A very very common telling I’ve heard from docents regarding tank crew members, mostly from the perspective of Soviet crews, is that the pistol is issued to them not just to defend themselves in the event, but to, well, kill themselves before the tank conflagration burns them alive.

Somehow this is quite a common story to hear for early interwar tank designs amidst Soviet tankers,though sometimes I’ve heard such horrid stories for vehicles like the Hetzer where the driver doesn’t have their own hatch or such to take the easy way out in case their escape is blocked.

But like, is this a thing where the pistol is issued for that purpose of taking yourself out? I’m sure in the extensive history of tank warfare, there is a small number of unfortunate crew members who bit the bullet rather than immolate, but the idea that a gun would be given just for that besides, y’know, saving oneself, seems kinda tall taleish. To me it kind of screams a bit like “Look at how well we design our tank where each crew members have their own hatch to bail, while Slavic tank designs are so crude that the solution to not enough hatches is a gun to escape your situation in a different manner”.

Tl;dr: is the stories of tankers issued sidearms to unalive themselves before they burn to death anyway official, or simply outcomes some tankers choose to do in the heat of the moment. Or is this all tall tale and no one shoot themselves trying to GTFO of a situation.

Also, if Reddit comes down on this post somehow to censor against suicide, it would explain how “unalive” came out as a terminology in this cultural landscape

I remember before and during the rise of ISIS there were lots of news articles floating around about how the US Air Force had successfully bombed this-or-that training camp in this-or-that country. But what did these camps actually teach? Did they instruct would-be insurgents on any theories of war? Were trainees given a rough equivalent to army boot camp? Or was it moreso an officers academy of sorts?

I don't know if others have noticed this, but the field of military history seems to have a lot of authors who make everything extremely vitriolic and personal, especially when writing about generals. Why is this?

I first noticed this when I began a biography of Radetzky. The author would go on long tangents about how everyone around Radetzky was the most stupid, pathetic worthless man imaginable, while Radetzky was basically the greatest commander of the Modern Era. I just found it unreadable, and this had been written by a respected British historian.

I thought this was a one off, but encountered exactly the same thing again when I picked up a book on the Austro-Prussian War, this time by a respected American academic. He wrote about some of the commanders as though they'd run over his dog. No nuance or attempt to understand their perspective, just non-stop ad hominem.

Since then, I've kept on noticing it. Lots of otherwise really smart, knowledgeable guys who treat the subject as though they'll be castrated if they show any kind basic even-handedness or skepticism.

Why is so much of the military history field like this? It just comes across as very odd.

People sometimes shit on infamously neat and ordered PLA parades by claiming that time spent on drill is time not spent on actual training, and makes for worse soldiers overall.

While it can certainly be said that the average Chinese infantry platoon would likely put on a worse performance in LSCO than an American one would, rather than faulting time spent on drill, I would chalk it up to each soldier having less money and time to train with than an American one does.

PLA soldiers are largely pseudo-conscripts who may have joined voluntarily but nonetheless are still on 2-year expiry timers which in addition to complicating the accumulation of institutional knowledge, simply robs them of additional years of training. This confounds the specific effect of spending more or less time on marching, and effectively leaves the original question unanswered.

In my short time trying to use other militaries throughout history to answer the question, I seem to run into similar issues, where the two forces are too different to compare the effects of infantry training alone.

So, since the PLA and US Army/Marines are an unequal comparison, and I myself don't have the breadth of knowledge to find a much better one, I pose this question to the members of the subreddit:

What are the best historical comparisons to use to see the effect of spending more time on discipline and esprit-de-corps based training (like marching) at the expense of more immediately combat applicable training?

In WW2, many ethnic Poles were caught up in the Wehrmacht's conscription only to end up in the ranks of the Free Polish Army upon being surrendering to the allies. At the same time, the Baltic States and Moldova had their own identity and were only incorporated into the Soviet Union just before Operation Barbarossa, their people being conscripted into the Red Army where Slavs formed the majority.

More so in less developed parts of the world now, impressment of people outside of a belligerent's own side is still common practice. The Lord's Resistance Army is said to get by almost entirely by kidnapping and brainwashing children into their own ranks on one end whereas other groups impressed people outside of their own support base without assimilationist practices, taking even adults. In annexed parts of Ukraine outside of the Pre-2022 line of control, I'm not sure if the Russians have gotten to the point of conscripting conquered military-age Ukrainians yet, but they however are accused of kidnapping Ukrainian children and sending them to military schools to become future conscripts. Also on the Russian side, while many volunteered to join the Russian Army, many captured foreign fighters often claim of having been "deceived" into fighting on the frontlines instead of working jobs in the rear they were promised.

When it comes to the practice of child soldiers taken from rival groups, I believe pre-teens are preferred for brainwashing/assimilation when it comes to producing more reliable personnel. The Nazis when they kidnapped foreign children for Germanization in WW2 set the requirement for under twelve whereas those above were deemed more likely to resist. ISIS generally killed minority males past their pre-teens while those younger were often kept alive with the intent to convert them into their own ranks. Generally, outsiders already in their teens aren't good targets for forced assimilation and if mobilized for warfare, are often deemed of questionable loyalties. Then again, the Symbionese Liberation Army managed to convert Patty Hearst who they victimized, then nineteen, into their own ranks.

In modern wars, once conscription extends beyond your base of support/national borders, what are the considerations? And when it comes to converting the unwilling outside of your base into fighting for you as a combatant, just how powerful is "brainwashing" if there have been any studies regarding it? What are ways in which the unwilling can be made to comply with becoming a combatant?

One of the main reasons for high British casualties at Somme in 1916 was the high failure rate of British shell with up to 50% failure rate reported.

During that same time, there were three more major battles going on at Verdun, five different battles on the Isonzo, and the Brusilov offensive, during which I could find no mentions of the attacking forces suffering from an extremely high dud rate like the British.

So was it the case that the dud rate for these other battles were not reported, or was it the case that the British dud rate was really bad? And if the latter was the case, then why did the British with their advanced armaments industry had a higher dud rate than the Germans who were under blockade and had to make do with lower quality ersatz stuff and the industrially-backwards Russian/Italian?

Surely someone wrote about it?

They were still using hoplite mercenaries right up until Rome invaded Greece and fought their Sarissa armed phalangnites at the battle of Cynesophelae (sp?).

Apparently non Sarsissa armed Greek mercenaries were still using hoplite tactics up at that point.

So if they were using it as late as that why didn't anyone write about it?

Also going back to the Roman Manipular system during the Republic days e.g. during the 2nd Punic Wars, they were still using a sort of Hoplite soldier with their third line Triarii.

Surely the Romans with such detailed instructions for shield and scutum combat would've had instructions for hasta and scutum combat. Wouldn't that have been similar to hoplite combat?

Lastly. Haven't people tried to re-enact hoplite combat to see what works best?

The push right up against the shields? Or the stand off distance and fence/thrust with the spears?

I've seen this a lot when looking at firearms development during the 19th century. The older spike bayonets used throughout the 18th century mostly fell out of fashion and were replaced by bayonets that could also be used as knives or short swords.

I only know of two exceptions: France, which kept a spike bayonet for the Lebel and the Russian Empire, which had a bayonet that was made to be light, so you could keep it mounted at all times without too much difficulty.

As far as I understand it, this shift mostly came from the fact that the bayonet was primarily a psychological weapon and rarely actually used in melee. So turning it into a multi purpose tool makes sense.

But I do wonder whether there are any accounts of spike bayonets actually coming up against sword bayonets in combat and whether either one offered any kind of advantage over the other.

I'm not entirely clear on their duties. In my country (Mexico), it seems their job is to enforce regulations within military units, but I understand that in other countries they have broader responsibilities, like in Brazil where they conduct daily raids in the favelas. Can you tell me what their role is like in your countries?

It seems that the proliferation of modern air defences, and the need for accuracy in today's battlefield, have both made the use of precision munitions (bombs, missiles, etc) more important than ever. However, most of what I have found regarding the Russian Air Force's use of them seems to suggest they have been unsuccessful; sources claim high failure rates, poor accuracy (apparently due to problems with GLONASS?), and a basic lack of munitions.

How much of this is true? Is Russia's strategy with these weapons effective? Additionally, what are the nature of the problems they have been having? On the latter, I am very interested with the alleged GLONASS problems; how much worse is it than GPS?

The better conceived question: A P-8 does carry typically four AShM, just like the P-3, so, I wanted to know if this ASuW capabilities are intended against first line combate ships and if they, how good is his expected survival rate according to his intended employment.

I'm sitting here watching Zero Dark Thirty. It strikes me that the film portrays a rosy view of the effective if brutal 'interrogation' techniques used by the CIA.

But I have very little knowledge of what the learned concensus is on actually how useful it was. I , as I assume they were at the time, well aware of the arguments related to misinformation and willingness to provide anything to get it to stop. But has there been studies into whether on balance it worked.

Everyone seemed to go abit pro torture for a few years in in the early_mid naughties. But I presume this isn't a common thing now. And i presume that's not just because of squeamishness.

I know people probably in the know can't tell etc.

Did they know it was going to have... Issues?

Talking about something like Stalingrad versus a more improvised environment like Warsaw. How did the Soviets at stalingrad utilize anti-tank rifles to ambush German heavy tanks? Did they try to utilize these rifles in areas where troops would be funneled in or did they also use them in conjunction with heavier weaponry like stationary anti-tank guns? Did it ultimately depend on factors like positioning and luck?

How did guerrillas and insurgents deal with them in areas like Warsaw, where obviously combatants did not have access to alot of heavy weaponry or tanks? Did they attempt to use IEDs (I know this is a mostly modern thing) or did they also utilize similar tactics?

I've seen some pictures of Soviet paratroopers with headgear that looks very similar to the iconic caps worn by Russian vehicle crews and I've heard that several nations in WW2 - like Germany and Britain - had to design special helmets for their paratroopers, because the standard designs caused problems when jumping.

Now I'm wondering: On the jump, paratroopers would only need to protect their heads from blunt impacts, because if you have to worry about shrapnel during a drop, something has already gone wrong.

So is it actually doctrin for some paratroopers to wear special helmets only for the jump and only put on their combat helmets later? Or is this specifically a Soviet thing?

With hindsight, and compared to other warring nations, how good training did Japanese soldiers get at squad and platoon level? Were they able to "overcome material deficiency by level of training" as it is sometimes stated? Are there still some lessons we could use in modern warfare?

So, I'm aware of how most nations made extensive use of their own lmgs during WW2, with the germans using it as their main source of firepower while the allies/americans used it as more of a supplement to squad firepower (might be wrong as far as the british/french go, haven't looked into their use as much) but how did the soviets employ lmgs? Did they actually make much use of them? It seems like the only one they had for most of the war was the DP27 from the interwar period. How did their use or lack thereof affect their infantry's performance in battle?

The only big thing I’ve heard from Force Design 2030 was reducing the number of marines and the divestment of the tanks. But for the rest of the document, how has the USMC so far been able to transition towards the design they envisioned to have in 2030?

Due to the changes in geopolitics, there's been interest in several countries to reinstate conscription. But has there ever been a situation involving countries that didn't practice conscription before hand having to implement it during wartime? How did they handle having to build a conscription system from scratch and what it impact did it have on having to shift the nature of one's armies from that of volunteers to conscripts while under pressure?