Reddit reviews How to Make War (Fourth Edition): A Comprehensive Guide to Modern Warfare in the Twenty-first Century
We found 6 Reddit comments about How to Make War (Fourth Edition): A Comprehensive Guide to Modern Warfare in the Twenty-first Century. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
William Morrow Paperbacks
Just some basic things can making them getting to you too difficult to continue. Basically make them go a different way.
Some books to learn from (I haven't finished them all yet). Some of these are just to understand modern warfare or conventional warfare which is important to understanding how to get around it.
James F. Dunnigan's How to Make War is a decent, very (and I stress very) broad look at the overall systems of warfare, their history, present (at time of writing), and future. Everything from air power, logistics, infantry, armor, cyber warfare, and so on are covered in different chapters. Though the book is somewhat dated (I think the original edition was published in the 80's) and some of the information is of the "well no shit" variety, it's a not a bad way to understand the different aspects of modern warfare.
Question; I've heard indirectly from James Dunnigan's How to Make Modern War that the Iraqis used subpar locally produced MBT main gun ammo. Is this true? How big of a performance gap was there between indigenous Iraqi ammo and the standard Soviet kit?
Aw crap! Someone actually called me on my bullshit? Now I have to defend my comments by providing sources and shit??? :P
> lack of any sources,
It's because they're not from any one particular source - I was pulling stuff out of memory from a very large number of things I read, heard about, etc., most of which I don't remember the context or titles of, plus a lot of which was actually conflicting with each other(e.g. a lot of stuff written or published in the US from the 70s and 80s, especially from RW or interested parties like high-ranking officers from the services, tended to overestimate the capability of Soviet weapons systems; conversely stuff from the political opposition, or stuff that was written post 1990, was a reaction to stuff like that, and focused on short-comings of Soviet weapons). There's also stuff in my post that's actually not accurate now that I've had time to think about it and review - I'll point it out below.
Sources to back up stuff I've said, check out:
...on Soviet weapons not being designed to last as long, since they thought they'd be destroyed quickly, and also because Soviet manufacturing technology lagged behind ours.
This looks like another good, general discussion.
One book I happened to read whose title I do remember. I read an earlier edition that was more focused on US vs USSR. It's not an academic, "serious" book, but the distilled knowledge, wisdom and impressions of a guy who's spent a career studying weapons and militaries around the world.
> Russian warships are able to carry more arms because they're less armored than American counterparts.
Modern warships are not, as a rule, armoured. So if Soviet ships carry more weapons (which isn't necessarily the case, as we saw with the Slava vs Burke vs Tico example above) they're sacrificing living space, or machinery space, or installing them on deck.
> And i honestly have no idea where did you get that "3 missiles on one target, just to make sure" nonsense. Russian navy always fires one missile per one target on every single naval exercise.
Yes, this is my bad. On weapons tests they will only shoot one, just like everyone else. I was conflating nuclear war doctrine (where multiple warheads were routinely assigned per target, to ensure destruction) and specific actual naval war scenarios (i.e. a saturation strike by regimental-sized Tu-22 formation on a US carrier group - people used to sit around thinking about how many AS-4's they'd need to launch to overwhelm a US carrier group's AEGIS air defense system). Normally their navy wouldn't launch any more weapons than our navy, if we're going after the same sort of target.
> From a top of the head: T34s had far greater range than Germans tanks of the time. On the contrary, German tanks suffered heavily from breakdowns and required far greater amount of service time.
I was actually thinking about post-WWII weapons. WWII tank comparisons is too much a result of circumstances and timing, rather than a true reflection of design philosophy and doctrine. So the Germans ended up with a reputation for terrible reliability because they had to rush Panthers and Tigers into production, and experienced horrible teething problems. The Brits screwed the pooch with poor early doctrinal and design choices, and basically had no decent indigenous designs until 1944-5. Even though they're clearly capable of building good tanks, since the Chieftain is perhaps the best western tank of the immediate post-WWII period. In any case, even with WWII tanks, you can perhaps see a difference in Western automotive/manufacturing superiority over the Russians in a comparison of reliability between US and Russian tanks. Russian tanks were satisfactory as far as that went, but US tanks were the gold standard as far as reliability.
> Soviet and Russian designs are very good in terms of serviceability and livability
I can't remember the examples now, but there were some notable cases of Soviet AFVs panned for bad design choices that affected ease of repair + ergonomics and crew survival odds. Party this was due to the fact that their stuff continued to be of cruder manufacture than western weapons, which in some cases requires more minor adjustments, etc. by their crews. Also, Soviets were early adopters of autoloaders, and reducing tank crews to 3, which means increased maintenance workload for each individual crew member. So it's not simply design choice but also personnel choices, different circumstances the two militaries found themselves in.
> But latest designs pay great deal of attention to this aspect.
Most of what I wrote was with the situation during the Cold War in mind. 1950s-80s. It doesn't apply as much now. E.g. the Russians no longer seem to stockpile large numbers of mass-produced weapons, in preparation for a reprise of WWII on the Eastern front. So I would expect that they are now much closer to the West, in building small numbers of durable weapons that were designed intended to last, they'll actually use pretty hard in training (the knock about the USSR military during the Cold War was that they couldn't train adequately because their weapons would wear out quickly, and their priority was in maintaining large stockpiles to be used up in a war of attrition).
It also obviously doesn't apply for simpler weapons like the AK-47, or RPGs. Russian lag in manufacturing technology would have manifested itself more in complex things like jet engines and AFVs.
> or presence of emoticons.
I'm determined not to take myself too seriously here. :D And this is an online board. C'mon, of course you have to take anything you read here with a grain of salt, with some skepticism.
If you're interested in more detail, this book does a very good job of explaining all of that and much more in clean, simple language.
That's because you don't know shit about how a war works and likely don't know that Russians were developing active protection systems from missiles on their tanks long before Israel or US worked them out. Granted, stopping an ATGM is very different from stopping one of these rockets, but the Israeli Iron Dome system won't be effective on the battlefield due to the sheer saturation of fire and the massive expense of these antimissiles and the complexity of the entire array. Russia isn't some nation of stupid drunks like you probably imagine, they have technology of their own, more practical technology that doesn't get as much PR but works well for what it is made for -- total war.
You're basically a kid who watched mil-porn (you know what I mean) and goes hurr durr wow le science is so amazing without considering how it actually applies in real life. In the real life a single Grad artillery battery will quickly overwhelm any sort of an Iron Dome mobile setup and even if Iron Dome holds out, the money wasted on Iron Dome will quickly bankrupt any nation that tries to use it an a conventional war. Same goes for ICBMs -- MIRV ICBMs have no effective defense. If you want your realities on war shattered, try reading How to Make War by Dunnigan, a DoD consultant.
That isn't to say the US military is weak, it is very strong -- but this technology isn't why it is strong. Technology that works against poorly armed militants using outdated weapons in small quantities is very rarely guaranteed to work in a full-scale war scenario. Moreover, Iron Dome has not actually cut down the casualties from rockets. If you check the stats you'll see that the same or proportionate amounts of Israelis are dying from rockets after Iron Dome was implemented just as before it was implemented. Iron Dome may intercept a lot, but something is off if the same or greater numbers of people are dying from rocket bombardments that aren't vastly greater than the ones before Iron Dome.