Bigduke6

Crowd psychology is a really interesting subject. There is a problem with the argument "there were plenty of college students and office workers and drunk yobs among the looters, therefore, the looting was not particularly linked to to class and social inequality in Britain." The problem is, people like this almost always are followers, not initiators. Speaking generally, they are quite law-abiding on their own, but when they find themselves in a situation where a substantial number of people around them are not obeying the laws, they decide it's okay for them to break the rules as well - usually to enrich themselves by looting. Which is pretty much basic mob psychology. The more people in the crowd that are breaking the rules, the braver (and, as the police would say, more dangerous) the crowd becomes. Add to this the second basic rule of mob psychology - the more the crowd outnumbers the law enforcers the braver (or, if you like, more inclined to commit crimes and/or defy authority) the crowd becomes - and the class aspect of this street violence becomes very clear. Every one (well almost) is human, and so every one to a greater or lesser extent resents not being allowed to do whatever he/she pleases. This includes obeying the law. If the law enforcers are perceived by a sub-section of the population to be vindictive/unfair/running dogs of the elite/racist goons/what-have-you, then that sub-section is going to be more inclined to take advantage of holes in law enforcement. But not every one is inclined to take advantage to the same degree, some are really angry, others are just opportunistic, some are inherently brave or happy to seek conflict (drunk young men are especially appropriate for this) but much more are basically cowards who have always wanted to break a rule or two but have been too scared to try it for fear of retaliation by authority. So, if the coppers are not around or if they are around but in small numbers in defensive formations, you are going to get, on average, a large number of people willing to take advantage of that a bit (the not so brave/angry ones) and grab something from a shop, and a smaller number of people willing to take advantage of that a lot (drunk or testosterone-wealthy males) who will confront the coppers and throw objects at them and if an individual law enforcer can be separated out of his defensive formation, beat him to a pulp. This is, unsurprisingly, why police numbers increase relative to crowd size, i.e., the bigger the crowd all things being equal a larger ratio of policemen are considered necessary to keep it under control. Not all people are inherently law-abiding, and they are willing to commit "crime" to differing degrees, but the more people there are together, the more violent and crime-prone the group gets. Shops and loot are an easy target if the crowd's overall willingness to obey law fails, and objects of authority - first and foremost a policeman - are the hard targets. Get enough people together with a critical mass of angry ones willing to start things off, and you will - unless the society itself is really inherently law-abiding - get plenty of followers to push the violence and law-breaking into a spiral. Thus, from a law enforcement (or, as the police would say, "keeping the peace") POV, the key question is how do you control the people with a low threshold for abiding the law, the ones who are likely to break the rules at the first opportunity? Keep them down in sufficient numbers, and the masses will never follow. If the society itself is relatively peaceful, accepting of authority and law-abiding, the task is relatively easy, you simply identify and prosecute the criminals. Japan is a terrific example, they had tsunamis and earthquakes and massive loss of life, yet for practical purposes no looting. Heck, I read yesterday the Japanese over the last six months or whatever it is turned in to authorities tens of millions of dollars of cash they found while digging through earthquake rubble. So it is safe to say that the Japanese generally consider authority legitimate and laws and their enforcement fair - which makes law enforcement there pretty damn easy compared to most places. But - and this is the key bit - if the society is perceived as unfair by enough people, or if authority is perceived as unfair by enough people, then law enforcement is more difficult. Sometimes, a whole lot more difficult. If your job is prevent or at least keep law-breaking under control, you have to worry about not just the habitual criminals who would break laws no matter what, but the opportunistic potential criminals who will break laws if it appears enforcement is lagging. Worse, if disgruntlement with authority is widespread enough, you have to worry about basically law-abiding people who, if among themselves will be honest and won't steal or destroy property, will certainly do just that if those acts seem to them to be sticking it to authority. If you as a law enforcer have those people going out of control then tacitly the police are out of business, they have lost control over society. Or more exactly, a critical mass of the population has abandoned the social assumptions that allow the police to keep the peace. The people in charge can keep that from happening lots of ways - by hiring more police, by emphasizing (or even inventing) outside threats, by marginalizing a small portion of the population, by appealing to the majority's sense of patriotism, by calling out the army, by spending money to make the angry people happier and so reduce the number of people willing to participate in a street mob, etc. etc. Appeals to the majority's sense of law and order and disassociation from the (usually poorer) minority are relatively cheap, that's just words after all. Increasingly law enforcement capacity is more expensive but often a popular choice as it increases authority's ability to control society not just in case of street violence, but all the time, and if people in authority have businesses that benefit from increased law enforcement spending then so much the better. Calling out the army is almost always effective but it carries a very serious risk for the decision-makers. If the soldiers refuse for whatever reason to use force against the crowd, then authority is out of options (short of calling in foreign troops I guess) and the mob will know it, and trust me the mob will make straight for the rulers' property, and indeed the decision-makers' own personal life and limb. As a general rule, the more often the army (or paramilitary police, which amount to the same thing) is called out, the more violent and deadly for the (former) decision-makers when and if the army's willingness to fire on the crowd fails. Social engineering so that most people are happy and law-abiding, and so unwilling to join law-breaking crowds, is quite possibly not even the most expensive option BUT it requires political commitment by the decision-makers to commit resources to the economic and social betterment of the less-well-off, which sounds fine by itself, but at the expense of committing resources to things that benefit the decision-makers, for instance their salaries or exclusive access for their children to become decision-makers themselves. Decision-makers (or as they are sometimes called in England, the "power elite") are people too and just as greedy and self-serving as poor people. They are not saints and if they have the ability to enrich themselves at the expense of others, and social rules don't say that's a bad idea, then they will do so and hang the general social discontent. There is also the "expanding pie" approach, which assumes that if every one can be made to become better off over time, then those who have less will still be satisfied, as the basic human desire is - and this is debatable, but it's an assumption of this approach - just to have one's personal life become better over time, rather than have social equality. The US tried this and it worked pretty well for about two centuries but I would say that based on the last 50 years or so this strategy appears to be becoming increasingly untenable. The Chinese are attempting it and you can bet dollars to dim sum the Communist Party bosses are really hoping it works out, as if it does not there are several not centuries but millenia of Chinese tradition of what comes next: The poor get really angry, revolt, and kill off the people in charge and replace them with another set of despots drawn from their own ranks. There is no proof the People's Republic has broken that cycle, and I think it is safe to say pretty much all 1.4 billion Chinese are aware of it. At a distance it looks to me like the British authority's approach to this street violence is to ignore the social aspect, declare it all simple crime, punish as many perpetrators as possible, increase police capacity, and hope that will keep a lid on things. Certainly, that's cheaper and better for the short term interests of the people in charge than attempting to reduce the number of people not in charge who have a grudge against authority. That's hard and expensive and is pretty much Socialism defined, so even if the decision-makers thought the funds were available it would not be politically unacceptable to them, it would after all directly undermine their position as the upper class. Maybe the "keep the lid on" approach will work, it has after all done fairly well so far. Then again, maybe it won't.

That was a well-written piece on Ms. Brooks. I pretty much agree, if she was editor when reporters were doing fishy journalism, then pretty much on this or any other planet she is going to wind up being responsible. Editors tell reporters what to do and editors give the reporters money to do it. Reporters like most people are naturally lazy and will only put out extra effort if some one pushes them, which is what editors are for. An editor not aware reporters are paying off police and hacking phone accounts to generate juicy news stories that will spike newspaper sales? Yeah right. The top editor's number one priority, the reason the top editor exists, is making the newspaper work meaning doing what it takes so people read it, so the pub makes money not loses it. If Ms. Wade was not aware her reporters and subordinate editors were coming up with these salacious articles by illicit means, never mind egging them on, then what in the world was there left for her to do? Sit in her office and exchange e-mails about the weather with Rupert? Judging from her recent comments (some of which were recorded secretly during a staff meeting just before the News shut down) she seems to consider herself a strong leader at the helm of a publication sailing the angry waters etc. etc., don't blame me the naval metaphor was hers. If I have her type right, in her mind her denials of complicity are a calculated insult, they say: I can deny everything and because I am so much more clever than you I can do that and there will be no repercussions. I strongly suspect this attitude comes from being a Rupert protege, for reasons best known to him she was his Golden Girl. It appears she may have confused the personal support of Rupert Murdoch, with a sound knowledge of the pitfalls of journalism on her own part. One of the most basic rules is that if you print enough lies and cater to the mob long enough, you will get in trouble somehow. She seems either not to have known this or to have thought the rule did not apply to her. Whether she took that route because she decided fact-based responsible journalism was old hat and cynically reasoned out a better way, or whether she was just a relatively ignorant woman placed in a position of far too much responsibility and she was just doing whatever felt good without really thinking about it, is now immaterial. For the record, my guess is she is clever and cynical rather than ignorant. But even if she was just a stupid woman in a job requiring extremely high intelligence, by the time the criminal investigations are over she may well realize being Rupert Murdoch's hit woman was, for her personally, not a Good Thing. This largely because once Fleet Street gets finished flaying Rebekah Brooks' reputation, it will become very difficult for her to attend the best parties and visit the right clubs and hob nob with minor royals and so on. Sure she will remain wealthy, but it's much less fun to be rich in Britain if the snobs cold-shoulder you. Which they most certainly will. Their standards are pretty low, after all they accepted her in the first place, but now the aristos and the Oxbridge people won't be seen in public with Ms. Brooks, probably forever. She will always be the woman the killed the News of the Day while doing that Australian Rupert Murdoch's bidding, which was to phone tap messages of dead murder victims and pay off police for information and get caught at it. And that will hurt. She had her chance to break into the elite, and she has lost it. The more interesting question, I think, is what about the US? Rupert's fingerprints are all over Fox news, which by many standards is far more odious, and in some ways dangerous, than News of the Day. See above note about lazy reporters. They also are generally cowards and won't go after a dangerous opponent, even if they have the goods on him, unless that opponent is wounded or even better already under attack. Will the media feeding frenzy against Rupert cross the Atlantic? Demonstrating Fox engages in irresponsible journalism is about as simple a reporter task, as demonstrating Jesus or Mohammed attracted followers. As nasty stuff about Rupert's practices in Britain come out, as surely they will, will that tar stick to Fox? It is a very dicey situation for them, national elections coming up, country in a long-term crisis, and every one's looking for scapegoats. What if Fox becomes, in the public mind, not a voice of the right but a perceived reason so much is wrong? Maybe America really is going to heck, in part, because a guy like Murdoch built a channel like Fox. You wouldn't have to prove it, just make it enough of a common assumption to convince people not to watch Fox. Likewise, and probably even worse, what about Wall Street Journal? They too are vulnerable, they're the cheerleaders for "Rich stockbrokers = Healthy America". Make no mistake, their journalism is world-class, but what if a thought along the lines of "Hey, WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdoch, how much can the newspaper's reports be worth with a guy like that running it?" got loose among the WSJ's readers? Can WSJ survive being on the side of the rich people when a depression is in progress AND being owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch to boot? Somehow I think Rupert's US holdings will survive just fine. But then I thought News of the World and tabloid press like it was unassailable in Britain, and at least to some extent that's clearly not so.

Story from the Cold War days: It was basic training and rifle week had begun, we were going to get handed out our M-16s and then trained to shoot them. Like many things the US Army does with new recruits, the procedure was set up so there could be only one result and the technique was catering to the least common denominator, or more simply the inherent stupidity of recruits. Who are after all mostly poorly educated American males in their early 20s, who for one reason or another have decide it's worth their while to give 2-3 years of their life to the military - this is not a group of people from whom one can reasonably expect reliably intelligent behavior. What they did was march us into an arms room, line us up alphabetically, and once you got to the sergeant you had to sound off, say your social security number, sign a piece of paper with your official legible signature (they didn't allow chicken scratches, if your signature was sloppy before in the army it had to be neat) and the sergeant gives you a clearly well-used but fully functional M-16A1. None of this surprised me and it even bothered me very little. Me, I was ready to get my rifle. My Dad was not a hunter except rarely when invited by friends, but one way or another even though we were in the suburbs I wound up shooting rifles from time to time. I think the first time I fired a .22 I was about six, just plinking at targets under very close supervision. I can still remember the first time I fired a 30-30 Winchester, I had to put the rifle over my shoulder and my Dad used his knee on the butt to take up the recoil. I was about 14-15 before I was allowed out with a rifle on my own. So by the time the Army got me I already had a pretty solid grounding in the basics of marksmanship. I knew you never, ever, under any circumstances, point a rifle at a person. Period, end of story, and if you do it by accident you get yelled at and if are distracted by how cool the rifle is and forget, you can get smacked (not hard) upside the head, and this from my Dad who otherwise practically never, his entire life, raised a hand against me. What the Army did was, after us recruits got the M-16s, the drill sergeants just left us alone with the rifles for about half an hour. It sounded like a room full of crickets, with all the clicking of triggers and bolt-cocking and handle-pulling, my first surprise was how much my fellow recruits could have fun just playing with their rifles. I knew rifles are as far away from a toy as anything on this planet. But the real shock was how much these fellow recruits of mine - who mostly basically a mix of white high school grads from small towns out for adventure plus inner city minorities needing employment or in the military because a judge or a gang made civilian life unsafe - had fun pointing their M-16s at each other and pulling the trigger. "Bang you're dead, hah hah!", stuff like that. They'd all grown up in the states and seen the movies and knew rifles kill people, and if handed a bag full of bayonets they might have postured a bit but they never would have pretended to stab each other. But this was clearly for most of them the first time they had every gotten their hands on a real working rifle, and these after all were young men. The instinct most young men have making weapons cool was too strong for them to resist. I was a peaceful recruit and our training platoon despite its gang-bangers was pretty calm and non-violent, but I went off on one guy, a buddy, who dry-fired me. He was confused, he honestly didn't know what was so wrong about pointing a rifle at another person and pulling the trigger. Even as I yelled at him I knew it wasn't really fair, I knew he just didn't know why what he was doing was so stupid. But I also knew - or more exactly had been taught - doing that was so bad, you don't worry about being nice when it comes to handling a rifle the wrong way. It is for killing and killing is serious. The drill sergeants came back after about a half hour and I think marched us around a and started us on the Army's fetish for training us, Cold Warriors preparing to fight the Soviets or the North Koreans or some one, manual of arms movements invented by Frederick the Great in about the 1740s so his army could deliver more efficient musket volleys. That was a proper waste of time (well, the drill sergeants would have said it taught us discipline) and I was irritated when my fellow recruits sort of looked blank when I told them about Frederick the Great and von Steuban and their influence on the US infantry's training methods. But over the course of the week the drill sergeants hammered into every one's heads the rules about using a rifle and being drill sergeants they had ways of making it stick. And yes, they kind of laid off on me some when they saw I was a competent shot. In retrospect though, the thing that impressed me the most was the decision to just leave us with the rifles for 30 minutes so the recruits could play with them, flip selector switches and try and move the sight posts and push the magazine release and dry fire until they got sick of it. Although I didn't realize it at the time, some one in TRADOC was a really smart psychologist, he allowed us (well not me) recruits to get weapons curiosity out of their system. It took about 15-20 minutes, after a while every one got bored with playing with the rifles and shifted to smoking and joking. And before some one decides to post this on an NRA site or similar, I would say that most people cannot be reliably trusted with firearms and if it were up to me I would make the bearing of arms legal only for those who had spent a year or more with some one who already knew how. As the 2nd amendment is written now I would repeal it. In my opinion, maturity and citizenship is not enough to give a person the right to use a firearm. If I have to choose, I would deprive people of that right to protect society from the threat of people untrained in weapons, having access to them.

Well, there are orchards and there are orchards. Is this the low-tech "walk in and pick it" type of orchard for a family's sustenance farming? If yes then expect low branches so owners have to use ladders at minimum. That's branches going close to the ground and excellent concealment as long as there are leaves around. Especially if said family is short-handed or lazy, in which case then you also have grass and even underbrush between the trees. Is this a medium-tech orchard where the fruit is picked and then sent and sold somewhere? Then you might get pruning to keep the branches off the ground and in general minimal large branches and lots of minor ones, more clearing between the trees, proper paths to get a tractor or horse cart in there, and so on. Or is this a high tech orchard where fruit is the business and they bring in whatever machines they can to assist in picking and spraying and so on? But for sure, the tech level in 1944 is going to be lower than today, and in general there was more sustenance farming then than now. As to forests, it's all about underbrush and in turn the age of the forest and whether or not any one is bothering to clear out the underbrush. I suspect in France in 1944, that was not a big priority, forest maintenance is one of those things that gets neglected in Europe when there is a war. And if trees won't grow very much in a year or two of war, that kind of time can convert a nice neat well-tended forest into a real mess, just because no one is going in there cleaning out the new growth.

Well then you agree with me. Tactical skill was not a Soviet organizational priority. They knew about the problem and complained about it mightily but didn't do much about it. As to whether or not Belarus was a logical place in the mind of OKW for a major 1944 Summer Soviet offensive, consider. Belarus' terrain, really, is far worse than west Ukraine's for big armored operations. The swamps and crappy roads and itty bitty bridges really are there. This is not the same thing as impossible. It does mean, however, that big armored operations are impossible. But it does mean that, if you are OKW and you're thinking about which way the Soviets will come, and you're aware the Soviets use lots of armor in their main attacks, that is a strike against Belarus as a suitable location for a Soviet offensive. Beyond that, west Ukraine contains much more potential manpower than Belarus. Just as important, unlike in Belarus where the soil is poor and much of it is covered by pine forest, you can grow food in substantial quantity in western Ukraine. As to the operational layout, If I remember right three - i.e. half - of the total six Tank Armies fielded by the Soviet Union were in central Ukraine at the outset of Bagration. Meanwhile, Spring pushes by the Red Army in Baltic region and Romania saw pretty much complete failure. Under the circumstances, OKW's conclusion Ukraine not Belarus would be the focus of the Soviet summer offensive seems fairly reasonable to me. I agree with you that the terrain did not have much of an effect on the actual AFV losses. Indeed, it is possible to argue that Zhukov's forces as they attacked through Belarus bled armor more slowly than Konev's as they moved through west Ukraine and Poland. However, it seems to me the way terrain in Belarus constricts and slows down mechanized operations certainly helped convince OKH to place its own panzer reserves elsewhere.

I have read that there was a prevailing opinion in Berlin in Spring 1944 that Belarus just wasn't a probable Soviet target for a summer offensive. The Germans saw Ukraine as the most likely target, as it was the last heavily-populated bit of the Soviet Union still under German control, plus that sector had been relatively dormant since April. An alternative Soviet summer offensive target, in the German view, was Moldova and Romania; this because the ground was extremely suitable to massed armor, plus if successful it would knock Romania out of the war. On the minus side, the Soviets had attempted a substantial push in April-May and gotten beaten up badly. Likewise, the Baltic Front was seen as an improbable target as repeated Soviet attempts to push into Latvia had gotten chopped up, most recently in May. A big factor in the German defensive success, both sides knew, was that the Baltic region is wooded and wet, and that helps the defense. The terrain in Belarus was (and is) worse than in the Baltic region. Indeed, it probably was the worst tank terrain on the entire Eastern Front (OK, maybe not Finland, but you get the idea) as of June 1944. Belarus is swampy, wooded, and lightly populated. The road network is anything but dense and what roads there are are poor. Villages are scattered, usually destitute, and what fields there are are - generally speaking again - small. There is lots and lots of pine forest which tanks won't go through at all, and forest paths which tanks will churn into uselessness in short order. The low ground often is soggy and cut repeatedly with rivers and streams. The bridges most of them are not built to carry a heavy load, which of course includes tanks. This I think goes a long way towards explaining why 1st Belorussian Front outnumbered AGC so heavily in armor. In the mind of the German senior command, Belarus was not a place where any reasonable army would conduct a major armored assault. I am not going to argue that Zhukov's forces were most of them highly skilled in the western tactical sense, however, I would say the Belarusian terrain had an effect on how many tanks the Soviets lost. I would guess in aggregate dozens lost in bogs and river crossings. Far more important, the limited ground where tanks could be fielded meant the Germans had a better chance of organizing effective AT defenses. Equally important, short LOS played against the Soviet artillery advantage. I think it's also worth remembering the Soviet priority never was winning the war via small unit tactical skill. They considered it useful if you had it but not the critical thing. What they did consider critical was mass (and so economy of force elsewhere) and pace. From the Soviet perspective, the price paid in men and machines for the result Bagration gave - liberation of White Russia, invasion of Poland, and destruction of Armee Gruppe Center - was worth it. The campaign erased something like 300,000 soldiers and maybe 500 tanks and SP guns from the German army list - over the course of two months. The Soviet focus, their top priority, never was preserving friendly forces. For them, small unit tactics and the resources and time needed to make them work, were not nearly so important as destruction of the enemy and the unhinging of the operational situation over the shortest time possible, and hang the material cost. Soldiers are material and expendable as well, to the Soviet way of thinking. By that standard - which certainly was not one shared by the German or the Anglo-Saxon armies - Bagration was one of the most successful operations the Soviets ever conducted.

Well the Soviet answer to that is, if you throw men's lives into a fight and get a result, the lives aren't thrown away. And protecting life is no more important than any other resource.

Why are you picking on Konev? It's true by the casualty counts Zhukov wasn't quite the butcher that the historians have made him out to be, but Konev was a pretty skilled commander. The Lvov-Sandomirz campaign is pretty much a classic armored operation: deception, operational maneuver groups, river crossings on the fly, etc. etc. And to keep to topic, I bet there aren't many people in the world who were more responsible for removing Panther tanks from the German inventory, than Konev. 1st Ukrainian Front overran a lot of territory and, as noted above, when the Wehrmacht retreated it left expensive panzers along the route.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Gavin complains that no US infantryman wants to die, well, that makes perfect sense to me. Gavin was a professional army officer whose career was made because he turned out to be one of the best combat leaders the country ever produced. He was a leader and a driver, and probably one of the toughest soldiers ever to put on the US uniform. This makes him very different from GI Joe, whose career and subsequent life would not be a whit better, if his company happened to be particularly hard-charging. Indeed, it made excellent sense to hang back and let the artillery do the job. Why get yourself killed or maimed just so your chain of command can look good? For the guys in the ranks, the point was survival. He had neither the tools nor the tactical system to give him any reason to believe his personal aggressiveness would - as Gavin argued - end the war any faster. Maybe this might help explain the German tendency towards over-engineered weapons clearly superior to the opposition. With those weapons in the German troops' hands, it was easier to convince the German troops in made some sense going forward into combat; after all they have "the best weapons possible." That plus the Goettedaemmerung ruthlessness of the German society of the day, and maybe that goes a towards explaining why Germans seemed to fight harder than the Allies. But for Joe and Tommy, what did they have to fight for? Sure to defend Democracy, but exposure to combat set pretty much all of them straight on how the system worked. The low-rankers go out into the open, and whatever fires on them, gets blasted with artillery. The average infantryman's role wasn't nearly so much to kill as it was to attract fire. And guys like Gavin could dress it up and talk about the Spirit of the Infantry all they wanted, it didn't change anything. In the Anglo-Saxon armies, if you were in the infantry the best you could hope for was surviving, and the best way to do that was lay low and attract as little fire as possible, as much as you could. And never, ever volunteer.

Yeah, that's it. I mean, they were to the point where the Allies' own internal capacity set the limits of their military operations. The Germans were just immaterial as whatever they put wherever they put it, the Allies could overwhelm it at will. I don't want to take away from terrain and geography as factors. In the initial stages of NW Europe when the Allies were in bocage and operating a supply line across the English Channel, and their front was narrow and restricted. Meanwhile the while the Soviets (generally speaking) had a line from the Baltic to the Adriatic to decide, where they wanted to concentrate force - AND they had a good year of practice organizing offensive operations that pretty much always worked.

It's one of those "where do you draw the line?" deals. If the time period is Summer 1943, do we look at Prokhorovka? At the Battle of Kursk? At Citadel and the Rumyiantsev together? Yes the Germans destroyed a great deal of Soviet personnel and equipment during the Battle of Kursk. But if a necessary result of that fighting was a German retreat across the Dniepr crossings with all the German losses that entailed, how do we factor that in to our "who-was-more-effective" equation? If the Germans abandoned pretty much all their Tigers in the retreat to the Dniepr, then no the Soviets aren't painting kills on the turrets but nonetheless those Tigers were certainly no longer of use to the Germans. So is the Tiger still a great tank? How valid is "tactical skill" as a military value if the price of that skill is equipping your soldiers with such expensive kit, it harms your war effort? Doesn't it follow that saying "The German panzers were tactically superior" is another way of saying "The German army fixation on tactics helped lose them the war, and a great case study is all those abandoned Tiger tanks inbetween Kursk and the Dniepr."? What about those subsequent battles where the Germans got swamped by Red armor? Was that overwhelming Red tank numbers, a case of quantity defeating quality? Or was it: "The Germans were paying the price of building big expensive heavy hard-to-maintain Tiger tanks that you pretty much inevitably have to abandon if your army has to retreat fast." There is no question that the Germans retained tactical skill where they concentrated well-trained forces in for tactically-rational tasks. But as the war wore on, the German capacity to do that on a substantial scale fell. I think it is worth bearing in mind when we try and make comparisons of tactical performance. Speaking generally, using the Eastern Front, and in my opinion, the progression went roughly like this: 1941 - Germans are tactically competent for defensive and offensive operations from perhaps across the entire Eastern front in 1941. Even an technically overwhelming edge in tank quality does the Soviets no good. 1942 Germans are tactically competent for defensive operations for the great bulk of the front but with a few outliers, but offensively competent only a large sector of the front, call it an army group. The Soviets can only defend, anywhere, by feeding troops into the meatgrinder. Offensive operations are generally disastrous, and the only time they manage a success they either have a major weather edge or months of planning. 1943 Germans are tactically competent for defensive operations across the front generally but weakening skill forces the use of fire brigades. Unless the terrain is particularly favorable the German infantry cannot by itself stand unassisted against a Soviet offensive. The Germans are capable of offensive operations generally by a single army or two, and specifically only the panzerkorps prepped to make the attack. The days of a sustained army group offensive over large distances are gone. The Soviets meanwhile are capable of deliberate defensive in depth backed up by multiple army-level counter-offensives. Their offensives can still be clumsy, but they can also be ruthlessly pressed, they Soviet by this point have learned how to break the German front and push an advantage. The Soviets display excellent tactical knowledge on German technique and are willing to spend lives to compensate for superior German equipment and, to a lesser extent probably, training. By the end of the year the Soviets conduct their first Front-level offensive which the Germans fail to stop, instead the Soviets call a halt themselves because of logistics. 1944 - German infantry is tactically incapable (which is not exactly incompetent but close) to stand defensively against a standard Soviet attack. Further, mobile unit fire brigades of division or rare korps size can only slow down the Red attack. The German army across the Eastern Front is capable of, in terms of effective force, roughly a Korps- or at best 2-Korps sized attack. This is nice and it includes Tiger II and Panthers, but it is pretty much meaningless across a line of contact the size of the East Front. Also, the Soviets are quite capable of shooting up the Tigers. The rest of the German force, generally speaking, is incapable of useful offensive action. Not enough men, equipment, training, morale- you pick it they don't have it. The Soviets for their part are capable of multiple-front offensives, and routinely maneuver to handle German counterattacks. For a full-dress Front offensive they throw partisans, reconnaissance, propaganda, and the rail network of two continents into the buildup; in some cases the Red planning makes a mockery of the superiority of German staff work. When the Soviets break into the German operational depths, for weeks at a time the Soviet mobile units move at a pace pretty much just as the Germans did during Blitzkrieg. Soviet equipment practically nowhere is decisively inferior to the Germans, and at times it is superior. 1945 - The Germans are defeated and with the exception of major defensive positions like Budapest or Berlin or a precious very few concentrations of panzers, the Germans are on the defensive and when hit by the Soviets they crumble. The main limiting factors on Soviet offensive action are logistics and politics. What the German army intends to do about the Red Army is no longer relevant. I would say we could probably see a similar progression in NW Europe, with the qualification that since the Soviets spent more time fighting the Germans they had more time to learn ways to defeat the Germans. It is probably fair to say that it took the Allies in NW Europe something like 6-8 months to get to a point where they could dictate battle conditions to the Germans, while the Soviets needed about two-and-a-half years. How much Soviet fighting taking the "edge" of the German war machine helped the Americans and Commonwealth forces in NW Europe, is another question. Certainly, even after the first half of 1944, given the right terrain or concentration of units, the Germans could give a good account of themselves on a small scale. They had a fair tactical doctrine and it helps to have the German army officer and NCO corps running your military. My point is, unless we are to compare only the best German units with the average Allied units, or narrow our source of test cases to tactical situations particularly suiting German strong points, it is hard (for me anyway) to come to the conclusion that the Germans had a powerful tactical edge over their opponents post- Summer 1944. A simple way to put it is, it is sloppy research to spend a lot of time looking at the panzer troops, the bocage defense actions, and the SS, and draw general conclusions from that sample. They were a minority not representative of the German army as a whole. Another way to put it is, if we want to simulate the real German army summer-1944 and onwards, if we are honest, it should be greens and conscripts, and almost always without much artillery or an armor. That was what the Allies fought against most of the time.

I'll dispute that. By 1944 the Soviet routinely converted roughly a 2-1 overall strategic advantage in force, to repeated operational victories. And not little victories either: for instance the Bagration offensive basically wiped out Army Group Center, inflicted half a million Axis casualties, threw the Germans back about 250 kilometers - and all this over the course of roughly 45 days. It was the worst military disaster suffered by German arms, in Germany's entire history. During the Minsk offensive, which was a piece of the Bagration operation, the Red Army penetrated 100 - 150 kilometers into the German rear area, and two full German armies were encircled and for practical purposes wiped out. This German performance is not, in my opinion, evidence of German man for man military unmatched by its Soviet opponents. I would say it is rather evidence of a German army leadership that failed to understand that clinging to the Frederickian rule that winning the battles wins the war was not only outdated but dangerous for the safety of the German nation, plus German army soldiers realizing that their leaders had no solution but to place German soldiers in the path of the Red Army and, generally speaking, hope for the best. There was never a recognition by the German leadership, even after the war, that the Soviets were brilliant at shuffling and concentrating forces, and of developing and exploiting a breakthrough ruthlessly. Over the entire Cold War, all the German generals kept saying: Well, it was overwhelming numbers that defeated it. Then the Wall comes down, the Soviet archives open up, and it turns out the Stavka was hands down better than OKH at obtaining useful military effect with the resources at hand. This was simply not the case by Summer-Autumn 1944 on the East Front. Probably not in NW Europe either. Certainly, the German schnell divisions retained some skill. But for every panzer, ss motorized, or fallschirmjaeger division, how many German infantry divisions were there? Security divsions? Luftwaffe divisions? SS cavalry divisions good for little but committing atrocities against civilians? Overall, the tactical quality of German army units was already worsening by Spring 43 and by summer 44 - I'm speaking generally here - the German leadership considered only a small percentage of its army capable of sustained offensive action. Further, they knew full well their soldiers were incapable of standing for any length of time against a sustained Red Army offensive. The lacked the training, the will, the equipment - you name it and the Reds were by summer '44 on an overall basis superior. As was demonstrated repeatedly when a Soviet offensive hit a prepared German defensive line, which the Germans manned with their infantry. Usually it failed in less than a day, sometimes it was a matter of hours. Certainly, if one chooses to think the German army was just panzer and ss units, and compares those units to the Red army as a whole, one could construe things so that yes the Germans maintained a tactical edge right until the end of the war. I would not call that a reasonable assessment of the actual case, however. Further, if one reads the Soviet histories, it turns out that for pretty much every German account of ueber-panzers destroying dozens of T-34s, there is a Soviet account of heroic Red soldiers achieving amazing results against superior German numbers and equipment. Well, strangely enough, we can check that. As it happens, the German army had plenty of opportunity to fight defensively, and only defensively, against the Red Army; from roughly July 1943 - May 1945 it is possible to say the German army ONLY fought defensively. OK, there were corps-sized counterattacks every once in a while and more rarely Hitler would order something like the Balaton offensive, but aside from that the Wehrmacht and the SS were stepping backwards and only backwards for close to two years. Over that time period, the Red Army not only liberated its own territory, it overran the Balkans, all of East Europe, knocked Finland out of the war, made Romania turn coat and leveled the German capital. This result was achieved as the Germans concentrated what resources they had against the Soviets, which they - rightly - saw as the major threat. I see little evidence of superior German tactical skill in all this, nor do I see much evidence of the Germans performing better when they stood on the defensive. What I see is a German army that was outclassed. OK, given extremely good defensive terrain (hedgegrows, a city) they could hold up Allied forces for a while, and as long as that particular little tactical defensive battle was going on in those very narrow circumstances they would "win" for a while. But sooner or later the battle would go fluid and that would be it, of all those defensively capable panzers most would break down or run out of gas, the German infantry units would come apart at the seams, and the minor nation soldiers conscripted to fight for the Germans would look for the first opportunity to surrender.

Well I think that article is just awful, and I am an Al Jazeera fan. There are plenty of errors in the case of things that I know, which makes me suspect there are errors viz. the things I don't know. Let's take it point by point. Here's Arnold Gunderson: This is misleading. Exposed to what? The reactor containment vessels in the worst case, i.e. not all the reactors at Fukushima, were as I understand it cracked. True this meant cooling water, which is certainly radioactive got out. This is not the same as a hydrogen/steam explosion blowing the roof off of a reactor and exposing the core itself to the sky, and with burning reactor materials pouring radioactive smoke and dust through the hole in the roof. That is what happened at Chernobyl. The fact is, at Fukushima, if Chernobyl is the yardstick, containment worked. The containment shells mostly held and where they didn't the engineers succeeded in keeping a lid on the nuclear reaction. Who says it's a greater problem, besides this guy? It sure doesn't seem that way to me. If the main pollution from Fukushima is radioactive sea water, then there is not better place in this solar system if not this arm of the galaxy to dilute that radioactive sea water, than the Pacific Ocean. Which is of course the largest body of sea water on earth whose volume compared to what Fukushima is astronomically larger, by probably more orders of magnitude than us humans can grasp. It is not nice for the local sushi business, but frankly radioactive water can be disposed of in the Pacific just fine, I think. This statement avoids describing the critical bits, the scale of the alleged melt through and the relative amount of water needed to keep the "blob" from continuing reaction. History - again Chernobyl - shows us that when a reactor core does go out of control and melts down, the accelerating atomic chain reaction does not keep speeding up to infinity, this largely because the nuclear fuel is not weapons grade. At Chernobyl, when the fuel stopped getting cooled it got really damn hot, melted through and destroyed the floor of the reactor, really did sort of become a blob - and then sort of stopped flowing when it hit water, dirt and sand. Basically the atomic reaction got damped by hitting earth; I assume this is a function of the fuel itself degrading as it melted earth and mixed with it etc. At Fukushima nobody probably knows for sure, but in the worst off reactor it seems the heat of the atomic reaction cracked the steel containment vessel - which did not exist at Chernobyl at all - meaning that indeed when water gets pumped onto the hot materials, the water will get irradiated and drain through the cracks to some extent, although full drainage is unlikely as the dirt and rock under the Fukushima reactors is not perfectly permeable. Sure there is fuel inside some of the Fukushima reactors that is still hot and reacting, but again, for the most part the bad stuff that follows from that is staying inside the containment vessels. Radioactive water that you can dump into the Pacific is a whole lot nicer, than dust and debris entering the fresh water table and recycling into dairy products. Finally, "incredibly radioactive" is a useless statement, misleading, and by most standards just wrong. I would call something "incredibly radioactive" if it induced a lethal dose in a human in say several minutes. I would call something "dangerously radioactive" if it would induce a dose likely to sicken a human over say several months. With the exception of some staff inside the plants, this level of danger was never threatened by Fukushima. Lots of problems with this statement. WTF is a "hot spot"? Lethal radiation over hours? Days? Possible sickness induced over a normal lifetime? Simply detectable? You can find hot areas from Chernobyl 100 - 150 km. away even today, depending of course on what you define as hot. (You can also find patches that are perfectly clean, even inside the Zone, and if you look hard you can find people living there.) The normal definition is "higher than normal background radiation." Another thing to remember is, most of these radioactive materials have reasonable half-lives. Sure the plutonium in the core will emit radioactivity for bazillions of years, but most of these other isotopes emit for days or weeks, fewer months and years. And as they stop emitting, the "hot" area cools. Therefore, finding a bunch of hot areas around Fukushima is not the same thing as long-term uninhabitability. Radioactive materials are unstable, they deteriorate, the rate they do it is known. Simply saying "hot spots around Fukushima" is not evidence of permanent or even long-term damage. It could be, if a chunk of fuel got tossed somewhere by an explosion - something of which we have no evidence of course - then sure where that fuel is would be a hot spot for 10s of thousands of years. But what Fukushima has created, basically, is sea water and steam with radioactive materials possessing half lives in the days to decades range. On the meltdowns, I say "so what?" A meltdown is the fuel rods getting so hot they melt. That happened in three reactors, but evidence suggests the containment vessels, er, mostly contained the melted fuel rods. We certainly don't have any evidence of a hot nuclear blob melting through rock and into the Earth's crust with nothing to stop it. On the 960 square km. uninhabitable, well, maybe that's right now but in a couple of months or years, if Japanese radiation acts like other radiation, that area is going to shrink as various isotopes reach the ends of their half-lives. The Chernobyl Zone in Ukraine is about 2,600 square km., and in terms of polluted territory in Belarus the area is roughly the same. Saying Fukushima polluted more territory than Chernobyl, worse than Chernobyl, is just wrong, there is no justification for a statement like that. As I understand it one of the bigger problems the Japanese are grappling with is not the fuel rods in the reactor but the spent fuel rods outside of the reactor, which are typically dumped in adjacent pools - these are the cooling ponds - to wind down their radioactivity enough so they can be handled and disposed of. Some of these spent fuel rods were in pools that lost their water and that created more heat and uncontrolled radioactivity release. The solution is pumping in more water; this the Japanese are doing. As to MD Janette Sherman Dr MV Ramana and the spike in infant mortality in NW cities, my main question is who declared today "Don't use your brain day" and didn't tell me? It's ludicrous, we're supposed to believe tiny bits of radiation flew across the Pacific (or swam, or hitched rides on attack submarines) and killed children in San Francisco? Over 10 weeks? How is it that all the Japanese children seem to be surviving, at least, we haven't heard about a spike in their infant mortality and you'd figure the Japanese might be looking. I really have trouble deciding what is more appalling, the idiotic logic that asserts somehow Fukushima radiation is harming US children, or the reporter/source assumption there are people out there stupid enough even to take a piece of lunacy like that seriously. Again: What is "hot"? How bad is "hot"? Radiation detection equipment can be very sensitive, and it is easy to detect a tiny bit more radiation than normal. Is that "hot"? After all, if you stand out in front of the Chernobyl station, you will be exposed to something like 2-3 times "normal safe" radiation. Were you to stand there several years, it might affect your health. Or maybe not, people differ. You can obtain the same radiation dose, for practical purposes, lying on a beach near the Equator. The sun after all is a nuclear explosion, it creates radiation, some of it gets through the atmosphere, etc. etc. The bottom line here is, detectable radiation higher than normal does not equal deadly, it does not even necessarily equal dangerous. A statement like "clearly there are people on the West coast that were affected" is misleading. How much? Why clearly? Is "people" hundreds, thousands, or maybe just two? Affected significantly? Or just enough so you can say they were exposed to something and it's impossible to tell what the exposure did, if anything? And why, oh why in the world should we take the word of a skin specialist and a medical doctor on the potential effects of air and seaborne radiation from a nuclear power accident? Just because the went to school for a long time and now get paid a lot of money to take care of sick people, doesn't make them smart about radiation. What, a person gets a license to treat acme and eczema, and somehow she magically can pontificate intelligently on what a deteriorating atomic fuel rod might, via steam or irradiated sea water, release into the environment? For the critical reader, actually, this is perhaps the most damning bit of the whole article. If the best the reporter could manage for "experts" to back up a Fukushima scare story, was a retired nuclear power engineer, a skin specialist, and a general medical practicioner, that is very close to a guarantee no proper expert on nuclear power accidents would touch such a loony POV as pushed by this article with a 10-foot pole. Not with a 20-foot Serb, even. I could go on, but you get the idea. One last point: the article says there is no way to clean all this up. Wrong. Radiactive decontamination is not complicated, it is just time-consuming and expensive. At Chernobyl it was basically removing the topsoil, sandblasting the buildings, and picking up whatever radioactive debris got thrown there by the explosions. This is not to say a cleanup is easy or preferable to making nuclear reactors safe in the first place. But the bottom line with Fukushima is, at the end of the day the Japanese controlled it. Not perfectly, but the serious radiation was contained, and the great bulk of the the unavoidable radiation is getting dumped into the Pacific. Not a great outcome, but in any case the actual one.

Steve, I've bolded the part of your comments I disagree with. I think that anecdotal evidence can be useful in statistical analysis. Primarily, as a reality check if you build a statistical model of a historical event, like for instance WW2 armored combat. Certainly anecdotal evidence can't be used as raw data on which to build a statistical model, in the first place because humans under stress perceive things in really variable ways, and in the second place because the anecdotal data available can be pretty far from a fair sampling of the actual reality. For instance, anecdotal information is if nothing else skewed towards the experience of survivors. However, and not every one agrees with this, in my opinion there is such a thing as the weight of anecdotal evidence. If there are enough anecdotes saying the same thing, and if a responsible check of the evidence seems to bear out that the anecdotes are consistent among themselves and with other historical evidence, then that is the yardstick by which one determines historical "fact". This becomes more important when one considers that although modeling AP to armor engagements is a science that can be reduced down to mathematical models, modeling them accurately for a computer is not as easy. This is because, in the real deal, the engagements were not AT cannon crews firing at defenders holding up plates of armor in front of themselves inside a test lab. Weather, tube motion, shell-to-shell quality, barrel wear, maintenance of both gun and shell, etc. etc. all could influence an individual shell's performance. Maintenance, age, junk hung on the outside, relative proximity to a welding seam, batch-to-batch quality, previous AP shell strikes, movement, etc. etc. could influence the armor's performance. These variables are, quality aside and as far as I know, not modeled in the game. This does not make the simulation inaccurate. Far from it. But it does make reasonable checking the simulation's modeling of AP shell to armor engagements against the historical record. Indeed, the historical record provides useful information, and sometimes it allows us to jettison anecdotes. I is easy to reject historical anecdotal evidence that most panzers encountered by Allied troops were Tigers, and most AT weapons fired at them were 88s. Why? Because we have more solid data that clearly contradicts that anecdotal evidence, to wit the German military historical record; we know how many Tigers were produced and where they were fielded and in what numbers. Given that, dismissing the Allied "truism" that every panzer was a Tiger and every cannon an 88, in Normandy, is easy. The game accurately reflects that with its - in my opinion - brilliant rarity point system. Whoever thought of that is one smart guy. That said, it seems there is some evidence that CMBN models the Allied 75mm AP shell as unable to penetrate the side or rear of a Tiger I from extremely close range. I'm personally not 100 per cent positive this is the case, but for the moment let's assume it is. Let's further assume - and I think this is an excellent assumption - that CMBN models the 75mm AP shell engaging the Tiger I's 82mm armor extremely well, i.e., probably better than any other computer simulation anywhere, by anybody. Does this mean we can safely ignore strong anecdotal evidence, that the only way Sherman crews could deal with a Tiger, is by getting close and hitting it from the flank and rear? I would say "no". This set of tactics was after all a tactical doctrine across the entire Allied force, and it was based on a historical understanding of what the Sherman's 75mm could and could not do against a Tiger. The Allied force, after all, had an advantage over CMBN, they had real captured Tigers and real 75mm AP they could test against them. Their conclusion seems to have been "Get close, hit the Tiger in the flank or rear." Are we to dismiss that in favor of CMBN modeling of that same engagement, which - again, assuming 75mm AP performance does not overcome Tiger I's 82mm armor - produces a very different doctrine: An Allied player should never engage a Tiger with Shermans, period, at any range? I think I have an idea of the Pandora's Box that gets opened, if one starts going into the game engine and mucking around with its AP shell-to-armor mechanics, for the sake of producing a tactical outcome similar to the predicted result in the real deal. Maybe it's just too hard to do, I just don't know. But one thing seems clear to me: If you have enough anecdotes, and they are borne out by other evidence, that can indeed be a useful check on a statistical model. Although if the check shows a problem - and to repeat myself, I'm aware I may well be going on here about a straw man - it's probably not going to be so easy to do something about the problem. I'm sure that if Tiger sides and rears provide to be tougher in the game than in the real deal, it will become clear enough quickly enough.

I've been playing a quick battle where MkIV are slugging it out with Shermans at 1,000 - 1,500 meters, the German shells are not nearly successfully penetrating all the time, and pretty much always it's taken several hits to take out the Shermans. None of this one-hit Ronco lighter stuff. The Shermans of course can't do jack and pretty much can't even score a hit, and if you give the Germans a Tiger or a Panther then the Sherman is a lot less survivable. But we knew that already. But all in all, I agree, the Sherman seems to take a lot more punishment in CM2. It's not ueber but you don't have to treat it like an eggshell.

Guess Oddball was wrong. As for me, I think that really isn't reasonable performance. I would expect that as a general thing if a Sherman got 4-5 hits in on the backside of a Tiger at point blank range, it should most of the time be able to harm a Tiger. But maybe that was a weird event, we'd have to see repeats of that to declare Tiger armor over-strong or the 75mm under-powered. Broken may be onto something. Maybe there is some way to program "likelihood of a critical hit goes up" when you get to really close ranges, the idea being if the firing crew had a reasonable chance to aim specifically it would, rather then just aiming center mass at point blank range or at 2,000 meters, which is what the game does. Not really an issue when the gun overmatches the armor significantly, but pretty important when right on the edge of AP performance for a weapon.

Hear hear. The game is amazingly accurate overall, but the CMSF "HE shells stuffed with nerve gas" are out there in force CMBN.

Not telling some one of your complicity in war crimes, is not the same thing as not being complicit in war crimes. Malmedy is an interesting subject in several ways, but one of them is that these "shoot SS prisoners" orders are prosecutable offenses with the death penalty as the maximum sentence. We know this because the Allies prosecuted and executed German and Japanese soldiers post-war for issuing exactly the same orders. Something to bear in mind if one happens to come across a lawyer or a moralist or indeed a soldier serving or retired talking about Sanctity of Law or the Blindness of Justice or Strict Observation of Rules of Engagement. That may be so sometimes, but in a war being the victor is way more important than being right. The Soviets had an interesting approach. Pretty much from the war's get-go the Red Army assumed that surrendering to SS units was pointless because they just shot you, either right off or eventually, and therefore, there was no point in trying to take SS prisoner. As for capturing them the SS usually didn't want to and, here's I think another interesting bit, if some SS guy did surrender then he probably deserved (in the Soviet mindset anyway) to die anyway simply for being a member of the SS. It is worth remembering that SS auxiliaries were responsible for rounding up whatever Soviet civilians that would get shipped off to the concentration camps, and SS police and cavalry units led the German anti-partisan campaign, which was a very nasty war even by the standards of the Eastern Front. Yes there are plenty of pictures of Soviet POWs being treated decently by Totenkopf (although considering it was Nazi reporters or SS soldiers taking the pictures you have to wonder how reliable they are) but in any case, when the POWs got sent rearward they wound up in the hands of other Germans also in SS uniforms who were, frequently, not so nice. If nothing else at the filtration point where the Communists and Jews go this way and the volunteers to serve in HIWI units go that way. Maybe it wasn't fair grounds for a blanket judgement of the entire SS, but for the Soviets things like that left a really bad impression. The result was a general Soviet assumption that if a guy was in an SS uniform he was probably directly or indirectly responsible for something criminal, if not right that second then probably sometime in the past, and even if somehow he's been clean right up to this moment there's no way he can stay decent as long as he's in the SS. Sooner or later he's going to wind up being part of murdering Soviet citizens. Not to say that was actually the case, I don't want to start up the "were all SS members baby killers?" thread again. Just pointing out that on the East Front, from start to finish, that pretty much was the Soviet assumption. Western shock at Malmedy is sort of a mystery from the Soviet POV, the standard post-Soviet reaction is "Well what did you expect? They're SS!" Point being of course the SS and indeed probably the Wehrmacht too had different standards for fighting different armies, and of course the Soviets had something to do with the way things went on the East Front. As to the movie, well, it may suck but it does get a basic point across to the general American viewing public which every day exercises its constitutional right to be willfully ignorant about history and then use popular entertainment to draw lessons from it. The lesson of the movie is "The German offensive at the Battle of the Bulge failed because some US units held out against great odds, and then the Germans ran out of gas." Which is, when you stop and think about it, pretty much really what happened. Oh, and one more thing, Henry Fonda makes a terrific movie hero.

Well if we look at the moon shots, there were several drivers that made them happen: - The space race was on and it was very easy for the government to sell "we can't let the Commies beat us" to the general public. To a great extent, even questioning the Apollo missions in a general sense was considered unpatriotic. - The US was in a period of perhaps unique economic strength, and probably more important, most Americans were getting a cut of the good times. This was an era where most (ok, not minorities but you get my point) citizens could buy a house and support a family on a working man's salary. A single salary at that. This made people optimistic and so inclined to support government programs needing public optimism to support them, and that is Apollo in a nutshell. - There were (when the "go" decision was made on the program) no major wars in progress, citizens weren't getting shot at by insurgents who refused to accept democracy, etc. So the military wasn't a major drain on the public till, which of course freed up cash for space. - The demographics of the nation I would argue really skewed the public mindset towards space. The seniors had seen the country go from a small town farming mindset to a global superpower, the middle-aged had fought and won WW2, and the youth were just numerous. It may not be PC but I suspect the fact women and minorities at the time really weren't a big part of the public decision-making process had a lot to do with public support to space. The logic is white American males are more likely to think space exploration is exciting than most other sectors of the society. I think it is safe to say that the country has changed since then, and therefore, so has the nation's willingness to support space exploration. My point is, my opinion, the decision to commit resources to space exploration has very little to do with actual benefit to society, and mostly to do with the touchy-feely of how much society likes space flight, which in turn depends on how much society feels like their own lives are going ok. Nationalism in terms of "we can't let them beat us" also is a factor. But the bottom line is public optimism, the perception that things are good enough on Earth that resources are available for a push out into space. There is always the chance that the citizens of America (or possibly the Europeans or maybe even the Europeans and the Americans together in a single project) might get their societies wealthy enough, and the wealth spread widely enough, that public opinion would back a major space program. Peace meaning no wars absorbing resources and killing citizens would help for no matter how often politicians say "it's sustainable" most citizens will think that if there is a war or two on things are probably not well enough off on Earth for a big space effort to make sense. Frankly, I don't see that happening in the next several decades. Wealth is relatively concentrated and it will take democracy time to reverse that, and the wealthy will fight it tooth and nail. There is an alternative, which of course are the command economies. Russian space skill is at least comparable and in several ways superior to US skill. They're not screwing around, just this week their Mars sustainability test (people living in a pretend module isolated from everything else) passed the one year mark. The only thing preventing the Russians from a major space effort right now is that the leaders, and this is a group of about 100 men, tops, think resources are best spent strengthening the state and state-controlled industries. If a solid majority of those men concludes (a) sufficient resources are now available for a big space program or ( space for whatever reason is now a national priority of the first order, then the Russians will go to Mars. Those 100 men don't have to worry about public opinion much as for the most part they dictate it. China of course is not exactly a command economy, but like the Russians for the most part if the leaders decide a direction for the nation, it happens without much discussion. They also have the advantage of oodles of cash and for what it's worth strong public support, unsurprisingly there are plenty of Chinese that think their country is on the right track, even if Internet is censored and the Tibetans repressed. The main barrier to Chinese space flight, as I understand it, is technology, they only started getting serious about space flight in they 1990s and they need practice. Being Chinese they are not sitting around doing nothing, they've orbited the moon twice and last I heard they are supposed to land a probe in 2013. Perhaps once that happens, that will convince the Kremlin it had better shove some of that oil and gas money into space exploration, and then with the Chinese and Russians setting the pace maybe the Americans and the European leaders will be able to use that as a lever to force their populations to sacrifice so as not to fall behind. There is of course the international option which assumes every one gets rational and decides going to Mars or beyond is too much for one nation so every one does a bit. The international space station is a good starting point for how to make that happen. But making it happen takes will in all the participant nations, at the same time. Right now I'd put my money on the Russians, but it's not a great bet, the Chinese have more potential capacity.

Question of scale my boy. Just because a few NKVD units have wide authority to define and shoot deserters, doesn't mean entire divisions of machine guns were lined up behind the rifle divisions. From what I have read the big fear among the troops was getting leave to rear for some reason and having the NKVD inspect your note from your commander, if the Chekist tears up the note you lose all right to be where you are, and he can shoot you on the spot for that. I also understand that notes from the commander permitting trips to the rear was a relatively recent development, as in the Tsarist army there weren't enough literate military police to enforce a pass system, and no I am not making that up. Russian rifle units from what I can tell advanced in the open against heavy machine gun fire in the early war for several reasons, first of all because that's how they had been trained, second because their officers knew no better or even if they did they didn't feel like risking their own necks trying new tactics, because of poor intelligence, and because their society prepared them "better" for accepting the risk of walking into machine gun fire backed with efficient indirect. You go a little down the historical road, and the stories about the MG units behind the lines waiting to gun down the cowardly pretty much disappear. Right about the same time the Red Army decided that no, there could be a party official with each unit but the commander was the commander and the commissar couldn't second-guess him. Which of course was a step towards the Reds figuring out that if you organize things right along a Front the width of a continent, you can convert 2-1 overall odds in your favor to 10 - 1 in the sectors you want to hit, and the Germans will never realize it was concentration of force not overwhelming numbers that did it. But I digress. On the interesting subject of machine guns, I wonder if part of the issue here is too much return fire from the platoon coming back at the MG? Perhaps there are modifiers for "fire from different directions at me" and "multiple shooters aiming at me", and these are having too much influence on the MG's effectiveness. In other words, maybe the return fire is overly suppressive? I agree that a main issue here is simply the infantry is not falling apart at about 20 - 40 per cent casualties, you would expect morale to fail at that point in the real deal but in the game it's not particularly a stopper. But the thing is, we all remember those WW2 Rand studies right, where we found out that artillery inflicts about 80 per cent of the casualties and something like 3 out of ever 4 infantrymen never fires his weapon? What about the game? How many infantrymen are firing THEIR weapons? Is it "too many"? If it is all of them or even most of them, perhaps that's too much to expect for a generic platoon facing an MMG in open terrain. If there are 30 regular infantrymen, average leadership, does it really make sense that pretty much all of them are banging away at the machine gun from time to time? Should we be asking, where are the guys that should be cowering/suddenly afflicted by the runs/criminally insubordinate/inspired by a looting opportunity in the opposite direction the moment they realized the platoon is supposed to advance across that open ground and an MMG is covering it? I am not criticizing the game, really, as it tries to model the fighting that takes place. The thing is, war lots of times is soldiers avoiding fighting, and the more dangerous the war the more it happens. It's sort of a chicken/egg issue here, because if the platoon started going to bits at say 15 per cent casualties then you'd get the same result. But if we are talking about modeling the advance of an infantry platoon over relatively open ground, and are trying to decide what is "realistic", then in a 30 man platoon with average leadership you are going to get shirkers, and it might well include NCOs and the officers. Real deal, that would reduce return fire available to suppress the MMG. No idea how to model it.

You sure about that pardner?

Well there you go. A Soviet ship captain ( clever enough to have a crew competent enough to detect the incoming vampires and tell him in time ( a crew and ship where, at the critical moment, everything is working and all hands are sober and at their posts © practiced enough with his super-secret Trojan Horse ship - and we all know how stingy the Soviets were about putting motor hours on the clock - so he can jink said vessel so that the missiles don't hit in a critical place and (d) actually willing to depart from his orders, which had to be "drive to Iceland by the fastest most direct route possible and stop for nothing" - just so he can preserve his command. Like Soviet commanders had the option of preserving their command rather than following attack orders. That's Capitalism! You think the Reds could have cut the guts out of the Fascist Beast in its lair, if every piddling peasant above the rank of sergeant started getting ideas about how valuable his command was relative to the mission? Sheesh! Who wants to fight Soviets like that? *Big Roll Eyes* Kirk would SO kick Ryan's butt. Kirk really hated paper pushers.

The thing I love about Clancy, is the perfection. It's just hilarious. What I mean is, everything works. To spec. All the time. And even when it doesn't work, the overall system has taken care of it, you know, maybe one of the Exocets gets decoyed but no worries, the bad guys knew how that could happen so the missiles are coming in salvos. All the technicians know their equipment. The women are gorgeous and well-dressed. The bureaucrats are dedicated professionals never touched by even a whiff of careerism. Not a one of the soldiers, ever, thinks that maybe laying low and waiting out the firefight and not standing up in all that flying metal would be a better move than jumping up and doing what he is supposed to do. And pretty much all of the time, when he DOES stand up all the flying metal takes a detour around him. Call it the CPHFF - Clancy Personal Heroic Force Field. And of course there is the whole separate category of language. These Clancy novel characters zoom all over the planet, they get into the most obscure and Godforsaken regions, and always just happen to speak the local barbaric tongue or even better it turns out that Bakhtiar the Yak Herder, who just happened to see the US ueber-secret reconnaissance aircraft crash-land on the high Tibetan plateau, is a big fan of MASH reruns and so just happens to speak excellent colloquial English. Or the fact that, over several decades of story arcs spanning the entire Cold War, with the Soviets as the main baddies, never, ever, anywhere, under any circumstances, is a ethnic Russian in a position of responsibility drunk on the job. This of course is incredible. As is, over the same period, the Chinese never once stop whatever military operation or espionage or international subterfuge they are engaged in for the sake of Clancy's plot, to have a proper lunch with fresh rice and at least two entrees. Over a billion Chinese on planet Earth, and Clancy manages to populate his novels with the total 200-300 ethnic Han worldwide that are not food-obsessed. In Clancy novels, no one is incompetent, ever. No corruption, no laziness, no one makes doofus move out of ignorance. Intelligence is accurate and the analysts are experts in their field, and what's more they never happen to be on vacation when the plot needs them. Red October was fun, but Clancy lost me with Red Storm Rising. At one point this Air Force weatherman stationed in Iceland turns into this Rambo guerrilla type because the Soviet marines invade and rape this Icelandic blond woman he falls in love with and has Tender Sex with a few days later. Then this guy (who just happens to run marathons for fun) becomes a Partisan Behind Red lines (true assisted by a single SAS trooper with a broken ankle but since he's SAS it doesn't slow him down) wreaking havoc on the Kamov helicopters and Gaz trucks the Commies have landed. The whole point is that he's a mild-mannered rear echelon fellow but since the Reds offended the Woman He Loves, he too becomes a Deadly Cold Warrior. By the time I got finished I was having trouble believing Clancy was serious. Did he really believe people would pay to read idiocy like that? Although, judging by the size of Clancy's bank account, clearly he was right. Wasn't it PT Barnum or WC Fields or some one like that that said, "No one ever went broke overestimating the general level of stupidity of the American public."?

Wildman, I think I have to disagree. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an attempt by the Soviet Union to place Soviet nuclear missile capacity in a position to deliver a debilitating first strike on the US, and that attempt was backed up by excellent intelligence, which spotted the missiles in Cuba. There was absolutely no question that the Soviets had the technology and skill to put the weapons into operation, not least because five years earlier they had beaten the US in the race to space. As it happened the missiles, called R-12s, were as I understand it (Wiki) the first intermediate range intercontinental ballistic missiles built by any one. Take note of their range: about 2,000 km. Further, six years previous they invaded Hungary killing tens of thousands and the West did jack. Seven years previously the detonated not an atomic bomb but their first hydrogen bomb. And almost one year exactly previous to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets detonated what wound up being the biggest nuclear device in history, 50 megatons. What's more, in the two years previous to the Cuban crisis the Americans deployed their own missiles to Turkey, giving the Soviets grounds to call their deployment to Cuba a response not a provocation, and further giving them an incentive to do it, as if they didn't then they spot the Americans a strategic advantage, i.e. a first strike capacity to some extent. Finally, the people making the decisions on the US side were sure enough of their intelligence to present it directly to the voters. It is worth pointing out, history and the Soviets themselves confirmed the US intelligence was pretty much dead on. So if the point to the game is guess the will and capacity of the potential adversary, I think it's reasonable to say that during the Cuban Missile Crisis the US faced as top a league an opponent as there was out there. Nothing more dangerous, anywhere, and that opponent had plenty of incentive to turn capacity into real danger for the US. That is what is called a salient threat. Which rightfully was taken very seriously. Now let's compare Cuban Missile apples with Iranian/Chavez oranges. Who knows, maybe history is repeating itself? OK, for starters the North Koreans sent some 1970s tech Soviet submarine missiles to the Iranians. Maybe the missiles were updated to North Korean technology - meaning they now have the roughly the same range and and accuracy as the Soviet missiles placed in Cuba nearly a half-century previously. That is theoretical of course, as this North Korean missile has flown exactly twice and once it failed. So right at the get go, we are not exactly talking top-of-the-line technology built into this potential threat we are comparing to the Cuban missile crisis. The next leap of faith is that the Iranians, would turn these missiles over to the Venezuelans. Sure they could decide to do it, but even if they could sneak the missiles into Venezuela consider, the Iranians have the Americans with air bases on either side of them. The Iraqis hate the Iranians and are next door, and during the last war with the Iraqis the main weapon of air bombardment was the SSM. Also next door are the Pakistanis who have missiles and are nuclear-armed, as are the Israelis. That to me is a pretty strong argument for Iran to accumulate SSM in its own territory, not send them to catch rays on the Caribbean. As it happens, interestingly enough, the Iranians actually are pretty advanced missile-wise. As I understand it (Wiki again) they caught up with the Chinese about 15 years ago and they've been making their own medium-range missiles and testing them for a while. So, unless the Koreans figured out some secret way to turn kimchee into a super rocket fuel, and further decided not to apply their advanced missile technologies to North Korean missiles launched in Korea, and only to North Korean missiles exported to Iran, odds are very good the Iranians have nothing to gain technologically from the North Koreans. An good indicator, as they say in the intell biz, is the nationality of North Korea's foreign technicians assisting with missile shots - the Iranians. This to me undermines the argument that if the North Koreans ship the Iranians missiles, suddenly the Iranians make the world SSM first team. If they had wanted to, the Iranians could have shipped the Cubans or the Venezuelans or the Haitians or the Bermudans or Berkley University or whomever in the Western Hempisphere willing to pick a fight with the US SSM missiles capable of hitting the US the missiles a good 5, maybe 10 years ago. The Iranians have had intermediate range SSM for a while. Since the Iranians have not, I deduce the delivery of 17 outdated North Korean launch vehicles to Iranian control is not a good logical basis for an assumption suddenly the Iranians will want to ship missiles to Venezuela. OK, so for the next leap of faith we have to believe that the Iranians and the Venezuelans start digging concrete-lined holes somewhere next to the Gulf of Maricabo, or more exactly, people who have a vested interest in a high level of perceived military threat to the US, tell us that these holes are being dug. Chavez hasn't talked about them, the NYT hasn't published the photos after the Pentagon hands them over over lunch, the UN and all the arms proliferation NGOs are just silent. Kind of strange if there really was something afoot. But even worse, all we have is some "Western security sources" telling us the holes are there, that they are silos, and that since the head of the Iranian Air Force drinks mojitas with Chavez that proves capacity and intent to base Iranian intermediate range missiles in Venezuela. What the Soviets were doing in Cuba, that was a real, salient threat. It could have touched off WW3. I would use a different term to describe what I think of the suggestion the Venezuelan goof ball Hugo Chavez might really be on track to command his very own strategic missile wing installed and doubtless operated by Islamic Republic of Iran technicians, assisted by nefarious North Korean nuclear engineers - and all of this depending on the world of "unnamed Western intelligence sources." "Preposterous" and "horse hockey" and "Boy they really are hurting for ways to justify more defense spending aren't they?" and "Either those "Western security sources" are monumental idiots, or they must think we are" are some of the descriptives that spring to mind. So anyway, I beg to differ. I would say the Cuban Missile Crisis was not really comparable with the missiles-to-Chavez scenario.