Tag: Essay

Wither The Running Back

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With NFL season approaching, a hot topic for (some) football fans is-the salary of running backs?

The short answer is that running backs have recently gotten a significantly smaller portion of the pie compared to other players (especially wide receivers). This is due to a decades-long trend towards more passing and also due to a more recent trend where a rookie wage scale was implemented-and almost all running backs burning out in that period before they could theoretically enjoy free agency riches. Because of this and because running backs thrive in the different college game, a team can draft a running back, use him, then draft another one.

It’s hard not to sympathize with someone whose career is short even by athlete standards and who has to be slammed by giants over twenty times a day. But it’s also important to note that the other 45 or so players on an NFL team are also facing physical pressure. There’s no realistic way that the owners and other players are going to give their share to appease players who can be reasonably considered more replaceable. And a certain subset of fan and reporter will always talk about the poor struggling running back and not the players who are earning much more (and not just in absolute terms) than they did in the past.

I do feel like the old “walking tank” running back may be more in vogue. People who otherwise would have trained as Barry Sanders-type “agility running backs” are likely to want to aim for a wealthier, safer receiver position instead. But since you can’t teach size….

Nuclear Terrorism Cont.

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Back to my “hypothetical nuclear terrorism” reading, and some of the analyses have given me this impression.

So there are some ifs beyond the norm that actually make it more likely. Besides the usual “if you have the resources and personnel for the job”, there’s two things that make the job of the would-be nuclear terrorist easier and their opponents harder.

  • Being willing to take the hit of large and likely fatal amounts of radiation during transportation and construction. This is pretty self-explanatory, especially when using comparably “fresh” (and thus high radiation) spent power reactor fuel as an input.
  • Being willing to detonate the bomb in a target area closer to the assembly site, even if it’s less damaging and/or prestigious.

However, this narrows the personnel pool even more. It may be a slight narrowing, but it’s still a narrowing. It’s also worth noting that the first point makes a “factory accident” a lot more likely, perhaps countering the advantage of fanaticism.

Hungary’s Humongous Divisions

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In the late 1940s, Hungary, fresh off Soviet conquest and the statistical worst hyperinflation ever recorded, was rebuilding its military. Not surprisingly, the plans reportedly called for a force structured along Soviet lines and doctrine. But surprisingly, the centerpiece was on ridiculously large infantry divisions. How large? Paper strength of at least 25,000 people, but that doesn’t describe all of it.

No, comparing the number of infantry battalions ultimately under divisional control draws this insanity into better perspective. The archetypical triangular infantry division has nine (three in each of three regiments/brigades). The square division largely rejected as too big and clunky had twelve (three in each of four regiments). This had sixteen. Four regiments of four battalions each.

There’s a reason why these actually weren’t made and why, even beyond the impact of the 1956 rebellion and short leash, Hungary’s army in actuality remained conventionally Soviet-styled for the rest of the Cold War.

Solving The Madness

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Ok, “How many shells were fired in the opening megabarrage of a multi-front offensive operation, such as a Fuldapocalypse or All Union’s invasion of Romania?”

Going with the latter because it’s my book, I finally have an answer that’s easier than a vague “Over a million.” Going with “Sustainability of the Soviet Army In Battle” and “Front Operations 1977” as main sources.

A unit of fire for each artillery piece translates to about 80 for 120-122mm, 60 for 152mm, 160 for BM-21s, and 120 for smaller mortars (sust., pg 68). GENFORCE Mobile has similar numbers but adds 40 for big 203+mm pieces. I’ll just split the difference and say 70.

“Thus, for instance, in armies operating on the axis of the main attack, the expenditure of artillery and mortar ammunition in the first day of combat actions without the use of nuclear weapons may be 2.0 to 2.5 units of fire” (front. pg 309)

A front is described in the same document as having 3,400 to 4,200 artillery pieces (front pg. 12), so a very basic napkin calc for two fronts gives 1,176,000 shells. That’s about 25,000 tons even if you assume “only” the weight of a D-30 round for each shell.

So yeah, 100-150 x the number of total artillery pieces for an extremely basic ballpark figure.

How To Nuke

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How much nuke-metal can you get out of Reactor X? As it turned out, nuclear proliferation scholar David Albright came up with an oversimplified rough formula, which he wrote in a briefing.

You need:

  1. The thermal energy created by the reactor. Note that thermal megawatts are different and greater than electrical megawatts.
  2. The capacity factor. As I’m not any kind of scientist, I would say just go with Albright’s recommendations or make it even lower than 0.5 if you’re using a press-ganged power reactor to simulate the extra work needed.
  3. The conversion factor. This is obvious in the slide for purpose-built production reactors, but for adapted ones, you need to look a little deeper. Fortunately, the same presentation has a comparative slide.

(Again, do not quote me on this. The very presentation says “this is for production not adapted reactors”, but oh well.)

So:

200mw production reactor: 200×0.6x365x.85=37kg of weapons grade plutonium in a year.

Adapted LWR power reactor: 1,400 mwth, wastage: 1400×0.35x365x.51= 91.2 kg of weapons grade plutonium in a year.

A Fat Man-level warhead is estimated to need anything from 6.5 kg (very low technology, used in said bomb itself) to 3kg. See here and here.

The Wargirl

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Made in Stable Diffusion

Anyone who’s seen my retweets knows how much I like tacticute. And Stable Diffusion gives me the chance to make tacticute in a variety of styles, clothes, and poses. The styles of these military women trend away from the fluffy model and more towards the semi-practical. I tend to give them shorter hair, and in the more photorealistic models, a rougher, harsh edge to their appearance. They may be tigresses worn down by the horrors of what they serve in, but they still have a kitten on the inside. But I digress..

Anyway, for the sake of fiction (obviously real life policy is complex and depends on so many factors), I must admit towards having my military females tending to be something other than armored infantry grunts. (All Union’s Cholpon is a medic, something women have done in battlefield support for thousands of years). Besides that, there’s vehicle crews, agents, even things like the descendants of the WWII Soviet scout-snipers. It’s not keeping them in the back and it’s definitely still putting them in harms way.

Even if there’s a mitigating factor in-setting (ie power armor,magic,even just the tone of things), I still have this bias. And I don’t mind if it’s done right, nor do I think it’s impossible to do right. I guess it’s just a partially subconcious reaction to the trend of “strong female girlboss who’s 5 foot 2 and scrawny and can do the most stereotypically masculine things better than the men can”.

Claude Larson and Library Music

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There lived a German musician named Klaus Netzle who more often went by the stage name Claude Larson. Although Netzle had many more aliases, as befit a stock music composer.

I find his work rather interesting. Meant as disposable background music, he wrote in many genres, and composed and performed many, many songs. Him and others like him made albums that filled vast business libraries but, with few exceptions, were not known to the general public until the internet.

I give you one of my favorite Claude Larson tracks:

The Hard Lesson

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The Ukrainian counteroffensive has not gained as much ground as hoped for. It’s important to see, as these respected experts did, that it’s not just a matter of insufficient equipment. Anyway, for a bit of Fuldapocalyptic contemporary commentary.

  • There’s the Russians getting better after their initial swing and a miss. Especially as…
  • There’s the problem that everyone, including the US, would struggle with an offensive against an opponent that has had months to fortify an inevitable and obvious avenue of approach over flat terrain
  • There’s the inherent material issues. After all, the last such offense I can think of that was a huge offensive against an opponent materially better in most ways was… the Battle of the Bulge. Which didn’t go so well for the attacker and devolved into a grindfest pretty quickly.
  • But there’s also the issues with Ukraine’s own military. Again, this isn’t something really to blame. Everyone (just look at Kasserine Pass) would struggle with complex operations after quickly raising an army in a rapid desperate period of total war. Yet mentioning these very real issues and mentioning their struggles as being due to something other than just the poor stingy west not giving them 200000000 tanks and a legion of Imperial Knights attracts a lot of angry criticism.
  • Ukrainians have every reason not to think like this, but from a western perspective, having a Ukraine with NATO/similar committment but without a bombed out strip of land in its east is vastly preferable to a Ukraine with said strip of land but still locked in a conflict.

The Cluster Debate

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So the Americans have provided cluster weapons to Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, the internet debates around them have not been the most fruitful or productive. The consistent opponents are one thing in that I find their arguments as flawed as they are understandable. Yes, it’s perfectly fine to be concerned about unexploded ordnance and collateral damage-as if there wasn’t plenty of that already, most of it caused by…. someone other than Ukraine.

But the more interesting thing to me has been the talk, largely from OSINT accounts, of treating clusters as an unstoppable superweapon. Between this and the Bayraktar TB2 slobbering of days past, it’s as big a sign as Michael Jordan’s baseball career that excellent talent in one area doesn’t equal having it in another. Anyway,

  • Concern about unexploded bomblets, and not just for collateral reasons, is valid.
  • Clusters are situational and even in the past before “normal” shells got better designed, had many situations where they were worse. They also had some where they were better.
  • Cluster shells will still be extremely useful, if only because they’re a fresh source of things that things that go boom.

Rediscovering Attrition

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Every so often an observer will encounter a war (the Ukraine conflict being the most recent) and then find that numbers, firepower, and the dreaded capital-A Attrition still matter, as they always have. Some of this is just seeing technological hype being inevitably worn down by realistic imperfection. But more of it is just because of the annoying way the Liddell-Hart/Boyd/Lind “MANEUVER WAR” crowd has wormed its way into military discourse.

Ok, so a lot of it is just WWII mythology of the Germans running circles around the French. But guess who’s amplified all that? Yep, the maneuverists. And in Liddell Hart’s case going all the way back to the first ever recorded battles where the “Indirect Approach” always won. So much as how people become legitimately shocked when, after a long dose of Pierre Spreyism, it turns out a new piece of military equipment actually works, they also become shocked when it turns out that fortifications are indeed viable if not essential, that the Big Breakthrough is hard, that maneuver has limits, and that there are few substitutes for force and attrition.

Studying actual doctrine even in maneuverist periods doesn’t make one surprised. After all, a Sov Kras Don Circ Heavy Opfor operational maneuver group gets going with a massive breakthrough concentration of firepower and stays going through mobile organic firepower. But going by popular media does.