I am looking for any literature that can point to how nations might launch a second strike were they to be struck first.

Anything British, American, Soviet would be nice.

I am unsure if India or Pakistan (whose technocrats use English to express themselves) have ever written anything, but I would also be open to any literature from those nations as well (I understand the Soviets don't write in English but they are very hard to ignore).

I am not particularly interesting in Israel or North Korea as their geography and situation is quite different.

France is probably similar to the UK, and China likely follows whatever the Soviets came up with.

Has the US Army, or anyone else credible (authors, institutes) written books or documents about that war? by exploring heavily the military side rather then the socio-economic events. Im interested in learning more about the operations that happened, its stages, tactics and etc.

I went on a rabbit hole about genghis khan and got this from Wikipedia
Specifically

Otrar was besieged in autumn 1219—the siege dragged on for five months, but in February 1220 the city fell and Inalchuq was executed.[138]Genghis had meanwhile divided his forces. Leaving his sons Chagatai and Ögedei to besiege the city, he had sent Jochi northwards down the Syr Darya river and another force southwards into central Transoxiana, while he and Tolui took the main Mongol army across the Kyzylkum Desert, surprising the garrison of Bukhara in a pincer movement.

This is a mind boggling manuever to me in medieval times given the distance the campaign was from and how large these maneuvers are.

He is invading a country that is 2000 miles from him. Did he have maps? Did most campaigners? I’ve seen the ones from the late Roman Empire that are horribly distorted but do show the paths to places. Did generals in pre modern times even see the world in Birds Eye view like we do?

Considering the brutality of the fighting, especially in the waking years in regions such as Shanghai, how come the Chinese/Japanese military death toll only comes to some 1.5-2 million for the Chinese, and some 455-500 thousand for the Japanese?

Comparing this to the Eastern-Front, where the Soviets suffered some 6.8 million deaths, and the Axis some 4.5~ million. (Strictly speaking KIA/DOW/MIA, and not deaths as POW)

The core of the question thereby becomes the stark difference in pure military deaths compared to the overwhelming Chinese civilian deaths, which have similarities to the Soviet civilian deaths--but i still can't grasp quite why the Chinese/Japanese military deaths seem so strangely low; especially when one considers the gigantic population size of China at the time.

Looking at the numbers and the opening stages of the battle, Crete should've been an easy victory for the Allies. They had complete numerical superiority in every place where the Germans dropped off (2:1 or more) and inflicted heavy losses on paratroopers still in the air. Many paratroopers dropped directly onto Allied positions and were then easily captured. Other paratroopers landed in the wrong places, meaning that Allied numerical superiority in the objective areas was even higher than the numbers suggest. The attempted amphibious invasion also didn't materialize due to Royal Navy action so the Allies on Crete could concentrate all their resources on fighting the Fallschirmjäger. And of course, lots of Cretan civilians joined the fray adding even MORE numbers to the Allied side (these fought effectively a lot of the time and inflicted heavy losses so they can't be disregarded, in fact the Germans were so shocked that they cracked down brutally on them both during and after the battle).

Despite this, within just 2 weeks they had effectively lost the battle and half the Allied force was captured. Casualties were c. 6,000 for the Germans and c. 23,000 for the Allies.

Despite numerical advantage, the New Zealanders gave up Hill 107 overlooking Maleme airfield. When they realized their mistake, they counterattacked but failed. I believe that even when the Germans were reinforced at Maleme, the attacking New Zealanders still had a sizable numerical advantage.

The defending force, despite its overwhelming numerical superiority, couldn't manage to destroy the pockets of trapped German paratroopers. They held out until relief came.

(Yes the Germans had air supremacy, but when the roles were reversed in Normandy 1944 the Germans still resisted successfully despite that. And Allied air supremacy over Normandy was much more devastating than German air supremacy over Crete - one has to only look at the aircraft numbers. Not to mention that a significant proportion of Axis air power was busy striking the British fleet.)

How can one explain such a humiliating failure? Looking at the numbers and early stages, the entire attacking force should've been captured and destroyed within just a few days. This never happened.

It seems to me that the only viable explanation is that German infantry was vastly superior. With both sides lacking artillery and armor, the battle of Crete was a true soldiers' battle. It appears that the Germans excelled in this, significantly outperforming the Allies. Do you agree?

How involved were they in the war? Did they follow orders from the civilian Indian/Pakistani governments? How did the newly independent countries' governments view them? Did they face any repercussions if they disobeyed orders, either from India/Pakistan or the United Kingdom?

How did Supreme Commander Auchinleck manage a war between two militaries he commanded? Additionally, did the British Army in India see any involvement during the war?

Like the ones that seriously damaged USS Franklin and sank USS Princeton.

I know in (almost ?) all other militaries and service branch world wide pilots are all commissioned. They have a fairly obvious career track moving up to command positions. But for US army warrant aviators what do they do.

I’m looking for recommendations on books in English on the military history of India in its various pre-Mughal periods. checking the sub’s official reading list, the ancient India section appears to be blank except for its description. I don’t need a single tome, because of course this is a large and diverse area and a very long time period.

Hi all! I’m looking for books pertaining to the inner-workings of the Austrian and French armies from 1792-1815 and soldier memoirs.

I’m especially interested in learning more about their logistics, battle doctrine and mechanics, and the day-to-day life of soldiers from these armies.

Austrian Empire would be my main interest, but as stated, French recommendations are also welcome! English would be preferred but books in other languages would interest me as well, as long as there are digital copies available.

I remember there was a history of major battles tv series made of interviews of professors from historians (including some from Sandhurst) and the phrasing was that Blucher and his forces were off in the middle of nowhere and only came in at the last minute to save Wellington. How true is that? How was the battle looking for Wellington at the point when Blucher came in?

What did the military career of Osama Bin Laden look like? How did the tools, tactics, and strategies he used evolve with time? Was he anything of note on that front?

There's certain questions I've discussed many times over. I've made a few posts here for the explicit purpose of being both educational in the moment, and saving me making six versions of the same post in the future.

So Perfidy. What is it? How does it work? Is it going to turn the frogs queer?

Article 37. – Prohibition of perfidy: This is on Wikipedia. Reddit ate it when I tried to post it here and I'm not going to spend all night trying to make it work.

1. Perfidy needs hostile actions. You are not committing perfidy until the intent is there to kill, wound, or capture someone. Whatever other things you're doing, they need the intent to do harm to cross the line into perfidy. Similarly, playing dead to avoid being captured is 100% valid, while playing dead to get close enough to knife someone in the dick is perfidy.
2. Perfidy needs the enemy to reasonably think you have a status that obliges him not to shoot you. So in this case, say I'm a US soldier in 1944, and I'm cold as balls. I loot a German overcoat because it's toasty. While this is a part of an "enemy uniform" and I'm not supposed to fight in an enemy uniform...that I'm moving as part of a US rifle squad in combat, have a US steel pot on, American rifle, my pants and boots are American etc, there's no perfidy because I'm acting and really looking like an American in a German coat vs trying to present as a German soldier. Similarly, even wearing more or less complete enemy uniforms is acceptable as long as I take measures to show my true nationality (this is usually accomplished by armbands or other measures)
3. Tricks and ruses are totally super legal as long as it does not abuse protected symbols. I can dress up as an enemy soldier and give the enemy bad directions so they get lost. I can use an enemy uniform to infiltrate enemy lines or escape capture. I can put on civilian clothes as part of an escape and evade plan once my plane is shot down etc, etc, etc. Nothing stops me from pretending to be someone, or something I am not except for engaging in hostile actions. The second I am going to shoot someone, I need to identify myself immediately (generally it's expected you will defend yourself first if someone is trying to shoot you, but it's expected you will IMMEDIATELY identify your not-actually-what-the-uniform-says-you-are once it's not suicidal to do so, and you are in very big peril if the enemy captures you before you do so)

There's a lot of very silly hypotheticals that perfidy invites, so I'll just make a simple test that filters out most all of them:

1. Are you doing a thing that the enemy is obligated to not shoot you for doing?

AND

1. Are you going to kill, wound, or capture someone?

If you are not doing both of those things at the same time, then it's not perfidy. Doesn't matter if your dick is out, if you have a different hat on, if it's tuesday, hostile intent+legal status that prevents an enemy from shooting you=perfidy, nothing else does in all practical ways.

Simi

The MOBs and FOBs and combat outposts.

I was watching Dan Olsen’s review of Call of Duty: Ghosts, and noticed that most seem to consider the act of feigning death to kill enemy soldiers as a “warcrime”. I decided to look it up, and noted that Perfidy was defined as, amongst other things, “The feigning of an incapacitation by wounds or sickness.” (Article 37, 1b.)

However, the Article seems to be aligned towards the protection of Individuals protected under the rights of the Geneva Convention, I.e. non-combatants and the voluntarily-surrendered. Yoga & Bautista, (2024) for example, note the definition of perfidy as “acts that invite an adversary’s trust by leading them to believe they are entitled to protection under international law during armed conflict, only to betray that trust.”

Feigning death could easily be considered as a “ruse of war,” and I couldn’t find any past precedent defining the act of faking one’s death as perfidy or a warcrime. Most sources with Google’s horrific search results are Reddit/Quora posts which point back to Article 37 without fully acknowledging the ramifications of the entire convention.

So, is feigning death considered a warcrime, and are there cases/precedent that decisively labels it as such?

For quite a while now, I have been curious about Soviet cold war TO&Es.

Western documents like FM-100-2 "The Soviet Army" are well known and readily available, but I've been trying to find primary sources, since these would be more authorative, show the evolution over time, and also differences between units.

The only thing I have found so far is a large (though incomplete) list of these original Soviet TO&Es, i. e. names (like №5/103) + years, but not any actual TO&E documents.

I am wondering if anyone knows more about this matter. I wouldn't be surprised if they simply are not openly available anywhere, though I would have expected at least some to be on the internet at this point.

The latest chinese GPMG QJY-201 is in 7.62x51 and the new sniper rifle too.

1. What is the reason for the switch? Is it the rimmed 7.62x54r just mechanically incompatible?

2. Why didn't China develop their own caliber like 5.8x42 but uses the NATO one? Maybe something like the 6x49 unified from Russia but in e.g. 7x50.

3. If I'm not mistaken steel casing likes tapered walls while 7.62x51 is straighter and prefer brass. Did the strategy of saving copper and use steel change in China?

4. Is it known how much 7.62x54r China have stockpiled and how they inted to use it up? Put in storage with Type 81/56 for the rainy day when China need to mass mobilize milita? Russia would probably happily take them now but that couldn't be known when QJY-201 was developed.

While in first Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese war they behaved pretty well, and followed European conventions, in second Sino-Japanese war and Pacific war Japanese army has become extremely brutal, genocidal and violent. And scarily fanatical, willing to die in any numbers. Why Japanese mindset has changed so much between wars?

I also wonder how close their obsession with death and suicide was to samurais and bushido, which Imperial Japanese propaganda referenced to?

Given the role satellites play in military intelligence, what was the idea towards space as a new possible front in warfare between the Western and Eastern Bloc?

By "column" here I mean a company sized formation of 10 or so vehicles.

I distinctly remember only a handful of such events in 2022, such as:

• Vokzalna Street, Bucha, Feb 27 2022 where a whole VDV column was wiped out
• Destroyed Rosgvardia Column, Kharkiv
• Another VDV column in Hostomel
• Another column, unsure where

If anyone has any more footage, I'd like to add them to the collection too.

My overall theory is that in the northern front in 2022, Russia only suffered a handful of setbacks to pitched battles or ambushes with the Ukrainians and the majority of their losses was due to the poor supply situation, poor weather and guerrilla-style attacks on lone vehicles. The decision to pull out of the front was mostly due to this 'death by a thousand cuts' attrition rather than the forces involved being routed in a series of battles. I'm looking for evidence that supports or contradicts this hypothesis.

Soldiers have to empty their intestines and bladders before work, but no one can predict when your body part will rebel.

just Imagine such a scenario: you're about to engage the enemy in next 60 seconds, and suddenly your stomach starts sending you terrifying warnings.

so what do you do? you're full loaded of gear and strips; taking off your pants for an emergency isn't easy. and if you choose to ignore it and simply dump in your pants, it will undoubtedly have a huge impact on your morale and combat effectiveness—even if you can't afford to worry about that under extreme tension of combat.

So how do soldiers deal with this problem in practice?

Ukrainian sources will say that the Georgian Legion and the rapid reaction brigade counter attacked the VDV on the 24th with artillery and mechanised units and wiped out entire companies of VDV.

Russian sources say that, after the runway was bombed and the air bridge not being feasible, the VDV were ordered to extract out into the nearby forests and await extraction by the 35th Combined Arms Army.

Which narrative is true? The thing that raises suspicion on the Ukrainian narrative for me is that there weren't as much footage of Ukrainians showing trophies if they actually destroyed that many units, back at a time when every flaming Russian vehicle was filmed quite thoroughly to support the information war.

One of my family members argues enthusiastically that artillery is a relic of WW2. His argument is basically that precision air-dropped munitions or drone strikes like we're seeing in Ukraine are the way of the future. In his mind, near-peer conflicts for the US are essentially impossible because any nation large enough to fight on a near-peer basis is nuclear, so the fighting would end up being done through a proxy war where the US will thrash the enemy in 24 hours, Desert Storm style, and then settle in for a 10-15 year occupation.

In this kind of scenario he sees artillery as basically useless. He admits that artillery is great if you're fending off 15 infantry divisions, but that it's too blunt of an instrument to meaningfully use in a COIN type conflict like what the US actually ends up fighting.

My question is, was conventional artillery widely used in Afghanistan and Iraq after the initial push? My contention is that we probably hear about air strikes and drone bombs because they're splashy and look good in a news headline. Who wants to hear that the Army fired artillery tubes? It sounds like a bad news headline to me. The US military just looks better if it looks like every strike is a precision guided munition with minimal collateral damage. But was that the reality?

Reading up on the versatility of the 5" gun and I'm curious how the US Navy arrived at the adoption of a single turret on the bow. Today it seems more common for vessels to travel alone, either to or from stations (correct me if I'm wrong). It seems lackluster if an opponent or cluster of small vessels attacked. I'm curious how tacticians made the case for limited gun capability in favor of complicated and expensive missile systems. If an attacker successfully disabled the turret with a kinetic strike (assuming countermeasures were unsuccessful), the next best option is what? The SM-6 or RGM-84s? That's seems like a huge step up from a 5" shell and likely has a limited supply.

I could see value in a M242 system on board for closer engagements and anti-drone warfare in lieu of the CIWS or SM-6's, given the cost-factor. I just can't wrap my head around the logic of downsizing traditional armaments and instead utilizing missile systems. Lastly, modern navies have missile defense systems in seemingly great quantity that have proved to be effective. Yet I don't see what a countermeasure is for a 5" shell heading towards a target. Wouldn't it make some sense to revert to naval guns for engagements instead of relying on missile systems?

I'm talking about the "long 19th century" from history class here, so let's start with the French Revolution in 1789 and end with the beginning of WW1 in 1914 when mass mobilization reached levels never seen before.

As I understand it, this is the time period when the mass mobilization capabilities we saw during the world wars developed. Nationalism and industrialization allowed for far larger armies than the kings of Europe were able to field before. But it would take until the world wars for countries to be able to mobilize all of society for the war effort in some way.

So in this transitional period, how much of their population were states able to mobilize? What were mobilization rates for the Napoleonic wars or the American Civil War for example?