Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Common Misconceptions - Technology \u0026 War" video.
-
@MehrumesDagon
The American "bodycount doctrine was stupid and it didn't bring America close to victory. On the contrary, it incentivised false statistics, and massacres on civilians to get the body count number up.... because if the enemy lost more men than they could replace then the war soon be won the US Military promised.
However, this promise turned out to be false. Truth is that the US Military had no idea how many Vietcongs and North Vietnamease army men were out there. So while the US Military promised a soon victory in 1967, those dreams were soon scattered with the tet-offensive in 1968. And the tet-offensive was far from this outstanding American victory like the mainstream narrative goes, because even despite the Vietcong leadership got totally wiped out in the cities and the vietcong took heavy losses, the war still progressed as before with equally high losses for the Americans as previous years. And while the Americans won the battle for the cities, they also at the same time lose all the control of the countryside as units were moving from the countryside into the cities to take them back.
So the war continued. And American solidiers got tired of this stupid bodycount doctrine, because the military leadership just saw them as expandable materia that could be replaced with new recruits if someone died when a careerist officer wanted his medals and promotions.
The stupid and costly fighting to take Hamburger hill is a typical example of this doctrine. In other wars Armies fight to gain control over vital areas - the Normandy beachhead, the Caucausus oilfields and so on.... But in Vietnam the Americans just attacked the worthless Hamburger Hill to kill Vietcongs, and then they just abandoned this hill soon after, even if many men had fought and died to get it, and within a few months would the Vietcong be back in control over it.
So all this crap made the morale in the American Army to fall apart, and fragging became common from 1969 and onwards, and the unreported numbers are surely higher than even the official statistics. And the reason was simple, the solidiers were throwing handgrenades at their own officers because they didn't wanna die in some pointless offensive.
And the search-and-avoid operations became common as well as more fraudgelent reporting of bodycounts, so that the leadership would be happy with the numbers and not try to play more aggressive and the send the men out on dangerous missions to get the bodycount number up.
All in all did the morale fall apart and a continuation of the war was no longer possible for Americas part, as the men refused to obey their own officers. So who is the blame for the defeat? The US Military and its stupid doctrine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFvcuuS5eUI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpr1HYZDzHY
141
-
94
-
Food matters. Not only did the Germans eat more food than they produced and therefore they were forced to prioritize the conquest of the Russian South that was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Food still matters today in modern warfare. The modern food industry was actully born out of the Vietnam war. The problem was that Solidiers didn't eat all their rations because they didn't like the taste of the food, so they got too few calories into their bodies and didn't therefore have the energy needed to do hard work such as digging, marching and fighting. So the military asked the private sector for help. And it made some research and invented new methods to make solidiers eat more so they could do more work. And the new discoveries also enabled the food industry to sell more food to consumers than they otherwise would and thereby increasing the profits. And so was the problem of overeating and obesity born in the western world.
The food scientist Howard Moskowitz (and the father of almost all the grocery store foods we eat) was asked for help by the US Military.
* “So I started asking soldiers how frequently they would like to eat this or that, trying to figure out which products they would find boring,” Moskowitz said. The answers he got were inconsistent. “They liked flavorful foods like turkey tetrazzini, but only at first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other hand, mundane foods like white bread would never get them too excited, but they could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they’d had enough.”*
This contradiction is known as “sensory-specific satiety.” In lay terms, it is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more. Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits — be they Coca-Cola or Doritos — owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html
But also other concepts was discovered, such as the concept of the "blisspoint" which is perhaps the most important discovery of all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWh1PSQfdK0
And it have led to the massive use of sugar, fat and salt to increase the allure of foods... since the human brain is developed by evolution to find pleasure in energy rich foods containing much sweat and fat.
And then did Moskowitz all discover the idea of making food that suits one consumer group, instead to try to make a product that suits all. The pasta sauce company was near bankruptcy as it desperatly called Moskowitz for help. And he analyzed their products and said that instead of making one pasta sauce, they should instead make many - one type that suits consumers who like their sauce spicy, another sauce for those who like it chunky, and a third sauce for those who liked it plain.
And Prego tried his idea, and turned losses into record profits in just a year.
https://youtu.be/iIiAAhUeR6Y
The food industry now also uses other new methods to increase its profits by overeating. It uses different kinds of sugars that more easily melts in the mouth and faster reaches the pleasure reflexes in the brain so we immiedtly starts eating more, and therefore pull more food down our bodies before we feel tired of eating.
So far has the easiest way for a food manufacturer to make profits not been to increase sales, but to instead cut costs - by for example replacing expensive ingridients with cheaper ones - such as salt and sugar which are both dirt cheap.
But now things are getting different, for example, have the profits from selling frozen pizza risen dramatically when producers discovered that they can increase the sales by a lot if they make their product more alluring to the consumer by adding extra cheese (because fat is an ingridient that humans are hardwired by evolution to like).
So thank or blame Capitalism for the food we have today. Its cheaper and more well tasting than ever, thanks to guys like Howard Moskowitz. But it is also food that have led to massive health problems around the world for humans as well as pets
It is however interesting that once again the military have provided much of the innovation for this. And the military is a field where food are put under a much harder test than in grocery stores. When grocery store producers cry about falling profits when food becomes uneatable after a few months, military food producers laugh because they have to make food that atleast could be stored for 3-4 years. And it should be made so well tasting that the solidiers are willing to eat their rations.
3
-
Building 50 and 70 tonnes tanks demand more specialist vehicles and strain the logistical system to an unnecessarily large degree. It would take 3 Famo-trucks just to be able to pull a single Tiger to a repairshop after it had broken down - and all this timestaking work had to be done in wartime condions where the Wehrmacht didn't have many transport trucks to spare to begin with, and even if some would be available it would still not be an easy job to slowly pull away a heavy tank while the enemy is firing in your direction. Furthermore will you need new military bridges, since neighter the standard 20 tonnes or 40 tonnes bridges would be able to carry those machines.
Those heavy tanks will furthermore be more tactically inflexible since they cannot cross normal bridges or most military bridges... and they are also too slow to keep up with the fast changes of the frontline due to their slow speed.
And when you produce something in larger numbers, then it makes more sense to start using specialized tools that makes massproduction easier. And massproduction in turn makes unit-cost to fall, so that a tank would take less and less manhours to build. A Tiger took 200.000 manhours to build while a new Sherman came out of Detroit every 45 minutes.
Producing things in small numbers simply makes it uneconomical and not very practical to switch over to more division of labour and more effiecent production methods.
Building heavy tanks also demands heavy cranes to carry all extra heavy machinery so I guess a car plant would need much modifications before production could be switched towards wartime production of tanks.
The Germans overengineered their tanks, and this is a lesson we can learn from the Russians. The Russians never overengineered their tanks. If the average lifespan of a tank was just 6 months, then it would pointless to build it with components that last much more longer than that. So the Russians could save both expensive and rare building material as well as manhours by not wasting any extra efforts in building a tank that probably just would be destroyed within a certain point of time. But the Germans never did that. They built their tanks with quality that could make them last for decades in peacetime, despite they would likely be destroyed within some month or year. So the Germans simply wasted time and resources, and also got less tanks produced.
And when it comes to the fighting I say that quantatity has a quality of its own. Germany could have relied more upon the StuGIII and a light weight version of the Panther and probably been doing better than what they did with their over-engineered tanks that either killed themselves in engine fires or got blown up by their own crews because they were too heavy to drag to a repairshop.
And those special scenarios with super tigers rarely happen. Firstly because only 1.300 were built compared to 100.000 Shermans and T-34's.. and secondly because only a few of them was in service, and half of the German tankforce was undergoing maintance because they were over-engineered. And thirdly, the allies were not stupid enough to try to make long distance fire duel at 2000 metres most of the time, but rather tried to let air power and battleship guns kill the German tanks, or make close range flanking attacks where they could make masskillings of the German cats - as they did at Arracourt and Korsun.
And here we come to the final point. The German cats was too expensable to afford to lose one of them.
But a Sherman, a T-34, or a StuG could be lost and it wouldn't be much of a big deal.
A weapon system that is "too-big-to-fail" is not every useful when it comes to war, if a carrier just sits in the harbour all the time that a war lasts because it would be too disastrous to risk losing it, then what use does it have? And if a Tiger tank is too dear to being risked of losing, then how useful is it?
To me it seems like Germany should have tried building a good 30 tonnes medium tank instead. It wouldn't have won the war, but it would perhaps allowed the evil empire to last a few more months.
And the German heavy tanks would have been outclassed by new allied medium tanks pretty soon anways, as the Centurion and T-44 was entering into production. And then the Tiger and Panther would have been as outdated as the old panzerIV was. So new tanks would be needed to be developed anyways if Germany should have kept its upper hand in the technological race.
2
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1