Daydream Notes

 So the truth about “Technowar in Vietnam” is much like the Vietnam War itself: you can really go nuts on the details, but the basics are quite simple. America got involved in Vietnam due to  overwhelming arrogance, one that assumed with enough force, materiel, and firepower, politics could  be ignored. “The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam” by James Williams Gibson is a book with a very good core criticizing how and why the war was fought, but when it steps away from that core, it can be atrocious. The book’s cardinal flaw (or saving grace, depending on your point of view) is that this core  and the halo of mostly confused nonsense around it never link together; the methods of one have nothing to do with the other. If the postmodern jank took over it’d be just another gibberish academic  book to be filed and forgotten; had an editor managed to cut out the extraneous bits, Technowar might  have been a classic.   So...when the book is good, it is ...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMfpFcMY96Q Opening. You may laugh at the crest of the air force, the title over a flying white-and-shiny aluminum B-52 , and the music intro choice. So this film is assuring SAC crews that their combat mission folders are strictly the best, and you should always follow them to the letter. 1:38 - IBM COMPUTERS, being used by somebody who's possibly the only non-white person in the film. Thinking about it, they don't really describe what these computers are doing aside from "assess variables." These computers are fed by punch cards and has an output of blinking lights, toggle switches everywhere 2:14 - the first of what we will call really lovely colour footage of period aircraft 2:38 - the first canned sunshine 2:48 - mushroom cloud as photographed from a Canberra 3:15 - YOUR combat mission planners! 3:52 - A officer uses a slide-rule 4:20 - Animated interlude starts I should say the use of music here is amazing. A t...

Pyotr Velikiy. The collapse of the USSR had a major impact on the Kirov program. By the time the lead ship Kirov was put into commission, it was 1980,  and the enormous military spending of the USSR (50% of GDP) was bringing the rest of the economy to a halt. As a result, I'm breaking up the service records into three eras: the Soviet era, the 1990s shambles, and the 2000 + stabilization of Russia. As a preamble, I thought I'd mention something only occasionally touched on when talking about the Soviet Military: the corrosive nature of their military-industrial complex. Jobs producing military goods were higher status in the Soviet Union, as well as relatively well paying. While there were lots of other things driving Soviet military budgets (especially in the early 1980s, when the Cold War reached a peak of hostility) communist party officials could best bring home the bacon for their constituents by getting more military production in their district. I suspect that some...

Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great.) Battleships were over by the time the Second World War ended. Aside from the US Navy (who being a superpower could afford to be sentimental about massively expensive warships) what battleships remained at the end of World War 2 were decommissioned and scrapped with astonishing rapidity, considering in World War 2 the very same ships were thought of as critical strategic assets. Why battleships fell completely out of favor is a pretty simple story. Battleships were enormously expensive to build and to man, and the march of technology had made them very vulnerable – both to submarines and to aircraft. The development of the first guided munitions in World War 2 was a knock against them, as going forward it would be far easier to design weapons with enough explosive to negate a battleship's armor. Another factor was that aircraft carriers had proven themselves as capable of taking over their role of defeating enemy warships at vastly greater enga...

Note: this infodump is quick and dirty, mostly just me rattling around the internet.  I have two sources for this infodump: a Osprey book on Soviet Battlecrusiers, and this extensive, very interesting series of posts on the Kirov-class auto-translated from Hungarian by Google Chrome. If the dog of truth is indeed menaced with the opportunity of being fucked, just holler at me. The start of nuclear powered battlecruisers for the Soviets starts in a very familiar place for anybody familiar with the Cold War: the other side had 'em, therefore we need to close that gap! The USS Enterprise , the missile cruiser USS Long Beach , and the cruiser USS Bainbridge were United States Navy experiments in nuclear powered warships. The Soviets looked at these ships and decided it was high time a nuclear powered warship of the people was built. While the Soviet Navy had been sketching designs for nuclear powered warships since the early 1950s, only one surface ship, the civilian icebr...