Simon Wren-Lewis promoted (or created) another, related, term in the UK; mediamacro. Somehow the British media (newspapers and BBC mostly) pretends that the economy works in certain ways, even though the state of economic research is completely different. Again, the media bias just happens to favour the pro-plutocracy, right wing stance over science.
2022/05/21
Very serious people
Simon Wren-Lewis promoted (or created) another, related, term in the UK; mediamacro. Somehow the British media (newspapers and BBC mostly) pretends that the economy works in certain ways, even though the state of economic research is completely different. Again, the media bias just happens to favour the pro-plutocracy, right wing stance over science.
2022/05/14
On tanks as part of a unit
2022/05/07
[temporary] Blog
2022/04/30
Open cities
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The destruction in Ukraine is enormous, and a great harm to the nation. It would be nice if it could be avoided, right?
Well, there is a concept that spares cities almost entirely during wartime: "Open cities". Open cities don't get defended, and very few military troops are inside at any time.
Paris as an open city in 1940 and 1944, Rome in 1944. You can literally see that even today.
Imagine an invasion in which the invaders get fought against a lot in the countryside, but are safe once they reach a city. Safe even from counterfires (to their own artillery and mortar fires) with anything except precision-guided missiles.
Every captured city would soon turn into an encircled pocket which still receives food supplies and if possible also electricity (essential for the supply of drinking water), but no munitions and no fuels.
The invader might turn the cities into firebases, but many troops would be busy with civ-mil tasks (and yes, they would commit crimes). The likely mode of warfare would be to sally out on a raid once in a while, but the defenders would have the advantage of interior lines.
Violently liquidate one small such pocket as a warning to others and the other city pockets might even surrender when the defender appears with massed forces at 'the gates'.
Numerous issues would be associated with such a strategy (including high rise buildings giving excellent vantage points for sensors, radios and ATGMs), but it might help to minimise damage to urban centres AND it would suit those armed forces that lack the quantity to actually fight in cities.
The approach could also be reversed; an invader could avoid the cites this way in an effort to be as little evil as possible.
Either way, the terrain would need to be suitable and one would somehow need to find a way to reach a favourable decision. The latter is easy for NATO; we can amass overwhelming power within months even if we are too few to accept an open battle in the first days.
S O
.
2022/04/23
It's the basics, idiot!
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This Ukraine War is a powerful reminder about what military professionals have said for generations: It's about the basics. You need to get the basics right, beginning with individual soldier skills. Supply, communications, discipline, keeping morale up, large-enough and secure-enough munitions and spare parts stocks are some more basics.
You don't need great sophistication for most things in war, just at a few big levers.
- reduce enemy air power influence with some persisting air defences
- be able to defeat top-of-the-line tanks without extreme sacrifices
- be able to maintain at least quasi-instant text message communications
The big budget NATO forces haven't limited themselves to basics, and indeed ALL NATO land forces have neglected some or most basics. We've had 30+ years of big budget Western armies pursuing "leap ahead" technology to "overmatch" hostiles rather than just being good at soldiering and being an army and winning becuase the hostiles aren't.
I very much doubt that this will change, albeit the spending frenzy will lead to more spares and munitions in stock.
Yet assume we were to shift to a "we're good at what we do, and use sophistication only where necessary" policy; that would make us unbeatable in land war, but what would it give us in terms of deterrence? Would the Russians -who played the gold-plating game to some extent as well- be properly deterred or would they be fooled by 2030 when they presumably have Armata armoured vehicles and Su-57 stealth fighters, along with new stocks of hypersonic missiles, certainly a bunch of proper battlefield drones and the tools to suppress enemy air defences (SEAD) for real? Might they not fall prey to the promise of their own wonder weapons?
The lessons of war are usually falling out of favour within about three years of fighting a war, largely forgotten within 20 years and reduced to book knowledge within 40 years. How could we deter with a "we're good at what we do, and use sophistication only where necessary" approach?
Could we do exercises to show off our basics from individual soldier camouflage to hauling huge quantities of fuel and artillery munitions on secondary roads and around craters on roads? Would being able to break camp from sleep within five minutes impress? Would marksmanship, casualty care drills, rapid tyre changes, rapid AFV engine changes? How could we keep potential aggressors from trusting their wonder weapons more than fearing the solid foundation of our land forces?
S O
2022/04/18
This is going to cause me trouble
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Foreign policy in Western Europe and later the whole EU was coined by cooperation and building of support for joint policies after 1951. This stood in stark contrast to the events of the Second World War and much of the 1930's as well as the First World War. The ultimately unsuccessful efforts to come to peaceful cooperation from the late 1920's had been picked up and brought to success.
We entered an age in which -at least within Western Europe and within our societies- confrontation had a bad reputation while cooperation, consensus-seeking and talking to adversaries had a good reputation to the point of being considered the only acceptable behaviour.
This macro level behaviour reminds me of the stereotypical advice that women give regarding conflicts; talk, talk, talk. Never in my life have I heard a woman advise to confront a source of trouble. This seems borne from evolution to me; the women of the world would have spent most of the past 900,000 years or so with broken jaws and worse if they had immediately confronted aggressive men rather than tried to keep the conflict at the level of talking (and shouting). It sure seems to have been a successful evolutionary strategy, but I suspect this success was misleading.
It's usually not the talking that reduces or solves the problem with some aggressor; it's that one man or multiple men step in to defend the woman. So the evolutionarily successful strategy wasn't really to limit yourself to talking; it was for women to buy time till men address (often solve) their problem with an aggressive man. This appears to have been lost somehow, and the belief in the power of the spoken (or written) word took over within Western societies.*
Today's women appear to suffer from the twin delusions that their hardcoded approach is universally superior and that they typically solve conflicts with aggressive parties themselves. I have never seen the latter happen in my life. All that I ever saw was that aggressive people shied away from further escalation when men stood up and faced them, deterring further aggressive moves.
Sadly, this twin delusion has infected the political 'class'. Germany has many politicians who are highly proficient in hiding failures and shortcomings until given intense scrutiny, and highly proficient in building networks of political support within their own party. Nowhere to see is a talent or suitable character for standing up and facing an aggressor to force him to cease with his aggressions.
Instead, they fall back to the only thing they know, the only thing the women ideology recommends; talk, talk, talk. Well, this and spending public money, especially when others chose to do more than talking.
Sorry for the blunt and unsophisticated messaging, but this repertoire is terribly incomplete. Cooperation, consensus, network-building all have their place, time and subject where they are the best path of action, but the challenge posed by aggressors isn't among them. Maybe they could eventually succeed, but this would be way too slow, and lead to too much suffering and damage. What's needed is a good-old-fashioned, stone age-hardcoded behaviour of a group of men standing up and facing the aggressor selflessly.
I do not believe that the public (media, politicians, pundits) are ready to accept this publicly. Their careers depend on not acknowledging it, for none of them are competent enough for their jobs and this could become completely obvious. Our society (societies) allowed a delusional ideology to take over, and it led us to a path of giving extraordinary power to systematically flawed personalities.
S O
*: This clearly excludes their dealing with foreigners on distant continents.
.2022/04/16
Russian military incompetence
2022/04/09
The West was foolish
- We should get training quantity right,
- we should get training realism right,
- we should make training comprehensive (including all wartime tasks),
- we should get the spare parts supply & stocks and thus technical readiness right,
- we should get our munition stocks right,
- we should re-establish useful battlefield air defences of a new kind and
- we certainly should kick out everyone who's not serious about the army's real mission.
- obsolescence of old equipment (inability to get spare parts produced)
- Russians being occasionally delusional about how crappy their army is, and thus possibly not deterred without an impressive show
2022/04/02
An army corps for Germany - revised
- HQ company (yes, just a company)
- 2 Panzerbrigade (tank brigade; rapid mounted combat counterattack formations, would be most of the time held in reserve during a war)
- 4 Leichte Brigade ("light brigade")
- 1 Jägerregiment
- 1 Lehrbrigade
- 1 support brigade
#Ukraine: A Ukrainian Recon drone found the firing location of a Russian Buk SAM system and despite Russian forces wisely moving quickly, was able to direct artillery fire, destroying the TELAR and other vehicles. pic.twitter.com/kiQmPwIizE
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 16, 2022
2022/03/28
A militia for the 2020's (V)
- calibre 5.56 or 5.45 mm, cheap LED red dot sight (easier aiming, less shooting training), folding buttstock (to fit in cars), 905 nm laser with trigger in front grip, MOA better than 2, 30 rds magazines fed by stripper clips, preferably select fire and ambidextrous
- carbine/assault rifle adapted for light machinegun role; requirements are 150 rds in 1 minute without trouble, bipod, MOA better than 2.5, may use bigger magazines in addition to 30 rds magazines
- red phosphorous bursting type with added flash powder (flash bang functionality) to affect eyes, hearing and analogue night vision devices. This bursting grenade would provide multispectral smoke, be incendiary, highly uncomfortable in a useful radius and it would not be as hazardous to its user as a defensive hand grenade. I understand if someone would rather want a offensive/defensive hand grenade in addition, but I don't see a need for it - to have many smoke hand grenades for breaking contact is more promising to me given the aforementioned doctrine of hit and run.
- Nammo M72EC. Its weight is bearable and it's easily powerful enough against BMP/BTR/BMD/MT-LB vehicles and its fuse design should defeat bar armour and also cope with the BMP's very much angled upper glacis.
- The most suitable one is almost certainly the RPG-28*, which weighs just as much as other anti-MBT weapons,but utterly lacks finesse. Its brute force approach limits it to 300 m effective range, but it also allows for a very cheap price. A new NLAW would easily cost 10...20 times as much as an unlicensed RPG-28 copy.
- The ideal mortar would be the 2B25 with its HE-PFF munition (PD fuse). The practical choice would rather be any 81.4 or 82 mm mortar, as those are readily available, even in many NATO countries' stocks. 60 mm mortars require the same effort for less effect and 120 mm mortars could not be easily lifted into a trunk.
- Countries with inventories of 12.7 or 14.5 mm machineguns or cheap access to foreign inventories of such guns could make use of those. The primary mode of employment should be an ambush from a tripod against vehicles, but a low swivel mount fixed on a pickup might also have its uses.
- preferably
a daytime-only launcher with Bolide missiles, but this may be more
expensive (and is rather crew portable than man portable) than the more common infrared
guided ManPADS. My preference for a laser beamrider design stems from
doubts about the ability of infrared guidances to overcome the best
countermeasures (especially DIRCM).