Podcasts, videos, books and tweets of the week 56

How little do you have to know about your job.

The absolutely enormous US army, in times when support was less important, had 1/3 in combat units.

“At the Operational Level, a Third of the Army is Found in Units Designed to Fight the Enemy Since 1917, the US Army employed basic operational units, divisions and brigades (the latter under the modular system adopted Army-wide by 2007). These units comprised between 45 and 20 percent of the total force, with an average proportion of 32.5 percent. Accordingly, throughout the 20th century and on into the 21st century, a third of all soldiers were organized into operational units. While at the tactical level, these units were not composed solely of combat troops, and many combat elements were not in divisions, from the perspective of the Army as a whole, these divisions and brigades were roughly equivalent to the combat elements at lower levels. Accordingly, it is interesting that the historical average of operational T3R proportion, 32.5, exactly equals the historical average of combat elements in the functional T3R (32.5—see Table 9).”

Somebody who knows their shit wrote this.

When you increase a ‘full-service’ army in size, it gets to put more into combat elements because the various support units can support more. Economy of size.

A tiny army like the UK, pretending to be an actual fighting army, has so much overhead, its unbelievable. Even having the special forces component above the size of a company is ludicrous in relation to total size. And you can’t ‘trim the fat’ because you lose functionality (which is why every fuckwit who talks about fat trimming is either a disingenuous liar who wants to kill the organisation or an idiot). Actual functionality. You might be able to field 35k Wagner soldiers in a 70k Wagner army but they’re being driven by the locals, served by local doctors, their vehicles serviced by local mechanics, fuel trucked by locals and fed by local cooks. MAYBE.

Poland hopes to have 6 divisions with 300k troops. Possibly. In the future. Not realistically - that’s one division per 50 k. Around 40% in combat combat units. Not 2 with 72k, which is 36 k per division. And Poland doesn’t guard the King, the Falklands, the Bahamas and do all the nonsense the British army does. The Polish army watches Russia.

The British Army has 130 general level officers because it does a million things an army six times the size would have trouble doing. The BA does have too many generals and does do too many things but there is no way it will ever field two divisions with 72 troops.

Even the Polish figures are super optimistic aka unrealistic given that we can realistically dump 1/4 of soldiers into combat units, aka combat divisions, giving us 75 k troops, which is 3 3/4 divisions, say 4 armored (20 k each) by stretching things. The UK gets one mechanised division at 16 k each. Which is super optimistic again.

Professional analysts.

Useless. Mostly.

Podcasts, videos, books and tweets of the week 43

The grifter and imbecile analyst crowd were hard at work since Friday, showing how they lack the knowledge to know they know nothing. Once we finished pointing and laughing at the Russians, we now have to point and laugh at the analysts. Including this pile of stinking nonsense. From a Russian.

FalloutDustin Du Cane

Budd of the week

Book of the week

Phil is in Berlin, don’t know if he likes Richie.

New Panzer?

That’s one hell of a shot trap under the turret.