Infantry Discussion Thread part 11: Gallas Razor edition.

[Old Varegia]

Iraqi average IQ is in the lower 80s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. Americans beat Iraqis every time. PLA average IQ is in the upper 100s or lower 110s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. PLA beat Americans every time. Obviously if there is a large enough disparity in intellect (say 1 SD?), then one side will absolutely dominate the other with very little effort put into the task, whereas if they are closer to equivalent in IQ you require much more effort.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with Iraq being a tiny country. By the way, the PLA actually doesn't have a 5.0 K/D when it comes to facing Americans. They did a nice offensive once in the Korean War. That's pretty much it. Considering the much higher amount of Chinese casualties to American casualties... I have no idea where you get the notion that the Chinese military has ever been superior to the American military in any aspect but numbers.

By the way, is anybody going to answer my question of whether I should use the AK-12 or AK-15, and if usage of the AK-15 would work well with usage of the A-545?

[Gallia-]

The PLA had nothing but peasants armed with wooden rice bowls. The U.S. Army had the global center of industrial economy behind it. And the USA lost the war. Someone did something right! IQ 113 Chinese master race defeats IQ 103 American average race. Unsurprising TBH. It's not like the Japanese weight of numbers beat the U.S. Army on Saipan or anything, despite literally have enough men to run through an artillery kill zone and annihilate an infantry regiment behind it.

Japanese confirm for IQ 103 average race? Possibly.

It wasn't "a nice offensive". It was on par with Hannibal's march over the Alps or the Mongols' invasion of Central Asia. They more or less accomplished their entire objective fighting a bunch of demi-smarts driving around in Shermans, Pershings, Pattons, and Chaffees with radios, jet bombers, and machine guns; armed with shovels, SKS, some random mortars, and the Greatest Hits of 1918. It says that either the PLA were incredibly competent IQ 130+ ubermenschen, or the USA was incredibly stupid IQ 80 morons who somehow forgot how to fight a war, or something in-between.

So it probably means the PLA was composed of a bunch of pretty smart guys who had learned well enough how to fight wars in the past couple years and applied the general knowledge they learned to the war in Korea, overrunning the Americans who were technologically superior in every regard with a bunch of messenger pigeons and steel shovels in a repeat of the Brusilov Offensive.

It wasn't necessarily original, advanced, or super capable mega tactics. It just meant that they were fighting complete morons who had no idea what they were doing (the United Nations Command) or how to fix what was wrong. It's more damning to America, the apparent capital of industrial civilization and other things that require some amount of foresight (unless America's economic success is purely accidental, which it might be!), than it is praising to the PRC, which was a country that had recently exited a major war and hadn't had the time nor inclination to purge the ranks yet.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Iraqi average IQ is in the lower 80s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. Americans beat Iraqis every time. PLA average IQ is in the upper 100s or lower 110s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. PLA beat Americans every time. Obviously if there is a large enough disparity in intellect (say 1 SD?), then one side will absolutely dominate the other with very little effort put into the task, whereas if they are closer to equivalent in IQ you require much more effort.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with Iraq being a tiny country. By the way, the PLA actually doesn't have a 5.0 K/D when it comes to facing Americans. They did a nice offensive once in the Korean War. That's pretty much it. Considering the much higher amount of Chinese casualties to American casualties... I have no idea where you get the notion that the Chinese military has ever been superior to the American military in any aspect but numbers.

By the way, is anybody going to answer my question of whether I should use the AK-12 or AK-15, and if usage of the AK-15 would work well with usage of the A-545?

So how many war goals did the PVA achieve compared to the UN forces? Also it took the Americans at least three PVA offensives to discover the fact that PVA offensives only lasted a week due to lack of food.

[Purpelia]

Are you seriously making the argument that the state of post civil war 1950's PLA is any indicator of their current state?

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Are you seriously making the argument that the state of post civil war 1950's PLA is any indicator of their current state?

Purplestan, I was addressing this:

By the way, the PLA actually doesn't have a 5.0 K/D when it comes to facing Americans. They did a nice offensive once in the Korean War. That's pretty much it. Considering the much higher amount of Chinese casualties to American casualties...

For the record the PVA completed five offensive operations in Korea, its successes are why the DMZ is where it is right now and not on the Yalü.

[Manokan Republic]

The military functions in literally the complete opposite way,

You just don't know what immediate assaults and close ambushes are.

http://www.hardscrabblefarm.com/vn/imme ... rills.html

We're talking about regular combat, not one specific type of thing, a close ambush. Furthermore *my whole point* is that fully automatic fire is better at close ranges, which is what a close ambush is. Finally, the source never actually mentions automatic fire, in fact the word "automatic fire", "burst fire", or any of them if you Crtl + F it. Immediate reactions to close ambushes actually would benefit from fully automatic fire, but again that's not normal combat, and the article you cited doesn't mention it at all.

Oh OK if you mean like gladiatorial duels between champions then I guess you're right. The Coronado SEALs would win the Super War LXVII Championship in 2150 every day until they run into like, the Shanghai Snow Leopards or something with their average IQ 113 vs. Coronado's avg. IQ 98, and the Americans lose because they cannot comprehend the same amount of information in the same time period. But that's like 130 years from now, so it's a bit far off to be discussing pure infantry duels.

My point is that aimed accurate fire is better against infantry in the majority of circumstances, that is at long distances. And it's better against armored cars too since getting super close to an armored car would mean you get killed by it. Naturally you want to keep your distance and not waste thousands of rounds shooting at armor to do nothing. Only by aiming at say, the driver or machine gunner can infantry realistically take on armor without the use of heavy weapons. And it STILL has nothing to do with IQ.

if not more intimidating, than a bunch of misses from a machine gun. Because suppressive fire and intimidation is a psychological thing and not a physical thing, there are many different methods that can be used to suppress an enemy force, and fully automatic fire is not the only way to do it.

Irrelevant when the U.S. Army has already measured the effectiveness of various forms of automatic and semi-automatic fire on combat veterans and found that light machine guns, i.e. belt-feds like the M60, M240, and M249, produce the greatest overall psychological effect on ground troops. In defending against, the infantry mortar produces the greatest effect, while in attacking against it is the light machine gun that does the most suppression.

Snipers (and other semi-automatic rifles) were dead last in both instances.

Where's your source?

I don't think it was IQ that was the deciding factor here,

Which is surprising considering how concise and neat an explanation it is.

Real life isn't concise and neat, combat is messy and complicated and thinking there is always one sure-fire way to win every time is exactly the problem.

as people don't just have higher IQ's and automatically win battles because of it.

Iraqi average IQ is in the lower 80s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. Americans beat Iraqis every time. PLA average IQ is in the upper 100s or lower 110s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. PLA beat Americans every time. Obviously if there is a large enough disparity in intellect (say 1 SD?), then one side will absolutely dominate the other with very little effort put into the task, whereas if they are closer to equivalent in IQ you require much more effort.

So physical strength, technology level, resources, on top of things like skill and training (which I siad were important in infantry on infantry combat), have no bearings, just the average I.Q. of your soldiers? Why doesn't every army just give up on things like weapons and tactics and start braining people to death with their high I.Q.'s? I guess you've cracked the codes. On top of no military doing this, there being no evidence or sources to back up your argument and being unable to understand the whole, exception to the rule thing.

Maybe their education levels

The maximum amount of education you can achieve is literally determined by your IQ and your effort. If you are too stupid to understand something or too lazy to capitalize on your intellect, you fail regardless

No it's not, it's just the amount of time it takes to get educated. And education matters because not all people are educated the same.

some number on a piece of paper,

I guess you don't have a FICO score, either? Or a Social Credit Score? At least with Social Credit Score you know what you're getting into, TBF. FICO scores are just Voudon black magic behind impenetrable boardroom walls.

A good FICO score won't cause you to win a war, it's just numbers on a piece of paper, not real world value.

Also source that their IQ's were lower?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

Oh for fuck's sake, not this bullshit. So on top of no evidence of this being important in the outcome of the war, and no mention of Grenada's or the U.S.'s average IQ in the book itself, you cite racist propaganda, are you for real? Let's look at the obvious elements of all of this, and unpack this. While this isn't the right topic for it, I'll go ahead and deconstruct it for you as quickly as possible since your world view seems to be based on high I.Q.'s meaning you are better at everything. Other than the obvious issue of resources, technological development and so on being useful for a war, as well as things like nutrition and physical strength being useful for soldiers, with China's average person obviously living in much worse circumstances than the U.S., the information in the Bell Curve has long since been debunked, with the author himself admitting to the flaws within it. The first and most obvious is that he didn't do an I.Q. test for all the world, he used a single I.Q. test of relatively small samples, and then used that to not only false stand as a measure for the countries I.Q., but then applied it to many surrounding countries as well. Much of the data used in the Bell Curve comes from Richard Lynn, most of which has been widely discredited for various reasons.

For example, his I.Q. test for Equatorial Guinea was taking the I.Q.'s of a handful of special needs children, of special needs children, in Spain. He then took the results of that study and applied it to the entire country of Equatorial Guinea, and actually used that in his data set. "The datum that Lynn and Vanhanen used for the lowest IQ estimate, Equatorial Guinea, was taken from a group of children in a home for the developmentally disabled in Spain". As if that wasn't stupid enough, he did similiar things for many other countries in his list, to engineer results to make certain countries appear to have lower I.Q.'s. to suggest that all the surrounding countries also had the same low I.Q. is equally dubious, as he didn't even take I.Q. tests from all of these countries, just guessed based on their neighbors. Not only is it stupid to take the results of special needs kids as if it's the results for an entire country, but then he applied it to other countries as well, showing it is not actually a representation of the real global average. In an interview he admitted he was wrong for doing this and didn't check his sources. There are numerous flaws throughout the study, from unreliable IQ statistics for 81 of the 185 countries used in the analysis, to insecure estimates of the national IQ in the remaining 101 countries in the sample that did not have published IQ data. He basically uses 81 countries to determine the I.Q.'s of 101 other countries, as he did not even use I.Q. tests for every country in the world, and most of the I.Q. tests were heavily lopsided in favor of white and asian countries, using special needs kids as a representation for an entire countries people in some cases and honor students for other countries average I.Q. In other words, he "guessed", and used OBVIOUSLY flawed I.Q. test figures, meaning it's all bullshit.

He also dismisses the fact that I.Q. raises due to education, something that's been well documented with industrialized countries having their I.Q.'s go up, which suggests that education and training is the best way to increase I.Q. scores ironically. The most common way of assessing intelligence is IQ testing. The Flynn effect describes the phenomenon that over time average IQ scores have been increasing in all countries since the turn of the twentieth century (the earliest point in time for which data is available). The change in IQ scores has been approximately three IQ points per decade. One major implications of this trend is that an average individual alive today would have an IQ of 130 by the standards of 1910, making them more intelligent than 98% of the population at that time. Equivalently, an individual alive in 1910 would have an IQ of 70 by today’s standards, a score that would be low enough to be considered intellectually disabled in the modern world. Furthermore, I.Q. is a measure of how well you can learn, but if you learn a lot of wrong information (I.E. if you get communist propaganda shoved down your throat), you will end up dumber because you learned a long of wrong information. A well educated idiot is better than a poorly educated genius.



Finally, the book itself never mentions that high I.Q. soldiers are more likely to win against low I.Q. soldiers, so you're just making that up. Once again, your source is bullshit AND doesn't exactly mention what you're talking about. Do you even read your own sources or how do you do this? Ironically the book claims that black people have lower I.Q.'s than white people (based on a flawed statistical analysis), with an average I.Q. of 85 vs. 100 for white people. However, black people are disproportionately more common in the U.S. military, with 18% of the military being black, vs. 13% in the regular population. So if that were the case, how is it that black people are often in the military, and more successful on average? In fact, 40% of the U.S. military are made up of racial minorities, rather than white people, higher than the average amount (given that only 25% of the population are in racial minority groups). There are just so many things wrong with this.

[Old Varegia]

The PLA had nothing but peasants armed with wooden rice bowls. The U.S. Army had the global center of industrial economy behind it. And the USA lost the war. Someone did something right! IQ 113 Chinese master race defeats IQ 103 American average race. Unsurprising TBH. It's not like the Japanese weight of numbers beat the U.S. Army on Saipan or anything, despite literally have enough men to run through an artillery kill zone and annihilate an infantry regiment behind it.

Japanese confirm for IQ 103 average race? Possibly.

The US lost the war? Do you live in North Korea? Do you think the war started because the US wanted to overthrow the North's leadership? That is not the case. The US saved the South from defeat and annihilated the North's military, only retreating back to the south once the approximately 1,350,000 Chinese troops invaded. They then pushed their offensive back to a line approximately at the 38th parallel, and throughout the entire war, only 36,574 American troops ended up dead, compared to the (and this is from a Chinese source) 183,108 dead on the Chinese side.

You want to talk about Saipan too? Let's talk about the 30,000 Japanese dead compared to the Americans' only 3,426.

I've never heard anything more hilariously stupid in my life.

[Manokan Republic]

And yet the PLA lost against India, the USSR, and Vietnam, all nations with lower 'national IQs'.

Complacency strikes the best of us.

So I.Q. isn't everything?

Boy I will slap you right in the penis.

"Iraqi average IQ is in the lower 80s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. Americans beat Iraqis every time. PLA average IQ is in the upper 100s or lower 110s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. PLA beat Americans every time. " Also if you think the North Korean or Chinese I.Q. is high you're a moron given how much malnutrition they have and crappy their education is.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

The UN forces achieved their least war aim, keeping ROK alive, the attempt to unify North and South under ROK leadership was a dismal failure. The PVA and its Chinese leadership achieved basically all their war aims, amongst which would be keeping DPRK, their buffer state against capitalism alive. The DMZ is not at the Yalü for a reason y'know.

[Old Varegia]

I'm sure it has nothing to do with Iraq being a tiny country. By the way, the PLA actually doesn't have a 5.0 K/D when it comes to facing Americans. They did a nice offensive once in the Korean War. That's pretty much it. Considering the much higher amount of Chinese casualties to American casualties... I have no idea where you get the notion that the Chinese military has ever been superior to the American military in any aspect but numbers.

By the way, is anybody going to answer my question of whether I should use the AK-12 or AK-15, and if usage of the AK-15 would work well with usage of the A-545?

So how many war goals did the PVA achieve compared to the UN forces? Also it took the Americans at least three PVA offensives to discover the fact that PVA offensives only lasted a week due to lack of food.

The Chinese can say whatever they want in relation to their war goals. They did not complete the DPRK's offensive. The South survived the war, and how is your second sentence relevant?

Are you seriously making the argument that the state of post civil war 1950's PLA is any indicator of their current state?

Purplestan, I was addressing this:

By the way, the PLA actually doesn't have a 5.0 K/D when it comes to facing Americans. They did a nice offensive once in the Korean War. That's pretty much it. Considering the much higher amount of Chinese casualties to American casualties...

For the record the PVA completed five offensive operations in Korea, its successes are why the DMZ is where it is right now and not on the Yalü.

I'm aware of the fact that the Chinese are solely responsible for the survival of the North. Whether it took one operation or five does not matter in this context.

[Manokan Republic]

The PLA had nothing but peasants armed with wooden rice bowls. The U.S. Army had the global center of industrial economy behind it. And the USA lost the war. Someone did something right! IQ 113 Chinese master race defeats IQ 103 American average race. Unsurprising TBH. It's not like the Japanese weight of numbers beat the U.S. Army on Saipan or anything, despite literally have enough men to run through an artillery kill zone and annihilate an infantry regiment behind it.

Japanese confirm for IQ 103 average race? Possibly.

The US lost the war? Do you live in North Korea? Do you think the war started because the US wanted to overthrow the North's leadership? That is not the case. The US saved the South from defeat and annihilated the North's military, only retreating back to the south once the approximately 1,350,000 Chinese troops invaded. They then pushed their offensive back to a line approximately at the 38th parallel, and throughout the entire war, only 36,574 American troops ended up dead, compared to the (and this is from a Chinese source) 183,108 dead on the Chinese side.

You want to talk about Saipan too? Let's talk about the 30,000 Japanese dead compared to the Americans' only 3,426.

I've never heard anything more hilariously stupid in my life.

But didn't you know? America lost WWII to Japan obviously, due to their obviously superior intellect, according to the great and widely accredited Richard Flynn, not totally bullshit at-all scientist, who's data for Equatorial Guinea, was taken from a group of children in a home for the developmentally disabled in Spain, and only took I.Q. samples for 81 out of 185 countries (despite claiming to know the I.Q.'s of all countries), comparing honor students to special needs kids. Because that's fair, right?

Honestly the fact his own sources have refuted him or not backed up what he said, and the fact he even does provide sources most of the time, suggests he just doesn't read them or doesn't care and makes up his own reality as he goes.

[Old Varegia]

The PLA had nothing but peasants armed with wooden rice bowls. The U.S. Army had the global center of industrial economy behind it. And the USA lost the war. Someone did something right! IQ 113 Chinese master race defeats IQ 103 American average race. Unsurprising TBH. It's not like the Japanese weight of numbers beat the U.S. Army on Saipan or anything, despite literally have enough men to run through an artillery kill zone and annihilate an infantry regiment behind it.

Japanese confirm for IQ 103 average race? Possibly.

It wasn't "a nice offensive". It was on par with Hannibal's march over the Alps or the Mongols' invasion of Central Asia. They more or less accomplished their entire objective fighting a bunch of demi-smarts driving around in Shermans, Pershings, Pattons, and Chaffees with radios, jet bombers, and machine guns; armed with shovels, SKS, some random mortars, and the Greatest Hits of 1918. It says that either the PLA were incredibly competent IQ 130+ ubermenschen, or the USA was incredibly stupid IQ 80 morons who somehow forgot how to fight a war, or something in-between.

So it probably means the PLA was composed of a bunch of pretty smart guys who had learned well enough how to fight wars in the past couple years and applied the general knowledge they learned to the war in Korea, overrunning the Americans who were technologically superior in every regard with a bunch of messenger pigeons and steel shovels in a repeat of the Brusilov Offensive.

It wasn't necessarily original, advanced, or super capable mega tactics. It just meant that they were fighting complete morons who had no idea what they were doing (the United Nations Command) or how to fix what was wrong. It's more damning to America, the apparent capital of industrial civilization and other things that require some amount of foresight (unless America's economic success is purely accidental, which it might be!), than it is praising to the PRC, which was a country that had recently exited a major war and hadn't had the time nor inclination to purge the ranks yet.

Nice job editing your post after I've responded to it.

Now, let's see you try to fight off a million and a half troops with only about 300,000. Let's see you not run out of ammo, get surrounded, cut off, and have to retreat. Ants can kill a crab. IQ has nothing to do with it. IQ is widely regarded as a shitty way to measure intelligence anyway.

[Old Varegia]

The US lost the war? Do you live in North Korea? Do you think the war started because the US wanted to overthrow the North's leadership? That is not the case. The US saved the South from defeat and annihilated the North's military, only retreating back to the south once the approximately 1,350,000 Chinese troops invaded. They then pushed their offensive back to a line approximately at the 38th parallel, and throughout the entire war, only 36,574 American troops ended up dead, compared to the (and this is from a Chinese source) 183,108 dead on the Chinese side.

You want to talk about Saipan too? Let's talk about the 30,000 Japanese dead compared to the Americans' only 3,426.

I've never heard anything more hilariously stupid in my life.

But didn't you know? America lost WWII to Japan obviously, due to their obviously superior intellect, according to the great and widely accredited Richard Flynn, not totally bullshit at-all scientist, who's data for Equatorial Guinea, was taken from a group of children in a home for the developmentally disabled in Spain, and only took I.Q. samples for 81 out of 185 countries (despite claiming to know the I.Q.'s of all countries), comparing honor students to special needs kids. Because that's fair, right?

Honestly the fact his own sources have refuted him or not backed up what he said, and the fact he even does provide sources most of the time, suggests he just doesn't read them or doesn't care and makes up his own reality as he goes.

Yeah, I don't know what his problem is.

[Schwere Panzer Abteilung 502]

If aimed accurate fire is so much more effective, why have a majority of personal firearms innovations until the mid 20th century been about making guns shoot faster? The invention of metal ramrods in the early 18th century allowed armies to reload faster than their adversaries. The percussion cap allowed musketry to dispense with the process of using a flintlock. The cartridge case meant that breechloading firearms could shoot much, much faster - eject the spend casing and throw a new one in. You can follow this line of thinking pretty much until the 40s, with the advent of ridiculously fast-firing machine guns like the MG42. Even after that, assault rifles allowed any infantryman to put a greater amount of lead in the general direction of the enemy than battle rifles like the M14 or SKS, either of which was dispensed in favor of assault rifles which are still in use today.

AFAIK battle rifles have made a comeback in recent days with long-distance mountain combat being more common in Afghanistan, but that isnt exactly representative of what the next major war will look like. Using WWI and WWII as case studies, the trend is absolutely towards being able to shoot faster over being able to shoot more accurately.

[Old Varegia]

If aimed accurate fire is so much more effective, why have a majority of personal firearms innovations until the mid 20th century been about making guns shoot faster? The invention of metal ramrods in the early 18th century allowed armies to reload faster than their adversaries. The percussion cap allowed musketry to dispense with the process of using a flintlock. The cartridge case meant that breechloading firearms could shoot much, much faster - eject the spend casing and throw a new one in. You can follow this line of thinking pretty much until the 40s, with the advent of ridiculously fast-firing machine guns like the MG42. Even after that, assault rifles allowed any infantryman to put a greater amount of lead in the general direction of the enemy than battle rifles like the M14 or SKS, either of which was dispensed in favor of assault rifles which are still in use today.

AFAIK battle rifles have made a comeback in recent days with long-distance mountain combat being more common in Afghanistan, but that isnt exactly representative of what the next major war will look like. Using WWI and WWII as case studies, the trend is absolutely towards being able to shoot faster over being able to shoot more accurately.

Pretty sure this is strictly within the context of modern assault rifles.

[Gallia-]

Are you seriously making the argument that the state of post civil war 1950's PLA is any indicator of their current state?

No. The current PLA is far better off than the post-Civil War PLA. The current US Army is about the same it was in the 1950's, though. Badly trained, poorly led, incapable of thinking ahead to next week's supper, and recently discovering for the nth time why it really needs to lay off the grand purging of the NCO and officer ranks after every major war it fights.

Honestly it'd be too charitable to consider the U.S. Army's (and USA's as a whole) problem is a strict, religious interpretation of liberalism where "war" is the aberration of existence and "peace" is the natural state. At least with that sort of interpretation, you'd have room for actually learning it's a lie and learning to stop doing it over time. But that's not really something that's happened? They can't even generate sufficient throughput of training/"readiness" to match their actual expenditures, which is a pretty basic concept. Energy in, energy out, etc.

So the U.S. Army is either so stupid it cannot feed itself at the same time it's working on something, or it's so stupid it cannot learn after beating its head against a brick wall multiple times throughout human history.

The PLA had nothing but peasants armed with wooden rice bowls. The U.S. Army had the global center of industrial economy behind it. And the USA lost the war. Someone did something right! IQ 113 Chinese master race defeats IQ 103 American average race. Unsurprising TBH. It's not like the Japanese weight of numbers beat the U.S. Army on Saipan or anything, despite literally have enough men to run through an artillery kill zone and annihilate an infantry regiment behind it.

Japanese confirm for IQ 103 average race? Possibly.

The US lost the war?

Yes.

Do you live in North Korea? Do you think the war started because the US wanted to overthrow the North's leadership?

No, the UN wanted to re-unite Korea to prevent the North from invading ever again. They failed utterly. The only force that can reunite Korea now is the ROKA/ROKAF tag team.

That is not the case. The US saved the South from defeat and annihilated the North's military, only retreating back to the south once the approximately 1,350,000 Chinese troops invaded.

The U.S. didn't save anyone from anything. What it did do was it saved the South another war to fight in the future to finish the job the UN ostensibly started: reuniting Korea. Never send a white man to do a native's job?

They then pushed their offensive back to a line approximately at the 38th parallel, and throughout the entire war, only 36,574 American troops ended up dead, compared to the (and this is from a Chinese source) 183,108 dead on the Chinese side.

It's more accurate to say the Americans found their testicles on the 38th Parallel N and stopped running away from a bunch of rice farmers armed with small arms and a handful of mortars. It would be like the U.S. Army retreating backwards through half of Afghanistan when they first sight the Taliban or something, except I guess the Chinese must have done some really impressive intimidation tactics. Something like performing 5-dimensional linear algebra matrix multiplication on a gigantic chalkboard, mentally, without previous instruction or practice beyond basic schooling. With the amount of brick laying that'd make me do I'm surprised the UN Command didn't just build a huge adobe wall then and there. Or cinderblock even.

A 1:5 ratio is perfectly fine for a force that is attacking a defending unit normally. It's exceptionally low for a light infantry force, whose entire communications trunk is composed of messenger pigeons and hoarse shouting, versus a fully mechanized army with tanks, VT fuzes, complete air supremacy, and plenty of radios.

You aren't helping your argument that the UNC was somehow in a bind when a million PLA troops pushed them out of North Korea. They could have won. They should have won. They just...didn't. The only two assumptions are that either the UNC was riddled with PLA sympathizers who gave bad orders, or UN troops were literally stupider and less mentally agile than their PLA counterparts, which led to them breaking and routing every chance they got.

This isn't some Golan Heights shit show. This is basically Omaha Beach by casualty proportions. Except the Germans have tank divisions on the beaches instead of miles behind them. And the Americans have no tanks. Or planes. Or battleships. And the Americans still win. Because the Germans just run away or something instead of actually fight the Americans?

You want to talk about Saipan too? Let's talk about the 30,000 Japanese dead compared to the Americans' only 3,426.

Uh, yeah. Like I said, Japanese confirm for IQ 103 average race. If they were Chinese, they would have pushed the Americans off the island with their own grenades or something and created a new nation.

Complacency strikes the best of us.

So I.Q. isn't everything?

Boy I will slap you right in the penis.

"Iraqi average IQ is in the lower 80s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. Americans beat Iraqis every time. PLA average IQ is in the upper 100s or lower 110s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. PLA beat Americans every time. " Also if you think the North Korean I.Q. is high you're a moron given how much malnutrition they have and crappy their education is.

IQ isn't affected by malnutrition.

What it is affected by is not actually well known. It's not affected by childhood nutrition, stunted growth, or poor education. Given a culture blind IQ test like Raven's Progressive Matrices, low-medium functioning autistic children who score 70s (mental retardation) on the Weschler scale can achieve average (95-105) IQ, since that relies on ability to manipulate symbols mentally rather than verbal knowledge, and we know that having a reduced/diminished ability to comprehend language (one of the characteristics of autism and Asperger's) makes things like Weschler into de facto culturally biased tests.

Using the same Raven-type IQ tests, the Dutch Army found that conscripts in the 1960s (i.e. born in the Hunger Winter) did not have any appreciably different IQ than their predecessors from the 1950s, and it actually increased, so clearly this line of argument is wrong. So we also know that modern Norwegian and Dutch troops are measurably stupider than their parents were in the Cold War, so it may be that there is some sort of neotenization (or "kittenization" if you will) occurring in the industrialized nations of the world. This would explain why modern European and American children are slightly stupider than their ancestors these days, and look to be getting progressively stupider as the future wears on.

Richard Lynn would probably say that nutrition affects it, but it's really doubtful except in the most extreme cases, like North Korea, where there was a sustained and long-duration famine (the Hunger Winter may not count since it, and the Holodomor, "only" happened for about a year; not long enough to seriously affect the early nutrition of children) for several years. Of course, I never said anything about North Korea. I'm talking about the PLA. The last time I remember the U.S. Army and the North Koreans having a go, the U.S. Army managed to stall a KPA army with a force 20x smaller (a division vs. like oodles of the same, with better tanks to boot) for something like a month.

Anyway, why it's occurring no one can conclusively say, otherwise we would be able to reverse it. But the fact of the matter is that the Flynn effect isn't understood enough to know exactly why it happened or why it's ending.

Nice job editing your post after I've responded to it.

Deal with it.

Now, let's see you try to fight off a million and a half troops with only about 300,000. Let's see you not run out of ammo, get surrounded, cut off, and have to retreat. Ants can kill a crab.

Done.

IQ has nothing to do with it.

The U.S. Army disagrees. Why do you think American officers are required to have university degrees? For laughs? It's because the only people who go through university are smarter than the average person, and the U.S. Army is well aware of, based on its WW2 experience, of the problems with having stupid people in leadership positions. Stupid people spook easily and flee combat the first chance they get. Smart people stick around because they're able to confront and address their fears rationally to avoid panicking.

IQ is widely regarded as a shitty way to measure intelligence anyway.

I guess FICO is a shitty way to measure your ability to repay loans, too? Or Social Credit a shitty way to measure how much you live up to society's/the party's expectations of you? Hardly.

Mathematics is the language of the universe, so really any sort of sorting algorithm based on repeatable metrics (i.e. standardized scores/IQ tests/whatever) will generally sort people quite adequately. The only people who would get upset are the people who either cannot appreciate mathematical purity or people who get left behind. That's not necessarily the same people, either, since there are plenty of philosophy and literature PhDs in universities around the world; and plenty of under-employed or unemployed engineering BSc's around the world.

[Purpelia]

No. The current PLA is far better off than the post-Civil War PLA.

That is indeed the point I wanted to stress.

[Gallia-]

The US lost the war? Do you live in North Korea? Do you think the war started because the US wanted to overthrow the North's leadership? That is not the case. The US saved the South from defeat and annihilated the North's military, only retreating back to the south once the approximately 1,350,000 Chinese troops invaded. They then pushed their offensive back to a line approximately at the 38th parallel, and throughout the entire war, only 36,574 American troops ended up dead, compared to the (and this is from a Chinese source) 183,108 dead on the Chinese side.

You want to talk about Saipan too? Let's talk about the 30,000 Japanese dead compared to the Americans' only 3,426.

I've never heard anything more hilariously stupid in my life.

But didn't you know? America lost WWII to Japan obviously, due to their obviously superior intellect, according to the great and widely accredited Richard Flynn, not totally bullshit at-all scientist, who's data for Equatorial Guinea, was taken from a group of children in a home for the developmentally disabled in Spain, and only took I.Q. samples for 81 out of 185 countries (despite claiming to know the I.Q.'s of all countries), comparing honor students to special needs kids. Because that's fair, right?

Honestly the fact his own sources have refuted him or not backed up what he said, and the fact he even does provide sources most of the time, suggests he just doesn't read them or doesn't care and makes up his own reality as he goes.

Lynn needed a manufactured controversy. Dude's gotta eat and books rarely sell unless they make bodacious, radical, game-changing claims. It's obvious to anyone who cares enough about the subject that he's exaggerating. Murray is just writing a pundit think tank book to sell to Congressmen. Doesn't change the fact that they're correct about the black-white IQ gap and it doesn't change the fact that the APA found a white-Asian IQ gap specifically in mathematics subscores of about 1 standard deviation (although taken together, Asians still an scored average IQ overall, but that might just reflect their relative inability to speak/read English on account of being recent immigrants?).

Lynn rides on accumulated social capital like any accomplished/end of the road scientist, after all. He doesn't really need sources when he's preaching to the choir because society is such a black-and-white morass these days [thanks Internet!] that he isn't convincing anyone who hasn't already convinced themselves and anyone who actually bothers to do independent research or care about the subject doesn't read popular science books anyway. Those are for lay men and average people. Or these days, for average people and laymen who agree with the politics of the author.

Actual people who care are people who are actually "going outside" (I only go outside at night, though, *hissssss*) and giving IQ tests to random samples. They don't write cool books and make money. They're poor and have to pay other people for the privilege of having their papers published because they don't have social capital to just free ride. Yet.

Flynn is a different guy. You can see him as sort of the opposite of Lynn, except in recent years he's turned around on the Flynn effect, and so have many other cognitive psychologists and psychometricians throughout the Western world, and there's somewhat of a consensus coming along that people consider it to be ending. There might even be a reverse Flynn effect, whereby Westerners become stupider as a result of induced neoteny, in coming decades. But that's a long ways off (individually speaking, we'll be "there" in the 2050s or something probably, but I'll be in my 60s and most people alive today will be dead!).

The main point of Lynn's, the one that everyone agrees on, is that there is a substantial difference in IQ "achievement" for different national and sub-national groups. Since IQ is more or less a hereditary predisposition, it tends to fly in the face of the idea of "self work" and "making it" that Westerners/Americans eat up, it's also pretty controversial. Yeah, the idea that your intelligence is about as deterministic as your height, skin color, or eye color, and about as easy to change, too?! Utterly gobsmacking. You mean to say that not everyone can be Albert Einstein or Kim Peek? Wow.

It's not really surprising that not everyone can be smart or not everyone can be stupid, just like not everyone is Yao Ming or Verne Troyer.

Of course, it wasn't controversial in the 1930s. Or 1940s. Or 1950s. It only really became controversial in the 1970s. So you can't even blame Hitler. You should be blaming the Weather Underground. It was so non-controversial in the 1940s that the U.S. Army literally based its entire post-war officership program on the concept of hereditary intelligence and IQ totals. The best soldiers in combat have the highest IQs, after all.

Which is really the point I'm making. Those last nine words, before the comma. "The best soldiers in combat have the highest IQs,". Yeah, that one. That's the truth. Don't believe me? Ask Austrasien for the book ISBN he read that one in or something; he knows words and I'm functionally illiterate. Or call the U.S. Army and ask them. They'll probably tell you to pay them money to search through an FOIA covered archive. Like DTIC or something. But it's already in print so you don't need that.

There are literally books on the stuff. I mean on IQ in combat. Battlefield psychometrics was a major topic of study in the WW2.

[Old Varegia]

No. The current PLA is far better off than the post-Civil War PLA. The current US Army is about the same it was in the 1950's, though. Badly trained, poorly led, incapable of thinking ahead to next week's supper, and recently discovering for the nth time why it really needs to lay off the grand purging of the NCO and officer ranks after every major war it fights.

I guess that's why every decent military analyst places them as #1 in the world.

Yes.

By that logic, Russia having nuclear weapons is proof that the west lost the Cold War. That means nothing in this context.

No, the UN wanted to re-unite Korea to prevent the North from invading ever again. They failed utterly. The only force that can reunite Korea now is the ROKA/ROKAF tag team.

I asked you about what started the war, not the extra war goals the UN tacked on after liberating the South.

The U.S. didn't save anyone from anything. What it did do was it saved the South another war to fight in the future to finish the job the UN ostensibly started: reuniting Korea. Never send a white man to do a native's job?

Oh, so the US didn't save the South from defeat? So they would've survived regardless? No. Their military was crushed during the North's invasion. Are we also going to forget the fact that the RoK is propped up massively by the US? They're basically the Israel of Asia.

It's more accurate to say the Americans found their testicles on the 38th Parallel N and stopped running away from a bunch of rice farmers armed with small arms and a handful of mortars. It would be like the U.S. Army retreating backwards through half of Afghanistan when they first sight the Taliban or something, except I guess the Chinese must have done some really impressive intimidation tactics. Something like performing 5-dimensional linear algebra matrix multiplication on a gigantic chalkboard, mentally, without previous instruction or practice beyond basic schooling. With the amount of brick laying that'd make me do I'm surprised the UN Command didn't just build a huge adobe wall then and there. Or cinderblock even.

A 1:5 ratio is perfectly fine for a force that is attacking a defending unit normally. It's exceptionally low for a light infantry force, whose entire communications trunk is composed of messenger pigeons and hoarse shouting, versus a fully mechanized army with tanks, VT fuzes, complete air supremacy, and plenty of radios.

You aren't helping your argument that the UNC was somehow in a bind when a million PLA troops pushed them out of North Korea. They could have won. They should have won. They just...didn't. The only two assumptions are that either the UNC was riddled with PLA sympathizers who gave bad orders, or UN troops were literally stupider and less mentally agile than their PLA counterparts, which led to them breaking and routing every chance they got.

This isn't some Golan Heights shit show. This is basically Omaha Beach by casualty proportions. Except the Germans have tank divisions on the beaches instead of miles behind them. And the Americans have no tanks. Or planes. Or battleships. And the Americans still win. Because the Germans just run away or something instead of actually fight the Americans?

That's not accurate at all. Don't deceive yourself. What kind of world do you live in where the world's #1 superpower is made up of the dumbest people in the fucking universe? Why didn't the SUPER MALE VITALITY HIGH-IQ UBERMENSCH Chinese have way more tech than the US? I'll redirect you to my previous comment on the matter: Ants can kill a crab. You try not getting surrounded, cut off, running out of ammo, and having to retreat when facing an enemy that has four men for every one of your own. No average group of people is skilled enough to make that difference. You also seem to be unaware of the US military's lack of preparedness for the war as well.

You should also understand that the US military is not run by Hitler. The US military goes by "better safe than sorry", not "YOUR DEVOTION TO THE FATHERLAND WILL ALLOW EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU TO KILL FOUR OF THE ENEMY WITHOUT A SCRATCH!" It should be easy to understand why an army would retreat from a massively swarming half-guerilla army.

Uh, yeah. Like I said, Japanese confirm for IQ 103 average race. If they were Chinese, they would have pushed the Americans off the island with their own grenades or something and created a new nation.

Which I'm sure is precisely why the Chinese couldn't beat a bunch of suicide-obsessed idiots who thought their political leader was a god.

IQ isn't affected by malnutrition.

What it is affected by is not actually well known. It's not affected by childhood nutrition, stunted growth, or poor education. Given a culture blind IQ test like Raven's Progressive Matrices, low-medium functioning autistic children who score 70s (mental retardation) on the Weschler scale can achieve average (95-105) IQ, since that relies on ability to manipulate symbols mentally rather than verbal knowledge, and we know that having a reduced/diminished ability to comprehend language (one of the characteristics of autism and Asperger's) makes things like Weschler into de facto culturally biased tests.

Using the same Raven-type IQ tests, the Dutch Army found that conscripts in the 1960s (i.e. born in the Hunger Winter) did not have any appreciably different IQ than their predecessors from the 1950s, and it actually increased, so clearly this line of argument is wrong. So we also know that modern Norwegian and Dutch troops are measurably stupider than their parents were in the Cold War, so it may be that there is some sort of neotenization (or "kittenization" if you will) occurring in the industrialized nations of the world. This would explain why modern European and American children are slightly stupider than their ancestors these days, and look to be getting progressively stupider as the future wears on.

Richard Lynn would probably say that nutrition affects it, but it's really doubtful except in the most extreme cases, like North Korea, where there was a sustained and long-duration famine (the Hunger Winter may not count since it, and the Holodomor, "only" happened for about a year; not long enough to seriously affect the early nutrition of children) for several years. Of course, I never said anything about North Korea. I'm talking about the PLA. The last time I remember the U.S. Army and the North Koreans having a go, the U.S. Army managed to stall a KPA army with a force 20x smaller (a division vs. like oodles of the same, with better tanks to boot) for something like a month.

Anyway, why it's occurring no one can conclusively say, otherwise we would be able to reverse it. But the fact of the matter is that the Flynn effect isn't understood enough to know exactly why it happened or why it's ending.

It would take more than one single season of slightly less food (an infant would always be fed anyway) to affect a child's entire development.

Done.

Some people wanted to nuke them, but it was deemed unethical. Funny how you're giving me a picture of a mushroom cloud instead of providing a conventional military solution. Goes to show that your argument is indefensible.

The U.S. Army disagrees. Why do you think American officers are required to have university degrees? For laughs? It's because the only people who go through university are smarter than the average person, and the U.S. Army is well aware of, based on its WW2 experience, of the problems with having stupid people in leadership positions. Stupid people spook easily and flee combat the first chance they get. Smart people stick around because they're able to confront and address their fears rationally to avoid panicking.

Have you ever taken an IQ test? They have nothing to do with knowing any amount of information apart from the basic literacy that is required to read the instructions.

I guess FICO is a shitty way to measure your ability to repay loans, too? Or Social Credit a shitty way to measure how much you live up to society's/the party's expectations of you? Hardly.

Mathematics is the language of the universe, so really any sort of sorting algorithm based on repeatable metrics (i.e. standardized scores/IQ tests/whatever) will generally sort people quite adequately. The only people who would get upset are the people who either cannot appreciate mathematical purity or people who get left behind. That's not necessarily the same people, either, since there are plenty of philosophy and literature PhDs in universities around the world; and plenty of under-employed or unemployed engineering BSc's around the world

Wow, look at that circular logic. It's good because it's good.

There's more to intelligence than IQ. IQ only grades your ability to make sense of whatever patterns they put in front of you. Someone can have an IQ of 200, but still get utterly destroyed in a war scenario if they don't have a grasp of tactics.

[Manokan Republic]

If aimed accurate fire is so much more effective, why have a majority of personal firearms innovations until the mid 20th century been about making guns shoot faster? The invention of metal ramrods in the early 18th century allowed armies to reload faster than their adversaries. The percussion cap allowed musketry to dispense with the process of using a flintlock. The cartridge case meant that breechloading firearms could shoot much, much faster - eject the spend casing and throw a new one in. You can follow this line of thinking pretty much until the 40s, with the advent of ridiculously fast-firing machine guns like the MG42. Even after that, assault rifles allowed any infantryman to put a greater amount of lead in the general direction of the enemy than battle rifles like the M14 or SKS, either of which was dispensed in favor of assault rifles which are still in use today.

AFAIK battle rifles have made a comeback in recent days with long-distance mountain combat being more common in Afghanistan, but that isnt exactly representative of what the next major war will look like. Using WWI and WWII as case studies, the trend is absolutely towards being able to shoot faster over being able to shoot more accurately.

My point is in regard to fully automatic fire, that semiautomatic fire is better than fully automatic fire, and specifically in infantry combat (as in, not in the anti-aircraft role). There are problems shooting too slowly, and problems shooting too quickly. You need a good balance, with aimed fire, that is semiautomatic aimed fire, usually being better than fully automatic fire. Even fully automatic fire is best relegated to short bursts, which is typically less accurate than semiautomatic fire. Fully Automatic fire is unrealistic due to the low accuracy, both due to the higher recoil and decreased time to aim, with it being impossible to aim a gun accurately 10 different times a second, or as fast as a gun can shoot. There's a limit to most people's aiming ability in a given time frame. You might be able to hit the target after 1000 rounds, but given that infantry simply don't carry that much ammunition it wouldn't be worth the trade off in weight, or time to fire that many rounds. Semiautomatic weapons also tend to be more accurate, when in use by soldiers, than bolt actions, as you don't have to take your eye off the target and have faster follow up shots in between misses. Bolt action rifles often require that you pause for long periods of time after you fire in order to reload, and instinctually it's much easier to correct from a hit immediately, than to have to take your eye off your target. Most people can see the target, miss a few times but trail the target and get on target with a semiautomatic. With a bolt action it's harder to pay attention on what's going on around you and correct your miss, which somewhat quixotically tends to make semiautomatics more accurate in most circumstances, unless you are super well trained enough to use a bolt action that accurately. The lee-enfield rifle used by the British in particular was designed to alleviate this in part and, they did actually prefer to use it to the M1 garand, although switched after the war.There's also the added benefit of maneuverability in these weapons.

Furthermore, killing the enemy is not always the goal, but survival. A suicide bomber can kill 50 men in one guy, but he kills himself as well. The purpose is more of a mater of survival, the ability to maneuver in to location quickly, or poke your head out from behind cover, take a few shots, and then duck back in to cover. The problem of what's more effective in war and what's more lethal in war are two different things. Killing the enemy doesn't always mean surviving, or winning the battle where you kill them but they don't kill you. Fully automatic fire's place is usually in hitting fast moving targets (such as aircraft or from aircraft), or in close quarters. The U.S. marines and Army removed the fully automatic feature from their weapons in 1982, with the army only gradually adding back in fully automatic weapons in the form of the M4 carbine recently (and the marines still using the M16), and that's so they can be better in close quarters combat, which the M4 excels at. Fully automatic fire is better in close quarters combat, as I've said before, as when you're closer to the target misses are less of a problem. Missing by 1 degree at 600 yards can mean being off by several feet, while it's only a few inches in close quarters. I've never said that accuracy is the only factor, or that speed is the only factor, I've said that balance is an important issue. I can go back and quote my exact words if you want.


An example of such a thing would be looking down the sights at 25 yards with an AR-15 [1], and 50 yards with an Ak-47. [2] While still relatively close, the target, a human sized target that is, is pretty small, and even a slight bit of recoil would mean you would miss. That's at 25-50 yards, where fully automatic fire actually does well. At something like, 600 yards, a human-sized target is roughly the size of your front aperture, and so if you were shooting super quickly, there's no way you'd hit the target. In fact, here's what it looks like from a scope [1], and you can see that it's still tiny; you can literally breathe wrong and miss at those ranges, hence why long range shooting involves controlling your breathing. Considering that *most* combat occurs at long ranges, that is past 50 yards, roughly 90%, and 50% occur between 300 and 900 meters, range is an advantage most of the time. The notable exception being say, SMG's in close quarters. The reason why soldiers use assault rifles is to compete against submachine guns at close ranges, and battle rifles at long ranges, however it is not the best at etheir. These guns tend to be a jack of all trades, rather than the best at everything. The purpose is a one size fits all rifle, not something that's the best at everything. And fully automatic fire is rarely used by most soldiers in the field, with burst fire being used by machine gunners.

This entire conversation of course is in the context of using the 6.5mm grendel over the 5.56mm, or a 4.6mm round. In that suppressive fire can be achieved well enough with such a round, and can be used well enough in close quarters to not be a hassle. Then it devolved in to talking about infantry vs. armored vehicles, and finally race and I.Q., with Gallia quoting a white supremacist book. How we got here is a question to me too but anyways the conversation has changed quite a bit.

[Old Varegia]

There are literally books on the stuff. I mean on IQ in combat. Battlefield psychometrics was a major topic of study in the WW2.

There are also books on how supposedly black people created every aspect of every civilization ever. Except for all of the bad stuff.

[Manokan Republic]

So I.Q. isn't everything?

Boy I will slap you right in the penis.

"Iraqi average IQ is in the lower 80s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. Americans beat Iraqis every time. PLA average IQ is in the upper 100s or lower 110s, American average IQ is in the mid 100s. PLA beat Americans every time. " Also if you think the North Korean I.Q. is high you're a moron given how much malnutrition they have and crappy their education is.

IQ isn't affected by malnutrition.

What it is affected by is not actually well known. It's not affected by childhood nutrition, stunted growth, or poor education. Given a culture blind IQ test like Raven's Progressive Matrices, low-medium functioning autistic children who score 70s (mental retardation) on the Weschler scale can achieve average (95-105) IQ, since that relies on ability to manipulate symbols mentally rather than verbal knowledge, and we know that having a reduced/diminished ability to comprehend language (one of the characteristics of autism and Asperger's) makes things like Weschler into de facto culturally biased tests.

Using the same Raven-type IQ tests, the Dutch Army found that conscripts in the 1960s (i.e. born in the Hunger Winter) did not have any appreciably different IQ than their predecessors from the 1950s, and it actually increased, so clearly this line of argument is wrong. So we also know that modern Norwegian and Dutch troops are measurably stupider than their parents were in the Cold War, so it may be that there is some sort of neotenization (or "kittenization" if you will) occurring in the industrialized nations of the world. This would explain why modern European and American children are slightly stupider than their ancestors these days, and look to be getting progressively stupider as the future wears on.

Richard Lynn would probably say that nutrition affects it, but it's really doubtful except in the most extreme cases, like North Korea, where there was a sustained and long-duration famine (the Hunger Winter may not count since it, and the Holodomor, "only" happened for about a year; not long enough to seriously affect the early nutrition of children) for several years. Of course, I never said anything about North Korea. I'm talking about the PLA. The last time I remember the U.S. Army and the North Koreans having a go, the U.S. Army managed to stall a KPA army with a force 20x smaller (a division vs. like oodles of the same, with better tanks to boot) for something like a month.

Anyway, why it's occurring no one can conclusively say, otherwise we would be able to reverse it. But the fact of the matter is that the Flynn effect isn't understood enough to know exactly why it happened or why it's ending.

Your source didn't in any way say that their I.Q.'s didn't decrease due to the famine. And predominately it effects developing children, with I.Q.'s dropping in children while they are malnourished. [1][2][3] It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize if you aren't getting the right nutrition to make the brain work properly, which gets all of it's energy and nutrients from what you eat, that it can cause issues with intelligence.

Literally every major medical organization on the planet disagrees with you, and your own source doesn't even mention I.Q. at all. Vitamin B12 alone, found in meat, is necessary for proper brain function and vitamin B12 deficiencies alone can hamper brain function even in adults. Hence why veganism isn't a sustainable diet, and vegetarianism is very hard to sustain. However, even vegetarians suffer, with Vitamin B12 deficiency occurring in 40% to 80% of the vegetarian population who are not also consuming a vitamin B12 supplement. In Hong Kong and India, vitamin B12 deficiency has been found in roughly 80% of the vegan population as well. So quite literally in these countries not only does malnourishment ironically lower their I.Q.'s, living on a diet of rice and beans, meaning they don't have higher I.Q.'s, but malnourishment is predominately responsible. This is documented evidence.

I.Q.'s of industrialized nations tend to increase over time, which can offset the effects of malnourishment over time, and further the Dutch population only experienced a famine for a year, and it wasn't the entire population, and it wasn't a very bad famine. This was mainly a calorie shortage, with vitamin and protein shortages being the main thing that causes brain damage and not being present for most of the Dutch famine. Finally, the impact being minor after another generation of kids after the famine now joining the military, is different than the impact of living during a famine. Not all malnourishment is equal, with short periods of malnourishment not having as much of an impact as being malnourished for many years, and especially when you are young. Your argument is essentially that based on an event that happened for less than a year and with smaller impact than many people living in say, the Sub-Saharan Africa, that malnourishment doesn't effect I.Q. Not only is it nonsensical logically but every major scientific source disagrees. And even if we were to count this as equivalent to the other cases, one outlier does not discount decades of observable evidence.

[Schwere Panzer Abteilung 502]

My point is in regard to fully automatic fire, that semiautomatic fire is better than fully automatic fire, and specifically in infantry combat (as in, not in the anti-aircraft role). There are problems shooting too slowly, and problems shooting too quickly. You need a good balance, with aimed fire, that is semiautomatic aimed fire, usually being better than fully automatic fire. Even fully automatic fire is best relegated to short bursts, which is typically less accurate than semiautomatic fire. Fully Automatic fire is unrealistic due to the low accuracy, both due to the higher recoil and decreased time to aim, with it being impossible to aim a gun accurately 10 different times a second, or as fast as a gun can shoot. There's a limit to most people's aiming ability in a given time frame. You might be able to hit the target after 1000 rounds, but given that infantry simply don't carry that much ammunition it wouldn't be worth the trade off in weight, or time to fire that many rounds.

Putting more ammunition downrange in a shorter amount of time means you are able to hit the target quicker. One well trained man with a rifle trying to hit targets are 500 meters is going to do worse at quickly and efficiently hitting the enemy than one well trained man with a machine gun. Squads and fireteams nowadays are constructed around the automatic riflemen; he suppresses the enemy and kills as many as is possible while the rest of the soldiers close with and kill the enemy. This has been this way since WWI. If you're worried about not carrying enough ammunition, carry more ammunition. If the automatic rifleman can't carry any more ammunition, that's what ammo bearers are for. Soldiers are not going to be stopping to carefully pick off enemies in the middle of a firefight.

Furthermore, killing the enemy is not always the goal, but survival. A suicide bomber can kill 50 men in one guy, but he kills himself as well. The purpose is more of a mater of survival, the ability to maneuver in to location quickly, or poke your head out from behind cover, take a few shots, and then duck back in to cover.

No, the goal is pretty generally to kill the enemy. If survival was the primary goal you wouldn't be in combat.

Fully automatic fire is better in close quarters combat, as I've said before, as when you're closer to the target misses are less of a problem. Missing by 1 degree at 600 yards can mean being off by several feet, while it's only a few inches in close quarters. I've never said that accuracy is the only factor, or that speed is the only factor, I've said that balance is an important issue. I can go back and quote my exact words if you want.

You can say it as many times as you want, that doesn't make it true. It's true you are less accurate when fully automatic. Putting more rounds downrange still increases your likelihood of getting a hit. That's why the Germans went so ham in developing the MG34 and 42. The M1 Garand wasn't the future.

[Galima]

Due to the relatively recent return of industry to my nation, they have developed a weapon that functions on the idea of rapidly changing calibres. The reason for this is, due to being based in a bombed out Houston there's a fair amount of ammo AROUND, just of widely varying calibres, as a result, Galima commissioned the most skilled gunsmiths in their sphere of influence to produce a weapon capable of holding at least 20 rounds of ammunition, and able to be switched between: 5.56x45, 7.62x39, and 7.62x35. it does not and is not capable of doing so under fire, but it is a simple enough system to be done by soldiers when not under fire and in the field

the big problem here is i don't know if that's entirely feasible with a magazine fed weapon and since you guys probably would know, i figured i'd ask. the barrel is relatively easy to switch out as far as weapon parts go, but would it require entirely new magazine well and feeding system? and is that feasible to be done in the field?

[Gallia-]

No. The current PLA is far better off than the post-Civil War PLA. The current US Army is about the same it was in the 1950's, though. Badly trained, poorly led, incapable of thinking ahead to next week's supper, and recently discovering for the nth time why it really needs to lay off the grand purging of the NCO and officer ranks after every major war it fights.

I guess that's why every decent military analyst places them as #1 in the world.

"Military analyst" is like "sex expert".

Yes.

By that logic, Russia having nuclear weapons is proof that the west lost the Cold War. That means nothing in this context.

It's similar to if the Greater German Reich still existed today and had genocided all the Jews within itself and Reichskommissarist Ost.

I asked you about what started the war, not the extra war goals the UN tacked on after liberating the South.

This is called "moving the goal posts". The goals the UNC gave itself were not achieved. Ergo, it lost the war. The goal of the war was to reunite Korea and prevent another invasion of the ROK from occurring in the future. Failed utterly. War lost. The traumatic shock of Korea is also why the USA lost the Vietnam War, more than anything, 20 years later.

Oh, so the US didn't save the South from defeat?

No. It was the UN. Why you keep tacking on "S" instead of "N" makes me think you don't know the difference between "States" and "Nations". I can't really help you there since we are on a site called "NationStates".

Are we also going to forget the fact that the RoK is propped up massively by the US? They're basically the Israel of Asia.

The ROKA/ROKAF would be at the Yalu River in like a month probably. Or less. Depends on how many fleeing refugees they have to machine gun their way through when the DMZ falls over. Meanwhile the Americans would show up just in time to cross the t's and dot the i's on the annexation treaty, notarize it, and smile for the camera to pretend like they did anything in the actual war.

Why didn't the SUPER MALE VITALITY HIGH-IQ UBERMENSCH Chinese have way more tech than the US?

Why does it matter? They routed multiple United Nations field armies in the field with nothing more than the finest technology of 1918.

And anyway, the Chinese have more tech than the U.S. It just took them 50 years to catch up. But of course, the US is a stagnant empire with no economic growth and little in the way of innovation these days, while the PRC is the land of opportunity and entrepreneurship that the USA thinks it is. As long as you're an entrepreneur for the party, friend. There could be worse things, though, like being in a post-industrial dead nation that rivals Russia or Brazil for wealth disparity and poverty. Which is where the USA is headed.

Which I'm sure is precisely why the Chinese couldn't beat a bunch of suicide-obsessed idiots who thought their political leader was a god.

I've literally been telling you they did this exact thing 1951-1953.

It would take more than one single season of slightly less food (an infant would always be fed anyway) to affect a child's entire development.

"An infant would always be fed". Not only culturally biased, but vaguely racist in the implication that anyone who doesn't feed an infant (rather than, say, a pig or something valuable) is somehow inferior or untermensch.

No, an infant is not always fed. More often in history, infants are fed to other things, rather than the other way around. They are useless mouths to feed in a famine. You kill them and eat them, or you just let them starve, because you're too busy starving yourself. And valuable animals like pigs and oxen are more important to keep alive. You can always have another baby, you can't get another pig or another ox when it was your husband's dowry, or it cost you two years wages, or something.

Done.

Some people wanted to nuke them,[/quote]

*No one.

Funny how you're giving me a picture of a mushroom cloud instead of providing a conventional military solution. Goes to show that your argument is indefensible.

What argument? What the fuck are you talking about? Do you even read words? Holy fuck. I'm literally telling you historical facts. This is like as controversial as "My pillow is stuffed in Pakistan" or "Fords are made in China". There's nothing to defend here, except your preposterous non-sequiturs I guess? There's nothing wrong with using nukes on a highly dense target that cannot move out of the way, either. America is just too morally weak I guess?

It's not like the Russians would have invaded Germany or anything over a bunch of dead Chinese in Korea. OTOH the USA at the time was almost entirely deluded that it wasn't actually witnessing a proxy war, but the start of the 3rd World War itself. Maybe MacArthur and Truman were thinking of saving the nukes for when the Russians rolled over into Berlin and flattening Joe's dacha?

Have you ever taken an IQ test? They have nothing to do with knowing any amount of information apart from the basic literacy that is required to read the instructions.

Have you ever given one?

IQ tests aren't "one thing". There are lots of them. Some of them require knowing a lot of information, like the American College Test, or the Scholastic Aptitude Test prior to 1994, if you're from a coastal city, or Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery prior to 1976. These require knowing the amount of information you would acquire in a typical scholastic career, because this is a proximate measure of your intellect. You've already controlled for amount of time in school, for the most part, so the only substantial difference is ability and willingness to absorb information. It's not really surprising that MENSA accepts some of these tests, provided they're old enough (sadly, a lot of these, like the ASVAB and SAT, are no longer IQ tests; the Triple 9 Society still considers ACT to be an IQ test though) scores.

Of course, there are other IQ tests, which test things like your knowledge of words, your ability to count, store, and recall numbers/information, and your ability to mentally rotate objects. The most comprehensive and probably best are the Weschler scales (WISC [Children's]/WAIS [Adult's] Series I/II/III/IV/V), but I am severely biased in that regard, and people like MENSA and Triple 9 also accept Law School Admission Test scores and a few other things.

Then there are pure pattern recognition tests, which are really the most beautiful ones because they are not biased at all in your ability to encode and retrieve verbal information, so they work fine for people with autism as well as typical people, since people with autism really cannot encode verbal language like typicals do. They work better/are better measured by things like Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and other Raven-type visual IQ tests, because these mesh well with how they view the world.

Anyway the reason you test information you already know is because g is comprised of two things: crystallized and fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence begins its decline after about age 20, and never recovers, while crystallized intelligence is what you know and generally grows, but increasingly stagnant, as time goes on. Put simply, fluid intelligence is what you're capable of learning at that time, and crystallized intelligence is what you already know at that time. If you can control the time, you can setup a baseline comparison by which you can compare someone's knowledge or their ability to recognize patterns, or both. This baseline is called a "norm" and a test which uses a baseline is called a "norm-referenced test".

It's the basis of all standardized testing. It works well enough to sort people into various labeled crab buckets, the problem is that people ignore the crab buckets and just assume because it looks like a crab and walks like a crab, it must be the same crab as all the other crabs. The other problem is that people don't know what a norm-referenced test is, or they don't like the idea of people being superior or inferior to other people (maybe they're afraid for their own egos?), so they dissolve norms and replaced them with asinine things like NCLB.

Of course, as I alluded to earlier, IQ tests are sometimes deprecated when the knowledge they test moves away from the norm. In which case, they must be "re-normed" using new information/questions and a new population sample, which involves intense (in tents? literally?) study of academic/scholastic schedules for whatever group you're trying to examine/compare. Then you must come up with questions to ask (this is the longest portion besides data collection) which is very difficult and more or less an art rather than a science. Kind of like writing an abstract. Then it involves deploying the test and establishing a norm within the population you're looking at, then you are done. And this takes several years. And by the time you're finished, you're probably ready to start, or sometimes already working on, the very next one.

So IQ tests aren't just rigorous, they're also expensive to make.

And no, "hard work" isn't a defense. All else equal, the person with a higher IQ/g will be more successful and more capable than the person with the lower one. In order to compensate, you either need the smarter person to do less or the dumber person to do more. And that is why you get into the issue of why IQ tests are "good" I guess? Because they represent an ideal? Not everyone is a hard worker, but it's easy enough to agree on the part that the smartest man in the world can be a NEET couch potato while the dumbest man in the world can study for his entire life and never make a single coherent sentence, surely? Unfortunately, that isn't the case.

FWIW, the Dutch and Norwegian armies use Raven-type IQ tests. Very forward thinking, IMO. Those are culture blind.

Wow, look at that circular logic. It's good because it's good.

It's good because it works, actually. Find a better method that works without the maths, or cannot be described by maths, and you'd have a point. You won't find one.

There's more to intelligence than IQ.

There literally isn't.

IQ only grades your ability to make sense of whatever patterns they put in front of you.

This is literally what life is.

Hell, war is one of the most pattern recognizing things in existence. It's second to maybe doing arithmetic homework or your family doctor/nurse diagnosing why your throat hurts.

Your source didn't in any way say that their I.Q.'s didn't decrease due to the famine.

Sorry, I assumed you knew anything at all about what you were talking about. Dutch IQ tests from people born prior to and during the Hunger Winter showed no noticeable drop in IQ, but rather the same then-current trend of increasing IQ. That trend ended about 15 years ago or something. IQ has been on the drop in the Western world since the late '90s or early '00s. People like to look at the Hunger Winter because it's one of those classic studies: there's lot of data about it (the Dutch government was, more or less, completely intact), the information was available for decades (they weren't behind the Iron Curtain, unlike Sevastopol and Leningrad), and it's been referenced before by a lot of other people.

There is one psychological health finding that malnutrition leads to in adult life: schizophrenia. That's about it. Physically, there's a strange correlation between infant malnutrition and obesity later in adult life.

This indicates that, although I'm somewhat skeptical, the DPRK's IQ is probably OK in the end. All they need is a warm bed, some food, a reasonable education, and several years of positive outcomes before it can express itself fully. Then they'll be basically South Korea 2.0. I'm skeptical because while their ability to match patterns is OK, i.e. Raven-type IQ tests, they would probably be unable to function normally/typically for other reasons not necessarily related to mental retardation. Such as schizophrenia. For that to be tested you'd also need to administer a large battery of IQ tests to the North Korean population. And schizophrenia is heritable. And a lot of Chinese rice farmers have it, probably.