NS Military Realism Consultancy Thread Mk X Purps Safe Space

[Questers]

The original design is two infantry battalions of 3 companies each and an armoured regiment of 6 companies, with an additional battlegroup headquarters, so it can be as balanced or unbalanced as the brigade commander wants.

What made Questers move to the forefront of radical combined arms innovation?

Meta? I wanted 1:1.

IC?
http://marewiki.ml/index.php/2015_Karaman_War

[Gallia-]

The whole thing can probably be traced back to the biblical end times and subsequent salvation of man kind. And this cultural trends seeps over into the realm of military and politics with nations constructing elaborate plans on how to survive post atomic war.

This is wrong. The West has zero comprehensive civil defense plans [maybe Germany or Japan did?], because it doesn't see nuclear war as survivable, for whatever reason. Probably because the major Western benefactor (USA) was never subjected to strategic bombardment and never had to institute a civil defense in the first place? A truly stunning surprise: Country that has no experience with a problem continues to believe it will never have any experience with said problem, possibly for all time, or at least until it does.

"If the bombs start dropping we are already dead so there is no point attacking the enemy military. Just focus on completely destroying their nation in revenge."

Purpelia = American; confirmed?

So what about your nation and culture? How do your people see the specter of atomic war?

Galla sees atomic war as an extension of bomber raids. If four to five years of bomber raids were compressed into five to thirty minutes.

A sufficiently robust civil defense force, state economy planning [in the sense of the state's portion of the economy, not a command economy], and military planning for a total defense of major industrial-economic areas against atomic attack; comprehensive education, training, and readiness exercises for the civil defense and emergency services; and a grounded education, understanding, and instillation of a "can do" attitude in the general civilian population is adequate to ensure survival of relatively large portions of the economy after an atomic attack. Relative to an unprepared state, of course, since vast swathes of Galla would be reduced to hollowed out husks of buildings, much like Dresden or Hamburg IRL.

The most extreme form of strategic bombing preparedness is a defense cottage industry I guess. It didn't quite work for Japan IRL because Japan is an island, but it may be feasible for a continental power. Basically once the initial five to forty-odd minutes of nuclear bombardment are over, you've survived. If you can get over the initial shell shock and realize that you aren't actually dead, then you've basically won, at least if your enemy's civil population decides to morally capitulate.

The power of a single surviving POL refinery or a tactical fighter wing or a tank battalion increases exponentially in a post-atomic world because the economies of the major industrial nations will be devastated. "Git thar' the fustest with the mostest," still applies, as it does in any other situation in war, and the fastest way to get the most there is by not needing to build new things at all!

So actual nuclear war planning involves superhard depots and military storage complexes, an emphasis on preservation of the population-economic centers that will allow issuing of the stockpiled weapons and ammunition to the survivors; transportation of the newly generated mekskytte and pansar battalions to the continent; and the final destruction of the Adversary by combined arms effort of the post-atomic army through the shattered husks of his economy. Rebuilding comes after the threat of the enemy's victory has been totally and finally extinguished.

When it comes to cultural symbolism atomic war has essentially usurped the concept of Ragnarok, the ultimate end all conflict in which all that lives dies and the world ends forever.

Ragnaroek was never "all that lives dies". It was the death of the gods. It's also not firey, it's snowy. Shocking: people from cold places fear winters. A nuclear war has the order reversed: Surtr comes after the Fimublwinter, not before, so having a bunch of fire and then eternal winter doesn't make a lot of sense with the eschatology of Nordic peoples. The other part of Ragnaroek that you've missed was that it wasn't "the world ends forever". At the end, Men emerge from the world tree Yggdrasil and recolonize the Earth after the death of the gods.

A country with a eschatology rooted in Ragnaroek will believe two things, if you want to weigh heavy on the religious themes:

1) That nuclear war is survivable. cf. Lif and Lifthrasir emerge from the holt and mankind regrows.
2) That the people of the world will be killed by freezing winters, not the fires of Hades.

Volcano gods were not as central to Norse religion as they are in Christianity, so fear of fire and brimstone isn't as strong and the association of nuclear war with the end times will be weaker.

Additionally, if you want to throw in sun worshipers to the mix [and any self-respecting atomic power should have actual sun worshipers, like Phyllis Wheatley], you might have radical Posadists running around advocating to bring the sun to earth. Deep lore of Galla revealed. Not only is nuclear war survivable, but we must make preparations to bring the children of the Sun (thermonuclear weapons) to all corners of the Earth, so that Men can witness the Beauty of the Sun firsthand. Or just make a self-sustaining nitrogen fusion reaction in atmosphere and turn the Earth into a sun.

[Purpelia]

I really need to finish writing my editorial on Purpelian religion one of these days. TLDR; it's basically an offshoot of Nordic religions but with lots of animist shamanism thrown in. And the whole thing is shifted so that Ymir is the all father, the gods are kin slaying usurpers and Loki and the frost giants are the good guys. I really just need to sit down and write it down one of these days. But TLDR in the Purpelian version the world ends and than it all reverts to Ymir who reassembles and continues walking through an infinite emptiness alone forever in a supreme gesture of "Fuck this creating the world thing. Been there, tried that and fuck it forever."

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

• Invest significantly in BMD, which means sophisticated early warning systems (radars, IR sats) as well as interceptors and directed energy weapons (sprint, brilliant pebbles, SBL, ABL, KEI, etc) based in the air, on land, at sea, and in space.
  
• Have an air defense system which can deal with bombers and cruise missiles (ie AWACS/JSTARS + fighters and SAMs)
  
• Put bomb/fallout shelters in all major cities and urban areas.
  
• Have emergency services and first responders occasionally train for nuclear attack scenarios to go along with a set of SOPs specifically tailored to deal with that eventually.
  
• Ideally have military facilities and major industrial facilities dispersed in rural areas rather than clustered together in or around cities.

Anything I could add or look into?

[Gallia-]

I really need to finish writing my editorial on Purpelian religion one of these days. TLDR; it's basically an offshoot of Nordic religions but with lots of animist shamanism thrown in. And the whole thing is shifted so that Ymir is the all father, the gods are kin slaying usurpers and Loki and the frost giants are the good guys. I really just need to sit down and write it down one of these days. But TLDR in the Purpelian version the world ends and than it all reverts to Ymir who reassembles and continues walking through an infinite emptiness alone forever in a supreme gesture of "Fuck this creating the world thing. Been there, tried that and fuck it forever."

The only thing that survives the end of the world is two relics: Sword Art Online and Devil May Cry.

• Invest significantly in BMD, which means sophisticated early warning systems (radars, IR sats) as well as interceptors and directed energy weapons (sprint, brilliant pebbles, SBL, ABL, KEI, etc) based in the air, on land, at sea, and in space.
  
• Have an air defense system which can deal with bombers and cruise missiles (ie AWACS/JSTARS + fighters and SAMs)
  
• Put bomb/fallout shelters in all major cities and urban areas.
  
• Have emergency services and first responders occasionally train for nuclear attack scenarios to go along with a set of SOPs specifically tailored to deal with that eventually.
  
• Ideally have military facilities and major industrial facilities dispersed in rural areas rather than clustered together in or around cities.

Anything I could add or look into?

Fallout shelters are kind of useless, unless they are hardened command posts for COG then they are probably OK. Anything that shields from glass is adequate for the general population. So duck and cover or hide in the closet and keep your fire extinguisher close to your chest so you can put out the inevitable curtain fires or whatever the thermal pulse brings. Anyone/anything close to the burst can be written off, and the ballistic missile defense system should be killing RVs that are targeting population heavy areas and strategic sites like armored vehicle depots and superhard airbases, but it obviously cannot stop them all.

Industrial centers, in the sense of the civilian economy, should obviously be located near the nexus of economic activity: cities. These are extremely useful transportation hubs that are close to work for the general population. They are also the most heavily defended areas of BMD protection, because they house the most people, who are the most important resource of any state. The military-industrial complex should be located in a series of planned communities, like Los Alamos or Oak Ridge, whose sole purpose is to service employees and families of employees of the MIC laboratory or factory.

A MIC is not extremely useful during a war, though. Especially a post-atomic war. However, it is absolutely essential prior to the war. Peacetime is the time that is spent preparing for the next war, because conflict/war is the inevitable result of politics. So it is more useful to have civilian factories that live in one or two surviving major cities that can produce asphalt and machine tooling. Not only are cities the most defended places, but they are the vital points of an economy. Thus, they need protection beyond reasons of "lots of people" and "ports to ship tanks to the continent" or whatever. The MIC can be regenerated over time when the national economy recovers from the war, which is not really a big deal.

Since the MIC produces so little actual physical goods (even if you had endless tanks like Kharkiv, you can still accommodate this with a planned community of a few tens of thousands of people and a suitably large railhead) even at its largest, it doesn't need to be located near the nexus of transportation. You aren't routinely exporting tanks to other countries, and those that do can be transported on heavy trucks to a port a few hundred miles away. Aviation is maybe one exception there the military and civilian centers overlap to the point that you could make an argument for there to be miscegenation between the state and private economies. But a B787 factory isn't going to be building F-15s or Super Hornets, so not really.

You can probably build fallout shelters to defend the MIC's PhDs from being vaporized by nuclear attack, if you feel like they will be useful in the immediate post-war economic environment. Galla might do that ICly, but I'm not sure, since it would certainly be easier to evacuate a town of 15-30,000 than a city of 1.5-3 million. The benefits of a ready-made package of PhDs safe and sound for loading into trucks vs. camouflage clad troops slowly combing the countryside for men in dirty white labcoats diminishes proportionately with weapon accuracy.

So basically you should orient your defense on the population and concentrate weapons and interceptors near the most populated sites, because the vital factors that allow people to live in large aggregations will also be vital for winning the war after the atomic attack. Don't forget to stockpile food and have SOPs for distribution and protection of the food distribution centers. But don't necessarily assume that the same place will be available for food distribution either; so those SOPs should be flexible and agnostic to where the distribution center actually is. Farmland will suffer bigly in an atomic war when the radioactive ash rains out on it, so you will need to survive severe famine by importing food and strict rationing.

But other than that you have the gist of it.

[Purpelia]

The only thing that survives the end of the world is two relics: Sword Art Online and Devil May Cry.

No idea where you are going with that since I've newer played either of those. My lore is basically based on the fact that Purpelians are NOT a Germanic culture and people. They are basically an asian people that at some point in ancient history got colonized by Norsemen who than blended into the local culture leaving marks into it. So like the language sounds Germanic but isn't. The script is runic though. And in the religious aspects Ymir has essentially become a substitute for the natural forces that were worshiped before and the norse "gods" became seen as these evil usurpers who came in, knocked Ymir out and carved their kingdom out of his corpse.

But it's all better because he isn't dead, only sleeping in what can only be described as an eternal dream of mind broken insanity. And I mean insanity. Like Ymir at this point essentially becomes a Lovecraftian horror whose dreams and nightmares effect the real world. So the religion basically revolves around doing things to try and effect his dreams and nightmares to manipulate nature through that. And the way this works is that all our souls are shards of his original soul which was broken into pieces when his body was broken. Well, all of animal and plant and Purpelian souls anyway. Foreigners don't have souls so they ain't people. So when Ymir has a dream that overflows and effects all the souls. And like if he has a bad dream the spirit of the river might get a bad day too and that's how we get floods.

And Ragnarok than becomes a complete point of divergence. When the frost giants rise, Purpelians actually join Loki and together they take down the gods and kill every single living thing in existence. And when all dies those souls go back together and Ymir awakes. So everything ends and all dies and no more nothing. But it's all OK because the proper order returns to the cosmos.

[Gallia-]

No idea where you are going with that since I've newer played either of those.

I'm saying it's needlessly angsty and reads like an edgelord wrote it.

[Allanea]

Put bomb/fallout shelters in all major cities and urban areas.

Let me just comment briefly as a resident from a country that actually has mandatory bomb shelters in all apartment buildings.

Israel has several forms of mandatory bomb shelters.

For the purpose of this discussion, what's important is the miklat (shelter), mamad (protected space), and miklat tziburi (publish shelter).

The miklat is essentially a basement area in a house or a school or whatever, sufficient to protect those who live there from impacts of small munitions, shrapnel, and the effects of NBC weapons. Under the law, one of these must have a filtration system sufficient for protecting against the NBC threats Israel faces, however sometimes these are allowed to fall in disrepair (then the nation reminds itself Iran exists).

The mamad is a protected space for people who cannot reach a miklat in time. When properly builts is protected against shrapnel, NBC weapons, and the direct impacts of small mortar rounds and some MLRS rockets. In theory, every new apartment built in Israel must have at least 9 sq. m. usable as a mamad. They're mandated for businessed but with different dimensions.

Fnially a miklat ziburi is a vast structure capable of sheltering members of the general public who have been nearby during an attack. [The Tel-Aviv Central Bus Station has a vast atomic shelter for 20,000 people].

Beyond it there is tomfoolery like armored bus statins etc.

However, most of these things (except for the larger ones - there are public bomb shelters in my neighborhood with 2-3 meters of concrete on them) are not secure for direct bomb impacts (although if I get to choose where to be when Armageddon happens, the Central Bus Station is probably it). That said, direct bomb impacts on a random apartment building are kind of unlikely.

[Gallia-]

Affordable bomb shelters become useless with high accuracy nuclear weapons anyway, unless you want to bury a city under 3,000 feet of solid granite or something. A nuclear weapon of any size can be within an arbitrary number of meters of any shelter. So anything that isn't deep underground is within the fireball/crater zone. They are only useful as major command posts for nuclear attack troops and preservation of the government so it can get to the part where it is ascertaining, consolidating, and marshaling the surviving economic resources for finishing the war as quickly as possible.

Mostly because a realistic economy can probably only afford one, maybe two, actual nuke-proof shelters. If you have infinite money and infinite time then it is obviously beneficial, but at that point you might as well invest in building underground arcologies and becoming mole men IRL.

Passive protection nowadays means generators, fire suppression systems, common sense, and stoicism. Bomb shelters were cool until the 1970s I guess.

e: Although if you are constantly being bombed by rockets or whatever like Allanea's backyard then they're still good. Just good. Not great, since even then, an active defense is still preferable. For nuclear weapons, an active defense is the only defense, but that's fine since it's the only defense against strategic bombers too if you ask the residents of Dresden c. Valentine's Day 1945.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

So revising my earlier post:

Have population centers and military-industrial facilities located in clusters, each major cluster having at least a hardened PAR/MAR type radar and multiple remote missile farms containing hundreds of Sprint or HEDI type missiles.

Make buildings out of non flammable materials (steel and concrete) and have very stringent fire safety requirements such as requiring all public buildings to have automatic fire suppression equipment (ie sprinklers).

I guess the goal is to ensure that enough military units survive that we can wage war in return while enough of the population and infrastructure survives that society can be eventually rebuilt.

[Austrasien]

Affordable bomb shelters become useless with high accuracy nuclear weapons anyway, unless you want to bury a city under 3,000 feet of solid granite or something. A nuclear weapon of any size can be within an arbitrary number of meters of any shelter. So anything that isn't deep underground is within the fireball/crater zone. They are only useful as major command posts for nuclear attack troops and preservation of the government so it can get to the part where it is ascertaining, consolidating, and marshaling the surviving economic resources for finishing the war as quickly as possible.

Mostly because a realistic economy can probably only afford one, maybe two, actual nuke-proof shelters. If you have infinite money and infinite time then it is obviously beneficial, but at that point you might as well invest in building underground arcologies and becoming mole men IRL.

Passive protection nowadays means generators, fire suppression systems, common sense, and stoicism. Bomb shelters were cool until the 1970s I guess.

e: Although if you are constantly being bombed by rockets or whatever like Allanea's backyard then they're still good. Just good. Not great, since even then, an active defense is still preferable. For nuclear weapons, an active defense is the only defense, but that's fine since it's the only defense against strategic bombers too if you ask the residents of Dresden c. Valentine's Day 1945.

Cease your evil defeatist groupthink commie.

The value of shelters is it's relatively easy to massively reduce the lethal radius of a warhead. Though it can potentially be overcome with more warheads and deliberate targeting, these can both be frustrated by missile defense, which robs the attacker of free choice in picking targets. There is great synergy between hardening and hard-kill defense.

[Allanea]

Affordable bomb shelters become useless with high accuracy nuclear weapons anyway, unless you want to bury a city under 3,000 feet of solid granite or something. A nuclear weapon of any size can be within an arbitrary number of meters of any shelter. So anything that isn't deep underground is within the fireball/crater zone. They are only useful as major command posts for nuclear attack troops and preservation of the government so it can get to the part where it is ascertaining, consolidating, and marshaling the surviving economic resources for finishing the war as quickly as possible.

Mostly because a realistic economy can probably only afford one, maybe two, actual nuke-proof shelters. If you have infinite money and infinite time then it is obviously beneficial, but at that point you might as well invest in building underground arcologies and becoming mole men IRL.

Passive protection nowadays means generators, fire suppression systems, common sense, and stoicism. Bomb shelters were cool until the 1970s I guess.

e: Although if you are constantly being bombed by rockets or whatever like Allanea's backyard then they're still good. Just good. Not great, since even then, an active defense is still preferable. For nuclear weapons, an active defense is the only defense, but that's fine since it's the only defense against strategic bombers too if you ask the residents of Dresden c. Valentine's Day 1945.

Cease your evil defeatist groupthink commie.

The value of shelters is it's relatively easy to massively reduce the lethal radius of a warhead. Though it can potentially be overcome with more warheads and deliberate targeting, these can both be frustrated by missile defense, which robs the attacker of free choice in picking targets. There is great synergy between hardening and hard-kill defense.

Essentially Austrasien is correct.

It's not possible to build, for the average civilian, or even for the average factory, a shelter that will protect you if a determined foreign military is aiming nukes, or even purpose-designed bunker-busters at your home personally. But that is totally irrelevant because, in terms of protecting the lives of average civilians, or even many non-average civilians, their homes are never going to be targeted with nuclear weapons. If you're in a bomb shelter with a yard of concrete on top of you, the only way you can be killed is if someone sets out to kill you, Joe Blow, in person. You're proof against artillery shells impacting your house, you're proof against shells, and you're proof against nuclear bombs unless literally for some daft reason Putin wants you dead personally.

[Gallia-]

I question whether this can be made to work against a weapon that can land a hit on any target within its fireball radius. However upon further contemplation I suppose that the residual blast effects might prove deleterious to the health of nearby inhabitants to the sudden appearance of a miniature sun next door, so perhaps hardening isn't so much to defend the target itself, but targets that otherwise escaped the fireball radius through active countermeasure (aka shooting it down)? In which case hardening does present an advantage in improved survivability of targets that are within the blast radius but not immediately in the crater zone.

I guess I'm hyper-focusing too much on the part where a CEP is 90m a worst and the fireball is like 10x that, and not enough on the part where there is actually a whole city to be considered. And maybe I'm assuming surface bursts like a hard silo, when a city would be a soft target, so it would be subjected to relatively high altitude airbursts (i.e. fireball doesn't touch the ground) instead.

The eternal agony of spergdom: tunnel vision by analogy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(...) in terms of protecting the lives of average civilians, or even many non-average civilians, their homes are never going to be targeted with nuclear weapons.

I can dig this in theory. The problem is renovating a bunch of old/pre-established city infrastructure with hardened shelters I guess? Or is that not actually a big deal?

What did Israel do to historically harden its pre-existing infrastructure? Did it just rip stuff down and replace it? I can dig mandating building codes that reduce fuel load and cut down the potential for firestorms, as well as hard basements like Switzerland, but where do you put the working class folks who shuck oysters or rivet together airplanes or whatever while their apartment is being replaced by a Brutalist brick? Or is it just a case of "deal with it you can move back in x months"?

I guess you could convert metro stations into shelters though or something instead of putting a megabasement in every apartment block.

Is there anything relevant here re: Swiss civil defense measures also?

[Austrasien]

The actual target will die, yes.

But shelters are ideally small and dispersed very widely so the actual "target" will account for a relatively small number of people. It is not unreasonable to suppose hundreds or thousands of reasonably hard shelters in a major city.

[Allanea]

I can dig this in theory. The problem is renovating a bunch of old/pre-established city infrastructure with hardened shelters I guess? Or is that not actually a big deal?

Israel has managed to work about this in two ways:

1. Mandating this on all new buildignsfor the past 30 years or so, I believe.
2. Creating a government program that, via public-private partnership, reinforces existing apartment buildings with the inhabitants still inside them while the construction goes on. This is officially for earthqwuakes (in the past 20 years research had discovered Israel is more vulnerable to earthquakes than previously thought), but safe rooms will also be added.

[Gallia-]

The actual target will die, yes.

But shelters are ideally small and dispersed very widely so the actual "target" will account for a relatively small number of people. It is not unreasonable to suppose hundreds or thousands of reasonably hard shelters in a major city.

Oh! Yeah that probably exists. That seems fairly minor a cost to both economic disruption and capital investment. More money to be devoted to building interceptor farms in abandoned lots or something. I thought you meant some kind of Supreme Total Defense like a Swiss-style "every house a bunker" thing. I was just thinking "this is fairly impractical unless you're a tiny country like Finland or Israel".

I think I'm saying what I'm not actually thinking, though. I'm saying "population oriented" but I'm thinking "economically/industrially oriented". So I guess what I meant by "passive defense" was like "this factory complex can take a stick of Mk 84s and still be partially OK because the workers are in the basement" or something. I guess I really need to think beyond "factory", "port", "railyard" and other actual targets, and think more holistically about "city", but I can't get over the hump that "cities are useless without railyards, factories, and ports" or whatever.

Though if you are relying on stockpiled weapons then it doesn't matter since you'd just conscript everyone alive into the army and give them a rifle?! But no ports or rails to move them to I guess.

Maybe I'm conflating/blending multiple phases of the societal struggle. Like, blending the actual war with the post-war reconstruction.

Does this mean Galla should be stockpiling machine tooling, railroad equipment, and locomotives; and mothballing factories and manuals into hard sites as well? Like Sierra Army Depot, but built into a mountain?

I can dig this in theory. The problem is renovating a bunch of old/pre-established city infrastructure with hardened shelters I guess? Or is that not actually a big deal?

Israel has managed to work about this in two ways:

1. Mandating this on all new buildignsfor the past 30 years or so, I believe.
2. Creating a government program that, via public-private partnership, reinforces existing apartment buildings with the inhabitants still inside them while the construction goes on. This is officially for earthqwuakes (in the past 20 years research had discovered Israel is more vulnerable to earthquakes than previously thought), but safe rooms will also be added.

This is beast. I figured #1 would be mandatory for the past 60-odd years in Galla (if not more), so that's taken care of, except there's probably some loads of old houses and whatever, and maybe the shelters are inadequate against increasing atomic weapon strengths or just through age. Since loads of Gallans live near tectonic plates so that is actually a good deal. I can even use the same excuse for like 30-45% of Galla's population. Perhaps just retrofit the remainder with flood protection in the basements, which is also used for shock hardening and repairing older shelters to newer, more modern standards.

It probably raises construction costs a slight amount but whatever.

[Allanea]

Essentially Israel has the following thing:

If you get 75% of the people in your apartment to consent, a construction company can come, and build a hardening structure around your house. Beyond strengthening the house against earthquakes, it widens the apartment building on two of its sides and usually adds a floor. (AFAIK, the construction company can then sell the apartments on this extrafloor). People often agree to this program because...

1. They often get 2-3 extra rooms. Because new construction in Israel is limited, and housing costs high, this can boost the value of an apartment by 20-30%, which is nothing at all to sneeze at.
2. The house is often renovated, adding such features as an elevator (at one point no elevators were built in apartments shorter than 5 stories).

The obvious downside of this is that you live in a literal construction site for as long as a year while people drill, hammer, etc. around you.

[Gallia-]

Rofl this blog Viyk posted is incredible. It's like Sparky but for civil defense. He's half right, half nuts.

I'm looking for "parasitic conspiracy of narcissistic evil anti-civil defense devils" to show up.

e: He also seems to think the only utility of sarin is bombing cities, rather than bombing battalions???

e2: I've found "evil anti-civil defense"! Now we're only missing the other half of the phrase! Will it actually appear? owo

e3: This page appears to occupy a space of the Internet approximately six miles long.

e4: Praises Thatcher's background with a BSc in X-ray chemistry with fairly pedestrian 2:1 or whatever, but ignores Carter's background with a BSc in nuclear engineering and top 10% of his class at USNA? That means Carter's degree equivalent was a 1:1, albeit nuclear engineering is a fair bit simpler/easier than chemistry, but it's still only average marks. Weird.

e5: And in between his Sparky-esque diatribes he is otherwise rather eloquent and well spoken, unless I'm reading a quote from someone. It's like he's two people in one body. Perhaps Sparky really did write in Armor magazine?!

e6: Viyk where did you find this?!

e7: "doom-mongering media lies" might be an actual sparkyism!

e8: But yeah besides his actual rabid Sparkiness he is basically right afaict; I admire his brave stoicism, adherence to the principles of Leninism, and dedication to the ideal for the West to be prepared for the next big one.

[Herador]

So I'm trying to understand the basic breakdown of a mechanized battalion but unfortunately I'm retarded and shit at reading force organization charts, can someone help explain the basics?

[Allanea]

e: He also seems to think the only utility of sarin is bombing cities, rather than bombing battalions???

....I thought this was well-known?

[Gallia-]

e: He also seems to think the only utility of sarin is bombing cities, rather than bombing battalions???

....I thought this was well-known?

What is well known? If you have enough chemical weapons to bathe a city in gas, you can replace all those shells with HE and achieve even greater levels of destruction.

[Allanea]

....I thought this was well-known?

What is well known?

That the only utility of sarin is bombing cities (well, and factories) and not battalions.

[Gallia-]

What is well known?

That the only utility of sarin is bombing cities (well, and factories) and not battalions.

Yeah I'm sure that's why the most common delivery vehicle for sarin is a 105-155mm artillery shell. So the Soviet Union can shoot across the IGB and into Bonn.

The only thing useful for bombing cities is nuclear weapons. Sarin is useful for making people work in MOPP suits and killing the handful who don't, which is why it's useful to spray airbases and battalions with it. By forcing people into chemical protective posture, you degrade the ability of the enemy to work. You can make the argument that mustard gas does much the same thing as sarin I guess, but it's not as High Tech. If you have an offensive chemical capability, and your enemy doesn't, you hold the initiative because you can gas anything that you don't intend to take, and they can't retaliate the same.

It doesn't really matter unless you think about it in terms of increasing turnaround times for fighter aircraft or something. But at that point you're probably better off throwing a couple nukes at the airbase and just removing it entirely.

"Chemical weapons against cities" is literally an invention of 1930s popular science magazines. Clearly Bruchmuller fucked up when he shot Allied gunners with mustard gas instead of the real target: the nearest Belgian peasant village.

The actual reason Hitler didn't use gas in WW2 is horses. The Germans were never able to develop a gas mask that a horse could wear: Really simple, intuitive, and makes a lot of sense. Unlike "here are pictures of children wearing gas masks they DETERRED Hitler's tabun/sarin aggression and evil cynical anti-civil defense murderers would have you BELIEVE OTHERWISE".

If they'd had horse gas masks they could have waited a few days for Allied troops to discard their masks, and then pound them senseless with tabun and sarin and kill a bunch of dogfaces.

[Allanea]

That the only utility of sarin is bombing cities (well, and factories) and not battalions.

Yeah I'm sure that's why the most common delivery vehicle for sarin is a 105-155mm artillery shell. So the Soviet Union can shoot across the IGB and into Bonn.
.

Ah!

Having recently read Chemical Weapons on the Boundary of the Centuries, I know the answer.

The answer is simple: there was a time when cold war military planners believed, indeed, that chemweapons would be incredibly useful tactically - not so much in the sense of 'make them work in NBC', but in the sense of 'catch them while they're still putting on the NBC gear'. They also knew that even NBC gear wasn't perfect, (the NBC gear are the time could only protect for a limited amount of hours, before the microdoses that actually were seeping through the cloth would kill you).

For this reason it was believed that it would be possible to reduce the utility of NBC gear by inventing better chemical weapons (particularly, a smaller lethal dose was sought after like the Holy Grail). Had this worked we'd see a cycle like we see with anti-tank weapons and tank protection. But instead it was concluded that there is a hard limit to how low a lethal dose of a chemical weapon can be and still keep it usable in combat). By the late 1970s/early 1980s, the Soviet Union's chemical weapons programs were only kept through lobbying.

[Gallia-]

The answer is simple: there was a time when cold war military planners believed, indeed, that chemweapons would be incredibly useful tactically - not so much in the sense of 'make them work in NBC', but in the sense of 'catch them while they're still putting on the NBC gear'. They also knew that even NBC gear wasn't perfect, (the NBC gear are the time could only protect for a limited amount of hours, before the microdoses that actually were seeping through the cloth would kill you).

"At the time". The most advanced NBC suits (read: JSLIST) are only good for attack against liquid aerosols for 24 hours. This isn't any better than Cold War battledress. The only thing that's improved is that the suit is easier to move in and slightly lighter. So by all accounts, everything you just said is still true?

Or are you talking about zero protective overalls?

For this reason it was believed that it would be possible to reduce the utility of NBC gear by inventing better chemical weapons (particularly, a smaller lethal dose was sought after like the Holy Grail). Had this worked we'd see a cycle like we see with anti-tank weapons and tank protection. But instead it was concluded that there is a hard limit to how low a lethal dose of a chemical weapon can be and still keep it usable in combat). By the late 1970s/early 1980s, the Soviet Union's chemical weapons programs were only kept through lobbying.

Is Novichok really "lobbying" or is it "Future Chemical Systems" (FCS). Big promises, big risks, no reward. A great idea that is also impossible because of a minor thing called "physics" (or rather, "chemistry")?

Or was Novichok the thing that was so deadly it became useless? How does that work? A BMP drives five miles downwind from a chem-stricken command post, a single molecule of Novichok goes into the commander's eye, and he just dies horribly? I mean I guess that could present problems.