The Camouflage Sweepstakes

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For some time after the fall of the USSR, the independent Russian military was known for its huge array of often-mismatched camo patterns. Even after the “digi-flora” standardization, this remains true to a degree (as in other armies-look at the classic “Woodland vest over desert camo” look in the Iraq War.)

For the camo sweepstakes of a surviving Red Army, I see a few options.

  • VSR-93. This pattern historically was in development when the USSR collapsed. There’s no reason why an intact, better-funded USSR wouldn’t be able to standardize.
  • TTSKO. This was an existing camouflage pattern widely continued by ex-Soviet republics.
  • For a more fanciful idea, a type of early digital camo could be adopted. As it stands, one was adopted by an ex-SSR, with Latvia’s “LATPAT” camo. Although not to the degree of the American Dual-Tex, the “pixels” are still significantly bigger than most other digital patterns.
  • Something else. Even in Russia itself, the Interior Troops adopted many patterns that could easily be used for the regular army.
  • Simple legacy pattern uniforms.
  • A combination. The GENFORCE-Mobile concept gives me the idea of the Mobile Corps and Airborne Forces having “fancier” uniforms.

Review: Danger Close

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Danger Close

Cameron Curtis’ Danger Close is kind of like seeing a local band play an original love song in a club with iffy acoustics. It’s not exactly ambitious, and you know the quality isn’t the best, but you don’t care. You enjoy the music anyway. Likewise, this ridiculously cliche “shoot the terrorist” story is still enjoyable.

It has a very predictable arc (I basically knew the fate of a certain supporting character because she reminded me of a similar one in Rambo II). It has the big burly macho ex-operator man-bro main character. It has research that somehow gets some basic details wrong. It has the Clancy/Baen-ist politics of a cliche cheap thriller and then some.

I didn’t care. Not everything can be an epic masterpiece, and not everything should be. This is disposable entertainment and should be treated as such.

Review: US Battleships

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US Battleships: An Illustrated Design History

Norman Friedman’s US Battleships: An Illustrated Design History was one of the first really big, really crunchy, really technical books on military equipment that I got. It’s obviously not light reading (at least for normal people), but it flows well. And I honestly think battleships are the best suited to a historical chronicle like this.

Since 99% of their history was in the past tense (the sole exception being the Iowa reactivation at the time of the book), it means there’s less sensitive info around. And since battleships are gigantic and awesome (don’t lie), it makes for fascinating reading. In battleships, you can see the US Navy going from its humble beginnings to its World War II juggernaut.

Technical naval warfare fans should definitely get this book. It’s one of the best of its kind.

World War 199X

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The Zapad-99 exercise, the first massive maneuver conducted since the fall of the USSR, shows some interesting insight into the conduct of a World War III in the 1990s instead of the classic 1980s. The conduct of the exercise went essentially like this:

  • The OPFOR, or “Hypothetical Enemy”, as is the official Russian term for such things, launched a giant campaign in the Baltic/Belarusian region, overwhelming the overmatched CIS troops with air and missile power.
  • Kaliningrad was overrun by the Blueeaglelanders.
  • In the most famous and controversial part of the exercise, a limited nuclear “escalation by deescalation” after the fall of the exclave was conducted in which bombers attacked several important targets with cruise missiles. Two Tu-95s and two Tu-160s were successfully launched, and the missiles on those are enough to cause monstrous damage. (that’s 36 AS-15s with 200kt warheads. Ouch.)
  • Said targets are likely to be NATO bases in Europe and American bomber and logistics bases in the continental US.

To a degree, this era has already been explored, however imperfectly, in Arc Light and Red Hammer 1994. Northern Fury takes place in the 1990s but assumes a stronger, intact USSR and conventional weapons (at least for now…)

A Thousand Words: Ishtar

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Ishtar

The film Ishtar, about a pair of dopey musicians that end up involved in a Middle Eastern revolution, is frequently labeled one of the worst films ever. Is it that bad? Not really. Is it bad, period? Kind of. See, it wants to be smart, but it fails spectacularly at being smart. When it lets itself be dumb, it has some good moments.

The highlight of the film is a scene in a bazaar involving a ton of secret agents with terribly stereotyped disguises. It had me laughing massively, and reminded me of the classic Oktoberfest scene in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. But the attempts at actually providing DEEP POLITICAL COMMENTARY? Not so much. Even some of the dumb comedy moments don’t work-there’s a scene later in the movie that involved arms dealers, natives, and the main characters “translating” by speaking gibberish that came across as contrived, unfunny, and honestly a little offensive.

The acting is iffy. Charles Grodin does a great job as a secret agent. The actor playing the emir of Ishtar is undeniably talented and would have worked well in a serious movie, but fails here where a Chaplin/Baren Cohen-style goofball dictator would have fit a lot better. The main characters are annoying and idiotic, but they’re meant to be annoying and idiotic. Does that help? You can decide.

It’s not the best movie of all time or even really “good”, but it doesn’t deserve to be considered one of the worst films ever.

The Artillery Growth Spurt

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I was looking through my old planning documents and noticed something very interesting. In a 1969 piece on conventional-only operations that was one of the first of its kind, the Soviet planners estimated their artillery could inflict a maximum of 20% enemy losses in the opening fire strike.

By 1974, just five years later, when their conventional balance was arguably at its height, it had grown to the more familiar OPFOR ratio of 30-40% in a similar document.

I’m thinking (pure idle speculation), various combinations of bigger guns, more mobile guns, more accurate guns, better shells (cluster warheads that make conventional SSMs more than just a nuisance are mentioned in the same document), and probably stuff I missed.

What I find extra-fascinating is that the Azeri’s Nagorno-Karabakh opening half-hour mega-strike apparently destroyed 40% of the Armenian artillery-which is in line with the previous estimates, especially if you take into account technical superiority and massive, massive advancements in smart weapons. (Also, though, for all that, the war still lasted a month and a half and claimed around Azeri 3,000 KIA by its own admission.)

Review: The Clinch

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The Clinch

Nicole Disney’s The Clinch is a yuri (female/female) MMA romance. Boy, I never thought I’d be having one of those highlighted on Fuldapocalypse. Anyway, it works very well as both a romance (the main character Eden Bauer is very well developed) and as a mixed martial arts book (Disney is experienced in martial arts herself, and it shows.)

There are a few quibbles, all of which are still highly forgivable. In the book the UFC women’s featherweight division is big and prestigious. In real life it’s a tiny skeleton consisting of just Amanda Nunes and her next tomato can victim. There’s also characters having too much situational awareness in the middle of a fight, which is understandable for literary reasons but still comes across as a little forced and unrealistic.

Still, this is the best mixed martial arts novel I’ve read, romance or not.

Cats

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I must admit I’ve always been more of a cat person. Me and my family have only had one dog in my life but have had no fewer than eight cats. The stereotype is that dogs are lovable companions, while cats are amoral parasites who have a purely transactional relationship with their human serfs.

This stereotype is often wrong, as I remember one of my cats with a full food bowl literally trying to rip her way through my bedroom door to be with me. I eventually let her in, don’t worry. Still, cats will make it very clear if their wants are not met.

Review: National Security

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National Security

As something that’s very much a “51%” book, Marc Cameron’s National Security is hard to really review in depth. The first full-length Jericho Quinn (what a name!) book, it fits in the category of “light but fun.” In fact, it’s arguably a better example of the “The ultimate 51% book” than Marine Force One, my past go-to novel, was.

If one was to play a drinking game for cheap thriller cliches in this book, they would die of alcohol poisoning less than halfway through. Everything from the antagonists to the hero, to the way the hero’s operation is set up is there and very familiar to genre enthusiasts like myself. There’s even the weird weapons like silenced .22LR Glocks and air-launched Tomahawks. It’s dumb, it’s sometimes tasteless, and it’s the kind of book I love.

The Pom-Pom turned Bazooka

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Having gotten the chance to read a lot of late-WWI and early interwar doctrine pieces, one thing struck me in particular. Not the focus on trench lines or the different communications with no radios, but the presence of “1 pounder guns” like this.

The 1-pounder was described as being meant to hit targets like machine gun nests and armored vehicles. It was almost always intended to be used for direct fire. In other words, it filled the same niche that far less clunky recoilless and rocket launchers did in World War II and beyond. I found that interesting.

(And, of course, the widespread use of light AA guns for ground attack means even the original concept hasn’t gone away. That the pom-pom was also one of the first effective AAA pieces means the connection is even greater).