Anti-Colonialism and American foreign policy

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Diogenes
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Post by Diogenes »

TallDave wrote:
Hardly. The Russians had so much artillery in East Germany at the end of the war, that they had trouble finding enough places to park it all, and most of that, by that time, was manufactured far to the east, out of range of German planes.
Heh, that's what carriers are for. The Russian coast was vulnerable.

Had we been bombing them instead of arming them, they would have (at best) been bogged down with the Germans in Eastern Europe. Even if we didn't actually invade them, we could have contained the Communist disease within Russia. Along with conventional forces, the threat of nukes could have convinced Stalin to remain within Russian borders.

We even had a legitimate cassus belli in the Hitler-Stalin pact. After all, the original aim of WW II was the restoration of Poland, by which measure the western Allies lost the war.
Throughout the cold war, the warsaw pact held a consistent 20 to 1 advantage in artillery and a 10 to 1 advantage in tanks, starting from the end of WWII.
Not much good against planes. The P51s were great tank-killers (they're the reason we have Ford Mustangs, too). The Soviets were always too enamored of quantity over quality.

A friend of mine married a Russian Girl a few years ago. He gave me a couple of his magazines showing a huge selection of women vying for American Husbands. I, and several of my other friends were astonished at the quantity and beauty of the Russian women, most highly educated as well. (His wife is a doll.)

We all speculated as to the reason why they were so beautiful and why there were so many available. I pointed out that the Russians lost something like 20+ million men in World War II. Most likely, the surviving men had their pick of the ladies, and naturally chose the most beautiful women to be the mothers of their children.

Perhaps what we are seeing is merely an illusion of abundant beautiful women, (for I can see how that would be in the best interest of the companies promoting these Russian brides.) but if not, I think my theory is as good as another, till a better one comes along. :)

IntLibber
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Post by IntLibber »

TallDave wrote:
Hardly. The Russians had so much artillery in East Germany at the end of the war, that they had trouble finding enough places to park it all, and most of that, by that time, was manufactured far to the east, out of range of German planes.
Heh, that's what carriers are for. The Russian coast was vulnerable.

Had we been bombing them instead of arming them, they would have (at best) been bogged down with the Germans in Eastern Europe. Even if we didn't actually invade them, we could have contained the Communist disease within Russia. Along with conventional forces, the threat of nukes could have convinced Stalin to remain within Russian borders.

We even had a legitimate cassus belli in the Hitler-Stalin pact. After all, the original aim of WW II was the restoration of Poland, by which measure the western Allies lost the war.
When exactly was the Ribbentropp Agreement's existence proven?

Lessee: Tank production runs:

T-34 medium tank: 84,000 (considered the best tank of the war, could fight on par in gun and armor with the Panzer, outnumbered the Panzer 10 to 1)

Sherman: 50,000 built, used in all theaters of the war, including africa, china and the pacific, AND many supplied to the Soviets.

The Sherman's gun was underpowered compared to the T-34, it could not penetrate the Panzer's armor, while the T-34 could, and could penetrate the Sherman's armor from all angles at extended range. The sherman also could not pivot in place, which both the Panzer and the T-34 could do.

You also need to look at their respective tank killer (heavy tanks), as doctrine was to use tanks to attack infantry, open breaks, and attack the rear, and not have head to head tank on tank battles. Tank battles were to be left to tank killers to go after tanks.

Now, as for aircraft, the Soviets had copied the B-29 due to keeping some models, and had produced clones of the B-17 as well as some of their own design.

Wrt fighters, the Soviets went INTO WWII with 100,000 trained pilots. You had to have 500 hours of flight time even to get permission to join a combat unit. By the end, both sides had plenty of pilots and the Yak-3 and Yak-9 were comparable or superior to the P-51 and P-38. German 109's didn't have a problem taking on Mustangs, but were under orders to avoid Yak-3's like the plague.

A few years later, in Korea, the US air forces got their butts handed to them until the F-86 entered the theater, flying against superior soviet air forces.





Throughout the cold war, the warsaw pact held a consistent 20 to 1 advantage in artillery and a 10 to 1 advantage in tanks, starting from the end of WWII.
Not much good against planes. The P51s were great tank-killers (they're the reason we have Ford Mustangs, too). The Soviets were always too enamored of quantity over quality.
As someone once said, "quantity has a quality all its own"...

djolds1
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Post by djolds1 »

IntLibber wrote:Throughout the cold war, the warsaw pact held a consistent 20 to 1 advantage in artillery and a 10 to 1 advantage in tanks, starting from the end of WWII.
One of their advantages in the later Cold War was the Soviet variation on Explosive Reactive Armor. The West only used the stuff to defeat shaped charge jets. The Soviets came up with a composition (Kontakt 5) that shredded both shaped charge plasma jets and long rod penetrators. The US Army and West German Bundeswehr freaked when they got their hands on some after the fall of the Wall; total protection against the APFSDS penetrators the US Army used during the 1991 Iraq war. Per reports, the current generation of Russian ERA (Kaktus) is even better than K5.
IntLibber wrote:If western allies were to turn on the soviets at the end of the war, it would have had to have been started by nuking Moscow to decapitate them. However the British were so thoroughly penetrated by the KGB that sharing any information about such a move with the UK would have caused any such plan to fail. Not to mention our own government was penetrated, with Alger Hiss and a number of other high ranking officials being soviet spies.
Yes. How thoroughly correct Tailgunner Joe was is one of the Cold War's bitter ironies.
Vae Victis

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

When exactly was the Ribbentropp Agreement's existence proven?
The Baltic states were complaining about it days after it was signed (and with good reason, heh). As a practical matter, it was hard not to notice the Soviets had annexed much of Poland.
A few years later, in Korea, the US air forces got their butts handed to them until the F-86 entered the theater, flying against superior soviet air forces.
The MIG-15 was only developed with British help.
By 1946, Soviet designers were finding it impossible to perfect the German-designed HeS-011 axial-flow jet engine, and new airframe designs from Mikoyan were threatening to outstrip development of the engines to power them. Soviet aviation minister Mikhail Khrunichev and aircraft designer A. S. Yakovlev suggested to Premier Joseph Stalin the USSR buy advanced jet engines from the British. Stalin is said to have replied, "What fool will sell us his secrets?"[6]

However, he gave his consent to the proposal and Mikoyan, engine designer Vladimir Klimov, and others travelled to the United Kingdom to request the engines. To Stalin's amazement, the British Labour government and its pro-Soviet Minister of Trade, Sir Stafford Cripps, were perfectly willing to provide technical information and a license to manufacture the Rolls-Royce Nene. This engine was reverse-engineered and produced as the Klimov RD-45, subsequently incorporated into the MiG-15.[6] Rolls-Royce later attempted to claim £207 million in license fees, without success.[citation needed]
Notice we held S Korea anyway, despite huge logistical and numeric disadvantages.
As someone once said, "quantity has a quality all its own"...
OTOH, Rorke's Drift proved superior quality can defeat virtually any quantity.
Last edited by TallDave on Thu Mar 18, 2010 11:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
n*kBolt*Te = B**2/(2*mu0) and B^.25 loss scaling? Or not so much? Hopefully we'll know soon...

IntLibber
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Post by IntLibber »

TallDave wrote:
When exactly was the Ribbentropp Agreement's existence proven?
The Baltic states were complaining about it days after it was signed (and with good reason, heh). As a practical matter, it was hard not to notice the Soviets had annexed much of Poland.
A few years later, in Korea, the US air forces got their butts handed to them until the F-86 entered the theater, flying against superior soviet air forces.
The MIG-15 was only developed with British help.

By 1946, Soviet designers were finding it impossible to perfect the German-designed HeS-011 axial-flow jet engine, and new airframe designs from Mikoyan were threatening to outstrip development of the engines to power them. Soviet aviation minister Mikhail Khrunichev and aircraft designer A. S. Yakovlev suggested to Premier Joseph Stalin the USSR buy advanced jet engines from the British. Stalin is said to have replied, "What fool will sell us his secrets?"[6]

However, he gave his consent to the proposal and Mikoyan, engine designer Vladimir Klimov, and others travelled to the United Kingdom to request the engines. To Stalin's amazement, the British Labour government and its pro-Soviet Minister of Trade, Sir Stafford Cripps, were perfectly willing to provide technical information and a license to manufacture the Rolls-Royce Nene. This engine was reverse-engineered and produced as the Klimov RD-45, subsequently incorporated into the MiG-15.[6] Rolls-Royce later attempted to claim £207 million in license fees, without success.[citation needed]
Notice we held S Korea anyway, despite huge logistical and numeric disadvantages.
As someone once said, "quantity has a quality all its own"...
OTOH, Rorke's Drift proved superior quality can defeat virtually any quantity.
We were driven to a tiny enclave on the coast at one point.

It was actually easier to ship by sea across the pacific than by rail across Siberia.

Rorke's Drift proved that superior position and fire discipline in a defensive position can beat 20 to 1 odds, but those sort of defensive odds have been known to be possible for centuries. Not to mention that spears against repeating rifles has never been a contestible fight, not in Africa, not on Pandora...

btw: Little Big Horn wasn't savages against riflemen, it was lever action shooting savages on horses, against trapdoor rifle shooting cavalry off their horses.

Then you can look at the Alamo, and of course the Germans had technically superior weaponry pretty much across the board, from sidearms and rifles to aircraft, submarines, ballistic missiles. The only shortcomings Germany actually had was long range strategic bombers, , an irrational waste of resources on a surface navy that could have been far more effective building more subs, and a failure to envision the compromise of their primary encryption technology.

Note that it took typically 12-24 hours to brute force and decode a days Enigma intercepts. For each additional wheel they could have added to the machine, would have doubled the decoding/brute forcing time required. If Germany had realized the potential for Enigma to be compromised, they would have increased the number of wheels the machine could use at once, and vastly increased the variety of wheel circuits...

Enigma being cracked was far more important to the war effort than any other weapons system. By the same token, the fact that the KGB had the US and British governments thoroughly penetrated, and we had so little capability in the USSR, tells me that had we gone up against them we would have gotten our asses handed to us.

Diogenes
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Post by Diogenes »

IntLibber wrote:
Enigma being cracked was far more important to the war effort than any other weapons system.

I disagree. Radar was the most significant weapon system developed during the war. Cracking Enigma didn't save Britain. Radar did.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

Yes, it was a good thing for people other than Americans as well. However, the U.S. only has an obligation to act in it's own people's interest.
Depends on how narrowly you want to define it. If you recall the Barbary Wars were popular in the North - the traders. And not so much in the South.

===

Keeping the trade lanes open for the Euros is in our interest. Plus it keeps them from having enough military to cause much trouble again.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

Aircraft carriers are useless if you want to conquer Russia. It is too vast.

If all you want to do is hold coastal enclaves fine.

That then gets you into a war of attrition. Americans don't like those kinds of wars.

But in fact the Cold War was a War of attrition. The Soviets couldn't keep up. And as news from the West seeped in they became demoralized. In fact even now the Russian population is declining at the rate of 1 million a year.

And China - when their bubble bursts this year? next? - they will be in a world of hurt.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

IntLibber
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Post by IntLibber »

Diogenes wrote:
IntLibber wrote:
Enigma being cracked was far more important to the war effort than any other weapons system.

I disagree. Radar was the most significant weapon system developed during the war. Cracking Enigma didn't save Britain. Radar did.
Thats the popular conception, but the fact is that radar was merely a cover for the fact that Turing's "bombes" had decoded Enigma traffic regarding every air attack during the Battle of Britain long before there was a single blip on the radar.

djolds1
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Post by djolds1 »

MSimon wrote:
Yes, it was a good thing for people other than Americans as well. However, the U.S. only has an obligation to act in it's own people's interest.
Depends on how narrowly you want to define it. If you recall the Barbary Wars were popular in the North - the traders. And not so much in the South.
There was no American nation at that point. The American nation did not come into existence until the American Civil War, as noted by the change in phrasing from "the United States are" to "the United States is." At the beginning of the ACW, Bobby Lee quite rightly sided with his country - Virginia. After the ACW, his country no longer existed.
Vae Victis

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

Rorke's Drift proved that superior position and fire discipline in a defensive position can beat 20 to 1 odds, but those sort of defensive odds have been known to be possible for centuries. Not to mention that spears against repeating rifles has never been a contestible fight, not in Africa, not on Pandora...
Actually, the army that besieged the British at Rorke's Drift had already beaten a much larger but less disciplined force earlier that day at Isandlwana, and in fact the Zulus had more rifles than the British but were poorly trained (much like Russian pilots) -- they tended to fire much too high. The position wasn't great either -- they basically had stacks of mealie bags. VDH's Ripples of Battle has a nice recap.
Aircraft carriers are useless if you want to conquer Russia. It is too vast.
They're useful for attacking and for establishing beachheads on the coast, which would be criticial if you wanted a two-front war.
n*kBolt*Te = B**2/(2*mu0) and B^.25 loss scaling? Or not so much? Hopefully we'll know soon...

Diogenes
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Post by Diogenes »

IntLibber wrote:
Diogenes wrote:
IntLibber wrote:
Enigma being cracked was far more important to the war effort than any other weapons system.

I disagree. Radar was the most significant weapon system developed during the war. Cracking Enigma didn't save Britain. Radar did.
Thats the popular conception, but the fact is that radar was merely a cover for the fact that Turing's "bombes" had decoded Enigma traffic regarding every air attack during the Battle of Britain long before there was a single blip on the radar.
Radar vectored British fighter squadrons to rendezvous with attacking German aircraft. It allowed the British to have the effect of an air force many times larger than it really was. As a matter of fact, the Luftwaffe very much believed the British had a far larger Airforce.

Radar located attack subs in the Atlantic. Britain very nearly lost the war as a result of wolf pack tactics. Without Radar, those subs would have remained active.

Proximity Fuses made allied Anti-Aircraft incredibly deadly. Likewise the Anti-troop bombs and artillery shells which detonated at specified height in the air to scatter fragments down into trenches and behind equipment.

And so on.

Diogenes
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Post by Diogenes »

MSimon wrote:
Yes, it was a good thing for people other than Americans as well. However, the U.S. only has an obligation to act in it's own people's interest.
Depends on how narrowly you want to define it. If you recall the Barbary Wars were popular in the North - the traders. And not so much in the South.

===

Keeping the trade lanes open for the Euros is in our interest. Plus it keeps them from having enough military to cause much trouble again.
Good point. However the operative words are "in our interest." That of course, is subject to interpretation.

Diogenes
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Post by Diogenes »

djolds1 wrote:
MSimon wrote:
Yes, it was a good thing for people other than Americans as well. However, the U.S. only has an obligation to act in it's own people's interest.
Depends on how narrowly you want to define it. If you recall the Barbary Wars were popular in the North - the traders. And not so much in the South.
There was no American nation at that point. The American nation did not come into existence until the American Civil War, as noted by the change in phrasing from "the United States are" to "the United States is." At the beginning of the ACW, Bobby Lee quite rightly sided with his country - Virginia. After the ACW, his country no longer existed.
The civil war was the harbinger of many changes. Not all of them good.

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