Electronic warfare history of the Battle of the Bulge

You were right that it was just AA for most of the war, due to the desire for secrecy, but starting at the battle of the Bulge in late 1944, proximity fuses were used by US artillery, on land.

Otherwise, I strongly agree with you.

The proximity fuse was used at the battle of the bulge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze

However they did tried to avoid them being captured by the Germans.

The proximity shells for AA guns were so sensitive that they with the help of targeting computers allowed the Brits to essentially neutralize V-1 attacks as they could effectively shoot down all incoming V-1’s.

The science behind building a proximity fuze in 1942 is just mind boggling. Even though they infinite money at their disposal it's still insane that they were able to computerize a shell moving with 16,000-20,000 G-Forces in the days of vacuum tubes.

I read "12 Seconds of Silence: How a Team of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Spies Took Down a Nazi Superweapon" recently. Never knew about the advantage it gave the Allies. James Van Allen as in the "Van Allen Belt" was part of the effort.

The Allies had fielded jets earlier than the Germans. WW2 arguably slowed down jet development not accelerated it as most of them were pre-war designs.

The Brits didn’t had the industrial capacity to produce jets in large numbers and for the US the early jets were a logistical nightmare.

Early jets couldn’t fly off aircraft carriers in fact it would take quite a while for the navy to get jets working and for close air support the navy still had prop aircraft until early Vietnam.

Jet bombers weren’t viable during WW2 and the limited range of jets their fuel, landing stop and other logistical requirements meant that it was far harder to support them from frontline airbases.

So it’s more of the case that the US simply couldn’t use the jets of the time effectively if they could they would’ve built more of them and some even earlier than 43-44.

The Me-262 was built in relatively large numbers but did absolutely squat to change the tides of war as the Allies found a very simple solution to go after the air bases.

Unlike most prop aircraft of the time that could take off and land in a field and could be serviced in a barn jets needed proper runways and maintenance facilities.

Well, they first had to steal the A-bomb project from British Empire (ok, technically the theft happened post-war, when they stopped brits from taking back their notes)

As for the above examples - Nazis were a bit behind on jet engine technology, and most importantly got lost in trying to get some super weapon while their designs and production lines were hamstrung by stupid ideas

You can see in the diagrams toward the end that likely four tubes per fuze were used in WWII.

https://maritime.org/doc/vtfuze/index.htm

Yep probably one of the most important and under discussed military operations of the war was one without a single bullet fired

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission

Nobody clicks on links (and the algorithm deemphasizes them). People want to read content natively without leaving the app.

So if you want reads, you gotta share natively on whatever platform you like to use.

The pros use a strategy where they write long cornerstone content then post insightful abstracts on various platforms natively. Super pros use interns/agencies to do the chopping and sharing.

Twitter has really become a platform for professionals to make a name for themselves in a relatively short time period. There's also a general trend the past few years of society pushing people to build a community (followers, subscribers, etc) online using whatever niche skills they have. I've seen it over and over in the real estate / SMB side of Twitter in the past year. Someone talks about the secrets of the storage rental business, laundry mat business, or house cleaning business using threads and they're able to gain a "community" of followers relatively quickly and then a few months later capitalize on it with intros or selling a course. So back to the original question, I believe the reasoning for people to publish stuff like this on Twitter is to build up a following and their public presence.

Bit of html with some img tags beats both.

javascript:(function(){var imgs=document.getElementsByTagName("img");for(var i=0;i<imgs.length;i++)imgs[i].style.visibility="hidden"}());

Source:

Javascript bookmarklet to hide all images from current webpage?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3623640/javascript-bookm...

Honestly I am dubious. There is a Norwegian military doctrine that has the mission objectives set and then the "unit" being expected to be autonomous to achieve those objectives. But this was in a time when the Norwegians expected Russia / Germany to take the country and then a Quisling government to issue a recall. The idea was that when a free Norway set objectives they would be carried out even if the capital fell.

Does the UMC think that marines should take one set of orders and then ignore any counter-marding orders? It's probably not what that term means.

Traditionally command / management has had three goals

- co-ordination

- resource allocation

- decision making in uncertainty

The first one is useful, but even in slow moving environments like business it's almost impossible to imagine up then down orders being more effective than horizontal. This is the meaning of your slogan and modern military have learnt this lesson well.(maybe the battle of Jutland ?). It's very dubious any major enterprise has learnt this lesson but I will take suggestions. (Just to expand on this - many business claim to push decisions down to lowest level. As do many militaries. In my experience this is really relegation by negligence - that the upper levels simply do not have the mental bandwidth / time / reporting chains to interfere. For example look at how empires before the age of telegraphy ran themselves - the Satrap was empowered to make wide ranging decisions - but as soon as communication went from weeks to minutes Prime Ministers and Presidents interfered all be time. If your CEO could interfere in your weekly stand up meetings, trust me he would.) This is the essential difference between some new model of organisation (cf Norwegian Mission) and the current one which is just the central office has not automated away your decision making power yet. See Amazon warehouses for an example of how oddly effective that has been (to date)

Resource allocation is mostly what we are talking about here. This project gets funding this does not. The failure here was a failure to appreciate the extreme value of anyone doing radio jamming versus that bomber squadron, abs the failure to appreciate the bulge was a counter attack. I am not sure any other system of command (distributed / bottom up / democracy) would do much better. Something tells me a software model of the whole "system" set up and distributed to all decision makers (voters?) would allow a sensible discussion. Not sure it would make a better army. But if it did that army would be terrifying.

And decision making in uncertainty is covered above I guess. It is IMO the only truly valuable thing for a hierarchical organisation. And it is so horribly dependant on the taste and capacity of the apex of the organisation.

None of these are easy fixes - this is very very much a 20/20 hindsight example - and yet we have to ask does software and the internet open up how we organise large groups of people into new forms. We have run armies and civil services like this for tens of thousands of years. Is it how we should arrange a 21 C business ?

Starter for ten: if every body in a SV start up got even shares - that is hiring the fifth person meant your shares went from 25% to 20%. Even founders. Would SV grow fast through automation or through hiring? What other minor changes to incentives will massively chnage how we organise?

True, but in this case the comments really aren’t about this single Twitter thread, but the use of Twitter threads in lieu of a Webpage. This discussion is of current and general relevance about that particular format, using this great content as an example. It’s not that common in this case.

Not a topic hijacking, but indirectly meeting a need that hasn’t been met by anyone posting an article addressing the Twitter thread issue as it has evolved over the last several months. This discussion has the benefit of a concrete example. Perhaps someone could post an article that focuses just on Twitter threads and the discussion can continue there?

You're right, sorry about that.

Fortunately Turing was given complete method to crack Enigma before the war started, eh? (Turing is responsible for bringing the computational complexity down and figuring Turing Machine from the multi-team work on Bombe, Colossus and other automated code breaking machines).

“Alan Turing, the father of modern computers”?

A (very important) father of modern computers. Canonization is unnecessary.