• came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    14 hours ago

    the US only knows how to kill civilians en masse and terrorize the working class into submitting to colonial structures. and in typical American fashion, we outsource as much actual fighting as we can. we lose every “war” we actually try to fight in, except the ones where we were aligned with communists and had them do all the heavy lifting. we declare victory and celebrate ourselves no matter what actually happened materially.

    we are the most expensive and inhumane joke in the world, and as the multipolar world emerges with more of the under developed world being able to integrate without the US it is only going to become more obvious that the US military is a potemkin village.

    • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      14 hours ago

      I absolutely do not want to give credit to the United States because death to America but the communists only did the heavy lifting in the West. The Eastern front against Japan was all the United States (and China) except for the very end where the Soviets swept over all of Manchuria and scared the US into using nukes.

      • egg1918 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        14 hours ago

        The Eastern front against Japan was all the United States except for the very end where the Soviets swept over all of Manchuria and scared the US into using nukes.

        Tfw millions of Chinese fighting for liberation did nothing

        Tfw the Japanese surrendering immediately after the collapse of the Manchurian occupation by the Soviet Invasion is the US doing the heavy lifting

        • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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          13 hours ago

          the defeat of the japanese navy was foundational to all campaign goals against the japanese army, japan is an island and their troops were supplied by sea. it was the largest naval campaign in history supported by the largest shipbuilding initiative in history, and more yankees died there than soviets.

        • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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          14 hours ago

          The Chinese at the time were mostly not communists who were fighting and dying. China did tie down a vast amount of Japanese infantry, but I don’t think it’s fair to discount the United States’ role in actually fighting and doing heavy lifting (I should correct though, China did too) in the Eastern front. The Western front without the US would have been even bloodier but it looks like the Soviets would have eked out a win. I don’t think that’s the case at all in the East without the United States.

  • context [fae/faer, fae/faer]@hexbear.net
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    15 hours ago

    “no, actually your super soldiers are not going to easily defeat an army 10 times their size, maybe you’re just going to have to trust me on this one. also, for the last time, they need food.” --sun tzu

  • alcoholicorn
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    14 hours ago

    I don’t think the US included effective electronic countermeasures into their equation.

    If 1 HIMARS Excalibur round with a 10m CEP can hit can hit a target that would otherwise take 40+ dumb 122 mm rocket artillery rounds with a 200m CEP, you can get away with way fewer rounds.

    But after a month or so when the enemy updates their ECM and that Excalibur has a 100m CEP, suddenly you need 10 $150,000 excaliburs, and might as well go back to using 100+ $500-$5000 dumb 155mm shells.

    • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 hours ago

      This puts the famous RF focus on jamming into perspective for me. I always just viewed it as an in-the-moment countermeasure by whoever’s being targeted, but I realize now that it’s an active strategy of attrition warfare. Our MIC is built around extracting maximum profit per unit rather than pumping out maximum units. So the jamming of very expensive special weapons has the downstream effect of depleting all the cheaper generalist weapons as well. Every Eaglepatriotshadow missile that whiffs also means hundreds of dumbrockets fired to make up the difference, and those things can’t be replaced quickly anymore. Nothing can.

    • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.net
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      12 hours ago

      CEP

      I didn’t know what this was, so:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_error_probable

      Circular error probable (CEP), also circular error probability or circle of equal probability, is a measure of a weapon system’s precision in the military science of ballistics. It is defined as the radius of a circle, centered on the aimpoint, that is expected to enclose the landing points of 50% of the rounds; said otherwise, it is the median error radius. That is, if a given munitions design has a CEP of 100 m, when 100 munitions are targeted at the same point, an average of 50 will fall within a circle with a radius of 100 m about that point.

      CEP concept and hit probability. 0.2% outside the outmost circle.