommorah]

Fascism existed still in a couple of nations. Franco's Spain for example would have been much more palpable to live in than say any of the Warsaw bloc countries.

It would still be a shit hole place to be in however and any of the other Western European powers would be better, but I mean yeah I guess this debates kind of pointless, they were both (Nazis and Soviets) supremely shit.

[The Akasha Colony]

Fascism existed still in a couple of nations. Franco's Spain for example would have been much more palpable to live in than say any of the Warsaw bloc countries.

It would still be a shit hole place to be in however and any of the other Western European powers would be better, but I mean yeah I guess this debates kind of pointless, they were both (Nazis and Soviets) supremely shit.

I think the word you are looking for is "palatable" rather than "palpable."

[Allanea]

Fascism existed still in a couple of nations. Franco's Spain for example would have been much more palpable to live in than say any of the Warsaw bloc countries..

You're still comparing the mildest fascist regime with some of the worst socialist ones.

At any rate Communism/Marxist-Leninist Socialism lasted to 1989 and is still very influential in some countries.

[Questers]

Fascism existed still in a couple of nations. Franco's Spain for example would have been much more palpable to live in than say any of the Warsaw bloc countries.

That's probably not true.

If you lived in Czechoslovakia you likely had a better standard of living and quite probably were free-er, too. In Hungary you probably would have been more free.

This is an improper comparison of wealth, but, taking Angus Maddison's World GDP data, using 1990 Gheary-Khamis dollars, Czechoslovakia had a significantly higher GDP per capita, at least 20% higher, until 1971. And Franco died in 1975. Czechoslovakia, for the years it existed, had a higher GDP per capita than Spain since 1925.

[HMS Vanguard]

Fascism existed still in a couple of nations. Franco's Spain for example would have been much more palpable to live in than say any of the Warsaw bloc countries.

That's probably not true.

If you lived in Czechoslovakia you likely had a better standard of living and quite probably were free-er, too. In Hungary you probably would have been more free.

This is an improper comparison of wealth, but, taking Angus Maddison's World GDP data, using 1990 Gheary-Khamis dollars, Czechoslovakia had a significantly higher GDP per capita, at least 20% higher, until 1971. And Franco died in 1975. Czechoslovakia, for the years it existed, had a higher GDP per capita than Spain since 1925.

What is striking is how similarly moderate fascist and moderate socialist countries performed.

It is not necessarily surprising when one considers the socialist origin of fascism.

It is fairest to say that Italy and Spain were "Brezhnevian fascism" and Germany was "revolutionary fascism".

Fascism seems to be milder in the sense that there was a much greater chance of skipping the revolutionary phase straight to the Brezhnevian phase. I think fascists were generally less emotionally invested in the ideas, and therefore more willing to abandon them when things started going wrong rather than doubling down on enforcement. The Germans were a notable exception, but they were notably more interested in foreign policy ideas than economic ones.

[Rich and Corporations]

That's probably not true.

If you lived in Czechoslovakia you likely had a better standard of living and quite probably were free-er, too. In Hungary you probably would have been more free.

This is an improper comparison of wealth, but, taking Angus Maddison's World GDP data, using 1990 Gheary-Khamis dollars, Czechoslovakia had a significantly higher GDP per capita, at least 20% higher, until 1971. And Franco died in 1975. Czechoslovakia, for the years it existed, had a higher GDP per capita than Spain since 1925.

What is striking is how similarly moderate fascist and moderate socialist countries performed.

It is not necessarily surprising when one considers the socialist origin of fascism.

It is fairest to say that Italy and Spain were "Brezhnevian fascism" and Germany was "revolutionary fascism".

Fascism seems to be milder in the sense that there was a much greater chance of skipping the revolutionary phase straight to the Brezhnevian phase. I think fascists were generally less emotionally invested in the ideas, and therefore more willing to abandon them when things started going wrong rather than doubling down on enforcement. The Germans were a notable exception, but they were notably more interested in foreign policy ideas than economic ones.

There is a good quote from Is Tomorrow Hitler's?:

Mussolini's Fascist state is the least terroristic of the three totalitarian states. The terror is so mild in comparison with the Soviet or Nazi varieties, that it almost fails to qualify as terroristic at all. The best proof I know of this is the experience of an Italian friend of mine who before Fascism came to Italy was chief correspondent of one of Italy's greatest newspapers. He occupied a position which might be compared with that of Chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times. When Mussolini took power this friend, whom I may call Luigi, was dismissed from his newspaper because he refused to become a Fascist. If he had wished to serve Mussolini, he would have been made a Senator, and would have become a rich man. But no, he was a courageous, passionately sincere liberal. He used to declare, "I would approve of nearly all Mussolini's program (he doubtless would not say that now), but as long as he wants to compel me to approve, I disapprove.

[HMS Vanguard]

Okay.

How "worse" one figure who did bad shit is than another surely depends more on their motivations and the value of those motivations.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Stalin didn't quite subscribe to "die untermensch".

The Soviet Union's version of GPO was "send Latvians to Siberia to chop down trees" and "destroy kulak". More or less, this was a very extreme form of pragmatism to break up the Baltic and Ukrainian nationalist sentiment and replace it with a Russian national mindset.

And the Holocaust was motivated by the supposed hostility of the Jewish mindset to the German. "An extreme form of pragmatism"! Sure, far too extreme.

It failed, but it was not really substantially different from what Western powers did in Africa or whatever to try to Westernize the aboriginal populations.

This is an outrageous suggestion. The Western powers did very little social engineering of this sort in any of their possessions.

GPO was literally founded on biologically and scientific nonsense, resembling something out of the Roman age with the return of warrior-peasantry and slave ownership.

Trying to draw a moral equivalency between the two is a surefire way to expose latent Holocaust denial, ignorance, or edgelord trolliness. Since the typical NSMRC poster is probably too Millennial to be an IRL Holocaust denier and too sperg to not have a passing understanding of GPO, the latter is the only sensible option so it makes you look like a children.

Stalin was a paranoid mobster, Hitler was a sperg.

Both systems were attempts to produce a new world for "our people", all others being slaves or dead. There was a different definition of "our people".

[Imperializt Russia]

In Canada and Australia, children of aboriginals were literally taken on the basis that "abbos can't parent" and either turned over to the state or white families, and subjected to special schooling.

That's quite despicable social engineering.

[HMS Vanguard]

In Canada and Australia, children of aboriginals were literally taken on the basis that "abbos can't parent" and either turned over to the state or white families, and subjected to special schooling.

That's quite despicable social engineering.

That is both a tendentious claim (aboriginals do have vastly higher incidence of child abuse than whites, so the claim that the removals were motivated purely by race isn't obviously true) and nothing to do with the claim he was making about imperial possessions in Africa.

[Imperializt Russia]

And, when you racially profile blacks for stop and search, you find that blacks have a higher incidence of drug possession.

[HMS Vanguard]

Thus proving that stopping blacks disproportionately often to their share of the population to search for drugs is equivalent to the GULAG archipelago?

[Imperializt Russia]

Thus proving that stopping blacks disproportionately often to their share of the population to search for drugs is equivalent to the GULAG archipelago?

I'm throwing out the suggestion of confirmation bias.

[HMS Vanguard]

I think this discussion belongs in General.

[The Greater Aryan Race]

No, they settled for burning entire cities to the ground repeatedly and even using atomic weapons on civilians. Nobody came out from that war clean. Nobody.

And no one is disputing that?

It's just that the things the axis did outside of war operations were so evil that it eclipsed this fact. And really those are only relevant to a discussion on military tactics and their morality if we look at them from the perspective of the resource draw they presented on the axis war machine which by the way was not insignificant.

I think you fail to see the point I was illustrating. That to automatically dismiss and throw out all rules of war, all regulations governing the behaviour and conduct of armed personnel during instances of war because "Hurr durr ends justify the means" makes for piss-poor strategy and ultimately dooms one to failure. There's a reason why we have rules to prevent soldiers from automatically flattening a village with artillery or raking a civilian with machine-gun fire because he looked at them funny. And not just because it's morally and ethnically questionable, even in the business of war, and because human beings in general are not savages who go around killing anyone willy-nilly. But because such an approach to warfare is extraordinarily counterproductive and ends up doing more harm than good.

Cases in point? Nazi Germany's conduct in the Eastern Front is one of the more famous examples. Oppressing and looting Russian and Ukrainian civilians while mistreating Soviet POWs was a massive own-goal on Herr Hitler's part. What could've been a golden opportunity to enlist thousands of Soviet civilians and soldiers to turn against the Communist regime failed spectacularly because many people saw how shitty the Nazis were and decided "Hey, better the devil we know than the devil we don't." and stuck to the Soviet government.

I can go on about other cases: The French counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria, American involvement in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan too. Not forgetting the German Empire's unrestricted submarine warfare programme, the mad gasp of a General Staff daily seeking "decisive" victories that never materialised.

[The Kievan People]

Samoz control your thread.

[Gallia-]

What are the lengths of Mini Spike and Spike SR?

This is important.

[The Kievan People]

About a meter.

[The Greater Aryan Race]

Mini Spike

wut

[The Kievan People]

[Gallia-]

I guess I can just eyeball the diameter, unless they're all 17 cm and that's why Mini Spike has a fat nose.

Battletech aliv in Spergtsunia

[The Kievan People]

Spike SR is 127mm or 130mm or smth.

Mini spike I think is about 100mm? IDR