NAFO is a Nazi propaganda op. Literally. The founder, Kamil Dyszewski (aka Kama Kamelia) is a Holocaust denier who adores Hitler. I call this the SS type genocide denier. That’s actually the most common type.
In case anyone thinks the rest of NAFO distanced themselves from this guy: Lol no, he was just on stage at the NAFO summit in Vilnius.
Further down in that Twitter thread someone posted archive links to some of the actual posts (and not just screenshots), so you can verify this yourself. You can also search archive.ph for “@Kama_Kamilia”. For example:
The NAFO summit from July this year was live streamed, you can see him on stage if look for a recording. The Estonian PM joined this event via video call, btw.
I think that view is an overcorrection to their inflated reputation. They, like every other Classical Greek state, had their comparative times of strength and weakness.
They as a polity had times of strength and weakness, but their reputation as peerless warriors doesn't really hold up under battlefield conditions, and their rigid caste system made all except the Spartiates perform relatively poorly on the battlefield. They traded on reputation (and terror) and an economic ability to wage war at any time (as Spartan citizen-nobility had no other significant functions other than repressing helots), not actual battlefield performance.
Sure, but if the Spartans were shit at war they wouldn’t have had the century and a half of being undefeated in decisive battle that would form the Peloponnesian League from their conquered subjects in the first place.
The League that then led the war against Xerxes, and eventually conquered Athens, Thebes, and Corinth, a hegemony that would only be broken by the man whose tactics would teach Phillip II and his son what’s-his-name how to conquer most of the ancient world.
That simply is not being shit at war, even if a critical analysis shows the Spartans did not perform notably better 1:1 than anyone else without trading on their reputation.
This collection is a really good breakdown of how the reputation of Spartan society did a lot to carry them through most battles, and how the actual Spartan society absolutely sucked for everyone. One of the things that really stood out to me in regards to how their reputation carried them was that in hoplite battle, you arranged your army by strength from right to left, meaning the right side of your army is facing the left side of your enemy. Essentially the goal of the left side of your army was to survive while the right side of your army was destroying the left side of theirs. Because of the Spartan reputation, it was common for the left side aligned to face their forces in combat would flee before even engaging, leaving an opportunity for the Spartans to flank their enemies and destroy their armies. So Spartans won a lot of battles not because of their immense military capabilities, but because their enemies would allow them to flank based on reputation.
That, supposedly, is a bit of misinformation spread by NAMBLA types. The Greeks apparently didn’t care for too large an age gap in pederastic relationships, and 16 was roughly considered to be the socially acceptable age to begin one.
Not great by modern standards but certainly better than some, and better than they treated women who were often considered marriable at 14. Though at least that was better than the Roman 12, and Aristotle even argued that 21 was the most appropriate age for healthy children (fertility periods being their primary concern)
I just assumed Greeks were similar to Romans when it came to that kind of stuff, but I did not realize that Greeks were slightly better than Romans when it came to that kind of stuff!
I feel obligated as a Romaboo to point out that 12 was the absolute minimum legal age of consent for marriage, while the mid-teens would have been a more average age for noblewomen to marry at. Not that any of that is great, of course.
A warm water port is a port that doesn’t ice over in winter.
Literally everyone but Russia has one, that’s why they start screeching and invading people because they just can’t fundamentally accept that they’re a joke of a naval power and always will be.
I’ve been trying to convince China: vladivostok (before 1900: Yongmingcheng) was taken from them. take it back. Russia won’t be able to fight it.
just take it back. there’s lots of resources up that way too; much more than you could ever get by starting ww3 over taiwan. SK, JP, fuck every pacific nation aside from NK will support Taiwan. Why fight the hard fight? Just… go north and get some. No one will complain. The UN will not censure anyone for fucking with Russia.
Honestly I don’t see nuclear powers escalating to nuclear attack when they’re adjacent to each other. Nuke Beijing and the fallout’s heading north back to RU lol. And they each have an arsenal, so nuke beijing, goodbye moscow.
but same, I’d be happy as a pig in shit.
thing is, it makes sense for these former communist countries to be at each other’s throats, and they’ve had literal armed conflict before - en.wikipedia.org/…/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict we just need to point out to China that it’s the path of least resistence and greatest return. They’ll never be able to squeeze out the sq km’s or resources going north could provide by invading Taiwan and trying to dominate the south pacific.
we just need to point out to China that it’s the path of least resistence and greatest return. They’ll never be able to squeeze out the sq km’s or resources going north could provide by invading Taiwan and trying to dominate the south pacific.
Chain shot was a thing. Two cannonballs attached by a chain (or by a bar making the projectile look like a barbell) were used in naval combat to cut the rigging on the sails. They were fired out of a regular cannon and were one of several attempts to make attacking the rigging on ships more impactful.
I have no idea why they’d try a double barrel field gun for a solved problem. The ammo did have an issue where it caused damage to the barrel and was ridiculously inaccurate compared to ball shot, but I don’t see how this design solved that. The chain would have had to be six feet long at least for this gun and the ball would certainly run into it on the way out of the barrel.
I bet they wasted less money on this than the fabled Sgt. York M247. It was an experimental intelligent anti-aircraft gun that did things like lock targeting onto the spectator stand during the demo, or insisted that the latrine fan was a slow moving rotary aircraft.
So much this. Chainshot was highly effective at taking down masts and sails, effectively immobilizing the target. If you fired a chainshot towards the mast, chances were really high that each ball would hit 9n each side of the mast, with the chain tearing off the mast itself. And even if you missed and hit only sail, the chain would rip out a huge chunk of sail and any rigging it hit as well.
Source: I used to play Cutthroats a lot back in the day.
It’s funny because the Sgt York was actually exceptional, as one of the pilots who had to test against it discussed at length.
In 1982 I participated in both cooperative and non-cooperative tests at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, flying an Air Force CH-3E helicopter against a Sergeant York. I would have been dead many times over had it been shooting live rounds at us instead of just video.
The Sergeant York was the front-runner in a program intended to provide the Army with a sorely needed “division air defense” (DIVAD) weapon system. It was based on a novel concept: re-purposing M48 Patton tank chassis’ with a new turret incorporating twin Swedish Bofors 40mm cannons and two radar systems — one for area surveillance (the rectangular antenna) and one for targeting (the conical antenna, an off-the-shelf application of the F-16′s radar). (Compare the picture below with that of the Sergeant York to see how this adaptation worked.)
A firing control system integrated the two radars, with on-board software prioritizing targets based on the threat they were assessed to pose to the system itself. (For the late ’70s /early ’80s, this was cosmic.) If the operator elected to allow the system to engage targets hands-off, it would slew the turret around at a nauseatingly rapid rate, taking on each in turn automatically.
On the next-to-last day of the test, my aircraft was joined by an Army AH-1 Cobra and OH-58 Kiowa and two Air Force A-10s. My H-3 was part of the test profile because its radar signature was essentially the same as that of an Mi-24 HIND assault helicopter of the day, which was heavily armed with both anti-tank missiles and rockets. We all converged on it simultaneously from about 6000 meters. My aircraft was the first to die, followed by the two A-10s, then the Cobra, and finally the Kiowa. It took less than 15 seconds to put plenty of hypothetical rounds into each of us.
I spent a depressing amount of that week watching myself get tracked and killed on video. Trying to “mask” behind anything other than rising terrain simply didn’t work; the DIVAD radar got a nice Doppler return off my rotor system if any part of it was within its line of sight, and it burned right through trees just fine. I couldn’t outrun or out-maneuver it laterally; when I moved, it tracked me. I left feeling pretty convinced that it was the Next Big Thing, especially since I’d come into the test pretty cocky thanks to having had a lot of (successful) exercise experience against current Army air defense systems.
So, what happened to the program itself? I think it was a combination of factors. First, the off-the-shelf concept was cool as far as it went, but the Patton design already was a quarter-century old; the DIVAD was awfully slow compared with the M1 Abrams tanks it was supposed to protect. It would have had a lot of trouble keeping up with the pack.
Second, The Atlantic Monthly published a really nasty article (bordering on a hatchet job) purporting to show the program was a complete failure and a ruinous waste of money. One of its most impressive bits of propaganda was an anecdote about a test where the system — on full automatic — took aim at a nearby trailer full of monitoring equipment. Paraphrasing, “It tracked and killed an exhaust fan,” chortled the author. (See The Gun That Shoots Fans for a recounting of this.)
Yeah, it did. It was designed to look for things that rotate (like helicopter main rotor systems) and prioritize them for prompt destruction. If any bad guys were on the battlefield in vehicles with unshrouded exhaust fans, they might have been blown away rather comprehensively. (My understanding at the time was that said fan was part of a rest room in one of the support vehicles and not a “latrine,” but why mess up a good narrative, right?)
To my knowledge, neither ventilated latrines nor RVs full of recording devices are part of a typical Army unit’s table of allowance, so I really doubt there was much of a fratricide threat there. However, the bottom line was that this particular piece of partisan reporting beat the crap out of a program that I believe the Army needed, but already was facing a few developmental issues, and helped hasten its cancellation.
(The New York Times opinion piece linked to above was equally laden with innuendo and assumptions. It made a fair point about possible anti-radiation attacks it might have invited… but there are radars on every battlefield, and there are means of controlling emissions. It compared a late-Fifties era Soviet system — the ZSU-23–4 — with one fully twenty years newer in design. It asserted that it couldn’t hit fixed-wing aircraft, which to my mind and personal observation was arrant nonsense. The only issue it raised that I agree with was possible NATO compatibility problems with the unique 40mm caliber shells the Sergeant York’s guns fired. Funny — the Times pontificated that it wouldn’t be cancelled, too. Oops.)
Third, the hydraulics that were used in the prototype were a 3000 psi system that really couldn’t handle the weight of the turret in its Awesome Hosing Things mode. One of the only times I actually got a score on the system was when I cheated; I deliberately exploited that vulnerability. I flew straight toward the system (which would have blown us out of the sky about twenty times over had I tried to do so for real) until directly over it, then tried to defeat the system from above.
If memory serves, the system specifications called for the guns to elevate to more than 85 degrees if something was coming up and over; it then would lower them quickly, slew the turret 180 degrees around, and raise the guns again to re-engage. It was supposed to be able to do that in perhaps ten seconds (but I’m here to tell you it did it a lot faster than that). So, I had my flight engineer tell me the moment the guns dropped, at which point I did a course reversal maneuver to try to catch it pointed the wrong way. What the video later showed was:
Helicopter flies over.
Traverse/re-acquire movement starts.
Helicopter initiated hammerhead turn (gorgeous, if I say so myself).
Guns started to elevate to re-engage.
Clunk. Guns fall helplessly down; DIVAD crew uses bad language.
The hydraulics hadn’t been able to support the multiple close-on, consecutive demands of movement in multiple axes and failed. Like I said, I cheated. The Army and the contractors already knew about this problem and were going to fit out production models with a 5000 psi system. That might have had some survivability issues of its own, but the Army was perfectly happy that we’d done what we did — it proved the test wasn’t rigged and underscored the need for the production change.
Finally, the Army itself honestly appraised the system based on its progress (and lack of progress) versus their requirements. Wikipedia provides a passage that encapsulates this end-game well: “The M247 OT&E Director, Jack Krings, stated the tests showed, ‘…the SGT YORK was not operationally effective in adequately protecting friendly forces during simulated combat, even though its inherent capabilities provided improvement over the current [General Electric] Vulcan gun system. The SGT YORK was not operationally suitable because of its low availability during the tests.’ ”
I guess I’m forced to conclude that the Sergeant York was a really good concept with some definite developmental flaws — some recognized and being dealt with, perhaps one or two that would have made it less than fully effective in its intended role — that was expensive enough for bad PR to help bring it down before it fully matured. The Army was under a lot of political pressure to get it fielded, but to their credit they decided not to potentially throw good money after bad.
On balance, a lot of the contemporaneous criticisms mounted against the M247 really don’t hold up very well over time. Short-range air defense currently is provided by the latest generation of the AN/MPQ-64F1 Improved Sentinel system. Radar emitting on the battlefield? Check. Target prioritization capabilities? Check. Towed (which equals “slow”) versus self-propelled? Check.
I’m glad we never wound up in the position of needing it but not having it. My personal judgment was and is that it probably could have wound up a heck of a lot more capable and useful than its developmental history might suggest, but its cancellation probably was justified given other acquisition priorities at the time.
Bottom line: I repeatedly flew a helicopter against it over the course of many hours of testing, including coming at it as unpredictably as I knew how, and it cleaned my clock pretty much every time.
And given how murderously effective the Gepard has proven in Ukraine, I’m inclined to agree with his assessment
Most people on Lemmy post in English if if they aren’t from the country. It just makes it easier for others to understand, considering most of the worlds population speaks it ( yes more than Chinese once you count second languages)
The Venn diagram of people who own > 3 guns “for home defense” yet think Ukraine should just let the invaders keep their gains is probably highly overlapped.
That’s a delusional take. I know a dozen people who collect guns irl and all of them as well as every self-professed pro-gun person has stated that they not only support Ukraine but that it pretty much proves everything they’ve said, that when hostile forces started kicking down Ukranian doors, it was the ready supply of weapons that allowed Ukraine to defend itself.
I live in a rural area, and pro-gun people are pretty spit here between Russian bootlickers and Ukraine supporters. The Ukraine supporters seem to have some delusion about civilian owned firearms being a major player in the war rather than the government flinging open old Soviet stockpiles and recruiting people en masse for territorial defense units. Better than being a genocide apologist, at least.
It’s not really something you’re buying. You’re making a donation to the war effort, and they send you this more as a thank you and proof that your efforts are helping.
That's Fredrik von Nazimurderkitty the First. He was adopted by the RAF, and his catlike reflexes and innate understanding of aerial warfare allowed the allies to kill many "kraut children" in their bombing raids of Deutschland. He had feline feline gigantism.
noncredibledefense
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