NS Military Worldbuilding Thread No. 12

[Puzikas]

this is what all conscript armies do to a nation

I can't believe conscript only managed to make Army Group Center vanish lmao typical conscript army can't complete objectives

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Conscripts did far worse in combat than volunteers in WWII in general, and when professional units went up against conscripts it was generally a massacre, such as in the eastern front with the germans vs. the Soviet union.

They did so bad wikipedia.org (your favourite website) denotes Operation Bagration as the greatest military defeat in German military history.

[The Corparation]

I'm currently in the process of reading "When Computers Went to Sea" which is a history of US Navy computing and in particular NTDS. The author mentions briefly at one point a "Project CORNFIELD". The basic concept was that due to the size of computers at the time you wouldn't be able to fit two on every ship (You'd need two for redundancy in case a vacuum tube blew out at an inopportune time) and instead would need a dedicated "master ship" to carry a pair of navalized SAGE Derivatives in order to coordinate air defense for the battle group. As is fairly obvious the shrinking size of computers allowed for every ship to carry a computer and the project never went anywhere. The author provides two citations on CORNFIELD, one is behind a paywall that I'm loathe to get through and while I tracked down the other it didn't provide any additional information and didn't have any citations to follow. I'm wondering if anyone here has heard of CORNFIELD before and if so do they have any spare portions of asparagus they could share on it.

[Spirit of Hope]

There is basically no evidence to support the idea that conscription causes soldiers to be less motivated than a volunteer force. It is a common saying, but just because people say it doesn't make it true.

Note that WW1 and WW2 were fought by conscription on all sides. It is hard to argue any of the sides suffered moral problems because they were using conscription.



The main advantages are political and economic. Conscription generally saves money on low end soldiers, since they are forced to be there you don't have to pay them competitively to the open job market. However you also have to have the political will to enforce conscription, which can be hard in the face of unpopular wars or engagements. The nation's that still maintain conscription generally have the political will because they face existential threats, see South Korea and Israel.

Further consideration is that while conscription will fill out lower ranks there can be a struggle to get quality personnel to stick around and become NCOs. But that is a struggle a volunteer force can face as well.

A final consideration is how many people are being conscripted and how you are choosing them, all adults when they hit a certain age, only men, only a percentage of, etc.

Conscripts did far worse in combat than volunteers in WWII in general, and when professional units went up against conscripts it was generally a massacre, such as in the eastern front with the germans vs. the Soviet union.

You are aware that the German Army of WWII was a conscript army, right? Conscription had been a thing since 1935, and something like a third of the Wehrmachts strength were conscripts in 1939.

The better example of the superiority of volunteers vs conscripts would be Great Britain in WW I, but their excellent volunteer force was quickly killed by machine guns and artillery so they resorted to conscription as well.

Most of the U.S. frontline infantry were volunteers in WWII and not, conscripts as well, as they generally didn't expect front-line troops to be successful if they were overly filled with conscripts. However, it's fair to say WWII is an exception to the rule, as when your own homeland is about to be destroyed people will generally be more motivated to fight, vs. a random small-scale war people don't find to be immediately engaging. Essentially conscripts tend to be worse at their jobs and have worse morale than volunteers in general, due to less training and organization, as well as less motivation to join the military in the first place, but that doesn't mean they will be automatically bad.

Training and organization are completely seperate from conscription. There really isn't even correlation between the two.

Motivation on the battlefield is going to mater more on unit leadership than on if someone is a volunteer or a conscript.

A volunteer army with bad training and organization will lose to a conscript army with good training and organization.

[Puzikas]

Conscripts did far worse in combat than volunteers in WWII in general, and when professional units went up against conscripts it was generally a massacre, such as in the eastern front with the germans vs. the Soviet union.

They did so bad wikipedia.org (your favourite website) denotes Operation Bagration as the greatest military defeat in German military history.

Tbh that's underselling up OPB was such a vicious thrashing of the rectal cavity that it is without peer before or since

Genuinely mad

Also it was a conscript vs conscript army lol

[Amidia-]

They did so bad wikipedia.org (your favourite website) denotes Operation Bagration as the greatest military defeat in German military history.

Tbh that's underselling up OPB was such a vicious thrashing of the rectal cavity that it is without peer before or since

Genuinely mad

Also it was a conscript vs conscript army lol

Exactly it was conscript v conscript, obviously a real professional army would have beat either side, perhaps both.

[Korva]

Soviets had like a 10:1 advantage in guns.

They could have used trained monkeys as infantry and done just as well.

[Champagne Socialist Sharifistan]

Do people with high school diploma, military experience and military leadership and management training (but no university degree) necessarily make bad military officers?

[Amidia-]

Do people with high school diploma, military experience and military leadership and management training (but no university degree) necessarily make bad military officers?

Taking in enlisted personnel to go through officer training is pretty normal, maybe not as a sole source of officer recruits.

[Immoren]

Tbh that's underselling up OPB was such a vicious thrashing of the rectal cavity that it is without peer before or since

Genuinely mad

Also it was a conscript vs conscript army lol

Exactly it was conscript v conscript, obviously a real professional army would have beat either side, perhaps both.

Are you saying that after those years those conscripts weren't indistinguishable from "professional soldiers" ?

[Champagne Socialist Sharifistan]

Do people with high school diploma, military experience and military leadership and management training (but no university degree) necessarily make bad military officers?

Taking in enlisted personnel to go through officer training is pretty normal, maybe not as a sole source of officer recruits.

Thanks

[Gallia-]

this is what all conscript armies do to a nation

I can't believe conscript only managed to make Army Group Center vanish lmao typical conscript army can't complete objectives

Literally the single greatest land offensive in human history, and the sort of campaign seen once a thousand years, as was such during the times of Chinggis Khan and Alexander

or

We literally got ass blasted by some farmers with 120 year old falling block rifles and own goaled every year for 10 years on the dot.

How will professional mercenary "armies" ever recover?

Soviets had like a 10:1 advantage in guns.

They could have used trained monkeys as infantry and done just as well.

Doubtful.

For all their mechanized tanks and airplanes the Americans still got btfo by a handful of Chinese light infantry with 10x fewer artillery pieces and no planes.

Conscripts did far worse in combat than volunteers in WWII in general, and when professional units went up against conscripts it was generally a massacre, such as in the eastern front with the germans vs. the Soviet union.

They did so bad wikipedia.org (your favourite website) denotes Operation Bagration as the greatest military defeat in German military history.

Part of the reason Galla is a conscript army fueled by the principle of mass is because it secretly channels high Bagration energy.

You can nuke it all you want that just makes it stronger.

Except the Sturmoviks are Hawker Hurricanes with Vickers S guns I guess.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Part of the reason Galla is a conscript army fueled by the principle of mass is because it secretly channels high Bagration energy.

You can nuke it all you want that just makes it stronger.

Except the Sturmoviks are Hawker Hurricanes with Vickers S guns I guess.

Sweden before acquiring a professional army: 29 brigades, 19 fighter squadrons, and storage depots enough to fight WWIII.
Sweden after acquiring a professional army: 1 brigade, maybe 5 fighter squadrons on a good day, and 1 field hospital, and ÖB going "We could maybe defend Stockholm for 1 week".

[Gallia-]

Part of the reason Galla is a conscript army fueled by the principle of mass is because it secretly channels high Bagration energy.

You can nuke it all you want that just makes it stronger.

Except the Sturmoviks are Hawker Hurricanes with Vickers S guns I guess.

Sweden before acquiring a professional army: 29 brigades, 19 fighter squadrons, and storage depots enough to fight WWIII.
Sweden after acquiring a professional army: 1 brigade, maybe 5 fighter squadrons on a good day, and 1 field hospital, and ÖB going "We could maybe defend Stockholm for 1 week".

Yes.

Galla before acquiring a professional army: big
Galla after acquiring a professional army: literally a motley collection of variously armed militias and neo-medieval cyberpunk/corporate levy troops

The trick is to never professionalize the army. Down that road lies internationalist neoliberal roadsterism.

[Triplebaconation]

I'm currently in the process of reading "When Computers Went to Sea" which is a history of US Navy computing and in particular NTDS. The author mentions briefly at one point a "Project CORNFIELD". The basic concept was that due to the size of computers at the time you wouldn't be able to fit two on every ship (You'd need two for redundancy in case a vacuum tube blew out at an inopportune time) and instead would need a dedicated "master ship" to carry a pair of navalized SAGE Derivatives in order to coordinate air defense for the battle group. As is fairly obvious the shrinking size of computers allowed for every ship to carry a computer and the project never went anywhere. The author provides two citations on CORNFIELD, one is behind a paywall that I'm loathe to get through and while I tracked down the other it didn't provide any additional information and didn't have any citations to follow. I'm wondering if anyone here has heard of CORNFIELD before and if so do they have any spare portions of asparagus they could share on it.

Cornfield was contracted out to the University of Illinois. The master ship would have been the aircraft carrier of a task force instead of Lensman-style command ship. It was really more of a systems concept than anything concrete - any software written for it (I'm not sure they got that far) ran on ILLIAC. The Cornfield team went on to use some of the ideas to develop PLATO.

The shortened model your talking about was shortened by 7 inches, this is based on the commando, which is shortened by a little over 3 inches.

Plus suppressors were used on the FAMAS, they fit over the muzzle break on the end of the grenade discharger, these do the same thing.

have you verified this information with wikipedia and thefirearmsblog

[Gallia-]

that is the most obscure thing you have ever posted i think

[The Corparation]

I'm currently in the process of reading "When Computers Went to Sea" which is a history of US Navy computing and in particular NTDS. The author mentions briefly at one point a "Project CORNFIELD". The basic concept was that due to the size of computers at the time you wouldn't be able to fit two on every ship (You'd need two for redundancy in case a vacuum tube blew out at an inopportune time) and instead would need a dedicated "master ship" to carry a pair of navalized SAGE Derivatives in order to coordinate air defense for the battle group. As is fairly obvious the shrinking size of computers allowed for every ship to carry a computer and the project never went anywhere. The author provides two citations on CORNFIELD, one is behind a paywall that I'm loathe to get through and while I tracked down the other it didn't provide any additional information and didn't have any citations to follow. I'm wondering if anyone here has heard of CORNFIELD before and if so do they have any spare portions of asparagus they could share on it.

Cornfield was contracted out to the University of Illinois. The master ship would have been the aircraft carrier of a task force instead of Lensman-style command ship. It was really more of a systems concept than anything concrete - any software written for it (I'm not sure they got that far) ran on ILLIAC. The Cornfield team went on to use some of the ideas to develop PLATO.

Have any readings on it? The author of "When Computers Went to Sea" mentions the University of Illinois connection however he seems to have thought that, at least at one point that they intended to have a purpose built ship, From Chapter 2, p69:

For the Navy, Project CORNFIELD proposed a dedicated ship that would literally be a floating computer center, carrying two of the massive computers.

To me at least a dedicated ship somewhat makes as the computers used for SAGE weighed on the order of a couple hundred tons and took up significant space. Multiply by 2 and it seems like you'd be hard pressed to fit the system on a carrier without axing most of the air wing.

[The Manticoran Empire]

There is basically no evidence to support the idea that conscription causes soldiers to be less motivated than a volunteer force. It is a common saying, but just because people say it doesn't make it true.

Note that WW1 and WW2 were fought by conscription on all sides. It is hard to argue any of the sides suffered moral problems because they were using conscription.



The main advantages are political and economic. Conscription generally saves money on low end soldiers, since they are forced to be there you don't have to pay them competitively to the open job market. However you also have to have the political will to enforce conscription, which can be hard in the face of unpopular wars or engagements. The nation's that still maintain conscription generally have the political will because they face existential threats, see South Korea and Israel.

Further consideration is that while conscription will fill out lower ranks there can be a struggle to get quality personnel to stick around and become NCOs. But that is a struggle a volunteer force can face as well.

A final consideration is how many people are being conscripted and how you are choosing them, all adults when they hit a certain age, only men, only a percentage of, etc.

Conscripts did far worse in combat than volunteers in WWII in general, and when professional units went up against conscripts it was generally a massacre, such as in the eastern front with the germans vs. the Soviet union. Most of the U.S. frontline infantry were volunteers in WWII and not, conscripts as well, as they generally didn't expect front-line troops to be successful if they were overly filled with conscripts.

This actually false. 61.2% of US servicemen in World War II were draftees. In reality there was no appreciable difference between a conscript and a volunteer during the war. German and Soviet conscripts fought each other in Eastern Europe. British, French, and American conscripts fought German and Italian conscripts in Western and Southern Europe as well as North Africa.

[Triplebaconation]

Cornfield was contracted out to the University of Illinois. The master ship would have been the aircraft carrier of a task force instead of Lensman-style command ship. It was really more of a systems concept than anything concrete - any software written for it (I'm not sure they got that far) ran on ILLIAC. The Cornfield team went on to use some of the ideas to develop PLATO.

Have any readings on it? The author of "When Computers Went to Sea" mentions the University of Illinois connection however he seems to have thought that, at least at one point that they intended to have a purpose built ship, From Chapter 2, p69:

For the Navy, Project CORNFIELD proposed a dedicated ship that would literally be a floating computer center, carrying two of the massive computers.

To me at least a dedicated ship somewhat makes as the computers used for SAGE weighed on the order of a couple hundred tons and took up significant space. Multiply by 2 and it seems like you'd be hard pressed to fit the system on a carrier without axing most of the air wing.

There's a chapter on it in The Friendly Orange Glow, which is about the development of PLATO. I'm not sure thinking in terms of processing hardware is especially helpful since the project seemed to be (at least to me) mainly about the cybernetics of theoretical networked computers.

This actually false. 61.2% of US servicemen in World War II were draftees. In reality there was no appreciable difference between a conscript and a volunteer during the war. German and Soviet conscripts fought each other in Eastern Europe. British, French, and American conscripts fought German and Italian conscripts in Western and Southern Europe as well as North Africa.

I suspect you're both wrong

Military service was so popular in the US during WW2 that the primary purpose of the draft was to limit volunteers. In fact after 1942 it was impossible to enlist unless you were outside the draft range, which of course was steadily expanded during the war. You could however volunteer for the draft - so most "conscripts" were actually volunteers.

Of course while not actually conscripts they were by no means professional soldiers - this was probably an advantage.

The biggest NS dumb about conscription is the hyper-militarized nation fighting forever wars with conscript armies.

[Hrstrovokia]

Is the MiG-31 still a viable concept today?

Most countries have gone towards multi-role aircraft. Would a nation be better off going for a Su-27 or F-16 variant than something as costly and without the same branching path towards multiple capabilities as the MiG-31?

[Miku the Based]

Yes, the MIG 31 as a interceptor for both high flying fast recon aircraft like the SR-71 and supersonic nuclear armed bombers are perfectly viable today. That threat did not end even after 2011.

[Cossack Peoples]

What are y'all's opinions on command guidance for surface-to-air missiles?

[New Vihenia]

What are y'all's opinions on command guidance for surface-to-air missiles?

Cheap,simple, suitable for supersonic-hypersonic missile, limited to short range tho up to 60 km. May have problem handling multiple targets.

[Austrasien]

Is the MiG-31 still a viable concept today?

Most countries have gone towards multi-role aircraft. Would a nation be better off going for a Su-27 or F-16 variant than something as costly and without the same branching path towards multiple capabilities as the MiG-31?

No.

The Mig-31 wasn't known for its multiple capabilities. It could shoot AAMs and in principle drop bombs. It was an aircraft with a very narrow set of capabilities for a very specific mission - shoot down the XB-70 force. Since the XB-70 force notably didn't materialize its existence was rather questionable and was more about salvaging the big investment in the Mig-25 than the need for an aircraft that could fly very fast for about 20 minutes in a nearly straight line.

The PVO was putting SU-30s into service by the end of the USSR and Novator thought for a long time about adapting the R-37 missile for it, and phased array radars for ther Su-30/Su-27 were well underway. Had all the pieces come together the USSR could have fielded a very effective Su-30/R-37 combo with more or less all the valuable capabilities of the Mig-31 baring a sudden RB-71 force, which wasn't going to happen.

What are y'all's opinions on command guidance for surface-to-air missiles?

Between IIR & active radar homing missiles for medium-long range and beamriders for short-range, it doesn't have much going for it.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Is the MiG-31 still a viable concept today?

Most countries have gone towards multi-role aircraft. Would a nation be better off going for a Su-27 or F-16 variant than something as costly and without the same branching path towards multiple capabilities as the MiG-31?

No.

The Mig-31 wasn't known for its multiple capabilities. It could shoot AAMs and in principle drop bombs. It was an aircraft with a very narrow set of capabilities for a very specific mission - shoot down the XB-70 force. Since the XB-70 force notably didn't materialize its existence was rather questionable and was more about salvaging the big investment in the Mig-25 than the need for an aircraft that could fly very fast for about 20 minutes in a nearly straight line.

The PVO was putting SU-30s into service by the end of the USSR and Novator thought for a long time about adapting the R-37 missile for it, and phased array radars for ther Su-30/Su-27 were well underway. Had all the pieces come together the USSR could have fielded a very effective Su-30/R-37 combo with more or less all the valuable capabilities of the Mig-31 baring a sudden RB-71 force, which wasn't going to happen.

Kinda excited over what Russia cooks up with PAK DP. Reckon it'll get cancelled after a "production run" of 1?