Bigduke6

I prefer football because it is a game that forces players of hugely different sizes and abilities to work together to execute plays, and as the plays vary so do the ways the players interact. Even the big guys: One time the offensive guard falls back to protect for the pass, another time he rolls to lead a sweep, another time he cross blocks the end, another time he just butts heads with the tackle opposite, another time he heads for the inside linebacker to cut off pursuit, and yet another time he seems to butt heads, but really he's just doing his bit to set up a screen pass. Also, football seems to me to have more scope for more characters. Namath, Unitas, Montana, Marino, Elway, Favre, Staubach and heck even guys like Tarkington and Bradshaw and Jurgenson and Fouts and Luckman all in their way were great quarterbacks, but they all played with very different styles that put a very different stamp on the game. Nor does the individual factor stop at the quarterbacks; it's one kind of football if you're trying to stop the run, and another kind if the runner coming at you is Gayle Sayers or Earl Cambell. Or heck, Michael Vick? Or flip to the defense, how do you run any play at all when Jack Lambert is across the line, or Jack Tatum is out there hunting your receivers? What do you do, surrender? Put a sniper in the stands? Rugby seems to me to be more flowing but less specialized. From my perspective, what's worse is that each player seems pretty much always to have the same mission the entire game; the big guys are in the scrum, the middle-sized guys are sort of transition and important for lateraling outwards and making, and the little fast guys that would prefer not to get hit are on the wings. To me, for my US football tasts, rugby players are too interchangable and there are too few standouts, too few guys who bring real individuality and character to the game. Maybe it's just my lack of understanding of rugby, true. But there is this: I have watched enough rugby to learly see differences in team styles between say the French or the Argies or the Kiwis. But the individual players, not so much. So in answer to the question "How does rugby look to Americans?", I would say thatto me rugby seems a good deal like US football, except there are no fixed lines and so there are only 5 - 8 plays (i.e., tactics to get the ball forward) each side is trying to run over the whole game, when a standard US team might run 60 - 70 plays out of a playbook of several hundred. US football to me seems several orders of magnitude more complicated, and to me that complexity adds depth to the game. It is also more violent, but to me that's neither here nor there; the rules allow the violence therefore violence is part of the tool book. But raw violence alone will almost never win you a football game, and in a competative league it never will. The delays in US football don't bother me as much as it would most Europeans, I think, because that down time is used for thinking: what down is it, where on the field is the ball, what is my team good at right at this moment, where are the opposition's weak points, and so what play needs to be run next? TV can fill this time with replays, but in the classic US football tradition fans use the time between plays to discuss what play needs to be run next, and/or why the previous play was a worse decision than the one the fans wanted. It's very interactive, you watch the game and you're armchair quarterbacking (note the origin of the term) pretty much until one side has scored so many points they can't be caught, and that's far from every game. Rugby to my eyes is far less controlled, less regimented, therefore far more up to the players' raw skills, and so less emphatically a coordinated effort by very different specialists than American football. It seems to me that if you are watching rugby there is less for a fan to think about, there is very little minute-by-minute second guessing of the coach and the quarterback. Rather, you are watching the flow of play and hoping your boys manage to exploit openings you see developing. If you want to go metaphors rugby is sort of a band of mostly horn instruments improvising music as they go along, they have a general tune or theme that they're going with but due to their skill they sometimes are producing amazing jazz, and part of why it's so amazing is because it's hard to believe humans can think and react that fast as they play for an hour or more. US football, in contrast, is a proper concert with violins and a wood section and brass and winds and percussion and the dude with the triangle, and very definately a conductor and sheets of music laying out exactly who is supposed to do what, when, and in what intensity. It is, in my opinion, a more sophisticated and complicated group task - although I would readily concede at least some of the jazz players can do things individually some concert orchestra members could not. But at the end of the day the greater and more difficult human achievement is the classical concert. That said, I will say rugby has this huge advantage over US football: It has an international level and the fans take it seriously, rugby is not professional and widely-accepted (i.e., the market isn't there for the truly huge money), and so an international match is not just your ridiculously overpaid gladiators against their ridiculously overpaid gladiators, but our boys versus those foreign scum, how horrid it would be if we actually lost to the (fill in traditional enemy)? It makes the big rugby tests of the modern day match way US grudge matches were in the old days, like Cowboys vs. Redskins in the Landry/Allen era. And even though I can see the athleticism in soccer, and I can appreciate the sometimes amazing skill in the game of soccer it just is not a man's sport, as rugby most certainly is. No sport can hold my full respect where faking injuries is an accepted tactic and a shoulder-to-shoulder contact by two grown men at a full run can often as not causes one of them to fling himself on the ground. I understand very well why one can't let the striker get past or why setting up the penalty kick deep downfield is just solid tactics. I am aware that soccer players sometimes have phenomenal skils. But those positives are trumped by too many aspects of the game that reward not athleticism or skill or teamwork, but gamesmanship. The thing I really do not understand is how the game of soccer can be popular anywhere rugby is played.

My opinion is, that when you read "bayonets and grenades" or "bayonet charge" or "naked steel" or "hand to hand" or whatever it is, the best way to interpet that: - Fighting was taking place a range close enough for the shooting to be personal, i.e., not masses of rounds in that general direction but private Shmedlap has to shoot it out with private Schmidt, and they are both close enough so that cover, movement, and individual accuracy determines who wins. - Above and beyond "normal" small arms fire, grenades and maybe even bayonets actually got used. This is very different from, grenades and bayonets had a decisive effect on the fight. - The fight was decisive, one side ran, was wiped out, surrendered, etc. I'm pretty much with LLF on this one. Although one can't rule out absolutely some one actually getting hurt by a bayonet in anger, the chances of it actually having a meaninful effect on a fight were pretty much nil. However, an attempt by infantry to get into very close range with other infantry (meaning here, pretty much any shot is individually aimed and has a high chance of hitting) is very prettily described as "a bayonet charge". Perhaps apropos of this but maybe just in the way of trivia, I'm reading Geronimo's memoirs. His recollections of fighting particularly the Mexicans but also other Apaches and the US cavalry are really interesting, several times he tells about how his guys are shooting it out with other guys, and then he decides it's time to get close in and decide the fight. This is over several decades when at the beginning most every one is armed with rifled muzzle loaders, and at the end pretty much every one (except the poorer Apache braves perhaps) are armed with rifled breech loaders, and in the case of the richest Apaches rifled muzzle loaders. But all black powder weapons with a maximum effective range of maybe 100 - 300 meters in a fight, depending on how you define "effective." He describes hand-to-hand fighting taking place at times, if I recall correctly no bayonets but certainly at times including clubbing and knives. Reading between the lines and making adjustments for bad memory and lies and so forth, it seems like what he was doing was leading his guys into close range and forcing a decisive engagement, during which some combatants actually did get close enough to one another to strike each other - but at the same time killing maiming some one by any means but shooting was so rare as to be extraordinary. Another anecdote from this era springs to mind - duing the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 Winston Churchill, certainly a man able to get enthusiastic about the alleged romance of battle, participated in a charge by the 7th Lancers against dervish tribesmen. The lancers lined up and went through their walk, trot gallop routine and Churchill, being an officer, had to place himself in front of his troop with drawn saber and repeat commands and so forth. So once the lancers get going and are bearing down on the dervishes, who according to Churchill are mostly armed with shields and spears and swords, what does the future leader of the British Empire do? He sheathes his sword (which, he points out, is no easy trick while galloping a horse) and draws a Mauser semi-automatic pistol, with which (again according to his account) he shoots four or so tribesmen in the esuing melee. I would say the more able a soldier, just about any soldier, is able to keep a round loaded, the less likely that man would be to resort to cold steel. Discipline or tactical circumstance (for instance, the dervishes didn't have access to fire arms) might skew that decision away from using a gun in a few rare cases. But if a human has any sense at all, the closer he gets to the enemy, the more he's going to want to eliminate that threat to his life as efficiently as possible: and that is almost never with a blow of a sharp or blunt object.

Well as we have seen the technology thing is debatable. Me, I am impressed by the German and their guided munitions, their continued armored tactic edge, jet fighters, small arms, etc. etc. As to the Soviets in Germany, I'm going on a gut feeling. The animal desire for revenge was huge in the real deal, and a year and half more of fighting with all the Soviet loss that would have entailed, AND a Soviet occupation of not part but all Germany ... I think the only thing the Soviets would have accepted would be the total obliteration of Germany as a nation-state. Considering what Stalin did to his own people it is scary to think what he would have done to the Germans if he had nothing to restrain him, and the Soviet populace I think would have been all for it.

I think once the Germans invaded the SU it was a done deal, there could have been no terms, ever. The Germans killed too many Soviet citizens too fast, and indeed destroyed too much of the Red army too fast, for the Soviet leadership to accept any outcome except total annihilation of the Germans. You want to think disaster scenarions, consider: What if the Hitler had come to terms with the British (meaning of course Churchill and his government is punted, which was pretty improbable but parliamentarry possible), and the Germans got a free hand in the East? This is not to restart the "could the Germans have ever beaten the Soviets?" argument, at least for me I see no way, period. Glantz says it would have taken the Soviets about 18 months more to beat the Germans on their own, without the western Allies, Overlord, Italy, Lend Lease, the whole lot. His take is the Soviets really were that dedicated, ruthless, and, ultimately, that competent. What I mean is, what if that fight had gone to its logical conclusion, and the Soviets had overrun Germany without the moderating influence of the British and the US? It's scary just to consider. The Reds would at minimum have killed or exiled to Siberia every single Nazi party member, every single Wehrmacht officer, and probably broken Germany up into pre-Prussian principalities. That's the mild outcome; a Genghiz Khan-style "reduce the whole place to pastureland and kill every one taller than a cart axle" would be a severe result, but to my mind well withing the Soviets' capability. I think it's very possible to argue that the Germans actually were lucky in having a two-front war, as fighting a one front war against the Russians, which they still would have lost catastrophically (it's debatable I know, but there are plenty of historians that say so) would have been an order of magnitude worse for the Germans. As to what would have happened if the Soviets never got involved, well, for starters what springs to my mind is the the obvious "the Germans aren't ever exposed to the T-34", which means they don't produce the Panther and the Tiger (at least, they don't feel obliged to quickly in order to maintain tactical ascendency), and so, if we want to speculate further, the great WW2 tank arms race almost has no reason to happen. This means that a big mass of limited German resources - steel, skilled manufacturing capacity, designer brains, bright soldiers and junior officers, etc. - are not committed to things like panzerschrecks and squeeze 28mm cannon and mass-production of extremely thick face-hardened steel plate, which is all complicated. Then there's the manpower issue. Without campaigning in Russia German manpower available in the West increases by roughly two-thirds, as that is roughly what percentage of German manpower that was lost on the East Front. That would imply a Wehrmacht, both officers and men, of extremely high quality for about as long as the western Allies would have fought them. The Wehrmacht never have been gutted by Stalingrad and Kursk If the Germans had been intelligent in such a scenario, then a fairly obvious move would be to take the industrial and manpower capacity that historically went to tanks and AT technologies, and stick it into submarines. Given how close the Battle of the Atlantic was historically, and how vital that lifeline was to Britain's survival, I find it pretty hard to believe that if most of those Panthers and Tigers and the support and personnel and whatever else that it took got put into u-boats, that Britain would been starved to death, of war materials and food. There was no other route for that stuff to get to England in but by sea and if Doenitz had say an average of 60 or 100 subs operating in 1941 - 42, rather than the couple of dozen it was, then a big East Front sucking capacity away from the German side of the Battle of the Atlantic seems like an extremely good thing for the British indeed. Or maybe they could have pushed through with their own Manhatten project. Or figured out a practical antidote to nerve gas - the lack of which, as I understand it, was pretty much the only thing that prevented them from using nerve gas themselves. The Germans were pretty much the world leaders in clever science, who knows what they would have come up with if the guy in charge wasn't fixated on defeating the Red Army in battle? But that of course is the point. That line of theorizing assumes, that had the Germans had capacity available due to the absence of giant mechanized operations on the East Front, they would necessarily have committed that capacity to u-boats or something else equally rational. This was far from a sure bet, the actual historical Adolf Hitler would be the one making the decision. He could just have easily (or maybe more so) decided the thing to do was build up a battleship line, or maybe super-long range bombers to try and level New York, or just tens of thousands of landing craft to invade England because he wanted to conquer not starve the English out. All of which could have sucked resources away from a ground campaign against Anglo-Saxon forces, as efficiently as the Eastern Front did.

Heavens no, the Soviets had Marx and Lenin, and the Chinese (well, the Nationalists at least if not the Reds) had, er, Confucious.

Von Kleist, I would say the direct answer to your question is: "No, you can't really get them out of single file. At most, you can employ some workarounds to reduce the game engine's tendency to herd infantrymen from point to point on a map. So yes, infantry moving around in the open is going to want to move in easy-to-shoot-up files, and yes, this makes HE and to a lesser extend MG even more deadly." I would add to that, that historically most infantry at most times will tend to bunch up, and the worse-trained and less combat-seasoned the unit is, the more men will want to clump together if under fire. So one might well say the game engine is more fair when simulating inexperienced infantry, and less fair when simulating veteran infantry. I would also say that there is a game-side bonus to the way infantry moves about the CMN battlefield. The pathfinding may force the little pixeltruppen into files and easy-to-kill groups, but on the other hand it allows them to find their way around a really complicated battlefield pretty much all on their own. If you want to move a squad just by the most efficient way possible from one hedgerow to another one several fields awayt, you don't have to plot to the gap, then across the field, then turn at the next gap, then proceed to the next spot, etc. etc. You just pick a start point and a finish point and the guys will find their own way. Usually, they will find roads and paths and not crash into obstacles but walk around them. Considering the complextity of CMN battlefields, this is a real benefit. It means that you the player can just tell your guys where you want them and, at least until there's going to be shooting, they get on with that quite well indeed. Mircomanaging when your guys are fighting may be fun for some, but micromanaging every single step of a multi-kilometer hike for every single squad is a pain almost for every one. The CMN engine is excellent at allowing us players to avoid that pain. The price is, of course, your dudes clumping up when the shooting is going on. I personally dislike it, but as for me I think it's not a game-breaking problem. (Just don't get me started on the HE rounds loaded with nerve gas, that one really irritates me even when I'm dropping shells on my opponent.) If I'm wrong about any of this I'm glad to be corrected.

I think it has to do with the procurement system. The more complicated and cutting edge the the thing, the more liveliehoods of businesses and so lobbyists depend on the thing. And therefore, the more likey one of them will trot out the "our boys have to have the best" arguement. This in turn makes the thing as expensive and complicated as it needs to be, to defuse the people who are trotting out the "our boys have to have the best" argument. Which, strangely, very often seems to happen when the contractor that was cut out, gets cut in. Or another contractor with better lobbyists manages to step in. For something boring that every one agrees on what the specs should be and what it should do, like JP4 or shoelaces or something, it's relatively easy, contractors pitch their products and - assuming there aren't any pay offs and corruption and so forth - the military just hands the business to the lowest bidder. But the moment you get into "we need this because the experts think it's necessary, and the precise definition of "it" and "necessary" varies from expert to expert, military need starts getting subordinated to which lobbying group can make the best argument. That's what that AF colonel's essay on how great this light attack planes would be really amounts to. A guy with all sorts of priorities besides rationally-calculated military need is pushing a serious purchase with very debatable actual value on the taxpayer. Another problem with a politicized system of military equipment procurement is, you wind up buying what the military thinks is cool and maintains their jobs and branch's importance, rather than what is most efficient. Which brings us back to the real question, which is of course, what war(s) do you plan to fight? Everything flows from that, not just cold rational planning but emotional fighting over contract money as well. The whole thing is driven by whatever perception there is, of what wars are next, including of course ongoing wars if they happen to be ongoing. The Brits Vark spoke with had the opinion "boots on the ground" is the answer, to wit - But I would argue those Brits and even the "boots on the ground school" are missing a bigger point. The assumption at the base of that thinking is, "If we just get the force mix right we would win." The counter to that is, of course, maybe sometimes there is no force mix that can win, given other factors, and at the top of that list I would put at the very top the willingness to sacrifice on the part of the people doing the fighting, and of the people supporting the fighters Vark hits it on the head that yes, larger numbers of infantry could be more effective against nickel and dime insurgents than small numbers of infantry supported by the wizzest-bangest of air support, IF there was a willingness of all involved to accept more infantry casualties. But infantry like it or not comes from the populace, and it is not possible to recruit or pay infantry well enough, in any kind of numbers, so that the population from which the infantry came will happily accept dead and maimed infantrymen no matter what. The infantrymen and the populace have to believe it's worth it, and for that you need clearly defined and achievable war goals. This is one of the reasons there is so much ridiculously technologically advanced air force capacity in Afghanistan. Not because it's the right tool for the job, but rather because: - The flying military community has all sort of incentives to justify their existence in real not just in theoretical wars - The infantry is happy to call down as many air strikes as they are allowed - The populace has been sold a bill of goods - advanced technologies will defeat nationalist insurgencies - Military manufacturing contractors maximize profits selling high-tech weaponry, whether or not that's what the military needs. If that sounds like a losing combination, well, we'll see. I know what I think. But the key to all this is, win or lose, smart procurement policy or stupid, the longer there is an ongoing conflict that can justify accelerated military procurement, the businesses and the lobbyists stay employed. A long, drawn-out conflict with plenty of arguing about which high-tech solution will end it, and lots of experimentation, is in their interest. Heck, if you want to be really cynical you could say that an impossible-to-win conflict is most in their interest, as it would allow them to force all possible high-tech solutions on the taxpayer, rather than just the ones needed to win the war.

Although I like the idea of cheapo platforms dropping precision-guided munitions, this good idea still has some problems, not least because not all COIN operations are created equally, nor is it particularly clear that Afghanistan is a particularly good measure of success. That LTC's write-up that Argie posted is a pretty good example of the idea. Take something off the shelf, make a bunch of them, deploy them densely, and life is wonderful. The grunts get lots of flexible air support and the air force gets lots of slots for F-15 pilots who otherwise would have to fly a desk or just search for work with the civilians. Sounds great, right? Well... For starters, there is the question of whether a little low/slow plane can really survive out there in the big bad COIN world. The article (which was written by a weapons and ground control air force guy) says "no", because in the main the threat from the ground is the odd .50 and Kalashnikovs. This is all well and good - but what if say the Taliban actually do read up on Vietnam? Maybe they would realize that where you can plant 1 x .50 you can plant a quad, and a quad .50 will definately throw enough lead to smack a little propeller plane that is equipped with - get ready - a .50 of its own. Or God forbid a Zsu, those things are dirt cheap and available if I was an insurgent and the western infidels were using little propeller planes to call artillery and drop bombs and missiles on me, I'd sure work hard to get me a couple. Of course you could always bring in the fast movers or the artillery to whack the AAA nest, but that sort of defeats the purpose of the little bitty cheap air support platform that is supposed to make air to ground support possible without the jet jocks. Then there is the arguement, well, technology is so advanced it's easy and cheap to built a propeller plane that drops flares and carries spiffy exhausts, so it won't get tracked and hit by a hand-held missile. I find this a bit hard to believe, if these missiles are designed to run down fighter jets, how much harder can it be for them to nail a putt-putt prop plane? This is assuming that flare technology stays ahead of IR tracking technology, which is not exactly guaranteed. Plus there is the same issue as the the Zsu or any other autocannon - a cheap little prop plane for doing ground support pretty much assumes, that the bad guys on the ground aren't going to get any kind of AAA bigger than what might be carried in pieces on a mule or a man. Finally, and the article actually does a good job of illustrating this, if you go for a bunch of planes that can operate from remote airstrips, then you definately are going to reduce response time and increase loiter time for the grunts in the field. But it is a good idea to think about the enemy, and I think that when I look at a map of proposed OA-X light ground support aircraft airfields throughout Afghanistan, I think: "Jeez, where NATO and the IASF had three big airfields (like Baghram and Kandahar) to keep the Taliban from mortaring and sending suicide bombers, now there are something like two dozen small ones. All those airfields need security, meaning more or your limited infantry, which you want in the field, has to sit around on airbase defence. And if you skimp on the defence or the insurgents do their job right, you have wonderful images of US aircraft burning on the runway from a guerilla attack." This I think is a fairly good example of why Air Force colonels are not allowed to make theater-level decisions. But the real problem with the light/cheap ground support aircraft is this. It's all well and good to say "OK, we think we are only going to fight fourth and fifth world opponents so really we don't need the spiffy stuff, we need relatively cheap systems to use our high-tech advantages in supressing insurgencies or forcing regime changes etc." Let's assume for a moment that's true, there are no well-armed enemies willing to fight it out in a more or less conventional fight in the forseeable future. It's a very risky assumption and not something I would want to be the national security on, but where does that logic lead? The article gives a big fat hint. Again, this is a effectively a work of "wish fiction" b a serving Air Force officer who is arguing that since COIN is the future, the Air Force needs a whole bunch of cheapo planes to do the ground support job, and the article in substantial detail writes up the period 2010 - 2018, and how the OX-A airplane was fielded and did just that. The story line even tells us about great collaboration between the USAF and the Afghan Air forces with these little planes. It does not, however, tell us when and how the Afghanistan war ends, nor does it tell us how US air strikes and airpower helped that happen. And I think the reason for this is, that the author cannot even in his wildest fantasy concoct a reasonable story of how that would be likely to happen. This, I think, is the essence of the problem. What is the point of spending a bazillion dollars in resources and retraining F-15 pilots to OA-X, setting up the ordnance people to build and maintain and support not just a few big fast jet airfields but dozens of small propeller plane airfields in the next great counterinsurgency, when even an officer rah rahing for doing all that can't come up with a believable way all that would defeat an insurgency? Money better spent on a losing proposition, remains money lost.

Good points. Here's my response. 1. The Secretary of Defence told Congress, in writing, no substantial damage to US high security operations done. I take that to mean that in his opinion, the people potentially exposed by the release referred to in the Australian's article, are/were not important enough for the US intelligence community to consider the exposure of these peoples' r identities a significant problem. 2. Wikileaks has released a whole bunch of stuff. The Afghanistan documents are only a small percentage, the State department cables are a big percentage, and more exactly, the biggest thing Wikileaks has thus far released. So FWIW I would say evaluation of the releases as mostly State Department cables is more correct than yours. That said, we clearly were discussing different things released by Wikileaks. I think that is part of our disconnect. 3. This is somewhat of a cheap shot, but still, the Australian - which you source for the evaluation of damage possibly caused by the Afghanistan leaks - is not just a Rupert Murdoch pub, but in many ways THE Rupert Murdoch pub. This is not to say their reporting is sloppy, but rather, there is at least a chance that their reporting might have a slant. Since the Secretary of Defence contradicts the assertions in the article, either Gates is lying or the Australian was wrong. Personally, I suspect Gates was telling the truth but I don't know. As for the rest, I think that the Australian article actually goes a good way towards supporting my argument. I quote: "US officers recorded detailed logs of the information fed to them by named local informants, particularly tribal elders." My contention is that there is no chance in this life or the next, for an Afghan of any type to meet with a US officer, and the other side won't find out about it. The American doesn't blend in, he can't speak the language, he must use an interpeter, and he must be "fed" information by the locals in a place the US officer and his command finds reasonably safe. All that means other people involved, and this is gossipy Afghanistan. Likewise, I find it very hard to conceive any Afghan actually having a conversation with a US officer without having dozens of other Afghans involved, what with security and support and bringing coffee and cookies and who knows what else. Now add into the mix these layers: How many Afghans would choose to talk to the Americans, without clearing it with their family/clan/tribe first? How secure is that information? Can US forcers rely on every single Afghan in this information loop to keep quiet for the sake of US national security? Can all those Afghans with proximate information about the Afghan that talked to the US officer, be relied on to keep quiet when night falls and the HUMMVes pull out and the Taliban comes calling and looking for proof of loyalty to the jihad? Is it even remotely possible, that among all these Afghans, not one would have a reason to backstab the Afghan that talked to the Americans? The Wikileaks disclosure of the identity of an Afghan that had a conversation with a US officer, is only a threat to that Afghan, if his identity was somehow unknown to the bad guys beforehand. I submit that under these circumstances, which appear to be the publication of field reports from US forces wandering about the Afghanistan "human terrain", it is ludicrous to assume the Taliban doesn't know or can't find out exactly who talked to the Americans, and when, and where. As a simple test, consider, who was it that according to the Australian the Americans were mostly talking to. Answer: Village elders. Now ask yourself, is it even remotely possible to imagine a village where the Americans would not talk to the village elder(s)? As another simple task, there is the question, do the patrol reports often reveal the not just the name of the Afghan but his father's name because of the great dedication to detail and research by US S-5 and G-5 personnel, or is it just that most Afghans have a single name and the only practical way to differentiate one Masud or Mohammed from another, is to identify his father and the village he comes from? On those grounds I say the Australian article and its ilk is hooey. It calls village chiefs and random Afghans US patrols talked to "informants", it touts naming the village and father of an Afghan the Americans spoke with as particularly sensitive information. Or take the "Afghan considering defection. Sure, if he really was, and if every one in the village had no idea he was talking to the Americans, then maybe Wikileaks compromised that potential source. That's the 1 out of probably about 1,000 chance. The 999 out of 1,000 chance is, a guy like that, he was telling the Americans he was thinking about defecting because he knew that's what the foreigners wanted to hear. Maybe he was just scared, in Afghanistan, the Americans are heavily armed and aren't always careful about whom they kill, and even worse they might hand you over to the Afghan police. Or maybe he really was a Taliban dude, but just fishing for information of his own. Or maybe he was just a guy, didn't really have any side, and when the Taliban patrol replaced the Americans he told THEM he really wanted to defect from the Americans. The possibilities are pretty close to infinate. What is limited, I think, is the real damage Wikileaks caused to the US intelligence effort in Afghanistan. Gates said it was minimal when arguably it would have been in his interest to say it was substantial. I would tend to agree because I have trouble inventing a scenario where a US officer-Afghan citizen contact could remain confidential long enough for Wikileaks to become the means of outing it. Here is a pretty good evaluation of the actual effect of the Wikileaks Afganistan stuff on the US war effort: The documents confirm what we already know about the war: It's going badly; Pakistan is not the world's greatest ally and is probably playing a double game; coalition forces have been responsible for far too many civilian casualties; and the United States doesn't have very reliable intelligence in Afghanistan. http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/07/25/the_logs_of_war

Cherry picking? Possibly, but not intentionally. Personally, I don't think so. The great bulk of the half million dox appear to be US State Department messages written by State Department employees. A smaller portion appear to be US DOD communications from Afghanistan, written - my guess - mostly by civilians. Frankly, almost all of the State Department stuff I've read falls well into the category of bureaucratic pencil-pushing. The information contained is, by and large, neither explosive, nor interesting nor relevant. In areas where I think I might be able to have a reasonable basis of judgement of my own, like the former Soviet Union, I believe that evaluation not to be just my opinion, but a demonstrable fact. It is not a surprise to me that diplomats are less polite about the people they talk with when they talk about them to the rest of their bureaucracy, than when talking to the person. I disagree, therefore, with your contention meaningful damage was done to US foreign policy interests, because US diplomats were revealed as being impolite and snide in internal communications. I doubt very seriously it was a revelation to the foreign officials. I suspect that some US State Department employees have a higher opinion of their ability at successfully faking sincere politeness, than the foreigners to whom the US State Department employees were pretending to like. But that's just a hunch. Moving on to Afghanistan and the revealing of sources, I think we need to be specific about what is meant by the word "source". There are highly confidential sources called spies. In the US government security system their identities are are classified top secret or higher. Wikleaks materials are classified secret. There are no spy identities within them. Go here to read the US Defense Secretary's letter that says that Wikileaks did not reveal any highly sensitive information, which by definition would include the identities of spies. http://www.scribd.com/doc/39590650/Gates-Levin-WikiLeaks-Investigation Gates goes on to note that Wikileaks did identify Afghans that "cooperate" with US forces. I guess that there may actually be spies among them but what these people mostly are, by and large, are Afghan officials. Who for whatever reason are on the US side (at least for the moment, heh) in Afghanistan's latest war. It's cops, governors, social workers, Afghan army officers, people like that. This is my estimate based on reading several but far from all of the messages. Meaning, I would think the odds are somewhere between excellent and fantastic the Taliban already knows who these people are, where they live, the names and residences of their relatives, and whatever else. An Afghan "cooperating" with the Americans is anything but anonymous. Heck, lots of them have to wear foreign-style uniforms. Therefore, I would argue the threat to the lives and property of these Afghans "cooperating" with the Americans changed very little with the publication of Wikileaks. Besides, even if the Taliban had]/b] gone through every cable (and surely they have better things to do), the Taliban insurgents are Afghans just as much as the officials cooperating with the Americans. If one puts on a Taliban hat and tries to figure out what all that Wikileaks means, it's not like one is going to see Wikileaks as the same thing as facts or hard evidence. If an individual Afghan is on the record of some US government message of saying or doing something indicating he is "cooperating", the absolute very first question I would have as a Taliban intelligence analyst would be "Is this guy straight up, or was he just lying to the foreign infidels like the rest of us usually do?" I would assume that any Afghan, pro- or anti-American, would lie to a US diplomat as a matter of course, about everything it was conceivably useful to lie about. That is the national tradition, that is the best way to stay alive in a civil war. I think the argument that Wikileaks threatens people on the US side in Afghanistan whose identities were secret, is an argument without grounds. In my opinion those identities, the overwhelming majority of them, were secret only in the sense that the US government had classified them secret. In almost all cases, I think it is reasonable to assume that these "secret" Afghans cooperating with the US have been known to and hated by the insurgents for years. I think this guesswork and estimation is relevant because, the counter-argument "The identities are secret because we the government officials deem them so for the sake of US national security" assumes that the US government officials use security classifications only in the best interests of the US, and never to just protect their agency from outside observation and of course do personal CYA. If there is one thing the Wikileaks documents have demonstrated to me, it is that that counter-argument is patently false. There is a mass of evidence showing the US State Department and the US DOD to be typical giant government bureaucracies filled with workers dedicated to demonstrating the importance of their position, their supervisors, and their station - even at the expense of public resources. I have no choice but to challenge people in the government who tell me they have my best interests at heart, and that they are professionals whom I should implicitly trust. I believe it when I see it. And not just because they tell me. There is a rich irony in all of this, of course. What we are seeing is 21st century surveillance and information technologies turned against the very people who, as a group, passed off relatively minor external security threats as major ones endangering the survival of the Republic, and played on fears created by those faked threats to impose a surveillance society in the US and run roughshod on wide tracts of the Constitution. This was possible because the leaders in the executive branch of the government told the lies and the workers inside the bureaucracies either signed on enthusiastically or just shut up. It has gone on for quite a while now. Many government workers have advanced their careers, and some of them certainly believe they are fighting the Good Fight. However, those policies pushed by those people working in the government have done great damage to the country, which has unsurprisingly made a lot of non-government people mad. And a few of them, really mad. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The answer is, whoever is in a position to do so, will do so. The watchers will be paid back in their own coin, or worse, if they lose the confidence of the watched.

Here's some possibilities I pulled up in about five minutes. I'd call it enough to make one decide there's evidence in Wikileaks Mr. Blair was up to no good when it came to Iraq: US diplomats report Gordon Brown government considers Blair's expedition into Iraq a mistake: http://news.scotsman.com/wikileaks/Wikileaks-Gordon-Brown-39wanted-to.6779847.jp US diplomats report Blair government in cahoots with big oil to grab Iraq: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/secret-memos-expose-link-between-oil-firms-and-invasion-of-iraq-2269610.html US State department cable: Secret deal with Blair government to protect US interests during Chilicot inquiry: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/30/wikileaks-chilcot-iraq-war-inquiry This hasn't directly to do with Blair, but it does directly undermine the Blair assertion prior Iraq that the Iraq war was moral, rightous, and something the British public should get behind: US and Britain ignored torture of Iraq suspects: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-military-leaks As to the rest: Yes, I'm guessing no one in the bureaucracies reads those cables. I suppose I should qualify that to, no one who makes any meaningful decisions. You are however incorrect when you assert I have not read the cables. I have, some of them anyway, and entertaining reading they make, too. For instance... http://cables.mrkva.eu/cable.php?id=163798 That is the text of a secret US State Department cable circa 2008 about a Russian youth movement that rabidly supports Vladimir Putin, and held a summer camp outside Moscow for its membership to hold prayer meetings and mock stock markets and camfire sing-alongs. As nearly as I can tell, one day a US embassy worker visited the camp along with a press pack. The cable goes on for 2,500 words describing in painful detail the history, ideology, and political implications of the movement. In the conclusion it mentions that the Nashi movement had 10,000 members out of a Russian population of I think 135 million people last year (in 2007) and this year there were 5,000 members. Further, this US State Department cable conclusion is of an event not just covered by independent media, but attended at the exact time as the US diplomat by the independent media. In other words, this is a report by a US embassy worker doing the exact same thing the professionals in the media did. The report is about a marginal organization with zero political influence, and the upshot of the report is that the organization got more marginal. Yet, despite the vacuousness and pointlessneess of that conclusion, the report and its contents is classified secret by the US government, and making that report public is a Federal crime. I for one fail to see a compelling need to consider the contents of this cable a state secret. There is just information about a non-event of little interest to any one. I have over the course of my life come to doubt, sometimes, when government workers tell me they know best and I should trust them. This State Department cable adds weight to those doubts. YMMV. Is the work that went into the report in the best interest of the taxpayers? Was the US public better off because their public servants with the State Department put no small effort into researching, writing up, vetting, approving, formatting, sending this report to each other, and oh by the way classifying its contents secret? Before answering that, consider the cable's analytical omissions, which off the top of my head include: - Failure to draw the screamingly obvious parallel between Russia's Nashi and the Soviet Union's Komsomol. - Lack of any kind of background on the leader of Nashi, a guy named Borovikov, with whom the US embassy worker purportedly spoke while he toured the Nashi summer camp along with a press pack. What possible use is a study on a fringe political group without some information on the leader, is he a stooge, a rabid facist, an alien, what? Diplomats are supposed to think about stuff like that, not ignore it. - Not even a hint of guesswork, educated or otherwise, as to who was financing the summer camp and what in the world he hoped to gain by it. (My personal guess, some oligarch trying to curry favor with Putin, no proof, just a gut feeling.) So all in all, yes, I for one call would that a cable that no one would read, not least because it is worthless. I would further call the effort that went into producing it wasted. And frankly, I would say the only people that benefit from the report's secret classification, are the government employees who were involved in producing the report, as its main importance in the real world (i.e., outside the government bureaucracy) is that it is a fairly solid piece of evidence of what happens if government workers are allowed to go on a silly field trip to a silly summer camp, without any one to tell them to stop wasting public resources. That's just one classified US State Department cable. There are what, something like a half million of them? Here is a linkie for several of the silliest: http://blogs.aljazeera.net/americas/2011/09/04/wikileaks-five-funniest-cables-about-war-drugs So yes, to move on to your next suggestion, I do indeed believe that at least some workers in the US State Department have acted and even are acting against the US public interest. Government waste and inefficiency are nothing new. Of course, one must pick one's enemies, and heaven knows I'm not perfect myself. Heck, I've written plenty of awful reports in my day, but in my defense I never took taxpayer money to do it. Anway, personally, I reserve my main anger when I'm of a mind to be angry at government for the senior US public servants that lead their countrymen into expensive unwinnable wars lacking moral justification, or waste really serious sums of taxpayer money, or push policies calculated to benefit corporate interests rather than average citizens. It's the government workers like those, in my estimation, that are doing the real damage to the Republic, and mark my words, they are. Pretty much every great nation that ever was, was undone by venal government bureaucracy. Maybe it's part of the human condition but I don't have to like it when I see self-serving people drawing government pay betraying the public trust. I've read Gibbon, I know where that leads. I certainly don't think the US would be better off without a State Department. But a State Department spending less time generating cables like that Nashi essay, yeah definately, the US would be better off without that. And yes, the State Department workers involved in producing that piece of horse hockey get no praise from me. As to other members of other government agencies, I see the question fairly simply I think. There is the public trust. Each person betrays it, or he does not. If he doesn't, he may well be supressed by his agency, that's how bureaucracies work sometimes. If he does, then he may well have a future in the bureaucracy, after all he's one of the boys. I would add that I'm not condoning assassination of government workers. But what I am saying is, if you are an active member of the group then you are one of the people responsible for the group's actions, and one of the people the group's opponents may very well dislike, and it is pointless to pretend otherwise. You may not like it, you may not think it is fair, but by your membership in the group you make yourself a potential target of the group's enemies. If you don't like that threat, don't join the group. Finally, I don't think Wikileaks is the arbiter of right and wrong. Far from it. Each and every individual, on his own, is responsible for his actions. Not his organization. Membership in an organization never has made a person immune to responsibility for his acts, for even when a man acts as a member of a group, it is his individual decision to do so.

A web search of with the words "Blair" and "Wikileaks" will give you a pretty fair overview of the case. Essentially, there is plenty of evidence there supporting the argument he was in fact a poodle cheerleader that helped W. push an unjustified war on their respective countries, and further supported fun things like rendition and enhanced interrogation techniques. As to people in Wikileaks being named, in the first place, pretty much all of these messages are US State department essays where one US State department employee writes something to inform others, and also to make himself and his boss and his station look good. More than anything else, Wikileaks exposes how much time and effort US diplomats put into writing reports pretty much no one will read. It may be true these people were "just doing their job". But if their job entailed wasting public funds, justifying their existence, and from time to time doing their little bit to create bogus information - The International Terror Threat is Real, The War on Drugs is Succeeding, this State Department Civil Initiative is Really Helping, etc. - then it absolutely is in the public interest that these wasteful activities be exposed. As to government worker identities being exposed, if that is a fear then the simple way to avoid that is not to work for the government. It's not like the people in the government are really careful about leaving alone the identities of people not in the government. See the FBI, CIA, IRS, etc. etc. In the second place, being on public business only justifies the acts of a government worker, and should protect him from the retaliation of irate individuals, if the organizaton acts in the public interest. This behooves government workers to eave organizations not serving the public interest. If that organization is not serving the public interest and at the same time concealing it, then a worker worried about retaliation needs to bail, immediately. If he stays, it's on his look out. Staying in the organization and hope that, since he was just following orders, he won't ever be targeted by people with an axe to grind with the organization, is a bad strategy. Life very often doesn't work that way. Perhaps staying in the organization, following orders, and depending on the organization to suppress information about its betrayal of the public interest so as to avoid angering the public, may have been a good strategy in the past. But this is the 21st century and information is too digital and accessible to too many people, for the most government doing to stay secret like in the past. Never mind Wikileaks, just think of all the blogs out there listing government malfeasance. The days where the government worker could say "Trust me, because you have no way of checking on me" are as dead as Allosauruses. Hoping government confidentiality will protect one'sself, if one works for the government, assumes the government actually will stay ahead of the curve on information security. That means whatever digital information defense geeks there are inside the government, must both outnumber and be substantially more skilled, than the digital information attack geeks outside the government. Which, in the long run, is impossible. There just are too many hackers out there and the information environment is moving too fast for people inside the government too keep up. We should not forget that there were hundreds and maybe even thousands of information security people collecting government paychecks, who failed to detect the vulnerability Bradley Manning found, and then failed to prevent him from exploiting it. Sure, they've probably closed that particular hole now. But it is ridiculous to assume that some other whistleblower won't find and exploit another one later. What has happened is, the people IN the government are now for the first time ever getting a real taste of what it is like, not to be in the government. When any one with a web link and a grudge can out you, and you have no defense, Big Brother can't protect you. All you can do is hope your past acts be squeaky-clean enough to survive a vetting on the web. Oversight can really ruin your day.

I think that the people talked about - for instance the leader of Iran - are perfectly aware said Western politician was insulting them behind their backs. Unless somehow the leader of Iran and people like him really believe what western officials say to their faces - which they most certainly don't - I would say the damage done on the politeness front is somewhere between null and void. As to the bank account/PIN question, the answer to that is clear, making it possible for some one to steal your property is pretty much amoral behavior in any society. However, I would argue that evidence of government officials - who are people themselves - in representative democracies lying to their own people is not evidence that should inherently be kept supressed and private like a PIN. I do not think that sort of information should only be made public only if members of the governing class deem fit. Screw that, people are people, the governors are no different than any one else, and if they can use their position to enrich themselves and CYA they certainly will. Moreover, a great many people working for governments have the opinion that lying to people not in government, and concealing information from people not in government, is not only okay but in the public's best interest. See previous paragraph and add: It is an extremely rare bureaucracy indeed, that is not self-serving. I do not trust, inherently and without reservations, the ability of a government organization staffed by humans to police itself effectively. So if Julian Assange, one of the governed, is mad at Tony Blair, one of the governors, for lying to all the governed about Iraq and so helping mightily to involve the governed in a war that killed and maimed the governed and cost them plenty of money they might well have spent on education or better roads, what is Julian to do? What if Julian has evidence that Tony not only lied about the Iraq casus belli, but that a great many of Tony's friends, who are also people in the governing class, benefited personally in careers and arms contracts and what have you, because Tony lied to the governed? Whom should Julian be loyal to? The governors? Why? Have the governors done right by the governed? Julian has proof positive they have not, indeed, they the governors hae sacrificed the welfare of the many (governed) for the few (governors). The governors have said they are serving society, i.e., the governed, but by their actions they are serving themselves. If Julian is a human and so responsible to society, which part is it moral to try and help? The governors? Or the governed? Which part of society NEEDS help? Which part of society is suffering more? Which part of society has less tools to defend its interests? The real problem with Wikileaks is not that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suddenly has found out that the British ambassor to Tehran doesn't like his choice in suits and is offended by his body odor. It is rather, that the governors in literally tens of thousands of separate messages can be proved beyond pretty much a shadow of a doubt of betraying the public trust - of lying to the public, of engaging in bureaucratic pettifogging, of wasting taxpayer money, of supporting patently goofy policies rather than challenging them, and generally of acting as if their only loyalties needed to be to their superiors. Who also, of course, were people who are members of the governing class. Another interesting question would be, did Assange ever at some point have a chance to get the message to Blair: "Look mate, I've got the goods on you, you told whoppers when you shouldn't, but if you do the right thing and fess up your crimes then I'll do the right thing and keep all the other dirt out of the public eye." But of course that's rhetorical. The governors almost never make deals with the governed, and the more powerful the governor, the more likely he is to use the government to retaliate against his accusers, rather than consider the validity of their accusations. That is what we have happening now. There is a group of non-government people convinced too many people in the government are abusing the public trust, and further, the government is rigged so that that abuse will continue no matter how the governed vote. Therefore, a small subsection of really angry governed people are trying to change things by other means. It remains to be seen whether the governors can supress them. In the old days it was possible to shut down newspapers or just brand groups unpatriotic, but what with the internet bouncing information all over the planet it's really hard these days to villify and silence a group of people who are governed, who have a bone to pick with their governors, unless you can corroborate that their claims against the governors are groundless. These days, the people doing the governing have to prove in the court of the worldwide information flood their really are doing their jobs right, that they haven't abused the public trust. If they have, actually, that's fair easy to demonstrate. If they did their jobs right then proof of it is actually in their benefit, it demonstrates to the governed that they are lucky to have such responsible governors. Of course, it would suck to be a person who had done well personally from being a member of the ruling class, but didn't do very much for the people he was ruling. If that information got out, the ruled would have every right to get upset. And the ruled would as a general thing really appreciate some individual's making that information available to them.

As it happens, in PBEM game I recently took out a StuG III with a 60mm mortar hit right on top. HE, normal concentration. Made a nice big explosion too. That said, a bunk more stonks in the vicinity of some other SPs w/ 60mm never hit a vehice. Just rolled boxcars yhat one time I guess. Sure would be nice to finish that game, hint hint.

My guess is either - (a) Warren has figured out he can't take it with him and so has decided to tell tihngs like he sees them as, from his perspective, he has nothing to gain from staying quiet. Not that I think he's found religion, but rather, a man nearing at the end of his life with no more need of friends or advancement is more likely to state his mind about right and wrong as he sees it, rather than say a younger man who is still pushing to get somewhere and will pay a price if he angers his peers. There is no down side for Buffet to say the wealthy pay too much in taxes, unless he wants to amass more money. And my guess is that he has decided that for whatever reason, he has enough. So kudos to him for a fine moral statement, but let's not forget that during his working years he chose to amass personal wealth rather than serve society. It doesn't mean he is a bad man, but in any case he was not a philanthropist all his life, he was a businessman. However, towards the end of his life he said some philanthropic things that very definately challenged assumptions of the very wealthy class he is/was a member of. ( Buffet has taken a look at this graphic - And decided that if the revolution is coming he had better get on the record as masses-friendly before the peasants start torching manors. That is a cycnical view and I would like to give Buffet more credit. However, when it comes to predicting human behavior I find being cynical usually makes my predictions more accurate. A final note, I disagree that Buffet is being insincere by calling for wealth redistribution without redistributing his own. If wealth distribution in the US is the issue, the problem is not one or two obscenely wealth people, but about three million. If there are 311 million Americans and one per cent of them control a lopsided proportion of the wealth (40 per cent by most estimates) then that's 3.1 million Americans controlling 40 per cent of the wealth. Interestingly, that is a wealth distribution roughly similar to Egypt. Were Buffet to hand all his billions over to charity overnight, that would not change the overalll problem, as rich as he is he is only (of the more wealthy, true) individual in a group of 3.1 million people. America's wealth distribution would remain similar to Egypt's. I think Buffet's point is, the way the system is set up the very wealthy may concentrate wealth without paying taxes, and every one else may not. Not, the wealthy have too much money, that is a different issue. And in any case, he has not died and we have not seen his will. If his wealth goes to charity, then we can judge him a reasonably charitable individual. Until he dies he is a member of society like the rest of us and we must judge him not only by his actions, but the intentions behind them. I think that approach can go far towards explaining why the ueber-rich who are having moral quandries do not simply turn over lump sums to the US government. Is the US government an organization that spends money wisely? In ways that benefit the great mass of Americans? In ways that strengthen the American economy? Have the spending policies of the US government helped or harmed America over the medium and long term? I would think that a man who clearly has great skill in amassing money efficiently would have excellent judgement as to where depositing his money would have a useful effect, and where it would be wasteful or have a negative effect. A guy like that is not just a money manager, he is literally one of the best in the world. Perhaps if the really skilled money managers hesitate to hand over large lump sums to the US government, the rest of us should draw our own conclusions.

Wow, 10 per cent from NYC? I didn't know that. Still, for every one of them how many were guys in their teens who came from purely rural backgrounds, hadn't completed high school, and weren't from farming families? You know, the rural poor? People from families in the Virginia backwoods or the Ozarks or upstate NY or somewhere, maybe Dad had some kind of job but the Depression killed it. Farming wasn't the only way to live in rural 1940 America. For starters, there was just being poor. Guys like that hunted not for fun but to put meat on the table. Heck, there are less of them these days but they still do. Sure in our generic US infantry company you are going to get a strong majority of urban recruits, but still, what with the system weeding out the educated and the guys with some kind of skill that fits the needs of Army support units, it would seem to me the system would necessarily put those guys that hunted regularly in the infantry, even if relatively speaking their type wasn't anywhere near the majority in the unit. For fun, here's the 1941 US census: http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1941-02.pdf Based on that - 1. About 74 million people lived urban, 57 million rural. So all other things being equal the entire military should be have reflected that. 2. Of the rural people, about 30 million people lived on farms, and 27 million "not on farms". So even if the Army is slotting boys from the farm out of the infantry because they know heavy machinery, there is a substantial pool (roughly half of all) of rural recruits who did not live on farms. I contend the poor ones would be as a group relatively uneducated and quite likely to get shoved into the infantry. 3. There were about 13 million people in NY state, and about 1.7 million of them lived rurally, almost all on farms. Therefore, 10.3 million lived in some city or town, and given the size of NYC viz. Albany etc. 7.4 million people lived in NYC which is roughly 5 per cent of the entire US population. If you figure some guys from Jersey and Connecticut would say they were from NYC as well (which is not for sure, but just for fun) then in any case it's not so surprising to me as it was a little while ago that 10 per cent of the US infantry could arguably be from NYC. At the time NYC was a very significant chunk of the entire US population, and there was a draft. Nonetheless, I'm still fairly sure that in the generic US infantry company, there would probably be 5-10 guys from backwoods towns and villages who had hunted pretty much their entire youth, and would have had little chance of having the Army send them somewhere else but the infantry. Maybe he hadn't finished elementary school but it's good be they knew concealment, LOS, and riflery. I very much agree these guys found their way into the infantry pretty much by default, the Army wasn't set up to do anything else with them. But my instinct was that as a group there were enough of them so that in a generic US infantry company there would always be a couple around to get the scoped Springfields. Call it the Gomer Pyle argument.

I would say Al Jazeera is very good. And of course BBC. Neither is perfect and there is a bit of slant in both, but that said I consider them solid news sources. Also, the major wire services are fairly competent at getting the basic information, they are pretty much always the fastest, and generally speaking they HAVE to try hard to get the story right as their customers by and large are other media. The thing to avoid - as Mr. Emrys has tacitly done - is the very biggest media who by the very nature of their customers must dumb down their product to such an extent, and kiss up to shareholders and political allies to such an extent, that if a person is actually interested in some aspect of the news what the majors give him is practically useless. If it's a huge news event of course the majors can do good work as they have huge resources. But the more you are interested in detail, the more you have to seek it yourself. I find my time often is almost always better spent hunting information on the web than watching a major. I also find that experience in academic research, particularly history but also whatever other topic you might be interested in, can really help. As can a passing knowledge of how foreign languages work, it is possible to access the media of entire countries with the help of Google Translate. At the end of the day if you want to find out about something it's a matter of using your own judgement and comparing varying and usually conflicting bits of information. There is a ton of information out there and to my mind if you are poorly-informed you are either trusting a few major news sources and hoping they get the story right, which is ludicrous when you stop and think about it; or you have just bailed on following the news, you have other things you want to do with your life. Which is of course the right of a free citizen.

It is worth remembering that the US population during the 1940s was far more rural than it is today, and so the pool of recruits that hunted routinely before jointing the service was, by modern standards, huge. If you got 100 - 150 American men together from that era there would pretty much always be 5 - 10 who had hunted all their lives. If you talk the infantry then the selection for those units weeded out the educated. And so probably increased the number of men who had 10 years or more experience as hunters. Heck, the 1903 Springfield not only was quite close to rifles commonly used by US rural hunters of the day, it was a popular civilian hunting rifle. It was entirely possible a US infantry company commander would be able to find a man in his unit who not only had 10 years or more of hunting experience, but had done it with the M1903. WW2 was a massive war and individual combatants by definition had very little effect on large scale combat. I submit that there was no point for the US to set up a sniper program because they had plenty of infantry recruits (not a majority, but a solid usable minority) that could do the job of company marksman perfectly adequately. Further, once the US forces got into combat shortages of trained infantry became chronic. So it made good sense not to divert infantry training resources to a sniper program which would suck useful men out of the line units. As to whether or not snipers are "effective enough" in CMN, I would say as a general thing they certainly are. This is because: - CM assumes that the targeted troop is aware he is in a war and is trying to stay alive. This means he will seek cover as a matter of course, and that even if you the player don't see the spots where a single man might find cover on the mapboard the pixeltruppen can and what's more they will seek it. Normandy is not a pool table, and the simulation replicates soldiers' being able to get their heads down behind something under most circumstances. Sure, one might expect a skilled rifleman with about 10 or so enemy some 200 meters away to pick them off in a couple of minutes if the world was a flat place without cover. But in the real world if you take 10 guys, put them in a conventional war, make sure their training and entire military experience (word of mouth) tells them "if you stick your head up you will die, maybe not the first time but sooner or later", and then put them in any terrain on Earth and a good shot 200 meters away, well, those 10 guys are going to find cover like their lives depend on it. Which of of course it does. - CM does not simulate a firing range, but war. The snipers' targets can shoot back. What's more, in almost all cases the targets have the ability to get their friends to help. This means that a single rifleman in a conventional war, no matter how spiffy his training and ghillie suit, cannot, in most cases, just set up and knock off the bad guys like tenpins. The bad guys might very well retaliate. Pretty much by definition, if the shooter is a sniper, the bad guys have far more firepower than a single rifleman. Sure, it is possible to find accounts of single riflemen shooting up squads or even platoons during WW2. All I would say ask is, how many times did that probably happen, and how many times did a marksman get off a shot or two, and then the other side pours indirect and direct in the marksman's general direction? My reading of the history is, individual riflemen taking a shot attracted so much fire it was in almost all cases foolhardy to take that shot. CMN's pixeltruppen are almost certainly far braver than real humans, but still, if you are talking about a single rifleman he also wants to stay alive and he is not just motivated to shoot the enemy. He has to worry about giving away his position, making sure if he does open fire he won't waxed, overcome fear and indeed human instinct to try and kill other people, etc. So if you're talking a sniper and a buddy taking aim at a squad about 200 meters away, I would say that generally speaking 2-3 hits on the squad over 5 minutes is a reasonable outcome. The thing to keep in mind is, the main thing infantry did, almost all the time, was hide. On both sides. Specifically, hide at the expense of taking a chance and firing a at the enemy. Both sides had far too much capacity to put flying metal into the air for a guy with a rifle to have any other priority than that. The main point of infantry training was, and for that matter remains, convincing young men that it makes sense to risk death just to have a chance of harming another human being. True young human males are more willing than any other part of humanity to do just that, but unless you can convince them they can kill with impunity, or the sides in the war are really lopsided, even the great majority of young men once they become actual participants of a conventional war will quickly opt for survival not killing. This behavior pattern is of course reinforced by war itself, which, if conventional, kills off the risk-takers with extreme efficiency. So, if we return to the example of the CMN "sniper" shooting at a squad 200 meters away, it is of course possible to argue there might well have been marksmen who would have been able to shoot dead the members of that enemy squad pretty much as the members of that squad exposed themselves, in a couple of minutes or maybe even a minute. However, in WW2, a sniper willing to accept that level of personal risk would probably have lasted an hour, I would say pretty much in all cases a day in combat. For the purposes of CMN, individual soldiers like that do not exist. Either they are dead or personal or acquired experience demonstrated that kind of behavior to be not just moronic, but suicidal. There is of course a school of thought that snipers have a major influence on battlefields and therefore, it makes sense to commit substantial resources to training skilled snipers. As a general thing, I do not subscribe to that school. If it is pure infantry on infantry combat, and for whatever reason substantial automatic weapons or indirect fire is not possible, then ok, I can see how snipers would be useful. If for some non-combat reason - you don't want to trash buildings or there is a political restriction on using high explosives - then sure, a sniper can be useful. I call those isolated cases. The moment HE and automatic weapons fire are possible candidates for an engagement, snipers to my mind become very cost-ineffective. There is very little in a war that a sniper can do, that a machine gun or indirect fire cannot do better, and at lower cost in resources and with far more flexibility.

1. An authoritarian government with will to invest, albeit for its own purposes more than because of a deep-seated regard for making life easy for business, in infrastructure. Roads, ports, education, high-tech research which expands the industrial base - all those things are top-down decisions that the government decides on and enforces. This make China worth considering production in; there is not just cheap labor but a growing infrastructure that supports access to (or, if you wish, exploitation of) that labor. 2. A consumer base (population) so large, that even if only a small portion of the Chinese population decides to buy something, in aggregate that's big bucks. The advantages of investing in China over whatever other fill-in-the-blank developing world nation are pretty clear.

It's pretty lush and tropical around Batumi, also there are tons of beach resorts. Definitely palm trees are an option. Here's a pretty generic view: The Chechen mercenaries weren't there. If you landed US Marines in the Batumi/Poti area the opposition would be first Abkhazian militia, then Abkhaz army units (which actually are reasonably well-trained and -equipped) and then Russian Marines a/k/a Naval Infantry. I guess if you really pushed things there might even be a platoon or two of Russian spetznaz operating in the area, and they might very well be used for standard infantry tasks. The naval infantry units came from Sevastopol and so you are talking elements of 810th Naval Infantry Regiment (they've since become a brigade) and 382nd Independent Naval Infantry Battalion. The 382nd is supposed to be a particularly well-trained unit with a long history, they were the guys that crossed the Danube in inflatable boats during Budapest 1945. I know that during the war the Russians landed BRD infantry carriers and T-72-type tanks in Abkhazia, which went on to overrun west Georgia, Poti, etc. As to air it would depend on which side would up the ante more.

Most likely this graphic got delegated to some low pay person that didn't know the difference, wasn't supervised and was left to guess which Tripoli was meant, and then either the system ran out of time to vet the graphic. Heaven knows I've griped about CNN before but television is a perfect environment for a goof like this, no time, high pressure, and you have to keep plenty of inexperienced staff on board because about 99 per cent of the time they can do the job just fine. Almost certainly the journo lady had next to nothing to do with the graphic, there is a very high chance she never even saw it before it went on air and there is a still solid chance she didn't even know there was a graphic planned. The thing to remember about TV reporters is that the important person is not the reporter but the producer; he/she calls the shots and decides how the piece is put together, out of what tape. Sometimes the producer tells the broadcast central "How about you guys do a map graphic at this point?" But far more often the broadcast central communicates with the producer, finds out there is say 30 seconds of interesting footage, and if there is 45 second of voice-over an editor says "Let's get a map graphic on this." Technically there is a tiny chance that every one in that chain of command at CNN really thought the Tripoli in question was the Lebanese one. But odds are much higher that the editorial people farmed out the graphic to the graphics department or even just a subcontractor, and somewhere in there a person with little knowledge of the news even got told "Make a map showing where Tripoli is" The further you get from the editors the better the odds of an editorial error, and the less time you give the editors to check, the harder you make their job. Kind of strange the chain of command didn't catch the goof of course, but again, TV forces errors, it's a really unforgiving medium that way. If you want to be cynical, consider this - Is it possible they DID catch it but decided their viewers were too ignorant to know the difference? Or maybe the graphics people thought the same thing? Fun to think about. But my money is on the "Time crunch plus unsupervised subcontractor."

Where most of the fighting was, it wasn't that wooded. Around Gori it was farm fields and substantial rolling hills, some orchards and villages etc. Actually a lot of fighting was in the villages. Tskhinvali qualifies as a town and is just urban. Gori actually is sort of spread out. But in any of those places there's usually high ground where if you can get on top of it you can get pretty good LOS. Around Poti and on the coast that's pretty dern flat, but also fairly built up. Although there wasn't much actual fighting there. If you want to simulate the heliborne assault into Kodori Gorge, that's different, that is real mountains and fir forests and little tiny fields and big water cuts, and if it's not a road the vehicles probably can't go there. That's where the fighting was. If you want to simulate what could have been then the sky's the limit. Georgia has terrain from absolute Alpine super-rugged mountain not even infantry can cross it, to old-growth forest to bush to desert and just about everything inbetween. Georgia I think is supposed to have pretty much every climactic zone there is on earth except tundra. If you do do a campaign please do consider including the two Chechen security battalions that fought on the Russian side, they were the ones the Georgians were really scared of and are just the sort of troops wargamers love to have.

No, and if you want to see whether democracy has anything to do with attracting investment, you need look no further than China. True China's rulers use police tactics in part to "keep the lid on", but far more important is just the country's expanding economy. Since the government is authoritarian it can take a big cut of that expansion and divert it to things people can see and that legitimately make their lives better: improved roads, rail, purpose-built cities, better health facilities, impressive military (get the geek vote!), nice sidewalks (approved by young women yearning to wear nice shoes) and so on. It is undeniable the standard of living in China for most has improved steadily for decades. That buys stability even if the Comparty bosses are skimming and building palaces and financing multiple mistresses and so forth. The question is, can China sustain that growth, that expansion of the pie forever? I personally tend to doubt it. From maybe 1945 - 1970 the Americans were supposed to have a great economic model that guaranteed wealth and plenty for all. Now it's pretty clear that's history. The Japanese about 1975 - 1990 were supposed to be the world winners, remember when they were buying up Manhattan and making everything better and cheaper than the West? Then it turned out they had big production costs and actually their zaibatsu industrial cooperation with government wasn't brilliant planning, it was just good old corruption. Or maybe countries who have a good living because they sit on mineral wealth, you know, the Saudis and the Australians and people like that. Who ever heard of an industrial commodity whose price went up forever? What happens when the price, which has been going up for a long time, heads the other direction? In China already there is plenty evidence of overconstruction and waste and inefficient government - and that's just what we see, the average Chinese see an order of magnitude more, they live with it day in and day out. If European and US orders for consumer goods stay down and energy prices stay up, just how are China's leaders supposed to maintain continued economic expansion? Is China's police force, heck, is any army in the world, up to the prospect of a Chinese work force sick and tired of crappy wages, rising prices, and Communist party officials poncing about in Mercedes and Rolls Royces? It might last quite a while, but I really doubt forever.

Well no obviously, WIKI informs me he invented the horse-drawn heavy MG, I'm not nearly that clever. As to the class war angle, it's interesting. Makhno has gone down in history as an anarchist so rabid he couldn't get along with the Bolsheviks, a loose cannon whipping up the peasant rabble to take over property of slightly richer peasants. One of the few guys Lenin was justified in sending Cheka hit squads out to hunt him down (for all the good it did them - that's more or less the conventional wisdom on Makhno. Yet if you look at what was motivating him, and more importantly what made him such a political force during the Russian Civil War period, I would say it comes down to two thing: a sense of what is unfair and an ability to communicate that to others. The Makhno line was, basically, "There are a whole lot of you poor and the wealthy are screwing you and your children and if you let them they will continue forever. Don't stand for it! Nowhere is it written, only the rich may use force and violence to obtain and hold property. If the rich want to let your children die in destitution and will use the army and police to keep you in your place, then all bets are off." This is a very appealing line to pitch to any person thinking he is a "have not", and the more ossified the society, the better this song plays. The bottom line is that people are people no matter where they are on the socio-economic pyramid, and if too much wealth gets concentrated in the hands of too few people at the top, and there is no way for people in the middle or the bottom to leave their miserable state, then the whole pyramid risks collapse. Therefore, the argument goes, it behooves the "haves" to make sure the "have nots" have at least a basic standard of living and opportunity of raising themselves higher, because if they do not sooner or later some one like Makhno comes along and leads raids by masses of poor people to loot rich peoples' property just maybe kill the rich owners. You can't ignore the social contract indefinitely. Unless you have a hugely growing economy, trickle-down just isn't enough to keep a lid on the angry poor people. It is not a question of whether the rich will give up some of their wealth to the poor, but rather, whether they will give it up voluntarily or at the point of a gun. Certainly, this way of thinking really could put a damper on free enterprise and accumulation of wealth, which even Marx agreed was the basic engine that made economies stronger and so created the material necessary to improve every one's lives, not just the wealthy. North Korea is not exactly a giant magnet for foreign investment, and if you let the Makhnos of the world do whatever they please, unchecked, they will strip an economy like a horde of locusts. No question. But if you are a poor person with no work, sick kids suffering from malnutrition, relatives dead from tuberculosis, and then some rich people in nice clothes come and tell you you are going to have to sacrifice for the nation, you may very well disagree. And if some one like Makhno comes along and says, essentially, "This is nuts, there are tons of you and only a few of them, they live well and you terribly, you sacrifice and they don't. Why put up with it? What do you owe these people? Have they given YOU a fair shake?" That kind of argument can be very appealing, to a lot of people. And thus the glue holding society together fails, worker turns against manager, the red banner of revolution goes up, etc. etc. you get the point. A society perceived by most of its members as essentially unfair is inherently unstable, and if the house of cards goes the haves are the ones that will be found guilty. No matter what Adam Smith said.

Thanks, but it is not like the people in charge are pushing a particularly coherent ideology. It makes them pretty easy targets. Sometimes I think the people in charge just believe that whatever they say will have the force of fact, simply because they said it, no matter how goofy. I don't do that, all my friends don't do that. Why do they? I wonder: "Do these people tell their children the world is flat and expect their children to believe it? Since they don't, why do they keep saying such idiotic things to the general public that undermine the very authority they depend on to ensure a comfy life for themselves and their children?" The big mistake of the leader class was educating the masses. Sure it gave them easier to train factory workers but once your factory worker stops accepting what the person in charge says at face value, as the factory worker inevitably must once he is taught reading and given even the most superficial understanding of democratic theory, the person in charge can't just blather on forever and say whatever he pleases, and not risk getting caught out as contradictory dolt.