How do Generals get to be Generals?

Strength training does not overcome genetics. As the Ranger course experiment showed, even extreme effort to prepare women physically does not overcome the genetic handicap. In 2015, 2 women graduated from the Ranger school. That was after several 100 women were selected, out in a special several month long training program prepared just for the women in which they were able to practice the various parts of the program (men don't get that advantage), then the women went through the prep course (some men get to do the prep course), then a dozen women went on the actual school and all failed, 8 were recycled, all failed, a General intervened, then 3 were recycled and 2 graduated. All that effort to get 2 women.

There is no evidence at all that shows any physical training program will put women at the same physical ability as men.

 

BH Obama was just doing what he said he would do before the election -- bring the troops home.

He was not a fighter he was a basketball player.

 

I don't know about the Army but I served in the Old Corps and my MOS was 0849, Shore Fire Control Party Man.

 

Whoa, after Nam, Westmoreland was highly critical of the US Admin! He said in a foreword to a Vietnam war book- "Washington locked me into a defensive strategy, thereby preventing me bringing the war to a swift conclusion"

 

Yes mate but I've never been in the military so I can't really chip in with any first-hand observations.
I did see Nam on TV though..

 

Yes, Don is making Obama look like the snivelling traitorous lefty wretch he always was..
I could hardly believe my ears when I heard Commander-in-Chief Obama say on the news during his first term- "Our aim in Afghanistan is not to defeat the Taliban, but to contain them and prevent them spreading their influence in the region".
I prefer this quote of Gen Douglas MacArthur's- "It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it"

Obama's legacy-



But he didn't seem too heartbroken about it when he was whooping it up earlier this year-

 

What could possibly go wrong?
Oh wait...


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As for women sub captains, forget it!
Sonar Operator- "I'm detecting a ship's engine sounds on passive sonar ma'am, shall I switch to active sonar to pinpoint its position?"
Woman captain- "DON'T YOU DARE! You know that wretched pinging sets my nerves on edge and gives me a migraine!"

 

Yes, same with our Brit top brass and planners, they couldn't run a kids boating lake let alone a navy..
As a wargamer, I learnt years ago that missile "saturation attacks" were the only way to go to blow the enemy out of the water..

 

Four years ago off the SoCal coast (Pt. Mugu NAS) a Ticonderoga class cruiser, USS Chancellorsville (CG-62) captain was on the bridge and the gunnery officer was on watch in the CIC but someone ****ed up when a civilian drone operator at Pt. Mugu NAS lost control of the little 12 foot drone and it crashed into the superstructure of the cruiser knocking it out of service for six months.


An image of guided missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville (CG-62) following a collision with a BGM-74 target drone on Saturday. The impact area is circled.


BQM-74E Aerial Target
http://www.northropgrumman.com/Capabilities/BQM74EAerialTarget/Documents/BQM-74E-DS-05.pdf


Todays warships aren't built to take hits and keep on fighting.

 

I was not an officer, but I ran into some extremely stupid officers - I swear some had to look at their dog tags to spell their names correctly. There was a major, that if I ever run into him, I will kick his ass. I was threatened with insubordination because I had said to him "This aint a ******n John Wayne Movie" when he wanted to waste a 5-man patrol. Too long a story.
In the enlisted ranks, wars were good for promotion.
I made sgt - E-5, in two years, because of losses in Vietnam, and I'm sure it sped up officer promotions as well.
The Marines lost a 3-star general in action in Vietnam.
Part of the trouble when politicians say "I listen to the generals" - is that the generals LIKE war - they get ribbons and medals and better chance of promotion.

 

Good for you mate, another true example is when an SAS Lieutenant refused pointblank to go on a mission because it was so stupidly conceived (I think it was the infamous Bravo-Two-Zero cockup) and sat quietly sipping tea. I'll try to find the incident again in one of my war books.
PS- I briefly thought about joining the Brit Army as a teenager and sent off for a glossy colour brochure, but dropped the idea because I knew I could never take orders I didn't agree with.
Got a shock a couple of weeks later when a 'Sgt Butterfield' from the local recruiting office came knocking my door on a follow-up courtesy visit in full dress uniform, stripes and all! I never answered the door and dived behind the settee til he'd gone.
Later I tore the enlistment form out of the brochure and filled it in with the name and address of a kid down the road who nobody liked and sent it in, dunno what happened to him..

 

I do not recall that FM Montgomery in WW2 got any more grief for being a showboat than Mac did in the Pacific.

But during WW1 the ineptitude of Haig and French is unparalleled in the history of warfare.

These two morons actually thought that taking massive casualties was a sign of success.

And they both always assumed the Germans were taking more, although the Germans by fighting a defensive war on the Western front were actually taking orders of magnitude less.

 

MacArthur's big advantage was having extremely competent staff, which moderated his massive ego to some extent and made him look more competent than he was. He wasn't bashful about stealing credit from his subordinates and other officers, like Halsey.

H.W. Brand has a new book out, new as of 2016, anyway, speaking of MacArthur, about the Truman administration, The General and the President: at the brink of nuclear war. Truman was right not to trust him, either.

 

Here is a paper from the era useful for the Peanut Gallery by a Marine aviator, that has a good backgrounder on the history of U.S. naval strategy in his intro.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a202139.pdf

Of course it emphasizes the Navy's role more than any other service, which is to be expected, but for all branches the forward strategy is by far the best; the isolationists are just nuts, and their ideas of deployment strategy has proven to be deadly on all counts, at least re WW I and WW II and at many points during the Cold War.

 

Covering his own ass, mainly; the major reason LBJ was 'micro-managing the war' was because nearly all of his military leaders and his intelligence agencies were blatantly lying from the get go and he rightfully had zero trust in them.

 

At what range would the ship firing those missiles detect our ships? The limitations of radar work both ways.

Or are you saying that our enemies would just blindfire expensive missiles towards an area hoping their onboard radars would eventually find our ships?

 

Unlike subsonic Western anti-ship missiles such as the Harpoon and Exocet, the Moskit is a supersonic sea-skimmer. It can be programmed to fly a high altitude trajectory at Mach 3, or a sea-skimming trajectory at Mach 2.2. If the sea skimming mode is chosen, the missile will be first detected by a warship under attack when it emerges over the horizon at a distance of about 15 to 25 nautical miles. This provides the defences on the ship with about 25-60 seconds of warning time before impact. The raw speed of the Moskit makes it a challenging target for most shipboard defences. All variants use the KTRV-Detal 3A-81E-01 series radar altimeter, similar to the design used in the Kh-59ME / AS-18 Kazoo.

Terminal phase approach to targets is at 10 - 20 m AMSL.

Manufacturer datasheets state the following capabilities for the Moskit E system:

• Ability to engage surface targets including warships, transports and ACVs with speeds of up to 100 knots.
• Ability to engage targets at sea states of up to 6, and low signature targets at states of up to 5.
• Wind speeds of up to 20 m/s.
• The fire control system performs automatic test of missiles pre-launch, and can manage and allocate missiles for up to 4 targets.
• The missile launch tubes can be deployed on a vessel for up to 18 months without servicing.
• The 3M-80E and 3M-80E1 missile seeker has active radar and passive anti-radiation homing capability [likely band limited by antenna design].

 

You notice nothing you posted addresses my question, right?

How are these sea skimmers targeting our ships? Radar limitations work both ways.

 

I'm pretty sure I did answered your question. < "15 to 25 nautical miles" >

How did the enemy know there were ships to target 50 to 300 miles away?

If you activated a radar on your ship that sends a single, "here I am." ?

Or maybe an enemy sub detected the ships from 50 miles away or a Russian Bear bomber spotted the ships ?

Which brings us back to "How to Hide a Task Force"

According to "Janes" the SS-N-12 Sandbox anti ship missile either uses active radar guidance or anti radiation guidance. But "Janes" also mentions that the SS-N-12 also has an electronic counter measure system but doesn't say exactly what it is. Radar jamming ???

I've read that the Russians new tactic using the SS-N-16 on a Slava class cruiser is launching a 8 missile salvo. 1/2 of it's SS-N-16 missiles. The first missiles launched loiter until all of the missiles have been launched and when the 8 missile salvo if formed they take off towards their target.

Also at the same time the Slava class cruiser escorts (destroyers, frigates and it's attack submarine escort ) are also launching anti ship missiles also becoming a multi missile salvo all programmed to come on target at the exact time hitting their targets all with in a couple of seconds of each other. This is when the ships being targets have to deal with maybe 24 incoming missiles.

If the target is a U.S. Navy Carrier Strike Group (CSG) 1/2 of the missiles would be targeting the aircraft carrier and the other half targeting the carrier escorts.

If there's an E-2 in the air and FA-18's in the air the incoming missiles will be detected long before the ships detect the incoming missiles.

The FA-18 will eliminate some of the anti ship missiles and the Ticonderoga class cruiser and the four or five Arleigh Burke destroyers will get some RIM-66 Standard missiles in the air and they will take out more of the incoming missiles then the Ticonderoga and the Burke's 5"/54 pop guns will get off a few rounds each just as the missile come over the horizon from 15 to 6 miles out . Then the CIW systems come into action, the RIM's will start engaging the incoming missiles 5.5 miles out and the Phalanx's will start targeting individual missiles from 2 miles away.

The computers say that 80% to 90% of the enemy anti ship missiles will have been eliminated.

 

As a computer wargamer I know how bloody difficult it is for the US to win in Nam and I think Johnson and his generals knew it too, so they adopted a "body count" strategy to bleed the Cong dry by deploying more and more US troops to the country, but it didn't work because the little yellow men just kept on a-coming year after year, so it seems Uncle Ho got it right when he said-

 

So the missiles will be using active guidance and we'll be able to detect from much further than 25 miles.

 

LBJ only micromanaged the air war north of the 17th parallel with really stupid rules of engagements (ROE)

The Vietnam War could have been won in 1965, 1968 and again in 1969.

Below the 17th parallel the ROE were written by the Saigon government not by the U.S. military.

The American troops were guest of the RVN government not an occupation force and were required to obey all RVN laws south of the 17th parallel including traffic laws.

It was the Saigon government who established "free fire zones" and "restricted fire zones." My MOS required that I be up to date every day on where the free fire zones were.

Unless you were in a free fire zone using any fire support larger than a 60 mm mortar required permission from the Saigon government via MAC-V. That was the purpose of all of those U.S. Army SATCOM microwave relay stations that you saw on mountain tops from Thailand to the DMZ.

As the war progressed the free fire zones kept getting smaller and smaller.

LBJ micromanaged the air war over North Vietnam.

Excerpts of some of LBJ really stupid PC ROE:

 

All I see is LBJ complying with the rules of engagement set down by the SEATO agreements and UN rules. Just because they were unpopular doesn't make them stupid, and as already pointed out, he had zero reason to trust a word any of them said, and his policies crushed the domestic VC organization. The South Vietnamese had to win theri own war, tht was always the goal, as this points out:

"
Below the 17th parallel the ROE were written by the Saigon government not by the U.S. military.

The American troops were guest of the RVN government not an occupation force and were required to obey all RVN laws south of the 17th parallel including traffic laws.

It was the Saigon government who established "free fire zones" and "restricted fire zones." My MOS required that I be up to date every day on where the free fire zones were.

Unless you were in a free fire zone using any fire support larger than a 60 mm mortar required permission from the Saigon government via MAC-V. That was the purpose of all of those U.S. Army SATCOM microwave relay stations that you saw on mountain tops from Thailand to the DMZ.

As the war progressed the free fire zones kept getting smaller and smaller."

It didn't matter what LBJ did, the Republicans, the Right Wing, and the northeastern Democratic Party establishment were going to stab him in the back at every opportunity; the white shoe liberals had already rolled out their Camelot Myth and selling it. These are the same political hacks that cut off the South Vietnamese in 1975 and left them to be slaughtered and 're-educated', after Nixon sold them out.

 

Was Giap lying when he said the VC were finished as an independent force in the South after Tet? You can also note the complete lack of condemnation by the UN or any other power of the North's repeated violations of rules of engagement and using other countries as bases to launch attacks below the DMZ throughout the entire period.

In any event, LBJ's escalation, along with his taking over from France the backing of Israel bankrupted the Khrushchev/ Brezhnev doctrine once and for all in 1973, witht he Israeli defeats of the Soviet puppet states in the ME and the SU draining its treasury to keep propping up the North Vietnamese, losing cred with it's pet dictators everywhere, and being reduced to having to import western wheat and refined petroleum products to stay alive from 1973 until it's final 'soft landing' under Gorbachev. Doesn't look like an awful record to me, but political partisanship doesn't really base itself on real life. Like Kissinger said, most of the time re foreign policy, all of the choices are bad, and you have to choose the least bad options as they seem at the time. Nixon's Cambodian bombing didn't exactly do wonders for Laos and Cambodia, wiping out much of its farmland, for instance.

 

Affirmative action calls for reserving a certain number of jobs, student slots, loans, etc. for a given group. It is a prima facia quota system.