Comments by "Gort" (@gort8203) on "EXERCISE SAGEBRUSH: What The Air Force Learned When It Nuked Louisiana" video.

  1. Reconstitution of destroyed or degraded forces in order to keep an exercise going is standard in furtherance of the goal of learning as much as possible from the limited units and time available in most exercise scenarios.
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  2. The conclusions of the exercise were valid and useful in shaping future doctrine. That fact that they are uncomfortable is lamentable but is not a reason to discount them. BTW, it a nuclear rather than conventional war exercise for a reason. There was no need to conduct a conventional war exercise. There had been recent conventional wars, and in the case of a another conventional war in Europe the West would not prevail without a massive buildup of conventional forces that would have been far more expensive then the nuclear one. When passing judgement on the thinking of the time another thing to keep in mind is that fallout is not necessarily as bad as depicted in the movies, depending on the targets. Airbursts are more effective again non-hardened targets, and above a certain height they don't create as much lasting fallout as ground bursts. To borrow from Bucky, "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks", is less than the last conventional world war. It was a difficult time.
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  3. (3:55) A fighter that has greater sustained turn capability than a predecessor with greater instantaneous turn capability is usually considered more maneuverable, not less.
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  4.  @DIREWOLFx75  I beg to differ with your 'well read' opinion that this was "psychopathy". From the comfort of your keyboard it is easy to slander people who were defending the West under difficult circumstances. It seems you would have them surrender because they were unwilling to fight a war that might be thrust upon them. We're lucky we had smarter men than you in charge of defending us then.
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  5. It wasn't an impractical exercise, it generated valuable information. Truth is not always pleasant.
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  6. It is entertaining but not necessarily reality. When passing judgement on the thinking of the time another thing to keep in mind is that fallout is not necessarily as bad as depicted in the movies, depending on the targets. Airbursts are more effective again non-hardened targets, and above a certain height they don't create as much lasting fallout as ground bursts. To borrow from Bucky, "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks", is less than the last conventional world war. It was a difficult time.
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  7. They never planned to nuke Hanoi, because they didn't even get to nuke North Korea. This video assumes the U.S. left itself completely unprepared for limited conventional war like Korea or Vietnam, but that was not the case. Curtiss Lemay was asked about that and said something to the effect of that if your forces are capable of fighting a major war they are also capable of fighting limited one. He said it more colorfully but he was not wrong. The airplanes used in Vietnam did not fail, the strategy used failed.
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  8. The snarky disrespect of the general in charge of the exercise is unbecoming of a channel which I view in the hopes of seeing objective and balanced material.
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  9. If that's what you get from this video it didn't do a very good job of educating you about the realities of war in general or that era in particular.
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