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Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

Also see r/combatfootage

Citizens should aware of what happens without passing through the media's filter/framing.

Also, a lot of the value in that sub is also from the comments. It's like the experts we have on HN, but for armed conflicts.

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I was watching a video (helmet mounted gopro) from a small unit doing recon in Ukraine. They seemed disorganized and were in enemy territory in broad daylight. They all died on video and then the Russians who defeated them used one of the cellphones to call the families and let them know they weren't coming home. Horrible. The thing that struck me is how often does your local government make a mistake or have incomplete information? Now imagine this same process applied to your life in a warzone. Everything outside of your control possibly with inept people who don't care about you making all the decisions. What a waste of life.

You think about this if you ever watched band of brothers. The autobiography of one of the main people, "The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters" gets into this. The leaders would send them into pointless investigations that would get nothing and lead to them being killed, maybe it was near the end of the war, he wouldn't send his out.

Even in modern warfare, with its surgical accuracy to pinpoint and take out specific targets, hundreds if not thousands of troops will still die in the course of a major engagement, counting tactical errors, accidents, and friendly fire incidents.

It's a sobering thought and one that makes me glad we're disengaging from foreign conflicts. War is hell.

We really have no concept of what a real shooting war looks like. Twenty years of counter-insurgencies around the Middle East has amounted to a US butcher's bill that would be less than one single day during a major offensive in 1916 in France or 1943 in the Ukraine. The generation that was alive during Vietnam is dying out.

I'm from a backwoods area that disproportionately sends recruits to the military, and I don't know anybody from the dozens who went over there that actually fired any shots in anger. The fobbit-fighter ratio is pretty absurd.

It would seem that our soldiers current experience would be most like that of the British Army soldiers of the late-Victorian era from the Crimean War to the Boer War, when they were largely engaged in policing the colonies of the British Empire in mostly small scale and guerrilla engagements.

Is there a literature from ordinary British soldiers forming "the thin red line"?

Kipling is probably unreliable. "Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Tommy, 'ow's yer soul? / But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes' when the drums begin to roll,"

https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/tommy.html

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, / And the women come out to cut up what remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/young_british...

> Twenty years of counter-insurgencies around the Middle East has amounted to a US butcher's bill that would be less than one single day during a major offensive in 1916 in France or 1943 in the Ukraine.

That's an exaggeration. Iraq 2003-2009 suffered around half the deaths of France 1914-1918.

WW I, most deaths in a single day: ~30,000

WW I, total deaths from France, cvilians and military: ~1,400,000

Iraq invasion: ~200,000 verified violent civilian death. Total estimations are 2x-5× that number.

These figures were from Wikipedia. From memory, a few comparison points with other Middle East wars were the USA had a minor role (a military minor role, since I doubt Saudi Arabia and UAE would have invaded Yemen if the USA had not provided their full support):

Yemen (2015-): ~100,000 deaths. 10 millions suffer from hunger.

Syria (2011-): ~300,000 deaths

I'm speaking from a decidedly US-centric point of view. Total deaths in all combat theaters from all causes for the US military is on the order of 11000 dead from the first boots on the ground in Afghanistan to today.

France, WW1: ~1,700,000 civilian and military (1.4M is military alone.); ~4.3% of its population. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties)

Iraq's population in 2002 was about 25,000,000 (France in 1911 was 39,000,000); ~650,000 excess deaths (2003-2006, the most I could find in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War) is about 2.6% of the population.

Americans have been carefully conditioned to count only American casualties.

The number of people killed or mauled in recent wars is so horrendous that any American complaining of unpleasantness should be ashamed.

They all died except one. I think how things were handled with the survivor, also on video, is very telling of the humanity in all of us.

Immediately after trying to sneak up and kill his enemy in an ambush he was rendered aid by them.

I myself grew up in a garrison town in Russian far east, Vladivostok. My early childhood memories were all about seeing gloomy gloomy military men, and hearing weird discussions at public canteens from which I remember phrases like "how much do they pay per body" and "who will be killing those people if not us?"

It must've been a shitty thing to be a union's officer. Officer corps' relationship with the state was not easy, in contrast to union's general staff, who were "lardons in uniform" in their majority.

It was almost as if the state and general staff was trying to bargain with their conscience.

There was an equally good and polar opposite video where the Russians are advancing through some fields using APCs for cover until a Ukrainian tank shows up (unsupported) and wreaks havoc for a little bit. The audio is a combination of the guy in charge yelling at everyone and the lower level grunts making wise-ass quips about how poorly the operation is going the whole time. Everyone involved was well beyond the point of giving a fuck about anything.

Lack of credible information indeed can be deadly, let alone horrifying. For that exact reason propaganda is very much gladly filling in the void.

Sure there're different flavors of propaganda, but the one which is able to target masses back home is a lot more potent than the one directed at the front lines.

I doubt that the Ukrainian soldiers would be swayed by footage like this, but their mothers sure will be. Perhaps this may also be meant to convince the mothers back in Russia that that their sons are "safe" in hands of "good" COs and are facing "easy" opposition.

Being able to recognize BS is as much vital.

<SARCASM> Spoken like a true expert who has all "credible information"</SARCASM>

And all that started with the US-sponsored coup in Kiev.

While I cannot attest to the accuracy of anything posted on that subreddit, it is worth pointing out that a lot of "combat footage" is selectively presented or staged for effect rather than representing the typical situations that actually occur in combat.

Sometimes, but Vets also often comment and explain the context.

That said, there is no such thing as true objectivity. The best you can do is try to get more evidence and personal accounts

selectively presented or staged for effect rather than representing the typical situations that actually occur in combat

Staged for effect? Typical combat? They're certainly selected for being dramatic or kinetic. As far as being staged, I'm not sure what you mean, perhaps you could clarify. I don't know what typical combat means either. "Typical" small arms engagements in Afghanistan vs. Iraq were quite different.

Perhaps he meant that some of those videos are fully staged, like an ad, in a safe area (for example for this one https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/du4vax/marin..., for the first part, the marines just found an empty/abandoned house, not in a combat zone and just shot the video. Or for this one https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/dumvcv/nlf_u... the soldiers(?) pitched the tents themselves before firing their missile).

"Typical" may be when no one side is overwhelmingly victorious. Where on any advantages you may possess there're handicaps placed. That's what lets the wars drag on for the long times as they do.

Side-note: it would be helpful if HN turned strings like that ("r/combatfootage") into actual HTML links to that particular subreddit. Reddit is a YC company, so why not?

Lack of features and poor UI is a moderation tactic to keep Eternal September at bay. It’s used aggressively by 4chan (eg setting a fullscreen overlay which can only be removed using user style css), but you see it crop up elsewhere every now and then.

Whether intentionally or not, I think HN effectively does the same. Let’s face it: the UI is lacking and laborious. While I only speak for myself, some might agree: that’s a feature, not a bug.

That is an interesting thought. You may be on to something...

They did eventually implement comment folding though.

Yet still they did (will?) not implement comment notifications, which I'm pretty sure will increase engagement significantly.

>that’s a feature, not a bug.

This! And I believe it's intentional. It's a common pattern actually: A site starts out and has a slight barrier to entry which keeps out the technologically illiterate and those with poor attention spans. The site gets good because all the contributors are, at the risk of sounding like a gate-keeping elitist here, high quality people because that slight barrier has selected for them. Then the site gets sold, bean counters and management want to increase users by enhancing usability and eliminating those barriers to entry, and quality goes downhill until the high quality people give up and find another hub to congregate. Wash, rinse, repeat. Case in point: Reddit. Only obscure niche subs are even tolerable for me anymore where nothing ever makes the front page and its just a bunch of knowledgeable enthusiasts.

I love to educate new people and welcome them into a community, but I really like the Buddhist monk or Navy Seal model. They only get in after they've proved they're sufficiently motivated to do their own work by waiting on the door step for 3 days, or going through intense training, etc. That's just the extreme. I've seen so many organizations or sites that have managed to maintain a quality environment by doing really simple things, like charge $1 for entry, require a credit card number with no charge made, require some contribution or a membership fee. Look at the difference between Costco and Walmart for another example where a membership fee that keeps out the riff raff has certainly played an important role.

The reality is, it's not always a design failure if your community fails to educate and cater to the lowest common denominator.

HN I think absolutely does this intentionally. I love that you have to get 500 karma in order to be eligible to downvote. It's a really smart tactic IMO. You have to really contribute something over a fair amount of time and thus gain a lot of situational awareness before you can start throwing around full voting privileges.

  Only obscure niche subs are even tolerable for me anymore where nothing ever makes the front page and its just a bunch of knowledgeable enthusiasts

Yes, true. I still use Reddit, for those reasons.

  I love that you have to get 500 karma in order to be eligible to downvote. It's a really smart tactic IMO.

Agreed. Still proud of the day I hit that magic number.

Edit: Nevermind. This turned into a weird ego battle I'm not interested in joining.

This comment is out of line. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 for the note that downvotes are allowed to express disagreement.

You're only being downvoted because the thread you started is too off-topic to the actual discussion

Thanks for trying to explain this stuff, I really appreciate it, but I think there was also something else at play here.

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