Conversation

To get back to whatever my original point was… soldiering is now a profession closer to general contracting in construction. It’s skilled and dangerous but in a different way than in history. Even the equipment is similar. Trucks, tracked vehicles, explosives.
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We don’t really think about how artillery, from the humble mortar up, is really the foundational weapon in conventional war. Not the rifle or the fighter aircraft. Just pound, pound, pound away till only broken bones on built environment remain. Ugly, unglamorous, unsexy.
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Most modern war now seems to be asymmetric and unconventional. We are now seeing asymmetric conventional and it looks weirdly dated. Symmetric wars are now primarily economic and memetic.
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American warmaking is also like this in a much smaller core. The air supremacy in recent wars has been so absolute, the job of artillery can be done from the air. But same pound-to-rubble principle backstops the work if “smart” methods fail to achieve decapitation/regime change.
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Russian and Chinese war making will likely remain this way since they lack the air/sea dominance to make it look cleaner.
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Something depressing about this visible reduction of military prowess to a lesser industrial construction/destruction prowess, which is as it should be. Humans never really abandoned anachronistic Don Quixote romanticism about war.
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If you read about military history right up to around 1700 or so, when battleships first took warfare beyond human form factors, it’s ugly and brutal but clearly a distinct activity from construction and demolition. Fire was the only larger force available and it was messy.
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But once shipborne heavy artillery could pound away at coastal cities, war became a sort of extension of the construction industry. KnightLu culture turned into general contractor services without permits.
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Replying to
I think you miss the mark there. Wallenstein was basically a military contractor and ship borne artillery has always lagged land based in power. By the end of the 1500s an army could level a city built with old style hard fortifications fast and burn the rest.
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Replying to
I’m thinking about mobilizing a lot of demolition power without being limited by draft animals. Land artillery was limited to the horse-drawn form factor. Single gun units. A ship of the line evolved from a handful to like 90 guns of 20-30 lbs. Moved by wind.
Replying to
Sure but a ship of the line or even a fleet would never challenge serious land based fortifications. The Hornblower series gives a pretty good account of both the limitations and power of navel gunnery. In the 1800s navel guns reached the level you are talking about.
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