Stalins Organ

Tero there's no need for being rude the failure of the Red Army doctrine is one of the reasons for its failure in finland - no-one ever said it was the only one, but DOCTRINE is what the monograph is looking at, not the other factors which you mention. Red Army doctrine envisaged a mobile field battle - it had almost nothing at all in it dealing with a situation where there was insufficient room to undertake the kind of operations that entailed. Of course it may also have failed even with that room, but it seemed to work vs Japan in 1939. The degree of fortification of the Finnish lines is not in question - and this monograph does not say it was the most heavily fortified line nor anything like it - however it points out that the Red Army was required to fight a type of war for which it had made no preparation whatsoever. Certainly by 1940 they had sorted out some of their problems and approached the battle with a moer realistic plan - which jsut goes to show how their doctrine was forced to change by experience. Your little rant is irrelevant to the monograph - it's like saying that the KV-2 wasn't a failure as a tank because there weer otehr problems in the REd Army armoured forces at the time.

Certainly - however one wonders how socialist spending can be a triumph of capitalism. Triumph of cronyism, pork barrel politics and a distorted market certainly. Triumph of capitalism? Not so sure.

Von Lucke you haven't answered why you think recognition will maximise future bloodshed. I expect Georgia to let those territories alone for the forseable future at least. The russian army will be in Sth Ossetia for a long time now, in greater strength than before, and there are no Georgians left there, so I really don't see any Georgia causing any great problems unless they want to provoke another invasion by Russia. Do you think they will? Perhaps Russia will manufacture a reason to invade Georgia - but that's a possibility that exists whether they recognise Sth Ossetia & Abkhazia or not. So as I see it the recognition makes absolutely no difference to the possibility of future bloodshed.

There's an intersting monograph on development of Red Army doctrine and its application in the Winterwar at the HyperWar site Among things that might be of note are that the regulations of 1936 (PU-36) recognised the need for defence and the increased capabilities of modern defensive weapons of the time - although noting that the offensive was the decisive form of warfare - I dont' think the Soviets were alone in that idea! And PU-39 (1939 Regs) noted Manouvre was seen as the key to both offensive and defensive warfare - and positional warfare should only be engaged in when the troops were poorly trained or ill prepared. Tukhachevsky and Svechin argued about annihilation vs attritional warfare - Svechin favouring the later due to natuer of hte Soviet State....whereas Tukhachevsky thought the increasing industrial might of the USSR was giving the army sufficient powerful weaponry to accomplish the former. with the destruction of senior personnel during hte purges the Red Army was no longer able to follow this doctrine. And since it was essentially aimed at destruction of enemy forces in the field it utterly failed when confronted with operations against fortified lines such as in Finland where all the principles of mass and amnouvre were completely useless. To quote the monograph: It's a good read.

Yes it's a bit of a drag...it's like saying that Churchill's planning to return to the continent in July 1940 meant he was going to invade during the Battle of Britain!

Being cautious is no guarantee of getting it right every time - sometimes cautious is the wrong approach. But it's the only sensible approach when you have limited resources and the opportunity to completely wreck a nation's war effort by getting it BADLY wrong.

Why will it encourage more fighting at all, let along be "the greatest possibility to lose human lives"?? Certainly Georgia will not be encouraged to attack again will it? will it encourage Russia to attack? That wouldn't necessarily cost the "greatest possible" toll of life, since Georgia palpably can't defend itself. Western recognition of the unilateral independance of Kossovo doesn't seem to have cost many lives so far - why would this be different?

Hi Dave - "agribusiness" and stockholders in same are farmers too - gotta go with the flow old boy...times are changing, and whoever farms is a farmer....not just those who fit whatever is the current nice romantic picture of what a farmer should or used to be. Plenty of those big agri-businesses are farmer owned collectives after all. but I'm happy to have it read "money paid to the farming sector" if you prefer - it makes no difference - the US agri-subsidies make it one of the biggest redistributers of wealth in the world - ranking right up there with pretty much any socialist country you care to mention.

A description of the ARVN M48's KO-ing the VPA's armour at Dong Ha is here - it says the VPA had no idea what was killing them.

Of course not - eth Nth ossetians havent' asked for it - and why would they? They are prospering within the Russian Federation...as no doubt their Southern cousins will be shortly.....

My point is that any increased investment in production facilities in 1942 had little to do with increased production from 1943 - I'm sure it helped, but the vast majority of the increase was due to improvements in use of facilities that had been there for a few years already. I'd be interested in any figures on how much extra capacity was actually generated in 1942. I don't know about German tank factories, but Russia was still building tank factories in 1942 - Plant #40 at Mytishchi started production in 1943, plants 37 (Sverdlovsk) 38 (Kirov) Uralmashzavod (Sverdlovsk) 174 (Omsk) all started production in 1942 - betwen them these plants produced about 20% of the total Tank/SPG production after 1942 (RKKA site) STZ itself only produced 3600 tanks before being over-run by the Axis in 1942. German tank production doubled from 1939-1940, and again from 1940-1941. they expected the war won in 1942 and so the increase was only about 25%, and then about tripled from that to 1943 - it is my contention that the majority of this last was from increasing labour input rather than increasing efficiency. Even with all the tank factories "built" by 1941 the Soviet Union was still able to roughly quadruple tank production from 1941 to 1942. In their case the cost of production also fell quite considerably - so they WERE introducing greater efficiencies - eg the cost of a T34 fell from 270k roubles in 1941 to 193k in 1942 (Zaloga), and a T34/85 in 1945 was a "mere" 142k (Wiki) the aircraft industry example shows how the German economic system works, and how they did the same thing from 1943 - not by building more factories (which they did for aircraft too....), but by making better use of those they already had - just like the soviets did earlier. However it points out how the extra labour was not accompanied by great increases in efficiency - the amount produced per unit of labour only increased by small percentages compared to earlier. It's not trying to say that the increase in production didn't happen - it's pointing out that the pre-conditions that allowed it to happen all come from before the war which is when the efficiencies came. The late war boost in numbers came from sheer volumes of labour poured into the industries for which the majority of production facilites already existed.

forcing early deployment creates command confusion - what's out there? how do we best attack it? Get more scouts into the area, gather information. These and other actions required on contact invariably slow down advances and use up resources. What more reason is needed?

Thus allowing the US to lower its "official" Agricultural subsidies for PR purposes with the WTO etc without actually lowering the amount of money paid to farmers at all?

There's a listing of penal unit allocations and designations on the RKKA site here and a commentary in Russian here - a 3.5mb pdf that looks like it is where the unit list came from but the text hasn't been translated.

This article (pdf about 200kb) argues that the German production increase from 1943 was in fact due to investments made prior to 1939 coming to fruition, and better use of available manpower and facilities - ie nothing much at all to do with any investment 1941-42. From the conclusion:

Dang...there's no colour in the pallette that can't be sen agaisnt the background

Beeb article - Cyberdyne might be a wee while off yet, and maybe some insight into how Alzheimer's disease works will come first......

The soldiers above with white cloth around one arm and on the tank without ERA are Sth Ossetians or other irregulars - the white cloth is the "field sign" for them. They're the ones now being reported as doign the ethnic clensing of Georgian villages in Sth Ossetia.

Carriers are specifially not allowed through the Dardanelles/Bosphorus by the 1936 treaty that governs the straights.

The 1936 montreaux convention governing passage of het straights prohibits aircraft carriers. From Wiki:

Ah - it's so simple, I wonder why they didn't think about it before?!:cool: Or perhaps NATO doesn't want Georgia, since they'd been warning them against precisely this kind of action for a couple of years now - why would you want to admit a loose cannon which you can't actually defend? -from the Beeb "Winners and Losers"

As a matter of interest exactly _1_ russian medium tank factory was captured or KO-ed in WW2 - STZ at Stalingrad (the "Tank Factory"). Factory 264 producing light tanks was also knocked out in hte battle. Neither of these ever produced another tank after 1942. 1 heavy tank factory was also stopped from producing in 1941 in Leningrad - TKZ - but it produced a handful of heavy tanks in 1945. the Leningrad light tank factories also stopped producing after 1941 & never restarted. the Kharkov tank factory was relocated to Nizhniy Tagil & restarted production there in 1941, and Factory #75 at Kharkov started producing T44's in 1944. Factory No. 37 was relocated from Moscow to Sverdlovsk in 1941, restarting production in 1942. Factories that started production in 1942 were No. 174 (Omsk), Uralmashzavod (Sverdlovsk), No. 38 (Kirov), and No. 40 (Mytishchi) A full list of tank factories and their products is available at the RKKA website. Russian steel production is tabulated here, and according to the list of LL materials supplied to the USSR they got over 425,000,000 tons of hte stuff.....but I think it's a misprint for lbs, since everywhere else the total tonnage shipped was only 17.5 million total!

It'll be particularly cold in Europe then, as gas supplies from the CIS become a weapon...... Maybe the back story is true - maybe not. What is indisputable is that Georgia screwed up royally - either playing into the Russian long term plan, or playing into Russian convenience.

I am - you are apparently having memory and comprehension problems and so I can't vouch for the "we" bit.

Hey I said there was probably higher math stuff in there somewhere! and while you don't need to kill every opponent 3.6 times, if they use balls defensively you won't get that opportunity......