Dinh AaronMk

The never ending story

This is now a Putin with animals thread.

The never ending story

<Snipped quote by Suzuiya>

Remove this comment. It has more than three or four words.

@BrobyDDark

Remove this post, it contains kebab.

Ancient London - A Cosmopolitan City

bbc.com/news/science-environment-34809..

A team of scientists have began to analyze the thousands of remains stored at Museum of London to put together a profile of the peoples who have inhabited London since it's founding by the Romans. So far, only four have been studied but already there's a wide-ranging origins profile with individuals from Eastern Europe, North/Sub-Saharan Africa, and one Briton.

The Thoughts of A Psychological Function

I don't think we can deal with Daesh in the same way we can a nation-state. They don't exist on the same principles as Germany, France, the US, or the UK and are a part of a much broader spectrum. So we eliminate Daesh: march into Al-Raqqah and break down their command and take out or capture Bahgdadi. But what do we solve? Not really anything.

The pretense of their activity as militant ultra-orthodox, almost apocalyptic Muslim philosophy still exists. We still got Boko Haram to deal with, Al-Qaeda to contend with, or Al Mourabitoun which encompass a extreme belief that transcends a single group or a perceived nation-identity.

For Daesh at the least, their validity is derived from the idea that the west is out to get them. They believe in and want to instigate a war of the civilizations akin to the Crusades. And they want Muslims in the west to become disenfranchised with their native countries so they become militarized and turn to them; because Daesh becomes their salvation.

In Syria and Iraq as well for the US or western powers to approach them with ground troops and to have a visible presence among the Syrian and Iraqi people again would validate for Daesh the west as being invaders despite their own instigation. This would help them recruit from the local region fighters that would attack us as soon as we get there because they want to kill us. And they want as many of us to approach them as possible.

Really, attacking them will prolong the existence of this ideology by validating it. It's seeking attention from us and we should not give it to them. Accept the migrants so that Daesh has no one to rule and so that they become indebted to us through our charity. Or even: help people out of the occupied territories.

Daesh's authority in the area is only really valid if there's anyone left. Most people that live in the affected areas of Daesh's control tend to flee so cities like Sinjar are often left totally abandoned and anyone who has had the means has left.

If they are to be fought, then it's ideally best - for us at least - to not justify the East vs West clash of civilizations philosophy and get the east to fight the east. Daesh is as much a reaction to the west as Progressive Islam is a reaction to itself.

Let Saudi Arabia fix the mutant afterbirth it enabled.

An Amateur's Treatise on Popular Military Understanding

@Zugzwang

And now that is settled, time for a gift.

An Amateur's Treatise on Popular Military Understanding

as I mentioned briefly, 99% of the time on campaign, soldiers are not fighting. Most of soldiering is walking, cleaning, cooking, watching for the enemy, and so often doing a whole lot of nothing. This ratio has changed over time, obviously, with the most fighting per day likely in the Wars of German Unification or perhaps in the invasion of Europe in 1944-5, but the principle has never been inapplicable.

@Zugzwang

No, the ratio hasn't changed much. The bulk of a lot of military operations is non-combat duty. You not only have the principles of cleaning and cooking to take care of to maintain a basic level of humanity but you have the management of a large logistics framework requiring truck drivers moving porta-potties from point A to point B, medical personnel overseeing not only for the care of soldiers behind enemy lines but civilian casualties, intelligence gathering which'd be a lot of radio interception, translating, code-breaking, and finding informants without necessarily going out into the field to kill anything. You have communication operations to organize where what report goes where. Civilian operations to keep the occupied territories at least a little happy and to ensure the right information goes back home so the civilian population supporting you gets the right information.

You need people to keep security, sitting over a FOB or some deployment position to make sure that not only do people not break in to cause problems but the young privates that just came in from basic don't get drunk and bored and steal from the cantina. And then you have basic military administration with all of the non-combat field work funneling into central command where it's processed centrally with people running accounts, managing liasons with national or foreign news, and so on and so on before it hits the commander.

At the end of the day the combat duties of the entire army is rather minimal. But really: this sort of structure was not around all the time and it wasn't until Napoleon and his Grand Army that this structure that this system came into place. Prior, more men may have been devoted to combat duties than non-combat duties and would have operated in a less ideal matter. Under the Napoleonic structure you get less combat personnel but the administrative structure makes a single soldier fight with the capabilities of ten men by relieving the stress of having to do multiple functions on his own (supplying his own gear, which was the norm in medieval armies for instance; that's now all handled through the quarter master and his clerks).

So while maybe you're not always fighting in the field back then and even now: there's far few people devoted to actual combat roles than there was two-hundred years ago but doing their combat a lot more effectively.

Before Napoleon often who commanded what was up to negotiations between the commanders or even the nobility (in the context of the middle ages) but that was rarely in bureaucratic management, it was more in what part of the army they were to lord over (center, right, left flanks for basic terms) and who got what or did what during or after the fact.

Go through the Alphabet before someone posts a My Little Pony Picture

Go through the Alphabet before someone posts a My Little Pony Picture

youtube.com/watch?v=bQUWlzmXX3M

Sci fi science: "How'd that really work?" Thread

So if it is about resource acquisition or conquest, locals will get hurt. If it is about getting the other side to acquiesce, then it might just end up being terrorism that becomes the main way to wage war.

@Vilageidiotx

We could bring this around to the present day as something to consider when looking ahead into the future. Wikipedia cites White, Philip L's "Globalization and the Mythology of the Nation State" when it says that in the post-Cold War era (or perhaps even as a personal addition: the post-WW2 era) that the existence of validity of a nation-state it much more defined by multi-national agreements and super-pacts between nations than the old world idea that a nation-state often derives validity on the people it rules (and aligned to the people it rules) with a national mythos that back up their own rule. But we have now in the world a political landscape with nations that don't define a single ethnic group but may arbitrarily encompass several, or divide existing ones (the African nations, the Arab world) and that these countries don't obtain their own validity by a shared heritage with its own people (either with two many once-feuding groups too scattered about the land to validate an ethnically-built nation-state or in the Arab world all the Arab peoples spread among dozens of nations and a national mythology speaks to a more pan-Arab ideology than a national ideology) but from other nations (Russia backing Syria, US backing Isreal, no one backing Palestine).

Wikiped than goes on to mention the growth of NGOs and international companies can erode the validity of a nation by providing the services the country could or should provide by themselves through outside funding, either with state-based patronage or private patronage. We could argue that with non-national entities like that the private individual could have more power over international problems than they had in the past with growing technologies and an infrastructure that supports a more robust industry that can bypass laws to do more than what we could have done in the past.

On top of that, I could make the independent argument that migrations mix and spread the once important ethnicities the old nations were built on that build multi-ethnic nations like the US or (supposedly) western Europe (though I tack on to this recognition this can be argued since I look at Europe now and still see a lot of fighting over the French/British/whatever identity native to their respective countries, where as the US may begrudgingly accept that the only natives are the people we genocided and that we're built on the premise of accepting immigrants).

Expanding: if trends like those Daesh are perfecting continue than we may very well see the end of war between nations but the war between abstract ideology. We won't be able to identify our enemies readily as we did in the past. This could change when the human race finds its first sapient sample of extra-terrestrial life and we someday go to war with it for some reason or another. But we could argue modern threats now are not bound to any one nation but can threaten them all, where ever they have ears and eyes that'll pay attention to them and believe in it.

Go through the Alphabet before someone posts a My Little Pony Picture