Hi Sheppard,
MKSheppard wrote:
The problem is, that while it's generally accepted that a draftee army will be of lesser overall quality than a all volunteer force; a draft army can be very high quality -- 75% or so of the effectiveness of a volunteer force -- it all depends on how you treat your draftees --
Of course it can be very high quality? Why limit it to 75%? Do regular volunteer forces often find themselves in the type of full blown war situations that can long be sustained without a draft? My point is not that volunteers need be of any lesser quality than the regular forces the essentially fill out but how long and complex a process it is under the best of circumstances.
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if you treat them as expendabul ammunition to be expended with a minimum of training, then overall their quality will not be good -- look at the Red Army of 1942 as it struggled to replace it's colossal losses in 1941 with new men while also having to fight off the German 1942 Summer Offensive.
The red army did not send any untrained formations into combat against the Germans; the first formations that were raised after the start of the war went into action in December after the 6 months of training which means that even the Russians understood that anything less was a utter waste. Yes and as the Russian efforts in the summer of 1942 proved 6 months training was not enough with the men they received and the methods they employed.
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By 1943, the situation for the Soviets wasn't as dire as it was in 1941-42, so they were able to spend more time on training the men, and additionally, by this time, the junior officers who had survived 1941-1942 were now moving into lower grade command positions, and the middle grade command positions which had been decimated by the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s were finally being filled with experienced officers.
1942 was a disaster for the Red army and what made it bearable was mostly the destruction of the 6th army; again largely Hitler's miscalculation rather than evidence of Russian brilliance.
But yes in the main nothing breeds success quite like survival in battle so what were not destroyed in 1941 were forming the basis for the very limited successes of 1942.
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Comrade Stas has pointed out that in many cases of the higher grade command positions, the people who were purged were replaced with their subordinates; so the loss at the higher level wasn't *that* bad, e.g. a General of the Army was purged and replaced with a Colonel General, who at least had some staff courses and experience.
Yes it's entirely debatable how great the effect was considering the time gap ( purges between 1937-39; 1 in 5 reinstated at outbreak of war) and the fact that they had the brutal experiment against Finland to learn from.
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However, at the middle grade level; a whole military generation of leaders was wiped out and their junior subordinates promoted up in grade.
To put things in context, while someone fresh out of Officer Candidate School (90 day wonder) can minimally command a platoon, and in extreme situations, a severely depleted company; they can't jump right up to battalion/brigade command (Major/Colonel) without several years of experience at both the company level, and then a few more years as a battalion/brigade staff officer.
No major disagreements here either beside perhaps the obvious fact that neither the French, British, Poles, Greeks, Yugoslav's or Dutch had any purges and were swiped out of the way in similar style with a absolute minimum of casualties. Basically i think the purges have very little to do with the defeat of the Red army and that it would have fared little or no better with the old officers.
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In Ringo's Posleenverse, we've had five years of time to work all this out; so if we inducted for example 1 million Second Lieutenants in 2000, they'd be Captains by 2004; and would have a year of time to learn how to handle a Company before the landings.
The same would occur for other grades in the Army -- e.g. Captains would be Majors or LT Colonels by the time Landing occured.
And that's just a very basic non sequitur. You insist that it must follow that time and theory leads to a predictable conclusion when such has not been borne out in fact. Could you consider the possibility ( sans mess up due to Re-juv) that a call up on a unheard of scale were just badly conducted , as it is claimed it was here, or that the doctrine taught had little relevance to the battles to be fought against the Posleen? Why was world war one fought in Napoleonic style for so long? This just looks like a appeal to American exceptionalism and i could live with that if this wasn't the Posleen universe where things even go badly for the USA.....
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The problem in Vietnam was that we were not allowed to fight the war the way the Service Chiefs wanted to -- instead of launching them at the source of the infestation -- North Vietnam, we simply puttered around South Vietnam for nearly a decade -- taking a hill, and then abandoning it to the enemy the next day.
The American army did it's best within it's political constraints ( some people actually learnt from Korea and realised that the Chinese would enter the war again if North Vietnam were invaded) and it failed to accomplish it's goal of convincing the Vietnamese citizens of South Vietnam that it were acting in their best interest. Once the American people can make peace with the fact that the American war machine did in fact do it's best short of kicking of Korea round two ( which it similar lost) and could not further expand the draft, without being forced to use those soldiers to police the streets of America preventing really massive scale social unrest, a understanding of American non-exceptionalism might in fact eventually follow.
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A good reference is Second Front NOW! - 1943 by Walter Scott Dunn, Jr.
Basically, during 1942, the US developed a method to make shake and bake divisions.
Basically, by that point it had been training for 26 (!) months in preparation for combat.
Some points before the argument....
1: Germany were rearming for a land war for much of the 30's and the American navy that defeated Japan so utterly were laid down in the 30's, not 40's and it's officer core expanded in preparation; the actions of FDR ( well the ruling circle) were expected to lead to war with Japan and events in Europe didn't escape their attention even if they were utterly unsuccessful in convincing the American public. Germany still failed despite all of it to mobilize sufficiently well trained manpower to defeat a nation with a larger industrial and population base.
2: Germany started preparing it's citizenry for a large scale land war the soonest giving them a considerable advantage in terms of expectations of the numbers of officers they would need by 1941-42 when they expected to make their move against the SU. No power other than the SU were similarly focused and for the SU they were focused on the mid 40's hence Stalin's disbelief of all evidence that Germany were going to strike so soon; as far as my reading goes Stalin wasn't ready, knew it, and were quite correct in his estimations as to the consequences of engaging in a war with Germany so soon. Germany still failed to deploy sufficient numbers of trained officers to create new formations and replace losses.
When one considers the initial combat record of these 'shaked and baked' divisions you can discern their roots quite clearly so again i see this as proof that in the posleen verse they would lose and lose badly in maneuver combat with the type of enemy and weapons described; A universe can be crazy and yet internally consistent.
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Additionally, while, the US division was training, training some more, and training some more for various combat roles, the German division was busy doing coastal guard duties, such as constructing coastal gun batteries, trenches, anti-landing areas, instead of training for combat.
If you are willing to find me sources citing the volume of training and it's comparative effectiveness ( results achieved under actual fire) for both forces i would discuss it but i don't have that kind of time to go into that at the moment. What i will say is that these German divisions fared very well in defense ( as well in the Russian countryside as in built up France) and very well in offense when they on rare later occasions well supported by artillery/aircraft. The Americans had that support and even with it the German infantry were rarely overcome or matched by Commonwealth ( or American troops) when it came down to infantry combat.
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You can also see how the US division only gets cadres pulled from it at the beginning, the German division is constantly raided for men; forcing the division to have to start over again to train brand new recruits from scratch.
And yet when American formations with two-three years of training ( Normandy, Island hoping in the pacific, North Africa, Italy ) met German formations with 6 months of training the Germans held their ground against well supported infantry. In fact their record against poorly supported Japanese were in no way other than what i would call 'the norm' for other commonwealth troops. Again i think the casualty count shows that the Germans were quite human so what they did right had everything to do with doctrine and training methodologies and nothing to do with genetics; German exceptionalism stems from the same cultural root as American exceptionalism and i have no time for it.
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So while for example, the 9th Panzer Division may get the A++ quality personnel to recover after Kursk during the spring of 1944; the 695th Infantry Division gets the D and F grade personnel. In contrast, the average U.S. division gets B- personnel.
And you know what they say about standards; one man's princess? Let us not get into subjective nonsense such as the rating systems used by various armed forces.
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Sure; it's lower quality than a crack German division like the Leibstandardte Adolf Hitler, but light years ahead of the average German Division.
LSSAH was 'special' by virtue of different things than simple training but how these shake and bake divisions were light years ahead of line German divisions ( even those created in 1943) i wouldn't hazard a guess at. We can agree that they should have been but yes, time spent training has little relation to actual fighting competence.
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The big problem was that the terrain in Normandy favored the defender, you could set up ambuscades and such with a single anti-tank gun that could knock out a platoon of tanks in no time,
Done my fair share of simulation gaming ( involving hexes and the like) and that's entirely accurate. Defense is certainly more of a science ( yields to analysis, etc) than attack but blaming the lack of performance on the terrain is just a way of obscuring the fact that the Germans managed to traverse the same environment in a fraction of the time suffering a fraction of the casualties against a opponent that were more closely matched in means and support than were the Americans/Commonwealth and Germany in 1944.
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and then hold up an entire battalion or whatnot for an entire day, because there's no way to manouver around the anti-tank gun, because the way around the gun position is filled by several other hedgerow complexes, each of which has to be reduced individually.
Yes, if your strategy hinges on a wide frontal approach ( because you are too conservative to risk penetrating armored strikes, or not good enough to manage them; learning from Russian mistakes perhaps?) then you must reduce individual positions in this meat grinder fashion based on massive fire support for lack of soldiers who are competently fighting in defense of their not-far-away country.
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I believe later in the series, it's revealed that much of the early failure of the U.S. forces and other national armies in the initial posleen invasion, was because of Darheel shapeshifters who infiltrated the militaries/political systems and messed with them, like changing orders to put noted incompetents in charge of major units, messing with transfer orders, etc etc.
Maybe there were thousands of people just like you who screamed and moaned about how it's impossible that corps sized American formations can essentially be destroyed and then indulged in some hand waving to make it all go away? But that does seem to be in the imperial tradition of taking credit for conquest and blaming defeat on 'foreign and domestic enemies'.
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Of course, the SS are somehow magically immune to this :rolleyes:
Right but i am not the one who thinks LSSAH is a 'crack division' and what i do credit them with has little to do with anything other than doctrine, training ( and it was as best i can make out no different than Heer training) and the occasional dollop of fanaticism( called heroism/commitment in the west). I can understand the motivation for involving mythology built up around the 'superior' SS divisions ( they were not) but that does seem to me at least entirely political and a appeal to the type of sentimentality that you can today find in both Germany and Russia. That's what happens when you tell young people organizations/things are 'evil' , like moths to a flame.
Either way i think the author either want to stir up the nest ( he managed) or has bought in the same mythology that leads you to consider SS divisions 'different' or 'better'.
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Please note i'm lowering the percentage we can draft because our societies require a lot more technical knowhow to keep running than they did in WWII.
And people have a lot more comparative technical know how than the draftees of 1941..... The problem is not in terms of shear complexity of any one task but the range of complex tasks that needs so many varied forms of specialized training as to create a nightmare scenario for anyone contemplating drafting people who have serious misgivings about being there and thus interest in learning what they should. It's a simplification to say that you needed less professionally trained men per gun toting person in world war II but i am still going to say it as essentially that is what it comes down when you try to coordinate the complexity that is modern war with less than willing people. In a fighting the combined arms wars ( they were always that but there is so much more to combine these days) of today the effectiveness of forces can just as effectively evaporate when they are not properly coordinated as at Cannae and the same widely disproportionate casualties is possible.
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Considering we did mobilize 17.8~ million people to fight in WWII...
But the big problem with the entire thing was the whole rejuv process.
In any army, there is a tendency to "forget" things from the last war -- because the people who fought it and learned the hard lessons are dead or too old to join up.
And the rest refuse to learn overly much from the vast volumes of statistics and paperwork that were produced by the ton in ODS/S and former wars. Thing is there is not that much to compare the war against either the Germans,Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqi;s to something described like the Posleen so teaching people to fight humans when they wont be is doctrinal failure of epic proportions the fact of which only became evident a year ( after Diess) before the actual invasion of Earth took place. Things were already bad before that but changing emphasis to accommodate new ideas is going to make it worse.
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But if you can take a 85 year old guy who landed at Omaha Beach and give him the body of a 21 year old; he's not going to put up with half the bullshit he sees; and he will suggest ways to fix errors that he knows happens from combat experience. Same thing would happen with the Korean War and Vietnam War vets.
That is certainly true but again the fought human beings and there are not that many of them to go around; he quibs a few times ( paraphrasing) as to how it's 'impossible to make a bucket of spit stick together by including a few bits and pieces of iron'. Either way his treatment of these rejuvs ( as if every person who fought in a past war held a gun or did much good with it) are indulgent so he thinks highly of veterans and have them rallying draftees left right and center. On the last point one can draw incorrect conclusions from past 'experience' ( if they don't kill you outright or mentally of physically maim you for life) so getting people from different era's to fight your wars for you ( command stays the same thought) is probably not the best thing you can do to start with.
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"Son, you're telling me -- someone who landed at Omaha Beach for chrissake -- that I can't use harsh language or motivate the recruits physically? Do you even know what it takes to make people who get out of that murder zone?!?!!"
So lets work from the assumption that without these rejuv's a posleen second wave wouldn't really have been necessary? I mean in the end sufficiently large volumes of men did fight from positions where they reckoned they had at least some change of survival so it's not a case of no one doing anything. For comparative measure, as to what just mere humans are capable of, why was the US Eighth Army’s retreat in Korea the longest in American history if they faced a enemy who's only crewed weapon were light mortars with no other support whatsoever? Why and how did men with nothing but rifle's and mortars manage that and why on earth couldn't the Posleen ( with their advertised weaponry) do worse?
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But somehow only the SS take advantage of this...
Very strange and not something i do not care enough to keep commenting on.
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You forgot the entire parts of units mutinying and Mighty Mite killing soldiers to keep their fellows in line; and of course, the entire assbackwardness of the battle.
No, i don't remember him killing anyone to keep the rest in line and as for assbackwardness there are plenty of historic examples in record , including American, history against much lesser enemies than the Posleen are made out to be.
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If the Posleen can't even interecept ballistic weapons with their lasers -- something which would have been revealed by any halfway competent envoy sent to the Galactics.
Just blame it on the Darhel( read communist/leftist/green wacko's, etc) conspiracy to undermine noble republican America/Germany. Right thinking noble GOP type's don't make mistakes that hurts anyone and when it is later uncovered that they did they didn't mean it and they are only doing gods work. How can you expect a book that is clearly written by someone with such obviously wrong ideas about how and by who we are led to be particular lucid on such topics? Can't you just get the message and indulge in this particular universe? It's fiction?
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Can you imagine the Joint Chiefs of Staff being briefed by the Galactics and being told that they can't access any records of Posleen combat, or that such and such records are classified?
Yes, i can as the JCS are somehow undermined by a red/leftist conspiracy ( named the Darhel in this case) who managed to %£%£$% everything despite the 'best' efforts of the majority of right minded people in command. It's like Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea never happened ( where they all leftist conspiracies too?) and American/Imperial/ corporate capitalist decision making is generally something that doesn't involve generous hand waiving, propaganda by the continent load and tens of millions wiped out in any given year.
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So the result is the Posleen land near a major urban center, rampage through the place for a few days, and then get crushed under Steel Rain from tens of thousands of guns firing kilotons of artillery shells. We could easily recreate the Berlin Barriage which literally caused wind patterns to shift from all the heat generated by tens of thousands of guns firing at once.
Actually they were led into carefully and elaborately created 'traps' ( why the enemy must be so stupid you must accept on faith, obviously) that involved the destruction of most bridges and plenty of large sections of cities.
Thing is you have to wait for them to come to you as moving to contact with Posleen forces don't work very well and normally leads to the fire controllers inviting fire more so than directing it.....
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That's something that bugs me. All we get from the Galactics are vague promises of "help", and a few battalions of super advanced power armor suits which have to be created by indowy indivudally willing each molecule in the armor into place?
Not sure if that's the exact process but it's a given that it's fantastically expensive to do so hence why the power suit divisions are actually paid for by 'the fleet' ( and they are fleet formations that happens to be fighting on Earth) as i understand for services rendered by human forces on various planets under attack by the Posleen.
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Why didn't anyone go:
"Hey, you know that super awesome armor that's only (insert impossibly tiny thickness) which can allow a powered infantryman to survive or at least deflect a Posleen weapon? Can you guys not make us the entire suit of armor?
That's just too complicated for mass production.
They can do complicated things with relative ease ( The initial cost producing a PzKpfw VI were pretty close to the construction cost of a US navy destroyer; complexity and cost means little to politicians) but there is the natural time it takes to do things and costs involved in it. As for too complicated to mass production complex is a utterly subjective term as the Tiger on average destroyed more than it's reichsmark value in enemy IFV meaning that it was not any type of failure as long as you were fighting someone with similar resource means.
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Why not just make huge slabs of armor that we can then incorporate in our own fighting vehicles?"
indowiwy stare at the General for a moment and then do a collective facepalm
Because if , as you say the books suggests, you have to will it existence it's not easy to manage and the larger the area you have to cover with the stuff the massively more expensive it will be. Since there will still be relatively few 'tanks' on the battlefield and practically nothing stops the relatively numerous HV Missiles and plasma rounds ( mobility kills = death) they will cost perhaps fifty times as much for the very same armor protection of a human being ( so much more area to protect ). Since tanks can't dodge or hide nearly as well as a human sized figure can ( presuming the same range of movement) it makes in at least my mind sense to have a platoon worth of targets with the firepower that a tank can wield distributed between them. Frankly speaking the whole point of a tank is to create opportunities for other forces to exploit with the point of armoring them being to survive what they are mostly likely to engage; infantry and sundry supporting relatively light forces. Tanks have no classical role against the Posleen as they are all the same and the cost of attacking them anywhere is exactly the same with armor that will probably never be sufficient if they mass fire on you. Since the suits somehow wield weapons that is more than enough to mow down Posleen by the tens of thousands it makes sense to evade return fire by entrenchment ( in defense) or by movement ( in the attack) where as there are cheaper ways to defend than tanks and no good way to survive counter fire on the attack.
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None of which would have occured in a plausible environment.
In my defense i didn't think up the posleen verse.
As for plausible i suggest you read some military history and see how implausible a whole lot of that looks even in retrospect! Who would have thought that the Germans would take both France ( with notable British support), the low countries and Poland at the cost of 70 000 dead and a two hundred thousand wounded when they lost in the same attempt twenty years before incurring dozens of times those casualties? Human history is plausible only because they tell us it happened that way but if someone told you about the last two thousands years of suffering and destruction in advance i wonder if you would considered it 'plausible'.
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If we can convince typical suburbanites to place suicide bombs into their houses so they're not eaten by the Posleen; it's quite easy to produce millions of kiloton scale tactical nukes that can be fired by 120mm guns, and issue them to the tank units; and advance under a hail of mushroom clouds wiping out posleen hordes while their return fire bounces off the super thick galactic armor we ordered to replace the depleted uranium inserts in the original Abrams Armor.
Presuming that Americans suburbanites are typical that might be a problem but he doesn't and i depending on which state so do i.
As for it being quite easy to produce kiloton scale tactical nukes that is surely the case and as long as you can emplace a sufficient curtain of fire by somehow gaining proper plotting data, and having sufficient forces to deal with any 'leakage' you could do that and perhaps hold the posleen. If you however can not make these micro nukes clean i am not sure your food is coming to come from when tens of thousands of ground bursting kicks up a good sized amount of dust. While i am not one of those fanatics who think radiation kills in any amount ( small dosages is actually beneficially; the accepted norms for western nuclear power facilities is far below it) you would basically need to put every person expected to work above ground in a suit and risk losing large proportions of your crops to fallout. If you can store enough food and keep the water supply ( because getting radioactive particulent matter in your respiratory or digestive tract kills relatively efficiently) for 300 million secure nukes would work great as we saw when the situation became dire and they did nuke the Posleen with conventional ICBM strikes.
In conclusion i have issues with the posleen verse but clearly not the same one's as yours and as far the the rest of the commentary do remember that i don't know anything so feel absolutely free to ignore me.
Stellar
( My apologies for taking so much time and then so many pages ...)
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