Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Military History not Visualized"
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The North Korea military is like a 1950s museum.
The army is unmodern but large, and most of its equipment is just garbage eventough a few weapons can still be very capable despite their old age. Some I would try to not underestimate the army.
But the airforce however is a complete joke. And no, even if it is an air force with a large numbers of planes I will not take it seriously. Any airforce with MIG15 jets in service is just fucking joke.
And yes, I also think the Chinease airforce is garbage for the same reason.
North Korea can never defeat South Korea with its badly equiped army, that is underfed, untrained, and have low fighting morale and lacking of oil and spareparts.
And no matter how a World war wiith China vs USA would play out, I feel pretty sure that USA would get 100% air superiority over China within just a month. F35 might be hugely over-rated. But it would still outclass Chinease Mig17 jets.
And Chinease tanks from the 1960s would simply be target practice, unless they break apart by themselves just like low-quality Chinease toys do the day after Christmas.
So even if China would intervene also in the next Korean war, I still think that North Koreas regime will only be able to exist under the mercy of the leader in Washington. Because if he wants to take over North korea, then the Communists would be unable to stop them.
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Frederick conquered the province from Silesia from Austria in the first Silesian war. And in the next Silesian war (also known as the Seven years war) the Austrians were determined to take back Silesia and crush Prussia once and for all. France was angry for Frederick had signed a peace instead of helping them in the previous war, so they also wanted revenge.
And Russia was also ruled by an angry lady just like France and Austria, so they ganged up on Frederick, who realized that a war was on its way and therefore decided to strike first before the odds would getting even worse. And then the Seven Years war had started and Frederick had no allies except Britain - which was a sea power with no troops to help Frederick with.
So had to fight on his own and rely on his well trained troops and his own skill as a Commander. And without those things Prussia would never had survived. The 1700s are known as a boring age in military history when battles were fought with two lines firing on each other and the side that runned out of manpower first lost... so no impressive crushing victories were won with big losses on one side and small on the other.
But Frederick turned upside down on all this with his bold, agressive, and unorthodox kind of warfare. Things looked very dark for Prussia in late 1757 when massive enemy troop concentrations were massing around the Kingdom. And Frederick striked back first with the crushing victory at Rossbach where the French army got a bloody nose.
But even after the victory, did Prussia not seem to survive for long. Frederick had to kick out the Austrians from Siliesia or lose the war. That rich Province had large economic value and big importance for its military industries, and even a temporary loss of it would be devestating. So Frederick decided to make a large flanking attack on the Austrian army at Leuthen with everything he had, only a month after the battle of Rossbach.
He set off his men in the very early hours of the morning and they took the Austrians completly by surprise and managed to inflict heavy losses on a much stronger enemy force and suffering much smaller losses on their own.
Prussia had been saved for the moment, and Frederick had become a popular national hero in Britain. He got financial aid from Britain. But the war was far from over. Morale was high and Prussia had won some crushing victories, but even the tiny losses in Leuthen were felt for such a small nation. And every man would be needed for the rest of the war against a mighty coalition of Austria, Russia, France, Sweden and Saxony.
There was simply not enough troops to hold all the enemies back at all places at once. And the overmight would eventually take out it right when Frederick's luck was running out. He would take some heavy defeats in battles against the Russians and Berlin got plundered. And Britain was happy with their victories on other continents, so they abandoned Prussia to its own fate. And the King was once again thinking of commiting suicide.
He and his troops had fought well but it led nowhere. And suddenly the monarch of Russia died, and the new Tzar
was a mentally ill boy who literarly liked to strangle rats. And he was also a great fanboy of Frederick the Great, and he used to dress himself in a Prussian uniform. So of course did he want to sign a peace with Prussia as soon as possible, and which he later did. And he even wanted Russia to join the war on Prussia's side against Austria - but that was too much for many Russian who protested. But he would become assassinated before such an alliance could be signed. But the peace between Russia and Prussia would remain.
And the future started to look much brighter for Frederick. Soon would also Sweden sign a peace deal with Prussia, since its half-assed military campaign had gotten nowhere despite the Swedish occupied provinces had been the hardest plundered in the war. The Queen of Sweden was also Fredericks sister so she of course never liked this war to begin with.
And then Austria was fighting alone had to sign a peace with Frederick. The war had been a costly world war. But Britain could heal its wounds by the riches gained from her conquest of America and India. Prussia, Austria and Russia decided to make peace with each other and fix their economic problems by grabbing land from Poland.
And France was left with economic problems - which became worse with the involvement in the American Revolution. France had no land to steal, and ending up with social caos and the French revolution.
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Prussia and Austria was unfriendly of each other from 1740 to 1871 because of reasons. They both wanted to unite all the German speaking people but only under an empire under their own leadership. One of them was catholic and the other one was protestant. Prussia and Austria also fought some wars over the province of Silisia, which Frederick the Great took from Austria. And then Austria and the Habsburg monarchy had wanted to crush all small German protestant states and force their globalism/papacy and central government upon its unwilling subjects with military force for much of the 1500s and 1600s, and a third of Germany's population had to die because of ambitions of the Austrian monarchy to dominate Germany....... so there was a lot of hostility towards South Germany from the North Germans, and vice versa.
Many Germans still kept on dreaming about a unified Germany in the 1800s, where Prussia, Austria, Switzerland, Hannover, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Saxony and all other German speaking lands would join into one single empire. But the Austrian and Prussian monarchs simply didn't wanna give up their own power and prestige for this project to come true.
And then Germany was created without Austria. And Bavaria decided to join Germany despite it had more common interests with Austria than with Prussia.
So it was only later that Austria and Germany became allies and fought the first world war together. And then the outdated Austro-Hungrian empire died in this war, because the multicultural empire could only be hold togheter by a monarch... and then this fabric of society was torn apart, and Habsburg lands was turned into many different countries.
So one could say that the 1800s was a conflict of nationalists vs Conservatives. And the Conservatives liked the monarchy, they like multi-culturalism and they hated the nationstate and democracy. And the nationalists were strong patriots and liked democracy and the idea of landwehr mass-conscription army and they were very intolerant towards minorities such as jews and slavs in occupied lands who refused to assimilate.
And the nazis would simply pick the worst things out of both these movements from the 1800s, and incorporate the old conservatives hatred of democracy and the nationalists intolerance of jews and slavs.... and all this added with militarism and flagwaving of course.
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Russia deploys small groups of men because they did know that Ukraine had a severe artillery ammunition shortage so they would not shot on russian soldiers unless there was a high chance of inflicting heavy losses. But by deploying few men that are spread out would Ukraine face a dilemma of using up their ammunition to stop russian assaults for very small gains. And that would leave Ukraine without ammunition and become very vulnerable in the future.
Ukraine also made attacks against the russian military with small groups of men to avoid getting easily seen by enemy drones and getting crushed by massive enemy artillery.
Its hard to tell what the solution would be. Outflanking the enemy defensive lines is one possibility - like the Germans did in France 1940.
Another solution would perhaps be superiority in firepower and using brute force to punch through enemy lines. Sure did this solution not work well back in the battle of Somme in 1916. But on the other hand was there no way that troops in the frontline back then could communicate with artillery and coordinate artillery fire with radio ask for reinforcements and request changes to orders. Today do we got artillery with much better range and precision. Counter-battery radars can slaughter enemy artillery, and drones can drop grenades vertically into enemy trenches and fly into underground tunnels where artillery cannot reach.
Drone technology is also just in its own infancy. Future generations will perhaps laugh at those primitive drones used in Ukraine like we do at the primitive WW1 aircrafts. With purpose built drone weapons instead of using surplus Soviet hand grenades and RPG-7 warheads and american cluster bombs, or artillery grenades... could the drones launch much deadlier explosives and also reduce weight.
Artillery shells have a thick metal wall that allows it to survive the brutal forces of being kicked out from an artillery tube many hundreds of meters per second. But if you are just going to fly a drone and drop a grenade from the air or slowly fly into a target with a drone you no longer need a thick metallic casing for your explosive. You can save that weight, and use that weight for carrying extra much explosives instead - like airplanes do with flying bombs. And that is the reason why flying bombs are so much more powerful than artillery fire.
I also expect AI and better sensors to revolutionize drone warfare even further and make it more deadly.
And then might drones replace helicopters to some extent. And instead of having an air cavalry division with hundreds of helicopters carrying supplies, could troops get their supplies delievered to them by drones that comes with packages of food, medicine, ammo, and fuel. And those supplies will be less vulnerable to enemy fire than a helicopter. A cheap drone could easily be replaced, while a helicopter can't. America with its economic and industrial force could afford to lose thousands of drones, while its not so willing to lose manpower.
Drones will probably also be used at rescue operations at sea with its powerful sensors that could easily detect a human body more easily than a human eye ever would.. heat seaking, optical sensors and other types of sensors could be built much more superior to the human eye. This could also be a powerful tool to help people in other emergencies like finding a human body out in the snow.
Sea drones is another chapter in itself, and they will revolutionize warfare at sea just as much as the invention of the torpedo and cruise missile have.
Drones will lay mines or work with mine clearance. They can fly behind enemy troop concentrations that are retreating, and block their retreat by dropping land mines. And then will the enemy be trapped and fall victim to enemy artillery or be forced to surrender.
Indeed the uses of drones are enormous.
Maybe drones could also be used to carry daisy cutter bombs to make landing zones for helicopters in the middle of forests. And perhaps they could carry mine clearing snakes to create passages through enemy lines.
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Europe was very backward compared to the rest of the world during the early middle ages. The Song dynasty in China led the country into prosperity. And Arabia was having a golden age when it collected knowledge from east and west and exchanged plants and technologies from Spain in west to Pakistan in the east.
Europe was a backwards place.
But things Changed. The Mongols crushed the Song dynasty in China, and slaughtered millions of arabs and destroyed irrigation and caused so deep harm on Iran that its agriculture would never recover until 600 years later. And the bubonic plague which were spread by the Mongol's did cause more harm in the muslim countries with densely populated big cities than what it did to the underdeveloped European countryside.
So Europe came in better shape from those problems than what the east did. Egypt was an economic superpower during the time of the crusades, but the black death killed more than 7 out of its 8 million inhabitants and wrecked the country.
But despite the crusades, the plague and the Mongols would the Ottomans still have some power left to expand into Europe for some centuries...
Europe did however have something that other cultures lacked: curiosity. The willingness to learn from other cultures.
This was demonstrated by the fact that China had invented gun powder, paper, the compass and the printing press. But it did not use those technologies to any large extent, unlike the Europeans. China used their gunpowder for fireworks instead of war, while Japan banned all use of fire arms. And book printing was not very useful in a language that uses pictograms to write things down. And the use of the compass stopped when the new rulers in China stopped all maritime trade and exploration, because they thought it was a useless waste of money and they thought that the rest of the world had nothing interesting to offer. And sea trade and shipbuilding stopped, then did of course the skilled shipbuilders not pass on their skills and technologies to the next generation of Chinese. So the knowledge was lost.
Also the Arabs lost their fantastic shipbuilding skills the same way. Shortage of trees among other things had pressed up production costs of ships and it was cheaper to buy ships from other countries. And the neglect of the navy led to navigational skills and shipbuilding knowledge to being lost. The problems was so large that Ibn Khaldun complained about it in the 14th century, and he said that ships that muslims in the past could build by themselves no longer were possible to build without importing foreign experts with the know-how.
India was never interested in the printing press and never took it to use. While the muslim world never got interested in doing so either. It was not until 1729 that the first muslim country adopted it - the Ottoman empire. However, it was quickly banned again after a few years. Religious leaders hated the innovation because they thought it undermined the written word, and the oral tradition of transferring the Quran was seen as holy.
So to conclude was India, China and the MENA-countries unwilling to use the innovations they themselves had created. While the Europeans did put all of them to great use. Gun powder weapons were perfected. The compass came into great use as Europeans explored, conquered, traded and settled the world. And the paper allowed Europeans to store information over generations, and reducing the cost of producing books down to a fraction. Knowledge became available to more groups of people, and literacy rates improved greatly in Western Europe.
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@cv990a4
"Some posit that its a way to use up Javelins - $250K weapon against a cheap tank (with sacrificial mobik crew)."
Using up 4 crewmen in a suicidal move and a waste of manpower so stupid that the Russians might actually think its a good idea.
And Russia is now sending 800 such tanks to Ukraine. And I believe that Ukraine easily can afford to spend 800 javelins for that. But I don't think they will use 800 javelins for them. Many hundreds of them will fall victim to mines, artillery, drones, Stugna-P, NLAWs, and cheap weapons like RPG7 and AT4.
So in a cost benifit analysis will it be the Russians who suffers more, unless those tanks can do much useful stuff on the battlefield - which I doubt.
Not only because Ukraine are a dangerous enemy with its wide range of anti-tank weapons. But also because of the sad pathethic shape of the Russian military. Had the Israeli army used T-55 and upgraded it, and put skilled, highly motivated crews inside and used good tactics with excellent support and teamwork from infantry, artillery and so on then I would fear this as a powerful force that I would treat with much respect.
But now are we talking about the Russian army of 2023. The Russian army of last year was incompetent. But the army of this year have almost no skilled troops left, and consists of newly mobilized, very poorly trained, and low motivated troops. Those troops are not good for offensive operations. And after a few weeks of training they barely know how to handle their weapons, and they don't know much about combat tactics. And they know even less how to fight along side tanks and combined arms teamwork.
So combine that. And combine that with bad tanks, and infantry with rusty AK47 and World war 2 rifles and I think that the combat power of those units is a bad joke on a battlefield of 2023. Indeed I think it would be considered a very crappy kampfgruppe even back in the 1980s if we sent the Russian army back in a time machine to that time.
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Germany did only have short range aircrafts and they lacked heavy bombers. And they didn't have enough transport ships. And their Navy took a heavy blow at Norway, and the air force lost much of its transports while it was trying to take the dutch airfields.
So operation Sealion in 1940 seems totally unrealistic to me.
But Hitler could of course wait until next summer and focus on building warplanes instead, which would probably be a better strategy. But still, he would need some new types of planes because the JU87 was completly worthless against capital ships with its tiny bombload of firecrackers. And the BF-109E didn't have the range to escort the bombers - which would make the bombers an easy prey once they were out of range of their own fighter protection.
And the new Fw-190 fighter would enter service in August 1941 - which would give Germany just one month to defeat England, which seems pretty unlikely to me.
So a long story short, Germany had to remodel its entire airforce which would take time, especially since German aircraft production was running at a very slow rate in 1940. And it is doubtful it could have expanded much more than it was already producing, since the German airforce liked their Messerschmitts and only agreed to start producing the Fw190 after it realized that it didn't have the production capacity to build more Bf109's. The Fw190 proved itself to be superb plane, but at first it was only built as complement to the 109's.
Britain on the other hand only needed to focus on building fighters, and they had the advantage of not getting their pilots become POWs if they had to jump out in a parachute, as well as they could rely on support from AA guns and the British weather for the defence of the island.
And by 1941, Britain would also be more well defended against a German land invasion since obstacles would have been put in places, more men would have been trained and more tanks and guns would have been built to replace the losses at Dunkirk. So even if Germany probably could get more transport ships, it would probably not be enough to compensate for this.
And then of course Britain could call upon their homefleet in Scotland if a German invasion fleet was starting to cross the channel. And even if the Germans somehow managed to land a few divisions by surprise, they would still have the problem of supplying those men when the British fleet would block all the supply ships and starve the invasion force into submission.
And by 1942, the USA entered the war with their huge industry, its huge navy, and its superior airforce.
And while Germany lacked rare earth metals for making fighter jets, and aluminium to make planes... the Allies would not suffer from any such constrains when the resources from America and the British Empire was combined.
More ships could be built than the German uboats could sink, and soon new types of planes was built that could provide allied ships with uboat protection over even the most distant corner of the Atlantic.
Better sonars was being developed, and the enigma code was cracked. And in mid-1942 Germany was suffering heavy uboat losses that could never be replaced, and the battle of the Atlantic was permanently lost.
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