Warning: What you’re about to see may be disturbing for some. This is a true story of exploitation of the female body in ways that you’ve never imagined. If you are at all squeamish we strongly suggest you not continue reading this post. You have been warned. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Military’
1950’s Digital Porn
by Bunk Five Hawks X ( 112 Comments › )Filed under Art, Cold War, History, Humor, Military, OOT, Open thread, Technology at March 7th, 2013 - 10:00 pm
The Russian Army and Reality
by coldwarrior ( 132 Comments › )Filed under Military, Russia at October 15th, 2010 - 11:30 am
I found this editorial at the Moscow Times. The paper is in English and is a wealth of information on Russia. What I found most interesting about this editorial is that Golts brings forward the mythical status of a million man army in Russia. The Russian Army drafts 300,000 or so twice a year, that makes 600,000 for a one year service time as draftees. Of these then, only 300k has more than 6months experience at any given time. The professional officers and soldiery total 250k.
This then begs these questions, how does a country project power with this sort of woeful and inadequately trained and equipped Army in the 21st Century, how does this effect strategic planning, how does it impact on foreign policy?
Golts states that :”Russia’s defense strategies are still stuck in the Napoleon age when “big battalions” decided not only who was right, but who was victorious. Fast-forward 200 years to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The 400,000-member Iraqi army was destroyed by only three divisions: two U.S. and one British. Those battles were won by the use of advanced surveillance and communication equipment to identify enemy troop movements, coupled with highly accurate weapons for destroying those forces.”
Please read on:
Every year in October, as the cold, damp weather sets in, it is time for the fall call-up of new draftees.
The goal is to conscript 278,000 young men by Dec. 31, but this year the army is supposed to institute new humanitarian measures to make the one-year mandatory service more civilized. For example, parents can attend draft board sessions and are allowed to accompany the future soldiers right up to their assigned units — a time in which many violations have traditionally occurred. In addition, conscripts can now have mobile phones to stay in contact with relatives and friends — or to report misconduct — and efforts will be made for them to serve relatively close to home. It is also expected that for the first time ever soldiers will be given weekends off.
The idea is to transform the current prison-like conditions in the military to something similar to a “sports camp,” loosely speaking. That is wonderful news, of course. Unfortunately, it will have little bearing on the combat readiness of the armed forces for two reasons. First, the Defense Ministry has rejected the 21st-century military model of building a compact, highly skilled professional force. Second, since the draft occurs twice a year — fall and spring — and conscript service has been reduced to one year, this means that the most experienced conscripts at any time have a maximum of only six months service under their belt — barely enough time to complete basic training. The result is clear — a woefully low level of combat readiness, particularly when modern battles require advanced training in communications and high-tech weapon systems.
Humanization is a much-needed measure, of course, but the efficiency and battle-readiness of the armed forces will never improve if this is not accompanied by modernization of the armed forces and a fundamental understanding of how 21st-century battles are fought.
Continued….
The Western way of waging war is the pathway to defeat
by Mojambo ( 140 Comments › )Filed under Afghanistan, Israel at June 26th, 2010 - 6:00 pm
Caroline Glick points out that the way the West now wages war – is a prescription for ultimate failure. An obsessive concern over civilian casualties, fear of the media showing our men fighting the enemy as they should be fought, attempts to persuade rather then utterly defeat our enemies – surrenders the initiative to the enemy thereby reducing our forces to sitting ducks. The only “rules of engagement” that we need is to find the enemy, grab him by the throat, and rip his guts out until he has had enough. The quickest way to end a war is to lose it and it is better not to fight a battle at all rather then win a fruitless victory.
by Caroline Glick
General Stanley McChrystal has paid a huge price for his decision to give Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings free access to himself and his staff. But he performed a great service for the rest of us. US President Barack Obama fired McChrystal — his hand-picked choice to command NATO forces in Afghanistan — for the things that he and his aides told Hastings about the problematic nature of the US-led war effort in Afghanistan. But by acting as he did, McChrystal forced the rest of us to contend with the unpleasant truth not only about the US-led campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. He told us the unpleasant truth about the problematic nature of the Western way of war at the outset of the 21st century.Hastings’ now famous article, “The Runaway General,” told the story of an argument. On the one hand, there are people who want to fight to win in Afghanistan. On the other hand, there are people who are not interested in fighting to win in Afghanistan. Obama – and McChrystal as his general – occupy the untenable middle ground. There they try to split the difference between the two irreconcilable camps. The inevitable end is preordained.The US and its NATO allies first deployed in Afghanistan in October 2001 with the aim of toppling the Taliban regime and destroying Al Qaida’s infrastructure in the country. They have remained in the country ever since with the goal of preventing the Taliban from returning to power.After McChrystal took command a year ago, he conducted a review of the allied strategy. His revised strategy was based on counter-insurgency methods developed in Iraq. It called for a surge of 40,000 US forces in Afghanistan. It also recommended that NATO train 400,000 Afghan forces who, in the long term, would replace NATO forces once the Taliban was defeated.McChrystal’s strategy was greeted with moans by leading members of Obama’s leftist base in the administration and outside it. Led by Vice President Joseph Biden, they offered a counter-strategy. As Biden has explained it, the alternative would involve deploying special forces units and airpower to target the Taliban as it becomes necessary, and otherwise disengage from the country at quickly as possible.McChrystal and his allies dismissed Biden’s strategy as a recipe for disaster. Without a sufficient number of forces on the ground, the US would lose its ability to gather intelligence and so know what targets to attack. Recent reports that the US drone attacks in Pakistan are killing civilians rather than al Qaida and Taliban members indicate just how difficult it is to gather credible, actionable intelligence from a distance.Presented with the two opposing strategies, Obama decided to split the difference. He ordered 30 thousand troops to Afghanistan. He refused to increase the target number of Afghan security forces from its previous 230,000. And he announced that US forces would begin to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011.Citing administration officials, last December the Washington Post explained Obama’s goal as follows, “The White House’s desired end state in Afghanistan… envisions more informal local security arrangements than in Iraq, a less-capable national government and a greater tolerance of insurgent violence.”So too, an administration official stated, “The guidance they [the military] have is that we’re not doing everything, and we’re not doing it forever. … The hardest intellectual exercise will be settling on how much is enough.”[..]
Since Obama is commander in chief, it is reasonable for criticism of this losing strategy to be directed towards him. But the truth is that for the better part of the last several decades, with occasional important exceptions, this sort of “half pregnant” strategy for war fighting has been the template for Western armies.Today US forces in Afghanistan are fighting in a manner that is depressingly similar to that forced upon IDF forces in Lebanon in the 1990s. Like the US forces in Afghanistan today, during the 1990s, concerns about civilian casualties caused Israel’s political leadership to constrain IDF actions in southern Lebanon in a manner that effectively transformed soldiers into sitting ducks. Israel’s finest were reduced to fighting from fortified positions and Hizbullah was given a free hand to intimidate Lebanese civilians, commandeer private homes and schools to use as firing positions and forward bases, and generally maintain the initiative in the fighting.[..]There were only two instances in the last ten years where Western forces fought to victory. Israel defeated the Palestinians when in the wake of Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, it retained security control over Judea and Samaria. The US defeated al Qaida and Muqtada el-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 by taking and retaining security control over Iraq.Both countries’ victories have been eroded in recent years as they have removed their forces from population centers and restricted them to more static positions. In both cases, the erosion of the Israeli and American achievements is due to waning political will to maintain military control.It is hard to imagine that McChrystal’s decision to open his doors to Rolling Stone was a calculated move to blow the lid off of the mirage of strategic competence surrounding the “good war” in Afghanistan. This is not the first time that the US military has mistakenly given access to hostile Rolling Stone reporters. And of course, the US military – not unlike the IDF and the British military – has a long history of giving undeserved access to its media foes and paying the price for its mistakes.
Read the rest The Western way of war
America Is Losing a National Treasure
by tqcincinnatus ( 109 Comments › )Filed under History, Military at May 31st, 2010 - 8:00 pm
Reading this post by Purple Avenger over at Ace of Spades HQ really got me to thinking. In it, he merely recounts a few of the stories about WWII that he had heard from the men of that generation who fought in that war.
Another story dad would rarely tell, and always with tears in his eyes, was of a cave near a small vacated town outside Naples. The Army and Marines had pushed forward and he was assigned guard duty at the port. During off hours, the sailors would wander about the countryside seeing what was to be seen. During the German retreat, they’d apparently blown up the mouth of this cave and the ground troops sweeping through never bothered to look inside. My dad and his pals did…and they discovered why the little town was vacant. The contents of the cave was the townspeople…all neatly shot in the back of the head. The Germans had blown the entrance to try and hide the atrocity.
Remember, this is the war that retards like Pat Buchanan and Vox Day tell us was just a big waste of our time and money, enemies who weren’t really so bad, who weren’t a threat to us in any way.
I remember some stories from my older uncles who fought in that war (my dad was 6 when WWII ended, he served in the Navy during peacetime in the late 1950s). One uncle was a tailgunner on a B-25, and was shot down over Germany on their last mission before rotation out of theatre. He got to spend 18 months in a German POW camp as an enlisted man. He didn’t talk about that much, but from what I could gather, the experience was nothing like Hogan’s Heroes.
Other uncles fought the Japanese in the Philippines and the island hopping campaigns. They all had stories to tell.
But what got me to thinking, especially after Purple Avenger mentions at the end of his piece that all the guys he heard the stories from are gone now, is that we are losing a national treasure with these vets. These guys who really were part of the greatest generation. These are the guys who became the military and political leaders who brought us through the Cold War. Guys who made all of us latté-slurping fatboys today look like the decadent softies that we are. I just can’t imagine the greatest generation, if it were still in its prime, taking something like 9-11 and not scouring the earth of those radical Islamic scumbags – something we should have done, but didn’t because of all the political correctness and leftist nonsensobabble about “tolerance” and moral equivalence.
Our greatest generation is going the way of all men. I only have one uncle left who fought in WWII, like Purple Avenger’s folk, the rest have gone on. We are losing the generation who instilled in America a fighting spirit that had previously been sapped by decades of short-sighted isolationism. A piece of our history is being lost irretrievably. We need to honour these men (and women, who fought the production battle on the homefront!) and lift up their memories this Memorial Day.
