The Old Hack

It's the new Second Life. They don't even ask you if you are interested before they run the game for you.

*puts lederhosen on head*

Well, in this case it was airfare.

Now if we could only find a reality where Electronic Arts got cancelled...

Fixed, and my apologies.

*with the added weight to the frame, The Old Zeppelin starts to gently descend at a rate of two hundred feet a minute. Twenty minutes later, it makes contact with the ground and safety vents jettison the helium. The Old Hack sits up and mutters, "Okay, that's the last time I have lobster habanero with ghost peppers for dinner before I sleep."*

The Moderator: mlooney is correct. If this must be discussed, it should be discussed there. ~tOH.

Um, roughly Angels 15, bearing close to what passes for true north on this planet. Airspeed eighteen knots and climbing. Looks like I'm caught up in a new storm or possibly hurricane forming.

The people who murdered him clearly disagreed with that.

It is part of a pyramid scheme. Which means that I entirely blame YOU.

*squeaks* yes?

My current weather report goes Screw this noise, I am staying in bed 'till spring.

*inflates* *expands to size of the Hindenburg and ascends* *drifts off on the wind*

At least you don't live in Kansas.

Basically, seconded.

That's odd. I was expecting... *16-ton weight tumbles out of hypertime rip and lands right on top of The Old Hack, squishing him flat* *from beneath the weight* Oh. Right you are, then. Never mind.

Oh, so the exploding phones and laundry machines are pure nostalgia. I can relate to that, I guess.

Depending on what point you were trying to make. It came across to me as seeming to say that packed infantry without cover would be helpless targets to air attacks, which is of course true. My point is that well trained infantry will not stay packed and without cover for very long. Agreed to the armored minority -- but the main army is still dependent on the speed of its slowest units, which will usually be the foot soldier. The armored minority could be used to create breaches and exploit them by cutting off supplies. The main force still needed to stomp the enemy, which would now be cut off and far easier to deal with. (Which also again shows that bit about speed in war. At times even a single rapidly moving unit in the right (or wrong) place can turn the tide of a battle.) The initial offensive always has fuel enough -- unless you are a complete idiot. (Mussolini, for example.) But even so, it is still a concern to accumulate, mass and transport that fuel. Even if you have a huge surplus of fuel it will do no good if it does not get to where it is needed. See the bit about supply lines above. Speaking as a grunt soldier, I am highly pleased with my role shifting to sitting in front of a computer and guiding a drone or launching a cybernetic attack. I am as many times previously mentioned a very lazy person. War with all the comforts of home and no-one shooting at me sounds far more comfortable than the marching in cold wet terrain and hauling bloody heavy squadmates around on stretchers that I did in boot camp. ...I still fondly remember the incident with that asshat who got himself drunk and ordered up on a stretcher where he couldn't mess up. Then the sergeant ordered us across a swampy area. Inevitably one of us stretcher bearers (me) lost their footing and deposited the moron in fifteen inches deep and COLD muddy swamp water. That drunken POS was having much less fun at our expense afterwards. And strangely, the guy who lost his footing didn't in any way get chewed out by the sergeant afterwards...

Tight formations were born out of a need to resist cavalry attacks. A tight formation with pikes or bayonets could resist cavalry charges. An open formation could not. Over the centuries as ranged weapons improved those tight formations grew increasingly expensive to maintain -- but the ever-present threat of a cavalry charge or even a tight formation of pikemen maintained the necessity for them. About the time where the Civil War ended the balance finally began to tip in favour of open formations. The arrival of the Gatling and only a couple or three decades later the Maxim gun made the tight formations ridiculously expensive. That they chewed up cavalry charges long before they had a chance to arrive was also kind of important. Tight formations are still used, but mostly for purposes of movement and maneuvering. If you know the enemy is coming, you scatter FAST. As to digging trenches, funny thing. The Russians were and are almost ridiculously fast at digging foxholes and trenches, probably because 1) they trained for it and 2) they really, really, really don't want to die. Those buggers can dig a basic trench in minutes. And other armies have troops that aren't far behind in digging speed. As to speed, the German army worked hard on motorising everything they had but even in 1941 the majority of their troops still marched on foot. And of course fuel is always a concern. Don't underestimate the human foot. Even today, it is the most important part of the grunt soldier. o.o

Oh good, that means that some poor soldiers gambling their lives on Samsung hardware will be throwing duds at the enemy. I feel so much better now.

It really depends on the reason for the forced march. It might be to escape a battle. If the end of a march is across an already defended border of some kind, any pursuit would run into fresh troops behind heavy fortifications and the forced marchers would then be lying at their ease in their bunks while their comrades in arms did the heavy lifting. Another reason might be to reach a very defensible position to hold it before the enemy could. It doesn't matter nearly as much if you are tired as long as you are tired at the top of some massive fortification where just scaling the walls or getting up the slope would take an epic effort in its own right. Sometimes speed determines the outcome of battles or even wars. And sometimes it does it before there even is any fighting. Those five or ten extra miles a day you squeeze out of your troops may make all the difference. As to history, I am almost sure that it has happened. Probably several times. It was likely glossed over by historians. But one thing is certain: in war, things get buggered up. Often very badly. Someone once described war as a long series of mistakes that ended when one commander at some key moment failed to make a mistake. An example of both cases, speed and mistakes: during WWII Leningrad was a key position on the Russian Front, a fortress city that stood at the centre of all logistics for everything north of Moscow. In mid-1941 it stood entirely undefended. The German general in that part of the front figured that it was in the bag and wanted a personal friend of his to have the honour of taking Leningrad. He held back all other troops in the vicinity and saved Leningrad for his friend. This friend was a massive slowpoke and he knew Leningrad stood empty, so why bother hurrying? Only when he arrived, the Russians had finally managed to scrape troops together to man the garrison and the fortifications. The door had slammed shut on the Germans and in a siege more than a year long where countless troops died they never did manage to force it open again. All for something they could have had for free if they could have been bothered to move a little faster.

Certainly not in the sense of sprinting. Human endurance comes into play with long easy strides or a not too fast lope. They could sprint with that weight, just not very fast and only for very short distances. But the buggers could march for days at normal speed carrying all that crap, or even forced march for a few days -- at the end of which they would be exhausted and there would probably be a definite amount of casualties from exhaustion or people who lagged behind.

Amen.

Best method is still what Sarah just did: aim for the ground -- and miss. Rest in peace, Douglas Adams.

Thank goodness this wasn't during the gridlock. Counterfeiting would have been legal for years now.