It'll be interesting seeing how that gets through Congress. It might then behoove our 435 elected Representatives and 100 Senators to tell the Executive branch "No".
*Tied nervously exits the building, hoping to mask the fact he knows almost nothing of tatical means of fighting war before 20th century, and his fat ass only reads about logistics of such wars and watches movies about them at night*
Edit: holy shit this is interesting. easy to follow
Software engineering is likely to continue to fucking suck. Any sort of engineering that's paving new ground is deep in the depths of the land of diminishing returns, and us poor bastards that sit in front of computers by definition are paving new ground because if you're not you find whoever's done it before and you license that shit. I'm also not terribly convinced we're going to see a big jump in single thread performance which means that any sufficiently complicated code is going to be full of the hardest sort of code.
Or I'm wrong and we're going to be eating grapes from the doting hand of the IDE we tell what to do as it actually turns flowcharts and diagrams into working software.
"Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." - Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC
Weaponsman linked to an interesting article about the British logistical problems during the American Revolution. It had never occurred to me before, but seemed obvious in hindsight that supplying an army across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century would have been... challenging. What's more surprising is not the difficulty of the endeavor, but how good a job the British ended up doing.
Any boy howdy am I glad I wasn't born back then:
Forget massed deployment of Ferguson rifles, or uzis from the future or any other alt-history wank. If you wanted to go back in time and make the British empire unstoppable in the late eighteenth century, slip them the secrets of modern preservatives.
*Tied nervously exits the building, hoping to mask the fact he knows almost nothing of tatical means of fighting war before 20th century, and his fat ass only reads about logistics of such wars and watches movies about them at night*
Edit: holy shit this is interesting. easy to follow
The story of the Russian 81st Motor Rifle Regiment in Grozny in the first Chechen war is insane. Wikipedia has a brief summary, but there's also a longer article from the New York Times with more details.
Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_%281994%E2%80%9395%29
By mid-afternoon, the first battalion of the 131st MRB occupied the train station, unaware of the 81st MRR's situation and separated from the second battalion which reached the freight station further to the west, and from the third battalion on the outskirts of the city. The unit parked its tanks and armored personnel carriers around the station and awaited further orders. Somewhere within that period of time, a Russian communications officer heard the words, "Welcome to Hell," on his headset. Shortly after, Chechen fighters, hiding in the depot buildings, the post office, and the five-story building surrounding the station, opened devastating automatic and anti-tank weapons fire. The surviving Russian soldiers took cover inside the station, which the Chechens soon set ablaze. Russian commanding officer, Colonel Ivan Savin, radioed for help and artillery fire, which never came
NY Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gall-chechnya.html
Across town on Pervomaiskaya Street, a long, broad avenue leading in from the airport, another fierce battle was raging where the 81st Motor Rifle Regiment came under ambush as it drove into town. Strung out for a mile along the avenue, the whole column came under fire from Chechen fighters positioned all the way down. Fighters were suddenly on the attack, running out in search of more tanks, plundering what did not burn for weapons and ammunition. By evening they gathered in the centre of the town, swarming around the market-place and moving towards the railway station.
The Maikop Brigade had occupied Grozny's railway station by early afternoon, parking its tanks and APCs in the square in front, facing the Presidential Palace, several hundred yards away down Orjonikidze Prospekt. They were unaware that they were a target for a very hostile and fierce Chechen resistance. Some members of the Presidential Guard even remember one Russian soldier poking his head out of the tank hatch to ask them where he could buy cigarettes. The Chechens answered him with a bullet to the head.
The Chechens took up positions in the depot buildings behind the railway station, the post office to the right and the five-storey building opposite. Over the radio they called on the Russians to surrender, warning them they were surrounded, but the Russians replied they had their orders and would not. Ryabtsev was standing under the arch of the railway budding when a bullet nicked his uniform. It was early evening, still fight, he remembered. It began slowly, with sniper fire and machine-guns rattling from nearby buildings. As the Russians answered with the big guns mounted on their armoured vehicles, the Chechens blasted them from the side with rocket-propelled grenades.
Within hours the square had turned into a horrific inferno of burning tanks and dead bodies. Ryabtsev was shot in the legs trying to haul a heavy machine-gun into the railway station building. He dragged himself behind the tanks and was pulled in through the window to a room that filled rapidly with wounded soldiers. Nikolai Zarovny, another young conscript, wag inside his light tank firing the gun when an anti-tank grenade seared into the side, bursting like a fireball. His clothes on fire, his face and hands scorched, he yanked open the hatch at the back and leapt out, stumbling over the dead bodies of his comrades as he dashed blindly into the station building. Badly burnt, he joined the growing number of wounded in the impromptu field hospital. As the fighting raged through the night, Ryabtsev remembers drifting in and out of sleep, hearing loud explosions and someone saying another tank had been hit.
The commander of the Brigade, Colonel Ivan Savin, radioed all night for reinforcements but none came. Kim's unit only made it to the station at five in the morning but was in no position to help. His vehicle was hit in the street by the Presidential Palace around three in the afternoon. His team leapt free and made it into the light tank ahead. Fifteen of them then took cover in a building until the early hours of the morning when they managed to duck and weave their way to the station buildings. At midnight the men stopped for fifteen minutes while their commander offered them a swig of vodka. It was by now New Year's Day but they had little to celebrate.
The end results of the New Year's Eve battle were devastating for the Russian side, with the first Russian armored column alone losing 105 of its 120 tanks and armored personnel carriers.
The entire first battalion of the Maikop Brigade, more than 50% of the 81st Regiment, and hundreds of men from the remaining units had been killed. A high-ranking Russian General Staff officer later said "On January 2nd, we lost contact with our forward units." According to Maskhadov, some 400 Russian tanks and APCs in all were destroyed.
Russian Colonel General A. Galkin reported 225 armored vehicles lost during the first month and a half of the war, including 62 tanks.
Most of the Spetsnaz detachment troops surrendered to the Chechens, "after wandering about hopelessly for three days without food, let alone any clear idea of what they were supposed to do."
Now many years Later Gronzy is a prosperous Russian city, and the army is new and reformed in mastery of asymetical deep battle warfare, but the lesion was hard to learn
Tied reacted to LoooSeR in The Small Arms Thread, Part 8: 2018; ICSR to be replaced by US Army with interim 15mm Revolver Cannon.
Tied got a reaction from Khand-e in The Small Arms Thread, Part 8: 2018; ICSR to be replaced by US Army with interim 15mm Revolver Cannon.
Tied got a reaction from Vasily Krysov in The Small Arms Thread, Part 8: 2018; ICSR to be replaced by US Army with interim 15mm Revolver Cannon.
Tied got a reaction from Belesarius in The Small Arms Thread, Part 8: 2018; ICSR to be replaced by US Army with interim 15mm Revolver Cannon.
