Comments on: You must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 15:58:18 +0000

Virginia Democrats know how to win a ground war. First you pass a law requiring the enemy to register all their guns. Then you pass another law telling them to hand ‘em in.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 21:18:55 +0000

Fehrenbach should be coupled with Fussell’s equal little gem, Wartime, and the connection between them should be made that the fantasists of the post-WWII American defense establishment did not. They believed that atomic weapons made the common infantryman obsolete and irrelevant, which led to the abandonment of common sense and an awful lot of wishful thinking. Army budgets were chopped, lessons from WWII were willfully ignored, and we got what we got.

Fussell’s essay about the way we went from “light to heavy duty” should be read, and the juxtaposition made between the opening phases of Korea. We imagined that conditions had changed, such that big conventional ground wars would never be fought again. We were wrong, and admitting that fact took decades. The massive number of “little things” which bit us in the ass in Korea, like the failure to move to effective AT weapons for the infantry, or to develop better, more effective small arms for them to carry into battle.

Much of the US military is delusional, hell-bent on denying reality. WWII torpedo issues were there to be observed, long before we were forced to finally admit that ours didn’t work. What made that happen? Delusion. Same with the small arms–We left WWI having clear evidence that the future was in intermediate caliber individual weapons. It took us until we encountered the AK47 in the jungles of Vietnam to finally have the recognition forced that the Camp Perry games we played had no relation to modern infantry combat requirements. Why was that? Again, delusion on the part of nearly everyone involved. In the M14, they built the perfect weapon for the Camp Perry matches, an entirely artificial set of conditions that bore no relation whatsoever to the needs of the combat soldier. The nearest equivalent I can come up with would be to imagine that instead of the Kar 98k, the Germans fielded a weapon designed to excel at their Schützenfest. They very obviously did not, so we can credit them with a modicum of that most rare quality, common sense.

By: Lu An Li

Lu An Li — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 16:43:41 +0000

Those North Korean and Chinese troops in Korea at that exact moment [1950] probably the best light infantry in the world.

North Koreans many of them actually Soviet citizens that had fought at Stalingrad and also as interventionists during the Chinese Civil
War.

By: Harry Jones

Harry Jones — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 13:14:06 +0000

I think this is why so much escapist fiction features intrepid heroes in a quest against a simplistic Big Bad that just wants to destroy Neverland.

It’s not entirely wrong: such evils do in fact exist, and weak minds refuse to admit this much. You can’t negotiate a treaty with your neighborhood axe murderer.

But the really smart villains embrace politics and the culture war. It won’t do to concede these fields without a fight. That’s how you get outflanked.

That’s the real ground war.