307 karma · joined November 1, 2016
Not enough in the piggy bank to cover?
What we are witnessing from Russia is not how armor should be employed. Armor is not suddenly obsoleted due to tech that’s been out for decades. That take is probably overly simplistic and wrong.
By the way, I’m a big proponent of FD2030.
Have you ever humped a combat load? It sucks. You’re rolling out with 40 lbs of stuff hanging off you before we even talk sustainment.
Javelin has gotta be 40-50 lbs. Add that on. Want an extra missile? Add another 30 or so.
Now suppose you don’t run into any armor, this is why every infantryman doesn’t/won’t carry one. Maybe 1 per squad, if we want to be super aggressive maybe 1 per fireteam. But that’s now a machine gun they’ve left out, what if they really needed more suppression?
It’s a trade off and humans aren’t capable of bringing all the nice to haves to every fight. This is why there won’t be hundreds in a company.
There’s no scenario where hundreds of Javelins are sitting in one infantry company. It’s the type of thing that only makes sense on paper.
Would be much more worried about evolution of loitering fires with drones.
If they are in force then you get rolled.
If Putin tries to invade Latvia, the default assumption in this analysis is that NATO will just crumble rather than respond?
Perhaps a publisher might think so, but I would suggest the appeal is the unique POV and voice of the author and the choices they make.
2. It’s not like you’re using the same scale to weigh yourself and the protein powder
The Force by Don Winslow
November Road by Lou Berney
Even the popular plotting libraries in python don’t seem to have an easily configurable version. Recently tried plotly and found it plotting the categories in reverse order from the intuitive way you’d expect to see.
I’ve been meaning to script my own custom plot since Excel’s waterfalls are tedious to create and you don’t get enough control over the labeling.
Fighting certainly doesn't stop because you can't get comms with the bird. You just lose that as on option to deploy.
I think what gets abstracted away when people think about military operations is that it's not a chess board back at the Pentagon. They only are accomplished by physical deployment of force. You always plan for the back up contingencies because the mission still needs to get done if all the systems aren't online.
Long hard experience has taught us the way you make operations resilient is always know how to fall back on a physical signal like popping a smoke or sending up a flare.
--Perhaps that take is a bit too simplistic, so take it with a grain of salt from a ground combat element guy. I get it that there a large portions of the military who don't show up to play when their widgets stop working.
I've used them in corporate strategy work in the past. IBIS is one example [1].
Frankly, you get a general overview of a market but it is usually underwhelming on the sort of details that would help you decide on specific areas of focus.
ECMO’s really an incredible feat of medicine that can bring people back from the edge where they would otherwise die.