Zinegata

Ask and you shall receive.  I have created a fire support variant of the Bradley equipped with a 105mm howitzer.  Behold!
 

One thing I've always liked about the BMP over the Bradley is that they have an actual fire support variant - the BMP-1 with the 76mm and the BMP-3 with the 100mm gun - that can do direct-fire HE as opposed to the Bradley being stuck with plinking with the autocannon.

I don't think people are really fully aware of the context of this issue, so here's a quick background.
 
The Spratleys are basically a bunch of unclaimed islands and reefs in the middle of the South China Sea, which may contain some oil deposits. By virtue of being unclaimed and possibly having resources it was subject to a tug-of-war by the region, with China having the biggest share of the pie because they had the biggest stick. The Philippines is the second best claimant because the Spratleys are closest to the Philippines. The status quo for a long time was that each claimant had control of some of them (with China and the PH having the most), and that nobody would start any development unless it has the approval of all the claimants.
 
The problem is that China radically changed its position around 2010, when some frankly crazy people in the military or Politburo decided to change the definition of "Chinese territorial waters". Rather than the usual 12 nautical mile limit, China decided they were extra special and claimed their territorial waters extended to over 200 nautical miles. If the Spratleys were considered to be Chinese territory (albeit the Spratleys, being contested reefs for the most part, don't even count as "land territory" from which territorial waters can be extended - a distinction that becomes important later), this essentially means the entire South China Sea becomes Chinese territorial waters.
 
This may not seem like a big deal, but very many major sea routes go through the Souh China Sea, which feeds all of the major ports in the South East Asia region - particularly Singapore, Manila, Hong Kong, and basically every port in Vietnam. By turning the South China Sea into territorial waters, China is basically saying they have the right to instantly blockade any South East Asian nation.
 
Unfortunately Southeast Asia isn't in any real position to do anything about it. Malaysia and Indonesia are only superficially involved and are busy with their own internal problems. Thailand is technically still in the middle of a coup. Singapore is a city-state and, while having a very advanced military, has to park most of its weapons in America because Changi Naval Station can't fit everything. Vietnam to its credit continued its grand tradition of fighting China in spite of hopeless odds, and got a patrol vessel sunk for its trouble by ramming after it challenged the construction of a Chinese oil rig.
 
That, much to the groan and dismay of the region, means it's up to the Philippines to contest the claim. And given our first action was to rename the "South China Sea" to the "West Philippine Sea" in all of our maps, which was an utterly useless symbolic gesture that only succeeded in getting all of China's Internet trolls to focus their efforts against us, you can see why the region is in utter despair.
 
That said, our governement has somehow managed to be more competent and decided on the pretty smart move of taking the case to the International Tribunal for the Laws of the Sea, which is all but guaranteed to rule against China's 200 nm territorial water claim, and is a potential source of embarassment for a China still styling itself as a benovelent big brother instead of a bully.  
 
The thing is, rather than back down from this legal challenge, China very recently decided to double down on their initial mistake and to defy geography in order to avoid admitting it was wrong regarding claiming the whole South China Sea.
 
Since the first problem with their claim is that the Spratleys are still considered reefs and not islands which can exert territorial influence, China decided to spend a whole lot of money to turn those reefs into actual islands. Since they now have actual "islands" in the area which can theoretically exert territorial control, they can then claim that the other claimants are in fact merely squatters claiming reefs and can therefore be evicted. After which China reasserts its 200 nautical mile territorial water claim and turns the South China Sea into their lake.
 
Hence the recent US interventions. One of the Philippine's side-tactics in the Spratleys game since the early 2010s had been to troll the hell out of the Chinese Navy, which could not really respond to our provocations because they fear it will cause the activation of the Mutual Defense Treaty between the PH and the United States (this is why the only casualties so far in our trolling match were in fact Taiwanese fishermen shot by mistake by the Philippine Navy); and the US for the most part was in fact horrified by this potential flashpoint because they thought the court case would already settle it.
 
The man-made Chinese islands changed all that. The US military (and I hope Obama) are well aware of how this changes the game and can potentially render irrelevant our previous play of taking the case to an international court. That's why they're stepping up the patrols and they're playing tag. They want China to know they're not happy about what they're doing.

Google has a history of rolling out stuff that they (or at least their PR department) claim will kill off a traditional industry, but in reality falls far short of the claims and will take at least several more decades and a lot more investment to achieve its lofty ambitions.
 
Take for instance Google Fiber. The US telcos (or rather, the top management, many of whom are clearly divorced from technical realities) were all panicking over Google promising to be an Internet Service Provider that's better, cheaper, and faster than any of the other telcos when it launched five years ago.
 
Fast-forward to today and Google Fiber only has around 30,000 subscribers and is a pretty insignificant player on the US market.
 
The problem, which was pretty clear to the rational telco people back in 2010, is that Google Fiber doesn't actually introduce any really new technology. Fibr-to-the-Home has been around since the early 2000s, and the reason why it hasn't reached widespread adoption is that the technology is frankly ridiculous overkill. Not every home needs a 1 Gigabit connection. Japan spent huge money on subsidizing these kinds of connections and found that the only people they really made happy where the torrent seeders. Most websites can't even take advantage of that size of pipe. This is why the most common implementation had been to use Fiber as the backbone, with the "to the home" portion being handled by DSL or cable, which can support a more reasonable 100 Mbps speed but doesn't require drilling new holes in your house.
 
It has gotten to the point that the younger folks in the Telco business are increasingly convinced that most of Google's seemingly hare-brained schemes are actually just red herrings to get the US and other telcos to speed up their rollout of broadband Internet; through which Google derives most of its revenues anyway. In this regard Google's actually a pretty useful addition to the landscape, because overall broadband penetration worldwide is in fact pretty low and the panic they caused did stimulate some expansion.
 
As for the Google Car - it's probably another project that's designed more to get the industry to act rather than a concrete "Google Enslaves Half the World" scheme. Google Maps has pretty bad navigation softwae for instance because it just looks at the shortest route based on distance and not any other factors, but Waze is pretty decent because it has a fairly extensive realtime crowd-source feedback mechanism (e.g. real time traffic reports) and it has cut my trip times by around a fifth since I started using it. This was inconceivable when folks started looking at navigation software back in 2004 (we had trouble plotting routes even with full-powered PCs. Now you can do it on a cellphone app), especially on the streets of Metro Manila, where the city planners have no idea what a "road grid" is (they insanely prefer circular roads) and the traffic is only behind Calcutta or Bombay in sheer awfulness .
 
The auto-drive thing is also pretty revolutionary and would be a pretty big boon in traffic-heavy streets even for private cars, because now I can nap/do other things while the car drives through the grind of heavy traffic.
 
Put the two together and it's not hard to envision a new model of self-driving cars that can be both privately or publically owned that would have actual concrete benefits for the end user. Of course not everyone will want to own a robo-car, and in my country I'm sure there will be lobbies by driver's groups against this (our taxi drivers are already up in arms over Uber, because Uber provides better service than most of our shitty taxi drivers), but having a robo-car as a viable option is in fact something that could be a thing once they work out the technology and figure out the legal liabilities in case of accidents.

I don't think people are really fully aware of the context of this issue, so here's a quick background.
 
The Spratleys are basically a bunch of unclaimed islands and reefs in the middle of the South China Sea, which may contain some oil deposits. By virtue of being unclaimed and possibly having resources it was subject to a tug-of-war by the region, with China having the biggest share of the pie because they had the biggest stick. The Philippines is the second best claimant because the Spratleys are closest to the Philippines. The status quo for a long time was that each claimant had control of some of them (with China and the PH having the most), and that nobody would start any development unless it has the approval of all the claimants.
 
The problem is that China radically changed its position around 2010, when some frankly crazy people in the military or Politburo decided to change the definition of "Chinese territorial waters". Rather than the usual 12 nautical mile limit, China decided they were extra special and claimed their territorial waters extended to over 200 nautical miles. If the Spratleys were considered to be Chinese territory (albeit the Spratleys, being contested reefs for the most part, don't even count as "land territory" from which territorial waters can be extended - a distinction that becomes important later), this essentially means the entire South China Sea becomes Chinese territorial waters.
 
This may not seem like a big deal, but very many major sea routes go through the Souh China Sea, which feeds all of the major ports in the South East Asia region - particularly Singapore, Manila, Hong Kong, and basically every port in Vietnam. By turning the South China Sea into territorial waters, China is basically saying they have the right to instantly blockade any South East Asian nation.
 
Unfortunately Southeast Asia isn't in any real position to do anything about it. Malaysia and Indonesia are only superficially involved and are busy with their own internal problems. Thailand is technically still in the middle of a coup. Singapore is a city-state and, while having a very advanced military, has to park most of its weapons in America because Changi Naval Station can't fit everything. Vietnam to its credit continued its grand tradition of fighting China in spite of hopeless odds, and got a patrol vessel sunk for its trouble by ramming after it challenged the construction of a Chinese oil rig.
 
That, much to the groan and dismay of the region, means it's up to the Philippines to contest the claim. And given our first action was to rename the "South China Sea" to the "West Philippine Sea" in all of our maps, which was an utterly useless symbolic gesture that only succeeded in getting all of China's Internet trolls to focus their efforts against us, you can see why the region is in utter despair.
 
That said, our governement has somehow managed to be more competent and decided on the pretty smart move of taking the case to the International Tribunal for the Laws of the Sea, which is all but guaranteed to rule against China's 200 nm territorial water claim, and is a potential source of embarassment for a China still styling itself as a benovelent big brother instead of a bully.  
 
The thing is, rather than back down from this legal challenge, China very recently decided to double down on their initial mistake and to defy geography in order to avoid admitting it was wrong regarding claiming the whole South China Sea.
 
Since the first problem with their claim is that the Spratleys are still considered reefs and not islands which can exert territorial influence, China decided to spend a whole lot of money to turn those reefs into actual islands. Since they now have actual "islands" in the area which can theoretically exert territorial control, they can then claim that the other claimants are in fact merely squatters claiming reefs and can therefore be evicted. After which China reasserts its 200 nautical mile territorial water claim and turns the South China Sea into their lake.
 
Hence the recent US interventions. One of the Philippine's side-tactics in the Spratleys game since the early 2010s had been to troll the hell out of the Chinese Navy, which could not really respond to our provocations because they fear it will cause the activation of the Mutual Defense Treaty between the PH and the United States (this is why the only casualties so far in our trolling match were in fact Taiwanese fishermen shot by mistake by the Philippine Navy); and the US for the most part was in fact horrified by this potential flashpoint because they thought the court case would already settle it.
 
The man-made Chinese islands changed all that. The US military (and I hope Obama) are well aware of how this changes the game and can potentially render irrelevant our previous play of taking the case to an international court. That's why they're stepping up the patrols and they're playing tag. They want China to know they're not happy about what they're doing.

I don't think people are really fully aware of the context of this issue, so here's a quick background.
 
The Spratleys are basically a bunch of unclaimed islands and reefs in the middle of the South China Sea, which may contain some oil deposits. By virtue of being unclaimed and possibly having resources it was subject to a tug-of-war by the region, with China having the biggest share of the pie because they had the biggest stick. The Philippines is the second best claimant because the Spratleys are closest to the Philippines. The status quo for a long time was that each claimant had control of some of them (with China and the PH having the most), and that nobody would start any development unless it has the approval of all the claimants.
 
The problem is that China radically changed its position around 2010, when some frankly crazy people in the military or Politburo decided to change the definition of "Chinese territorial waters". Rather than the usual 12 nautical mile limit, China decided they were extra special and claimed their territorial waters extended to over 200 nautical miles. If the Spratleys were considered to be Chinese territory (albeit the Spratleys, being contested reefs for the most part, don't even count as "land territory" from which territorial waters can be extended - a distinction that becomes important later), this essentially means the entire South China Sea becomes Chinese territorial waters.
 
This may not seem like a big deal, but very many major sea routes go through the Souh China Sea, which feeds all of the major ports in the South East Asia region - particularly Singapore, Manila, Hong Kong, and basically every port in Vietnam. By turning the South China Sea into territorial waters, China is basically saying they have the right to instantly blockade any South East Asian nation.
 
Unfortunately Southeast Asia isn't in any real position to do anything about it. Malaysia and Indonesia are only superficially involved and are busy with their own internal problems. Thailand is technically still in the middle of a coup. Singapore is a city-state and, while having a very advanced military, has to park most of its weapons in America because Changi Naval Station can't fit everything. Vietnam to its credit continued its grand tradition of fighting China in spite of hopeless odds, and got a patrol vessel sunk for its trouble by ramming after it challenged the construction of a Chinese oil rig.
 
That, much to the groan and dismay of the region, means it's up to the Philippines to contest the claim. And given our first action was to rename the "South China Sea" to the "West Philippine Sea" in all of our maps, which was an utterly useless symbolic gesture that only succeeded in getting all of China's Internet trolls to focus their efforts against us, you can see why the region is in utter despair.
 
That said, our governement has somehow managed to be more competent and decided on the pretty smart move of taking the case to the International Tribunal for the Laws of the Sea, which is all but guaranteed to rule against China's 200 nm territorial water claim, and is a potential source of embarassment for a China still styling itself as a benovelent big brother instead of a bully.  
 
The thing is, rather than back down from this legal challenge, China very recently decided to double down on their initial mistake and to defy geography in order to avoid admitting it was wrong regarding claiming the whole South China Sea.
 
Since the first problem with their claim is that the Spratleys are still considered reefs and not islands which can exert territorial influence, China decided to spend a whole lot of money to turn those reefs into actual islands. Since they now have actual "islands" in the area which can theoretically exert territorial control, they can then claim that the other claimants are in fact merely squatters claiming reefs and can therefore be evicted. After which China reasserts its 200 nautical mile territorial water claim and turns the South China Sea into their lake.
 
Hence the recent US interventions. One of the Philippine's side-tactics in the Spratleys game since the early 2010s had been to troll the hell out of the Chinese Navy, which could not really respond to our provocations because they fear it will cause the activation of the Mutual Defense Treaty between the PH and the United States (this is why the only casualties so far in our trolling match were in fact Taiwanese fishermen shot by mistake by the Philippine Navy); and the US for the most part was in fact horrified by this potential flashpoint because they thought the court case would already settle it.
 
The man-made Chinese islands changed all that. The US military (and I hope Obama) are well aware of how this changes the game and can potentially render irrelevant our previous play of taking the case to an international court. That's why they're stepping up the patrols and they're playing tag. They want China to know they're not happy about what they're doing.

Many of the surviving katanas also tend to be the "lucky" ones where the ore was better and the sword itself was better-maintained, which is why the lasted so long and were so treasured to begin with. There's an inherent bias towards the good swords surviving, whereas most of the swords were broken in combat or rusted down.
 
Take this also with a grain of salt because Cracked was the first place I saw this pointed out - but the Katana is also apparently harder to master and train on because of the compromises in design due to the crummy Japanese ores. Dunno if this is really true.

I'm not sold on this article because it proposes a requirement of mine-clearing while under fire. I don't think you should really do this to begin with - eliminate the enemy naval and air assets first or reduce them significantly before you begin MCM operations sounds much more sensible. Indeed, the last time I can recall that a fleet tried to clear minefields while under fire was Dardanelles, and that resulted in three pre-dreadnoughts being sunk due to an undetected minefield. Even in all of the wargames I've played the only scenario that required the USN to mine-clear while under fire was a pretty ridiculous EU + Russia vs US scenario wherein a CVBG was evacuating from the Med through Gibraltar; and the EU/Russia had to resort to limited strikes against the MCM helicopters because their air power was so decimated by the CVBG..
 
Moreover, I think people are a bit too hard on the LCS for MCMing. You want mine-clearing to be done by a relatively small ship with few crew, so that you minimize inevitable losses; and the primary mine-clearing asset in any case is in fact the ship's helicopter.
 
If you want faster mine-clearing as proposed in the "Contested" scenario you'll actually need a small fleet of helicopters, which means dedicating an LHD (which is what the article proposed, albeit the ship carries only four helicopters which I think is really inadequate for fast clearing) or significant deck space on a full carrier.
 
Which again goes back to my original point - wouldn't it be better to instead have more fighter and strike craft on your LHD/carrier and eliminate the other threats entirely before getting to work on mine-clearance? Indeed, by having less space for fighter and strike craft you're leaving yourself open to having the enemy target your MCM LHD specifically and wipe out all your MCM assets in one go.

Yep, though I'm convinced that this wasn't the original plan and it was only partway through shooting the movie that Tom Hardy and George Miller both just agreed that Charlize was a much better lead. At which point they stopped all pretense and decided she should be the "hero"; which is also why the next Mad Max movie's subtitle is already Furiosa.
 
It was still a Mad Max movie through and through because of the atmosphere of the movie, even if Max's most awesome moment happened off-screen .

Was the loss of officers to the Bourbon restoration really that severe? While Ney and other Marshals were killed others were spared and even held positions in the restored government - Davout, St Cyr, and Soult being the particular stand outs. There were a couple further revolutions after Napoleon's final defeat though so I'd think those would also account for why the French army ended up having amnesia - by 1870 French politics was such a mess that I think the French army had trouble remembering who exactly they were fighting for by this point.

Just another note: Studies of Napoleonic eras revealed that bayonets only caused about 2% of the casualties, and that bayonet charges were largely mythical in nature.
 
And when I say mythical I don't meant that entire battalions didn't charge with bayonets drawn - they certainly did. However, the charge was usually conducted when the defender was already wavering and the charge itself was just one massive bit of posturing to put them to flight. If the defender didn't run then the result was the attacker usually taking an entire volley at point-blank range resulting in the attacker getting routed instead.
 
In fact, Jomini - one of the big Napoleonic references of the period - claimed that he in fact never witnessed a battalion ending up in a melee with another battalion. One side or another always broke first. The bayonet injuries, when they do happen, tend to happen to men who are running and are caught by the pursuit charge; or they occur during smaller charges by skirmishers (usually of only a few dozen men) fighting each other for good positions. That the French had to study the Civil War to find out the dubious utility of bayonets when their own Grand Armee actually hardly relied on it goes to show how institutions can easily end up mythologizing its own past into unsound doctrines for the present.

Lol, but when the French can make a 35 ton design that's roughly equivalent to the T-55...

The desire for quick victory frankly permeated all of Europe's militaries before the breakout, with the obsession with mobilizations and the cult of the offensive.
 
However, in naval matters, I would hazard that it was the dreadnought race itself which was part of the impetus for a quick victory. You had the British public lobbying for more spending on battleships before the war - "We want eight, we can't wait" was one of the chants if I recall correctly - and such impatience in getting battleships is probably going to be matched by wanting those battleships to actually win some battles.
 
I know you're trying to find a link between the new British-French alliance and try to find a way to link it with British naval strategy, but as Keegan noted the Admiralty in fact generally did not get involved in any of the joint armed forces meetings - whose very focus was finding out how to fulfill their obligations to the French. They were, to quote his First World War history, "aloof" to what the Army and the French were doing. In fact it's worth noting that the Grand Fleet never even joined forces with the French Navy in any operation - it was only for Gallipolli that the Royal Navy engaged jointly with the French and using only old battleships.
 
In any case, strictly speaking, the "alliance" hadn't been totally cemented from a legal perspective - hence the British needing the excuse of Belgian neutrality to get involved - and the French and British were in fact still arguing over some of the minor colonial issues that could have escalated.

The desire for quick victory frankly permeated all of Europe's militaries before the breakout, with the obsession with mobilizations and the cult of the offensive.
 
However, in naval matters, I would hazard that it was the dreadnought race itself which was part of the impetus for a quick victory. You had the British public lobbying for more spending on battleships before the war - "We want eight, we can't wait" was one of the chants if I recall correctly - and such impatience in getting battleships is probably going to be matched by wanting those battleships to actually win some battles.
 
I know you're trying to find a link between the new British-French alliance and try to find a way to link it with British naval strategy, but as Keegan noted the Admiralty in fact generally did not get involved in any of the joint armed forces meetings - whose very focus was finding out how to fulfill their obligations to the French. They were, to quote his First World War history, "aloof" to what the Army and the French were doing. In fact it's worth noting that the Grand Fleet never even joined forces with the French Navy in any operation - it was only for Gallipolli that the Royal Navy engaged jointly with the French and using only old battleships.
 
In any case, strictly speaking, the "alliance" hadn't been totally cemented from a legal perspective - hence the British needing the excuse of Belgian neutrality to get involved - and the French and British were in fact still arguing over some of the minor colonial issues that could have escalated.

The Admiralty was officially never integrated into the Ministry of Defense until after World War 2. The RN was in fact disconnected from the rest of the military and the government; a holdover from the time when the RN was more of a privateering force than a navy.
 
It's a very peculiar institution as far as militaries go.

It's very hard to take your "calling out" seriously when you're too busy playing strawman, trying to make us feel bad about poor Britain spending all the blood and treasure to beat the Germans (while ignoring the very real reality that much of British prosperity only came about because they looted India, whose economy didn't grow while under British rule even as the population exploded leading to the current poverty-stricken situation it's still trying to solve).
 
Instead, what you fail to realize is the issue is not Churchill, but the institutional rot of the Royal Navy's leadership as a whole high among which is its utter failure to come up with a grand strategy.
 
You sing the Royal Navy's virtues by saying they contributed a lot of vessels for D-Day, but you fail to realize that the British had to be literally dragged kicking and screaming from the utter failure that was their Mediterranean strategy before they agreed to invade Normandy. It was in fact primarily Britain's fault that the Western Allies wasted the entirety of 1943 by invading Italy - which Churchill keeps referring to as the soft underbelly of Europe without realizing that Italy is one really long chain of mountains unsuited for mechanized army operations (and both US and British Armies were fully mechanized at this point; with the US having one token mountain division in total) and that at the very top of Italy is not Germany but an obstacle called the "Fucking Alps" wherein a million Italians died in fruitless assaults on mountain passes guarded by Austrians in the First World War.
 
That, again, is a clear failure of grand strategy. The Royal Navy had no clue what it was supposed to actually do in the war except to muddle through. They were bailed out in the First World War because Jellicoe refused to succumb to any delusions by his peers like Beatty, Fisher, Wilson, or Churchill (funny how you pick only Churchill) and had too much of a lead on the even more mind-bogglingly incompetent Germans anyway. In the Second World War, there really wasn't a clear strategy until America basically grabbed them by the neck and shoved the Victory Plan in their faces.
 
Frankly, this is why I'd actually bet on the IJN beating the Royal Navy if the USN magically didn't get involved. As crazy as the IJN's leadership was, it at least understood that they were facing a war wherein the IJN would face numerical inferiority and had spent the inter-war years cultivating specialized skills that were meant to minimize this inferiority in specific situations (particularly night battle). The IJN had a strategy - create conditions where the defeat of the enemy fleet is probable and engage them in these conditions - even if the strategy was paired with the equivalent of national suicide.
 
The British strategy when the actual Pacific crisis hit in December 7 was apparently... "Send a few ships to show the flag, surely that will deter Japan?" Which is again not strategy but a load of wishful thinking.

The other issue that contributed to the rapid decline of the RN was its failure to understand grand strategy; particularly what made the Royal Navy so successful in previous wars in the first place.
 
The reality of the Royal Navy is that its big, flashy victories - Trafalgar, the Nile, etc - were merely a means to an end; which is to allow the British Navy to maintain control over the sea lanes by blockading the enemy's sea ports. Winning Trafalgar didn't cause Napoleon to give up - there is a decade long gap between Trafalgar and Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo. It was the long, grinding blockade that no one likes to talk about that actually defeated the French.
 
The problem by the First World War is that the public, and to a large extent the Admiralty that wanted to remain in the public's good graces, had come to expect that they would win smashing naval victories from the outset. This was why grandiose schemes were being drawn up to invade useless pieces of North Sea rock - because they wanted to "draw out" the German battlefleet and destroy it.
 
Jellicoe, to his credit, understood that he had to resist all of these insane ideas and limit himself to being the gaoler of the German fleet. As long as the German fleet and merchant marine was kept bottled up in its home ports, then the Royal Navy was doing its part to win the war.
 
Really, this is a classic case of the undisciplined pursuit of the new, which was identified by Jim Collins in his business books as one of the key indicators of what destroys successful corporations. I know historians are loathe to apply business book strategy to history, but in reality Collin's conclusions were based on statistical research and focus on the evolution of institutions - of which governments and militaries are in fact not much different from corporations.
 
Great companies in fact are often destroyed not by external competition, but rather because they fritter away resources in pursuit of pet projects that don't pan out while forgetting what made them great in the first place. When you have Churchill trying to tinker and micro-manage based on his delusional understanding of Trafalgar rather than sticking to the solid strategy that worked before, you get the same sort of embarassing rot that leads the RN from being a leading world navy to one that got badly trounced by the Japanese.

One of my little historical myth buster dissertations over in the Paradox Forums...
 
Movies tend to depict cavalry as charging in massed formations. It looks cool especially if you add some orchestral music to it:
 

 
And it is especially sad when you gatling gun all the men and horses in slow motion:
 

 
To an extent, the reason for this is because most paintings of cavalry depict them in such poses, such as this painting from the Battle of Beersheeba in 1917:
 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Palestine_Gallery_at_the_Australian_War_Memorial_(MG_9693).jpg
 
There's a little problem with this painting though. It was drawn during the age of photography, and as it turns out we have some actual photos of the battle:
 
http://www.rfd.org.au/site/beersheba.asp
 
And immediately we can go into mythbuster mode and make some key observations:
 
There are four photographs of the Australian Light Horse in the site, three of which depict the cavalry on the march and the fourth depicts them during the charge. The fourth is particularly significant - it might be the sole photograph of an actual cavalry charge ever taken. 
 
What's striking here is that the Beersheeba painting in fact bears most resemblance to the three photographs of the cavalry on the march - meaning they were in column, riding nearly knee to knee
 
Meanwhile, the "charge" photograph is very different - you can in fact see that rather than charging as a massed force, the cavalry had spread itself into three distinct waves - each of which is so sparsely manned that you can still make out individual riders on the most distant third wave. The spacing between each wave is also quite generous - several horse-lengths at least - at complete odds with the painting wherein the cavalry are basically charging as one huge column.
 
Why is the charge formation so different from the painting? Why is real war so different from Tom Cruise getting machinegunned? (No matter how amusing that may be).
 
And the answer, it turns out, is relatively simple: Cavalry charged in sparse waves for the same reason that automobile drivers maintain a minimum safe distance from the car ahead of them: In the event that the car ahead of you suddenly stopped, you want to have enough distance to either evade the car or brake yourself to a stop.
 
Cavalry were no different. If a cavalryman in the first wave got killed, then the troopers in the second wave want plenty of space to be able to avoid his corpse and that of his horse - not for sentimental reasons, but because failing to do so would likely cause your own horse to slip and lead you crashing into the ground.
 
The problem, as we know now from the history of cavalry paintings, is that most of these paintings were not drawn based on battlefield accounts. Instead, most of these paintings were drawn by artists witnessing parade-ground maneuvers (the famed painting "Scotland Forever" was drawn by someone who was not present at Waterloo, as an example) - hence the cavalry could safely gallop in massed columns due to the fact that it was unlikely anyone in the front was going to suddenly stop and cause the rest to pile up.
 
Additionally, painters tended to paint cavalry from the side view - as it seems to be a more impressive vantage point that maximizes the effect of a few horses. The painting at Bersheerba and the photographs on the march in fact seemed to have come from this school of thought.
 
Funnily, much as we want to make fun of The Last Samurai, they actually get this bit right when you look at 0:11 of this video:
 

 
Although the cavalry are charging towards the left (away from the guns and the guy we're supposed to hate), the line is actually only very sparse and contains only "our" brave white man, Ken Watanabe, and a few other extras. This gives each man plenty of space to pretend dying dramatically in slow motion without resulting in any unfortunate tramplings that could cause real injury.
 
That said, we then find out why the cavalry charged to the left and away from their intended target by 0:30 - That way we can now switch to side-view shots of the cavalry dying in slow motion, which again allows the filmmaker to maximize the impact of a handful of riders. There are perhaps just 10 guys in the scene at 0:30 - yet it seems a lot more since so much action is happening in the entire screen.
 
So there you have it, a fun little snarky piece on why people should never, ever believe pieces of Napoleonic "art" depicting cavalry drawn by artists commissioned by governments for the glorification of their armies - artists who by and large never witnessed combat. That last sentence in fact should have already been proof enough why paintings are such bad sources of historical truth, but one can never underestimate how stubbornly some people cling to what "military history" tells them.

One of my little historical myth buster dissertations over in the Paradox Forums...
 
Movies tend to depict cavalry as charging in massed formations. It looks cool especially if you add some orchestral music to it:
 

 
And it is especially sad when you gatling gun all the men and horses in slow motion:
 

 
To an extent, the reason for this is because most paintings of cavalry depict them in such poses, such as this painting from the Battle of Beersheeba in 1917:
 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Palestine_Gallery_at_the_Australian_War_Memorial_(MG_9693).jpg
 
There's a little problem with this painting though. It was drawn during the age of photography, and as it turns out we have some actual photos of the battle:
 
http://www.rfd.org.au/site/beersheba.asp
 
And immediately we can go into mythbuster mode and make some key observations:
 
There are four photographs of the Australian Light Horse in the site, three of which depict the cavalry on the march and the fourth depicts them during the charge. The fourth is particularly significant - it might be the sole photograph of an actual cavalry charge ever taken. 
 
What's striking here is that the Beersheeba painting in fact bears most resemblance to the three photographs of the cavalry on the march - meaning they were in column, riding nearly knee to knee
 
Meanwhile, the "charge" photograph is very different - you can in fact see that rather than charging as a massed force, the cavalry had spread itself into three distinct waves - each of which is so sparsely manned that you can still make out individual riders on the most distant third wave. The spacing between each wave is also quite generous - several horse-lengths at least - at complete odds with the painting wherein the cavalry are basically charging as one huge column.
 
Why is the charge formation so different from the painting? Why is real war so different from Tom Cruise getting machinegunned? (No matter how amusing that may be).
 
And the answer, it turns out, is relatively simple: Cavalry charged in sparse waves for the same reason that automobile drivers maintain a minimum safe distance from the car ahead of them: In the event that the car ahead of you suddenly stopped, you want to have enough distance to either evade the car or brake yourself to a stop.
 
Cavalry were no different. If a cavalryman in the first wave got killed, then the troopers in the second wave want plenty of space to be able to avoid his corpse and that of his horse - not for sentimental reasons, but because failing to do so would likely cause your own horse to slip and lead you crashing into the ground.
 
The problem, as we know now from the history of cavalry paintings, is that most of these paintings were not drawn based on battlefield accounts. Instead, most of these paintings were drawn by artists witnessing parade-ground maneuvers (the famed painting "Scotland Forever" was drawn by someone who was not present at Waterloo, as an example) - hence the cavalry could safely gallop in massed columns due to the fact that it was unlikely anyone in the front was going to suddenly stop and cause the rest to pile up.
 
Additionally, painters tended to paint cavalry from the side view - as it seems to be a more impressive vantage point that maximizes the effect of a few horses. The painting at Bersheerba and the photographs on the march in fact seemed to have come from this school of thought.
 
Funnily, much as we want to make fun of The Last Samurai, they actually get this bit right when you look at 0:11 of this video:
 

 
Although the cavalry are charging towards the left (away from the guns and the guy we're supposed to hate), the line is actually only very sparse and contains only "our" brave white man, Ken Watanabe, and a few other extras. This gives each man plenty of space to pretend dying dramatically in slow motion without resulting in any unfortunate tramplings that could cause real injury.
 
That said, we then find out why the cavalry charged to the left and away from their intended target by 0:30 - That way we can now switch to side-view shots of the cavalry dying in slow motion, which again allows the filmmaker to maximize the impact of a handful of riders. There are perhaps just 10 guys in the scene at 0:30 - yet it seems a lot more since so much action is happening in the entire screen.
 
So there you have it, a fun little snarky piece on why people should never, ever believe pieces of Napoleonic "art" depicting cavalry drawn by artists commissioned by governments for the glorification of their armies - artists who by and large never witnessed combat. That last sentence in fact should have already been proof enough why paintings are such bad sources of historical truth, but one can never underestimate how stubbornly some people cling to what "military history" tells them.

One of my little historical myth buster dissertations over in the Paradox Forums...
 
Movies tend to depict cavalry as charging in massed formations. It looks cool especially if you add some orchestral music to it:
 

 
And it is especially sad when you gatling gun all the men and horses in slow motion:
 

 
To an extent, the reason for this is because most paintings of cavalry depict them in such poses, such as this painting from the Battle of Beersheeba in 1917:
 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Palestine_Gallery_at_the_Australian_War_Memorial_(MG_9693).jpg
 
There's a little problem with this painting though. It was drawn during the age of photography, and as it turns out we have some actual photos of the battle:
 
http://www.rfd.org.au/site/beersheba.asp
 
And immediately we can go into mythbuster mode and make some key observations:
 
There are four photographs of the Australian Light Horse in the site, three of which depict the cavalry on the march and the fourth depicts them during the charge. The fourth is particularly significant - it might be the sole photograph of an actual cavalry charge ever taken. 
 
What's striking here is that the Beersheeba painting in fact bears most resemblance to the three photographs of the cavalry on the march - meaning they were in column, riding nearly knee to knee
 
Meanwhile, the "charge" photograph is very different - you can in fact see that rather than charging as a massed force, the cavalry had spread itself into three distinct waves - each of which is so sparsely manned that you can still make out individual riders on the most distant third wave. The spacing between each wave is also quite generous - several horse-lengths at least - at complete odds with the painting wherein the cavalry are basically charging as one huge column.
 
Why is the charge formation so different from the painting? Why is real war so different from Tom Cruise getting machinegunned? (No matter how amusing that may be).
 
And the answer, it turns out, is relatively simple: Cavalry charged in sparse waves for the same reason that automobile drivers maintain a minimum safe distance from the car ahead of them: In the event that the car ahead of you suddenly stopped, you want to have enough distance to either evade the car or brake yourself to a stop.
 
Cavalry were no different. If a cavalryman in the first wave got killed, then the troopers in the second wave want plenty of space to be able to avoid his corpse and that of his horse - not for sentimental reasons, but because failing to do so would likely cause your own horse to slip and lead you crashing into the ground.
 
The problem, as we know now from the history of cavalry paintings, is that most of these paintings were not drawn based on battlefield accounts. Instead, most of these paintings were drawn by artists witnessing parade-ground maneuvers (the famed painting "Scotland Forever" was drawn by someone who was not present at Waterloo, as an example) - hence the cavalry could safely gallop in massed columns due to the fact that it was unlikely anyone in the front was going to suddenly stop and cause the rest to pile up.
 
Additionally, painters tended to paint cavalry from the side view - as it seems to be a more impressive vantage point that maximizes the effect of a few horses. The painting at Bersheerba and the photographs on the march in fact seemed to have come from this school of thought.
 
Funnily, much as we want to make fun of The Last Samurai, they actually get this bit right when you look at 0:11 of this video:
 

 
Although the cavalry are charging towards the left (away from the guns and the guy we're supposed to hate), the line is actually only very sparse and contains only "our" brave white man, Ken Watanabe, and a few other extras. This gives each man plenty of space to pretend dying dramatically in slow motion without resulting in any unfortunate tramplings that could cause real injury.
 
That said, we then find out why the cavalry charged to the left and away from their intended target by 0:30 - That way we can now switch to side-view shots of the cavalry dying in slow motion, which again allows the filmmaker to maximize the impact of a handful of riders. There are perhaps just 10 guys in the scene at 0:30 - yet it seems a lot more since so much action is happening in the entire screen.
 
So there you have it, a fun little snarky piece on why people should never, ever believe pieces of Napoleonic "art" depicting cavalry drawn by artists commissioned by governments for the glorification of their armies - artists who by and large never witnessed combat. That last sentence in fact should have already been proof enough why paintings are such bad sources of historical truth, but one can never underestimate how stubbornly some people cling to what "military history" tells them.

One of my little historical myth buster dissertations over in the Paradox Forums...
 
Movies tend to depict cavalry as charging in massed formations. It looks cool especially if you add some orchestral music to it:
 

 
And it is especially sad when you gatling gun all the men and horses in slow motion:
 

 
To an extent, the reason for this is because most paintings of cavalry depict them in such poses, such as this painting from the Battle of Beersheeba in 1917:
 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Palestine_Gallery_at_the_Australian_War_Memorial_(MG_9693).jpg
 
There's a little problem with this painting though. It was drawn during the age of photography, and as it turns out we have some actual photos of the battle:
 
http://www.rfd.org.au/site/beersheba.asp
 
And immediately we can go into mythbuster mode and make some key observations:
 
There are four photographs of the Australian Light Horse in the site, three of which depict the cavalry on the march and the fourth depicts them during the charge. The fourth is particularly significant - it might be the sole photograph of an actual cavalry charge ever taken. 
 
What's striking here is that the Beersheeba painting in fact bears most resemblance to the three photographs of the cavalry on the march - meaning they were in column, riding nearly knee to knee
 
Meanwhile, the "charge" photograph is very different - you can in fact see that rather than charging as a massed force, the cavalry had spread itself into three distinct waves - each of which is so sparsely manned that you can still make out individual riders on the most distant third wave. The spacing between each wave is also quite generous - several horse-lengths at least - at complete odds with the painting wherein the cavalry are basically charging as one huge column.
 
Why is the charge formation so different from the painting? Why is real war so different from Tom Cruise getting machinegunned? (No matter how amusing that may be).
 
And the answer, it turns out, is relatively simple: Cavalry charged in sparse waves for the same reason that automobile drivers maintain a minimum safe distance from the car ahead of them: In the event that the car ahead of you suddenly stopped, you want to have enough distance to either evade the car or brake yourself to a stop.
 
Cavalry were no different. If a cavalryman in the first wave got killed, then the troopers in the second wave want plenty of space to be able to avoid his corpse and that of his horse - not for sentimental reasons, but because failing to do so would likely cause your own horse to slip and lead you crashing into the ground.
 
The problem, as we know now from the history of cavalry paintings, is that most of these paintings were not drawn based on battlefield accounts. Instead, most of these paintings were drawn by artists witnessing parade-ground maneuvers (the famed painting "Scotland Forever" was drawn by someone who was not present at Waterloo, as an example) - hence the cavalry could safely gallop in massed columns due to the fact that it was unlikely anyone in the front was going to suddenly stop and cause the rest to pile up.
 
Additionally, painters tended to paint cavalry from the side view - as it seems to be a more impressive vantage point that maximizes the effect of a few horses. The painting at Bersheerba and the photographs on the march in fact seemed to have come from this school of thought.
 
Funnily, much as we want to make fun of The Last Samurai, they actually get this bit right when you look at 0:11 of this video:
 

 
Although the cavalry are charging towards the left (away from the guns and the guy we're supposed to hate), the line is actually only very sparse and contains only "our" brave white man, Ken Watanabe, and a few other extras. This gives each man plenty of space to pretend dying dramatically in slow motion without resulting in any unfortunate tramplings that could cause real injury.
 
That said, we then find out why the cavalry charged to the left and away from their intended target by 0:30 - That way we can now switch to side-view shots of the cavalry dying in slow motion, which again allows the filmmaker to maximize the impact of a handful of riders. There are perhaps just 10 guys in the scene at 0:30 - yet it seems a lot more since so much action is happening in the entire screen.
 
So there you have it, a fun little snarky piece on why people should never, ever believe pieces of Napoleonic "art" depicting cavalry drawn by artists commissioned by governments for the glorification of their armies - artists who by and large never witnessed combat. That last sentence in fact should have already been proof enough why paintings are such bad sources of historical truth, but one can never underestimate how stubbornly some people cling to what "military history" tells them.

One of my little historical myth buster dissertations over in the Paradox Forums...
 
Movies tend to depict cavalry as charging in massed formations. It looks cool especially if you add some orchestral music to it:
 

 
And it is especially sad when you gatling gun all the men and horses in slow motion:
 

 
To an extent, the reason for this is because most paintings of cavalry depict them in such poses, such as this painting from the Battle of Beersheeba in 1917:
 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Palestine_Gallery_at_the_Australian_War_Memorial_(MG_9693).jpg
 
There's a little problem with this painting though. It was drawn during the age of photography, and as it turns out we have some actual photos of the battle:
 
http://www.rfd.org.au/site/beersheba.asp
 
And immediately we can go into mythbuster mode and make some key observations:
 
There are four photographs of the Australian Light Horse in the site, three of which depict the cavalry on the march and the fourth depicts them during the charge. The fourth is particularly significant - it might be the sole photograph of an actual cavalry charge ever taken. 
 
What's striking here is that the Beersheeba painting in fact bears most resemblance to the three photographs of the cavalry on the march - meaning they were in column, riding nearly knee to knee
 
Meanwhile, the "charge" photograph is very different - you can in fact see that rather than charging as a massed force, the cavalry had spread itself into three distinct waves - each of which is so sparsely manned that you can still make out individual riders on the most distant third wave. The spacing between each wave is also quite generous - several horse-lengths at least - at complete odds with the painting wherein the cavalry are basically charging as one huge column.
 
Why is the charge formation so different from the painting? Why is real war so different from Tom Cruise getting machinegunned? (No matter how amusing that may be).
 
And the answer, it turns out, is relatively simple: Cavalry charged in sparse waves for the same reason that automobile drivers maintain a minimum safe distance from the car ahead of them: In the event that the car ahead of you suddenly stopped, you want to have enough distance to either evade the car or brake yourself to a stop.
 
Cavalry were no different. If a cavalryman in the first wave got killed, then the troopers in the second wave want plenty of space to be able to avoid his corpse and that of his horse - not for sentimental reasons, but because failing to do so would likely cause your own horse to slip and lead you crashing into the ground.
 
The problem, as we know now from the history of cavalry paintings, is that most of these paintings were not drawn based on battlefield accounts. Instead, most of these paintings were drawn by artists witnessing parade-ground maneuvers (the famed painting "Scotland Forever" was drawn by someone who was not present at Waterloo, as an example) - hence the cavalry could safely gallop in massed columns due to the fact that it was unlikely anyone in the front was going to suddenly stop and cause the rest to pile up.
 
Additionally, painters tended to paint cavalry from the side view - as it seems to be a more impressive vantage point that maximizes the effect of a few horses. The painting at Bersheerba and the photographs on the march in fact seemed to have come from this school of thought.
 
Funnily, much as we want to make fun of The Last Samurai, they actually get this bit right when you look at 0:11 of this video:
 

 
Although the cavalry are charging towards the left (away from the guns and the guy we're supposed to hate), the line is actually only very sparse and contains only "our" brave white man, Ken Watanabe, and a few other extras. This gives each man plenty of space to pretend dying dramatically in slow motion without resulting in any unfortunate tramplings that could cause real injury.
 
That said, we then find out why the cavalry charged to the left and away from their intended target by 0:30 - That way we can now switch to side-view shots of the cavalry dying in slow motion, which again allows the filmmaker to maximize the impact of a handful of riders. There are perhaps just 10 guys in the scene at 0:30 - yet it seems a lot more since so much action is happening in the entire screen.
 
So there you have it, a fun little snarky piece on why people should never, ever believe pieces of Napoleonic "art" depicting cavalry drawn by artists commissioned by governments for the glorification of their armies - artists who by and large never witnessed combat. That last sentence in fact should have already been proof enough why paintings are such bad sources of historical truth, but one can never underestimate how stubbornly some people cling to what "military history" tells them.

One of my little historical myth buster dissertations over in the Paradox Forums...
 
Movies tend to depict cavalry as charging in massed formations. It looks cool especially if you add some orchestral music to it:
 

 
And it is especially sad when you gatling gun all the men and horses in slow motion:
 

 
To an extent, the reason for this is because most paintings of cavalry depict them in such poses, such as this painting from the Battle of Beersheeba in 1917:
 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Palestine_Gallery_at_the_Australian_War_Memorial_(MG_9693).jpg
 
There's a little problem with this painting though. It was drawn during the age of photography, and as it turns out we have some actual photos of the battle:
 
http://www.rfd.org.au/site/beersheba.asp
 
And immediately we can go into mythbuster mode and make some key observations:
 
There are four photographs of the Australian Light Horse in the site, three of which depict the cavalry on the march and the fourth depicts them during the charge. The fourth is particularly significant - it might be the sole photograph of an actual cavalry charge ever taken. 
 
What's striking here is that the Beersheeba painting in fact bears most resemblance to the three photographs of the cavalry on the march - meaning they were in column, riding nearly knee to knee
 
Meanwhile, the "charge" photograph is very different - you can in fact see that rather than charging as a massed force, the cavalry had spread itself into three distinct waves - each of which is so sparsely manned that you can still make out individual riders on the most distant third wave. The spacing between each wave is also quite generous - several horse-lengths at least - at complete odds with the painting wherein the cavalry are basically charging as one huge column.
 
Why is the charge formation so different from the painting? Why is real war so different from Tom Cruise getting machinegunned? (No matter how amusing that may be).
 
And the answer, it turns out, is relatively simple: Cavalry charged in sparse waves for the same reason that automobile drivers maintain a minimum safe distance from the car ahead of them: In the event that the car ahead of you suddenly stopped, you want to have enough distance to either evade the car or brake yourself to a stop.
 
Cavalry were no different. If a cavalryman in the first wave got killed, then the troopers in the second wave want plenty of space to be able to avoid his corpse and that of his horse - not for sentimental reasons, but because failing to do so would likely cause your own horse to slip and lead you crashing into the ground.
 
The problem, as we know now from the history of cavalry paintings, is that most of these paintings were not drawn based on battlefield accounts. Instead, most of these paintings were drawn by artists witnessing parade-ground maneuvers (the famed painting "Scotland Forever" was drawn by someone who was not present at Waterloo, as an example) - hence the cavalry could safely gallop in massed columns due to the fact that it was unlikely anyone in the front was going to suddenly stop and cause the rest to pile up.
 
Additionally, painters tended to paint cavalry from the side view - as it seems to be a more impressive vantage point that maximizes the effect of a few horses. The painting at Bersheerba and the photographs on the march in fact seemed to have come from this school of thought.
 
Funnily, much as we want to make fun of The Last Samurai, they actually get this bit right when you look at 0:11 of this video:
 

 
Although the cavalry are charging towards the left (away from the guns and the guy we're supposed to hate), the line is actually only very sparse and contains only "our" brave white man, Ken Watanabe, and a few other extras. This gives each man plenty of space to pretend dying dramatically in slow motion without resulting in any unfortunate tramplings that could cause real injury.
 
That said, we then find out why the cavalry charged to the left and away from their intended target by 0:30 - That way we can now switch to side-view shots of the cavalry dying in slow motion, which again allows the filmmaker to maximize the impact of a handful of riders. There are perhaps just 10 guys in the scene at 0:30 - yet it seems a lot more since so much action is happening in the entire screen.
 
So there you have it, a fun little snarky piece on why people should never, ever believe pieces of Napoleonic "art" depicting cavalry drawn by artists commissioned by governments for the glorification of their armies - artists who by and large never witnessed combat. That last sentence in fact should have already been proof enough why paintings are such bad sources of historical truth, but one can never underestimate how stubbornly some people cling to what "military history" tells them.

No, you're supposed to look at the supporting evidence. That book you linked? Its thesis was already featured comprehensively in a pretty good article from 2009.
 
 
http://www.salon.com/2009/06/15/neo_nazis_army/
 
And before you go "biased liberal media" the article quotes DoD documents from 2005/6:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
So really, Walter's anecdote is no mere anecdote. There was in fact a Neo Nazi problem by the 2000s - as filed by reports from the US Army itself, which wasn't resolved and was being even consistently ignored by the brass.
 
====
 
Meanwhile, here are the facts of Kyle's book.
 
First of all, it is a biography, written primarily from his own experiences and recollections. Why we've turned Belton Cooper into a punching bag and haven't done the same to Kyle, I'm not sure, but I'm not too busy hero-worshipping to apply the same level of exacting fact-checking that we've applied to SS fanfiction.
 
And really, it's not a pretty picture.
 
The first and most important thing to realize is that Kyle was found to be lying about multiple statements. He in fact was found guilty of libel against Jesse Ventura - not a man known for his credibility - because his fellow SEALs testified against Kyle. 
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/07/29/jesse-ventura-wins-1-8-million-in-damages-against-chris-kyle-slain-navy-seal-sniper/
 
This is before we consider the fact that he also claims to have murdered two people in cold blood in Texas (in "self defense") and said he was shooting looters during Katrina. Those who say the latter is just a joke or a tall tale would be well reminded that America just went through a couple of riots because of the possibility that police may have shot unarmed black men. Here we have a US Army sniper claiming the government authorized him to murder looters in cold blood. 
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/30/the-complicated-but-unveriable-legacy-of-chris-kyle-the-deadliest-sniper-in-american-history/
 
But really, all that really pales in comparison to the real problem of Kyle's record: His supposed 160 "official" kill score.
 
The problem is, I have found zero US Navy sources corroborating these claims, both the official tally of 160 nor his own guesstimate of 220+. In fact, US Special Forces command said this:
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/american-sniper/facts/
 
 
 
 
 
The article then goes on to say that Kyle's co-author claims he had to verify the claims with command, but let's be frank here - we don't accept self-reported SS kill claims. Neither should we accept self-reported claims from US snipers.
 
Moreover, I have in fact tried to look for other sources to maybe try and corroborate the claims. The problem is that they all lead to even more fantastical stories and blatant inconsistencies. For instance:
 
http://projects.militarytimes.com/citations-medals-awards/recipient.php?recipientid=307606
 
One of the first things I looked at was Kyle's Silver Star citation. At first glance, looks good - 90 confirmed kills over 5 months. "Plausible". But then there's also the rough edges - only 32 overwatch missions, implying 3 kills per overwatch? Only five "snipers with scoped weapons" specifically identified? Sounds like someone is just taking Chris' words at face value and applying the loose standards for kills - which is "as long as the spotter and sniper saw someone go down, it's a kill".
 
So I took a look at the involvement of the SEALs in the above battle - Ramadi 2006 - and found this book:
 
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sheriff-Ramadi-Winning-al-Anbar/dp/1591141389
 
Which claims, on the flap cover, this:
 
 
 
 
At which point any sane SS fanfiction hunter goes "hold it, the SEALs claimed a total of 300-400 kills in Ramadi, stretching to a period beyond Chris Kyle's tour" (Kyle's tour ended in August 2006. The book and the battle stretches to Nov 2007). Is Kyle seriously someone so superhuman that he accounted for 1/3 of all SEAL kills at Ramadi despite participating only in 5 of its 24 months?! Something's fishy here.
 
And guess what? I managed to get a partial copy of the book (more specifically Google Books) and found Chris Kyle's name wasn't even in the index or in the entire damn book. You have Michael Monsoor, who won the MoH by falling on a grenade and a few other SEALs mentioned, but not Chris Kyle.
 
http://books.google.com.ph/books?id=C7rbAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA83&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
 
At which point, I really just have to call bullshit. How the hell can the sniper who supposedly accounted for 1/3 of all SEAL kills in just 5 months of operations be not included or mentioned at all in a book about SEALs in that very battle? 
 
It just doesn't come together. Worse, when I look at USMC accounts of the battle, there's hardly any mention of SEALs, so even the "Sheriff of Ramadi" version may already be overglorifying the SEAL's overall achievements as it stands.
 
Hence, there really is serious doubts about Kyle's kill count or supposed heroic status. Nobody just has the courage to actually look and call it out. And really, given his public record it looks like he made it up. Or worse, if you transplant his Katrina fantasy to Ramadi, you have Kyle acting like a terrorist sniper gunning down people as it pleased him; which the Navy then papered over with a Silver Star that none of his colleagues ever thought was deserved (again, his own fellow SEALs testified against him over Jesse Ventura). The latter is a particularly disturbing possibility when one considers April '06 coincides with the Marines deciding to loosen the rules of engagement around Ramadi with predictably bad results for the civilians - something that was realized to be a mistake.
 
So, yeah, sure, let those families with Iraq War vets try and pretend that this "American Sniper" movie is some kind of catharsis. Me, I would find it supremely ironic if the film which they thought "honored" their families was in fact featuring a protagonist who was ultimately a gun-nut fraud that in fact dishonored all of the actual serving members of the military. Life can be real cruel like that; which is why people keep buying lies in the first place.

*flashbacks from 10 years ago when Zinegata was very active in The Gaming Den*
 
The Essence of RPGs
 
The essential thing to realize about a roleplaying game is that it is ultimately a conflict generation and resolution mechanism. The game must be able to create conflict scenarios, that is then resolved by the players using their characters.
 
Hence, before beginning development, you need to define what kinds of conflict the system is supposed to generate and resolve. All successful RPGs, at its core, must feature interesting conflicts that players would like to participate in - be it a "dungeon crawl/adventure" conflict (D&D), a "military" conflict (Twilight 2000), a "space opera" conflict (Star Wars) or whatever.
 
And in general, I'd note that specificity is very important for good RPGs. D20 Modern for instance is mostly forgotten because it didn't have a strong central core conflict - it was basically seen as a D&D port in a quasi-modern setting that didn't necessarily subscribe to the dungeon crawl style of conflict to begin with. Shadowrun by contrast, despite its mechanical clunkiness, has niched itself solidly by defining itself as the RPG that combines both magic and cyberpunk elements in a sorta coherent whole.
 
Tabletop vs Computer Implementation
 
In general, tabletop systems are the easiest to develop because the premise of the system is that there is a human Gamemaster to nudge the system along even when the rules fall short. On the other hand, the ease of development means there's also a massive glut of tabletop gaming material out there, plus it's not exactly a growing market. This will apply regardless what your conflict resolution mechanism is - be it dice, special dice, cards, etc.
 
PC games by contrast are much harder to develop, as the computer game program must come out fully understanding the rules with minimal bugs; and it must also have the resources to generate conflict scenarios. A tabletop Game Master can, with a few hours of preparation, create a dungeon that the players will tackle. A computer can't do this - it must have a pre-loaded scenario or it must have very robust tools for creating random encounters (as eptomized by the random dungeons of rogue-likes).