Naked units?

[Watchman]

Far as I know the modern training paradigm is to drill the soldiers in their tasks thoroughly enough that under fire they don't "freeze up" but do something if only on "autopilot" - hopefully the correct thing, but I understand that generally doing almost anything is much better than doing nothing.

[Celtic_Punk]

Far as I know the modern training paradigm is to drill the soldiers in their tasks thoroughly enough that under fire they don't "freeze up" but do something if only on "autopilot" - hopefully the correct thing, but I understand that generally doing almost anything is much better than doing nothing.

this is true till the last part. Sometimes doing nothing is what you need to do. Training replaces instinct, which is what is going to get you killed in the firefight. You've got to shut down your brain and act on your aggression and training. Fear seizes up your instinct. all thats left is your training. Its the only thing that should be in your mind. "Clear your mind, your ass will follow."

You earlier said something about intense bouts of fear in firefights aswel, this doesn't happen in the war we fight today. A few of my buddy's in country right now send me back videos of firefights, arty strikes, airstrikes, all sorts of awesome stuff! one of my buds is a .50cal gunner on an HMMWV, hearing them scream "Wooohooo!" more than anything else tells me that their havin' the time of their lives.
"There's nothing in this whole world that makes you feel more alive than being shot at by a towelhead with an PKM", so he says. I bet you any warrior that fought under good old Vertingorix would tell you the same. "There's nothing in this world that makes you feel more alive than 10 000 romans running straight for you!", or something along those lines. Liquid courage probably went along way too for some of those battles.

The fact of the matter is there is something powerful when you have an army behind you... In this case you literally did have an army behind you. And though you might have pissed your pants thinking about being dizembowelled by a spear 20 minutes ago, Now that the lines are closing, its just like WWI when you went over the top, whether you were scared or not. You forgot about that fear, and you ran, and you ran, and you ran. And with 15, 20 000 men all smashing their shields together and yelling and screaming and being obscene, you couldn't help but become insatiably thirsty for the inevitable. After all, for a Celt, to die honourably in battle was the greatest thing a man could do. Same with the Spartans, and I'm sure many many other peoples from the books of history.
I guarantee you all the same goes for the professional class of warrior then as it does for now. Your time spent training gives you an eagerness. I myself am quite eager to fight a war. I've trained and trained, I've spent more than enough time shooting paper targets stabbing dummy's and clearing killhouses. We're all eager. Eager to kill, Eager to fight, Eager to test ourselves and our training. Its not that we're messed up in the head or anything. But its like when you learn CPR, you think about using it for real, you wonder, could you really save a life? Its the same thing, you train and train and train. You become eager to do your job. Your will to fight grows and grows. It will outweigh your fears 10 fold. I am 150% certain the same went for the professionals of antiquity.

[Mikhail Mengsk]

I don't think your buddy would be so adrenalinic under heavy artillery barrage. When you are FIGHTING, adrenaline can overwhelm fear. When you are under fire, and you could do nothing against the enemy, is much different. Snipers are the most fearsome threat in urban warfare, because you KNOW that if you make the wrong move, he will kill you. Artillery can kill you even if you are far from the battle field.

Ancient warfare was all about the single battle. A few hours or a day of adrenaline and fear. In modern warfare, you are ALWAYS in danger. In WW1 and WW2 soldiers fired to themselves trying to be evacuated. The stress accumulates day by day, always growing.

WW2 american military studies stated that a soldier would reach the best of his battle conditions in the first weeks, but after 90 days the risk of a mental collapse was almost sure. Much depends on training and individual "strenght", but after 90 days an "average" soldier is very near to collapse.

[Celtic_Punk]

You are speaking about a conflict between two first rate militaries. Where battles result in numberless casualties on both sides. Where as on the MODERN battlefield things are not so brutal or bloody. The casualty counts are much lower. The amount of enemy ordinance fired as us is exponentially lower. And we're fighting people who have no damn clue how to fire a rifle, let alone execute complicated infantry manoeuvres. Hill boys, all of them, flippin' hillboys.

You can hear the rounds from the Taliban flying over their heads, green red and yellow tracers all up the line, and nobody cares. Its the most intense, incredible, and probably pretty fun experience anyone can experience. All this changes when a friend goes down though. Things change from counting the one's you drop to getting your buddy out alive if he still is. The gravity of the situation changes. collapsing back on your vehicle is probably a lot more scary than when you rushed out of it. Especially when you are providing covering fire for your buddy bleeding from his chest profusely. As long as everything is fine, your havin' the time of your life.

As far as snipers go? The vast majority of those clowns can't hit anything to begin with. Line up the top 10 shooters of the tallywally-ban, and I could outshoot em all on any given day. And you can quote me on that.


Like naked celts, the taliban rely on fear as their weapon. The only thing we're scared of is the road exploding. And even thats in the back of the mind of EVERY soldier, except the doctors that pick up the pieces afterwards. Its a lottery, when your number is picked, its your time. There's nothing you can do. If you live by that, nothing should scare you.

EDIT: to Mikhail Mengsk - Nearly every morning he's woken up by mortar barrages inside the perimeter. 81mm mortars are no howitzers, yeah, but thats still heavy duty ordinance. Thats an artillery barrage in my book, and the army's.
This is not 'Nam. The man in the black pyjamas was a worthy adversary. These clowns can't tell a receiver from a firing pin for chrissake.

[Mikhail Mengsk]

You are speaking about a conflict between two first rate militaries. Where battles result in numberless casualties on both sides. Where as on the MODERN battlefield things are not so brutal or bloody. The casualty counts are much lower. The amount of enemy ordinance fired as us is exponentially lower. And we're fighting people who have no damn clue how to fire a rifle, let alone execute complicated infantry manoeuvres. Hill boys, all of them, flippin' hillboys.

You can hear the rounds from the Taliban flying over their heads, green red and yellow tracers all up the line, and nobody cares. Its the most intense, incredible, and probably pretty fun experience anyone can experience. All this changes when a friend goes down though. Things change from counting the one's you drop to getting your buddy out alive if he still is. The gravity of the situation changes. collapsing back on your vehicle is probably a lot more scary than when you rushed out of it. Especially when you are providing covering fire for your buddy bleeding from his chest profusely. As long as everything is fine, your havin' the time of your life.

As far as snipers go? The vast majority of those clowns can't hit anything to begin with. Line up the top 10 shooters of the tallywally-ban, and I could outshoot em all on any given day. And you can quote me on that.


Like naked celts, the taliban rely on fear as their weapon. The only thing we're scared of is the road exploding. And even thats in the back of the mind of EVERY soldier, except the doctors that pick up the pieces afterwards. Its a lottery, when your number is picked, its your time. There's nothing you can do. If you live by that, nothing should scare you.

EDIT: to Mikhail Mengsk - Nearly every morning he's woken up by mortar barrages inside the perimeter. 81mm mortars are no howitzers, yeah, but thats still heavy duty ordinance. Thats an artillery barrage in my book, and the army's.
This is not 'Nam. The man in the black pyjamas was a worthy adversary. These clowns can't tell a receiver from a firing pin for chrissake.

Pretty easy to be the superpower who fight the poorly armed and trained insurgents, isn't it?

Pretty easy to be able to call the air cavalry and the heavy artillery every time you want.

Pretty easy to call in an air strike and to level entire villages to the ground before even attacking.

Pretty easy talking about clowns, tallywally and flippin' hillboys when you are a fully trained (one of the best of the world, no problem to recognize it) and equipped (same thing) modern soldier, and you have all kind of support available today.

Next time invade a comparable modern military nation like China, Germany or Russia, you will see the combat from another point of view. 81mm mortars, what a HUGE artillery barrage! Try to be on the receiving end of a 220mm thermobaric artillery like Russian TOS. You will find it pretty scary, i think.



Quote: Ludens

On the other hand, there are psychological and physiological differences between acute stress and chronic stress. An ancient battle must have been a terrifying experience, but outside of the battlefield you were mostly safe. Modern warriors on the other hand have to be constantly on their guard, because even when in camp they can still be attacked by snipers or mortar fire. There is no sanctuary for them anymore. I think that must contribute too to problem.

That's what i'm talking about: continuous stress led to mental collapse. In antiquity, after the decisive battle (that was relatively shorter than a modern battle) a soldier had time to recover and rest. For soldiers, being effectively away from the front is a very very good think for their mental health.



Quote: Celtic Punk

plus stalin killed like 90% of his officers because they weren't commies.

Totally wrong, both percentage and reasons.

[ARCHIPPOS]

this is slowly turning into a thread abt politics me thinks... if you want to talk politics that's fine just do it on msn...

In Vietnam the Americans lost not to the Commies nor to the hippies back home... Vietnamese people were a traditionalist agricultural society who viewed western influences as corruptive and demoralizing... aren't you guys intrigued by the fact that the technocratic bourgeois goverment that the Americans tried to institute in South Vietnam was overwhelmed by corruption and inefficacy??? the Vietnamese people never believed in the west which was cosidered as ALIEN the US/French urban "modern" paradigm was foreign to their culture...

Similarly the Soviets lost the Afghanistan war against a tribal society and from all looks the US are going to lose there too (for the same reasons) ... this is not a question of ideologies or weapons or tactics or training but of modes of living: tribal vs technocratic, agricultural vs technocratic and so on...

Alexander (who was a genious) immediately understood this and respected and implemented eastern tribalism in his political vision... he used the persian nobility and fused it along with the Greek , respected eastern Gods and customs ...for these reasons the Seleucids and the Bactrians ruled there for however long ...

The Romans tried to project urbanism in the west "barbarian" tribal regions... this endeavour proved successful but was a lengthy expensive process which took centuries of colonising,infrastructure,assimilation and huge amounts of manpower (raw military)...

[Watchman]

Now you're just talking in gross stereotypes, generalisations and plain bad data.

[Exosus]

There was a good point regarding PTSD in modern soldiers. I had always wondered what it was that changed things - whether modern men were simply more prone to mental difficulties or perhaps there was simply much lower reporting at the time, but the concept of a more limited scope of danger may have contributed greatly.

Do you have a reference where you got that concept from, or is it your original thinking? I would like to quote that in the future if it exists somewhere . . .

Regarding the penis size differential between Romans and Celts

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

the difference flaccid is considerably less than the difference erect. Romans and Greeks both, in general, fall into the category of men whose penises gain the vast majority of their size upon arousal, while many (not all) Celts maintain roughly the same size, give or take a couple inches, at all times. In modern terms, Celts are showers, Romans are growers. If we assume that combat would lead to a testosterone increase to a degree which would create a kind of false arousal, asexually, as it does in many or most men when faced with melee, and to a lesser extent ranged, combat, then the difference would be relatively slight.

I think I may have died a little inside having participated in that conversation at an intellectual level. Thanks for that /wrist O.o

[Watchman]

You earlier said something about intense bouts of fear in firefights aswel, this doesn't happen in the war we fight today. A few of my buddy's in country right now send me back videos of firefights, arty strikes, airstrikes, all sorts of awesome stuff! one of my buds is a .50cal gunner on an HMMWV, hearing them scream "Wooohooo!" more than anything else tells me that their havin' the time of their lives.
"There's nothing in this whole world that makes you feel more alive than being shot at by a towelhead with an PKM", so he says.

All this is because the "war we fight today" is so horrendously lopsided - ragged urban guerillas and angry hill tribes with shoelace budgets and virtually no heavy weaponry to speak of versus some of the most grossly potent and best-equipped space-age military forces on the whole planet.

I suggest reading witness descriptions on what kind of great fun it is to be at the receiving end of an artillery barrage or a massed armoured attack, of which kinds of experiences the World War memoirs for example are quite full of, to get a more realistic and balanced perspective regarding what modern war between at least reasonable equals is like psychologically.

[Exosus]

There are still significant numbers of PTSD sufferers coming out of the War On Terror though - much greater than those that came from, say, the Roman conquest of Gaul. How do you reconcile that?

[Watchman]

Me ? I was just pointing out that said friend's perspective was clearly skewed by the simple fact he wasn't on the receiving end of all the heavy ordinance and general ghastly firepower and junk modern wars involve. Lopsided, as it were.
Also machoBS psychological coping mechanism, but I figured that was too obvious to require pointing out; doesn't keep people from coming back all scarred inside either, far as I know.

[Ludens]

There are still significant numbers of PTSD sufferers coming out of the War On Terror though - much greater than those that came from, say, the Roman conquest of Gaul. How do you reconcile that?

How do you know that? We don't have statistics on that war, and the Romans may not have had a single term for PTSD. It could be a wide-spread problem that simply wasn't noticed by those in who left us records. After all, the writing of commentaries and histories is an upper-class activity; we have no records about how the Roman proletariat felt. Furthermore, our society as a whole is quite obsessed with health and performance, and our media far more able to report on it: just because we didn't hear about it previously doesn't mean it wasn't there.

On the other hand, there are psychological and physiological differences between acute stress and chronic stress. An ancient battle must have been a terrifying experience, but outside of the battlefield you were mostly safe. Modern warriors on the other hand have to be constantly on their guard, because even when in camp they can still be attacked by snipers or mortar fire. There is no sanctuary for them anymore. I think that must contribute too to problem.

[Reality=Chaos]

There are still significant numbers of PTSD sufferers coming out of the War On Terror though - much greater than those that came from, say, the Roman conquest of Gaul. How do you reconcile that?

You are talking about PTSD as if it were a recognized illness in antiquity.... It was not... I am sure a lot of people got severely twisted by the wars they fought, but without anyone even knowing what PTSD even was it would not be recognized as much.... I'm sure there were psychotic and traumatized soldiers though.... When Carthage was sacked the roman Commander rotated the kill squads that went into Carthage to make sure they wouldn't go mad with slaughter they were wreaking. So most probably they did know that battle did something to a man.....

Modern warfare has a different fear factor... especially in city warfare the enemy is virtually invisible, which I can imagine to be very very unnerving indeed... it also might bring a sense of being powerless to do anything about enemy snipers and whatnot.... Different times different wars different kind of fears....

[Watchman]

I would remind you that "shell shock", as what today's psychology calls PTSD was known back then, first turned up in large scale in the trenches of WW1. It should tell something that the problem was quite novel in spite of Europeans by that point having spent a round half millenia shooting each other to bits - and you get three guesses at what was the main functional difference between that and earlier wars...

[Celtic_Punk]

Nothing a few bursts of .50cal through a building can't deal with!
In all seriousness though. Look at the havoc the Fallujah sniper wrought. I can tell at least a few Marines were worried to strap their body armour on for patrol during those days.

Also I am sure that it was understood back in antiquity that battle changed a man, and not all men could deal with the change. They didn't understand it as we do today, but we don't even understand it today either. Shellshock was widely unheard of until The Great War. Soldiers unharmed by shrapnel were still coming off the line as casualties of war. This however is a totally different form of PTSD than what we're talking about.

I'm very sure Romans returning from Caesars conquest of Gaul were haunted by the massacre of the women and children and had many many many sleepless nights. I know I would.

[Reality=Chaos]

Nothing a few bursts of .50cal through a building can't deal with!
In all seriousness though. Look at the havoc the Fallujah sniper wrought. I can tell at least a few Marines were worried to strap their body armour on for patrol during those days.

Also I am sure that it was understood back in antiquity that battle changed a man, and not all men could deal with the change. They didn't understand it as we do today, but we don't even understand it today either. Shellshock was widely unheard of until The Great War. Soldiers unharmed by shrapnel were still coming off the line as casualties of war. This however is a totally different form of PTSD than what we're talking about.

I'm very sure Romans returning from Caesars conquest of Gaul were haunted by the massacre of the women and children and had many many many sleepless nights. I know I would.

indeed...

[Watchman]

Well I would imagine it didn't help make them very nice and well-socialised people anyway. Though from what I gather the Romans didn't appear to have particularly major problems with shell-shocked veterans no longer "fitting in" back in the civvie world, quite in spite of their longstanding Assyrian policies.

For that matter, the same seems to roughly be the case with the various more-or-less tribal warrior societies where perfectly regular Joes were commonly enough expected and called up to fight and kill and were rarely any nicer than anyone else in victory. And in some cases, at least if the Roman sources are to be believed, didn't even qualify as full adults before slaying a foeman...

No, assorted "war psychoses" don't appear to have been very common back in the day, inasmuch as can be gleaned from the sources. *Some* individuals do seem to display at least some of the symptoms of PTSD, but even among grizzled veterans it appears uncommon. Neither does it seem to have been much of a problem in the much better documented European armies of Middle Ages and later - before WW1, that is.

[Celtic_Punk]

All this is because the "war we fight today" is so horrendously lopsided - ragged urban guerillas and angry hill tribes with shoelace budgets and virtually no heavy weaponry to speak of versus some of the most grossly potent and best-equipped space-age military forces on the whole planet.

I suggest reading witness descriptions on what kind of great fun it is to be at the receiving end of an artillery barrage or a massed armoured attack, of which kinds of experiences the World War memoirs for example are quite full of, to get a more realistic and balanced perspective regarding what modern war between at least reasonable equals is like psychologically.

Don't get me wrong, I was by no means belittling that war. Read the earlier posts I made. There is not a single day that I get up and don't think about what kind of courage it must have taken my grandfather to get up every day, sometimes multiple times in a day to get into the cockpit of his spitfire, and rise up to meet hundreds of german aircraft. with only 20 seconds of ammunition and still take it in stride. Hell, what I remember of the man you'd never be able to tell that more than half of his friends died when he was no older than I am now. That's courage.

What was it that Churchill said? "Never in the history of man has so much been owed by so many to so few."

[Watchman]

My grandfather was an infantry squad leader - and we fought the Soviets back then. Let's just say that reading firsthand accounts of what it's like to fight an enemy with vastly superior equipement and heavier weaponry, nevermind now general resources, helps put things in perspective.

[Macilrille]

My grandfather was an infantry squad leader - and we fought the Soviets back then. Let's just say that reading firsthand accounts of what it's like to fight an enemy with vastly superior equipement and heavier weaponry, nevermind now general resources, helps put things in perspective.

Simo Häyä...

SISU FTW!!!

But that is OT.

[Celtic_Punk]

My grandfather was an infantry squad leader - and we fought the Soviets back then. Let's just say that reading firsthand accounts of what it's like to fight an enemy with vastly superior equipement and heavier weaponry, nevermind now general resources, helps put things in perspective.

you guys gave birth to the greatest sniper of all time. And only because he was a legendary hunter. Skills of a battlefield sniper are one with a hunter, this much is true. 800 kills in 100 days. Amazing.

The winter war was a huge display of how a motivated individual can stand up to the many, in the face of all odds stacked against you. It also proves that moral is everything. Had your people been defeated in spirit you'd have been rolled over by the soviets.

[Watchman]

you guys gave birth to the greatest sniper of all time. And only because he was a legendary hunter. Skills of a battlefield sniper are one with a hunter, this much is true. 800 kills in 100 days. Amazing.

Speaking of snipers, a distant relative by marriage was one during the war. Unlike grandpa, who "wrote out" his war traumas like many vets did, he AFAIK *never* refers to those times...
Go fig.

The winter war was a huge display of how a motivated individual can stand up to the many, in the face of all odds stacked against you. It also proves that moral is everything. Had your people been defeated in spirit you'd have been rolled over by the soviets.

More like rank idiocy and institutionalised incompetence do wonders to negate advantages in resources and technology.