Greetings. I was making a research about MAR-I radar and found this pdf. PDF claims (at page 179) the radar cost 160 million usd, which is 1.2 billion in 2019 value. Radar had 2,000 golden plated preamplifiers, called ''colgate paramps''.

I wonder why preampfiliers used extensive gold plating ?

And my second questions is, If it influenced technological innovation so much, from preamplifier technology to the manufacturing of gold itself, why is there so little information about this radar ?

I've heard a lot of talk from analysts and the news about how Al-Qaeda might be building significant power in cooperation with Iran and the Houthis, who have supplied groups like Al- Shabaab with MANPADS. There's even some claims that they're using Nasrallah and Sinwar as martyrs to bridge the Sunni- Shia divide, or that various events are linked as part of a wider plan. That seems close to a conspiracy theory or post- 9/11 hysteria, though, especially since I haven't seen too much mainstream discussion of this, so I'd really like to hear whether this has merit. Is there a large- scale strategy being pushed? Are these groups really organizing and equipping themselves to an unprecedented level? When in the ISIS/post- Bin Laden period did this start and develop?

For example, the French in the Peninsular War had to face Spanish guerillas harassing them and a well-formed British army ready to give battle. If the French dispersed to hunt down the guerillas, the British would be able to mass and destroy them piecemeal, but if the French stayed concentrated the guerillas would be able to harass their foragers and supply lines, and deny control of the Spanish countryside.

The Vietnam War faced South Vietnam and its allies with a similar dilemma, with the PLAF serving as the guerillas and the PAVN providing the conventional forces. You can also point to the Axis fighting anti-Axis partisans in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at the same time.

Are insurgents and conventional forces usually so widely separated that this isn't a going concern? Or is it expected that a military will defeat either the conventional force or the insurgents first and then reconfigure to deal with the other once its been isolated from its support?

I've been following the war in Ukraine since it began and have seen the development and proliferation of FPV kamikaze and munition dropping drones.

Electronic warfare seems to work up to a point. I see a lot of videos of troops still getting hit by these drones with no defense except their rifle. Rifles are not effective against drones at all but shotguns have seen some success.

It made me think of the AA12 fully automatic drum or magazine fed shotgun and how with its recoil mitigation syatem it would be a really effective shotgun against drones.

Are shotguns being deployed in any kind of reasonable numbers in Ukraine? I would love to see a program where we manufacture thousands of AA12s and hand them over to Ukraine.

Are there any militaries that use steel case nato calibers?

Learning about historical warfare, it seems that most settled civilizations at some point fought in massed polearm formations, of pikes, yari, iklwa, chang qiang, etc. It seems to me that being at the front of a pike square basically guaranteed a horrible death. Obviously you are always at risk of death in war, but being at the front of a polearm formation seems unavoidably deadly. Sword and shield warfare and even line warfare seems slightly less deadly, but it seems difficult to imagine wanting to be at the very front of a formation.

What motivated people to do it? Specifically in the context of low-rank or levied troops. How did you survive an entire war?

With the shift in threats on the battlefield, I'm curious why body armor has replaced the traditional flak jacket. Given that flak jackets were designed to protect against shrapnel, wouldn’t they still offer good protection today, especially when body armor often struggles with armor-piercing rounds? Are there specific reasons body armor is preferred over flak jackets in modern military use? Would love to understand the advantages and trade-offs between the two. Thanks!

Even outside of nitty gritty of the Schlieffen plan debate and its merits, when it comes to his operational narratives like Ardennes or Mons. Can they be considered reliable ? It seems the universal criticism of him is that he is very partisan in favour of germans and their performance in opening stages of WW1. Too partisan to the degree that makes these books not a reliable assessment of both sides of the conflict. Is there truth in that and do you get a skewed version of history as a result ? His book on Ardennes is like one of only 2/3 modern works in english of this very understated clash so I'm thinking of getting it.

I've been trying to find this out for quite a while, and even my USAF friends don't know. Some speculate that it was towards the end of WW2, others thought there might have been a strafing attack or two in the Korean war. I know there was a small amount of air to air combat during Desert Storm, but I don't think there was air to ground.

NOTE: NOT Talking about missile strikes, but an actual strafing or bombing by an enemy aircraft.

During the Iraq War, violence increased dramatically during the onset of sectarian violence in 2006. Bush, in the beginning of 2007, ordered 20k additional troops to Iraq and appointed Patreus as overall Commander. By the end of 2007, attacks against U.S./Iraqi government forces significantly decreased, alongside civilian casualties.

It is my understanding Patreus took a more population centric approach rather than simply valuing the killing of insurgents. What did this actually mean in practice?

Were the surge and COIN tactics the primary reason for the reduction in violence, or were there other factors at play helping to reduce guerilla activity?

Any anecdotes from people who were present is also appreciated

Obviously is hard to determine the efficiency of an weapon while the war is happening, but certainly we can draw some conclusions regarding the use of heavy propelled guns. The Russians are using 2S4 and 2S7 heavily in the ukrainian theater, with some sources saying that they increased the production of 203mm and 240mm by a lot compared to pre-war numbers, Rob Lee said that 2S4 are "likely a priority for Ukrainian counter-battery fire".

Which leads me to the question, what those heavier calibers can do that 152mm and 155mm can't?

During Yeltsin's and Putin's 2000-08 run, the Russians gave the Chinese abnormally advanced weapons systems before they were procured to their own forces on a large scale or released for the main export market. For example, a batch of SU-30 MKKs and SA-20s during the 1998-2000 timeframe according to the CIA. The Chinese were also intended to be a priority customer for the new R-77 missile which was in development at the time. As late as 2016, SU-35s deployed to Syria for comparison were still decked out with R-27s as per Helion's War in Ukraine Vol 2 despite the threat of AMRAAM armed Turkish F-16s which had no qualms with downing Syrian and even occassionally Russian aircraft as the SU-24 Shootdown showed.

Why didn't this apply to say Backfires? If it did would the PLARF have still felt the need to develop ASBMs as the Backfires and their Kitchen missiles would be a significant improvement over the Badgers and their older anti-ship cruise missiles.

In the modern era it seems like the standard weapon among armies has typically been same. I think a AK's might prioritize rate of fire while western rifles prioritize long range accuracy? But they are still the same type of weapon. I guess you could look at the Korean war and say there is a stark difference between a M14 battle rifle and the AK-47 assault rifle, but they aren't that widely different.

But if you look at the late Roman Republic and the Hellenistic states, it seems like their infantry is wildly different. The Legionaries have a big ass shield and sword, while the descendants of Phillip and Alexander and fighting with really long spears and small shield. It seems like legionaries can be more effective in small groups or disperse, where as phalangites are fucked once their formation breaks up. And it seems like they came out of the similar environments. The mountains around Macedon aren't much different than the mountains the Sammanite wars were fought in, are they?

Bows are a ranged weapon, but they are still a physical object, a large wooden stick. If you stick a knife somewhere on the bow, as you might with a rifle, then you could use the bow in melee without resorting to using another weapon. With a little upgrade, you could very well have a short spear on your hands.

Actually, isn't the bow as it is a plausible melee weapon? You could use the string of the bow to choke someone. The wood of the bow is taut and could snap violently, and they end in sharp points. The arrows of the bow are like little spears. Why not modify the bow to make it more versatile?

I've often heard it argued that Austria-Hungary was a terrible ally and was generally a detriment to the Germans, with failures against the Serbians, Russians often cited as proof. However I have also heard counterarguments that the Germans fucked them over in the early war. They agreed on rather different troop deployments pre-war then what actually happened. This meant that the Austrian and Serbian troops had roughly the same numbers (except that the serbs had already experienced modern war), and they had to face more Russian troops. This lead to high early losses which meant that they lacked the officers and well trained men to build a proper modern force. Additionally while mostly under German leadership, combined with German forces they did achieve victories. So overall what was their performance really like? Were they really so terrible allies?

Also what's the consensus on Conrad von Hötzendorf? He is also often refered to as very incompetent but many of his contemporaries had a high opinion of him. Shaposhnikov even refered to him as his ideal chief of staff in Mozg Armii. If he really was that incompetent why did they praise him?

Like for example at Chaeronea did the Macedonians (and allies) fight Thebes/Athens (and allies) in a straight line or did individual units square off against each other with gaps in between?

At the very least, Helion's War in Ukraine Vol 2, the Russian Invason states that the Russian air defences had to be jammed so that they didn't engage the Tomahawks. The Operations Room made it seem like both sides fleets were very close to directly engaging.

Everything I've read about the Moskva-class says that they were designed to protect the SSBN bastions in the Barents Sea and Sea of Okhotsk from NATO SSN infiltration. However, both ships of this class were part of the Black Sea Fleet and rarely seem to have deployed outside the Mediterranean. Why is this?

I'm primarily curious regarding what the DPRK's initial military goals would be if they were to move forward with military action against the south.

I understand they often engage in sabre rattling with South Korea. However, I've always thought it seemed fairly unlikely for North Korea to actually gain total control over the South. At least in recent decades. The amount of population growth and industrialization that's occurred since the ceasefire makes it seem unlikely for the North to successfully absorb the South.

So I'm interested in whether we know what North Korean plans would be if war did break out. Would they be planning a limited land grab or just retaining their current territory? Or do they believe they have the manpower and capabilities to actually make an attempt to fully unify Korea?

Like Big Bertha or Schwerer Gustav, how were they turned left and right after being assembled? Did the artillerists plan the only target in advanse and had to partly disassemble and reassemble the gun when they needed to shoot something 6° to the right?

Reading some recent military history focused on the American Civil War, I was struck by some of the similarities between the (stated) strategy of the South and Japan during World War 2: specifically that they knew they were overmatched by the total resources of their opponent but they intended to make total victory slow/expensive enough that their opponent would "give up" and agree to a peace treaty that gave them at least part of their goals for starting the war.

Nazi Germany seems to also have at least attempted this strategy after 1943 or so, again with the idea they could fight defensively and inflict enough casualties that their opponents would agree to a favorable peace.

Of course, another similarity here is that they were A) both fighting America, and B) it didn't work.

The strategy itself seems to rely on two main assumptions. The first is that fighting defensively is more efficient than fighting offensively, however you'd like to define any of those terms. The second is that your opponent actually cares about the inefficiency, enough to stop fighting.

I'm not sure about the first assumption, it's easy to imagine that if you had a choice, you'd rather be the soldier in the trench/bunker with your sandbags and emplaced machine guns rather than the one charging across the field on the attack, but artillery and the force concentrations allowed by railroads/trucks/etc seem to be more of an advantage in practice.

The second assumption also seems fairly reasonable, especially when you consider someplace like America which has elections every 2 years, any of which could, in theory, cause the government to change enough to want to stop fighting. On the other hand, it never seems to actually work out that way in practice. It's hard to say why that is, perhaps something about the voting populace caring more about the appearance of victory than the exact numbers involved, e.g. a civil war victory where there's 15,000 union casualties vs 13,000 confederate casulaties, but the union still gets to call it a victory because they forced the confederates to retreat.

I suspect the two main examples that are going to instantly come to everyone's mind are the Korean War and the Vietnam war, so I'll go ahead and address them right now.

For the Korean War, my understanding is, that while there were a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of semi-conflicting goals, you can reasonably summarize the goals of the North Korean side as wanting to conquer South Korea and the goal of the opposing forces being to preserve the independence of South Korea. When the war "ended", South Korea was still around and controlled more or less its original territory, which seems like a pretty clear victory for that side.

As to the Vietnam War, the original goals seem to be the same, North conquering the South, but while the North definitely won the war by achieving their goals, I don't think you could characterize their strategy as defensive. They started the war on the offensive and kept making offensive attacks into the south, basically until they won.

The recent afghanistan war might be a better example, but it seems hard for me to classify the events that caused the americans to leave the country as a war. This is of course, a bit of a semantic argument, but it seems reasonable to me to classify most of what happened after the intitial invasion as being non-state actors committing terrorism in order to achieve a specific goal, the dissolution of the american backed government.

A large aircraft like a bomber seems like it would require the crew to coordinate lots of activities at the same time to work well, just like a warship or an armored vehicle. The latter two free up their leader from steering their vehicle to focus on command. Why are military aircraft different?

What tactics were used to finally tilt the balance against horse archers like the Golden Horde and Mongols? What were some of the interesting examples of battles where tactics were developed to defeat these tactics?

In general the eastward expansion of the Rus is really interesting to me.

I'm looking for readings covering frameworks/concepts/theories of how armed conflicts have affected civilians, particularly in terms of humanitarian needs and assistance provision.

Case studies from the 20th century that involve the likes of bombings or blockades without ground fighting would be ideal but not necessary. Thank you!