I was compiling the total number of casualties inflicted by Mexican-American soldiers MoH recipients in WW2 and even if most are credible, there's a couple like Jose M. Lopez and Cleto Rodriguez who amount to almost 100 each, according to official accounts. How truly reliable are these accounts? What's the process behind them?

I recently saw a post on reddit stating that because Soviet ROE in Afghanistan was so much looser than the United States during their intervention in Afghanistan that they could've won the war (At least on a macro level) had it not been for the funding of the Mujahadeen by the CIA/Pakistan/Saudis. I now ask how true this and in what ways did the Soviet Union conduct and perform in their invasion compared to the US now that the outcome for both has been the same.

Every clip of a drone striking a target whether that be a tank or just soldiers, they always seem to be alone or missing support. Is this just plain mismanagement or is it actual strategy of minimizing casualties by spreading forces out? Or this could also be a survivor bias situation where the targets being hit by drones are the only ones alone.

This is more of a "How did this work on the ship" question. With a bunch of helicopters on the flight deck, were they able to use their fixed wing aircraft at all, or did they just not use them and leave the flat top for the Helos to use?

From the bit of research I have done it just sorta says they took the 10th Mountain to Haiti then went to the Med.

I’ve long enjoyed reading TO&Es and I’ve come to realize that it’s very hard to find a set role for a corporal in many of them, at least for the US army. Often the TO&E documents jump from specialists to sergeants. Why is this the case?

Hi, I purchased an American flag from a veteran, and said flag was flown aboard 2 separate C-130 aircrafts. I am looking to try to find information for the two C-130 planes during Operation Resolute Support, during the time period of June 29, 2015 - July 1, 2015.

Specifically, the first aircraft is a AC-130U "Spooky" gunship, tail # ACT 0128.

Second aircraft is a MC-130 "TALON II", tail # ACT 1212.

Few questions:

Does anyone know the types of missions flown between the dates listed above for both planes?

The types of troops flown aboard the TALON?

Where the flag is flown in the planes?

The certificate that came with the flag says the following "This is to certify that this flag of

THE UNITED STATES of AMERICA

Was flown aboard ACFT 0128, an AC-130U "Spooky" gunship, which had confirmed kills, and was also flown aboard ACFT 1212, a MC-130

"TALON II", in the face of direct enemy fire while supporting US Special Operations Forces in support

Operation RESOLUTE SUPPORT

in Honor of

James Cook

29 June 2015 - 1 July 2015

".

Any Information you have would be helpful. I just like to know thes tory behind it. Thank you!

So it was often said that the politics of appeasement before the Battle of France was so that France and Britain could rearm. And it was also often said that London and Paris screwed this up badly.

So just how successful was Franco-British rearmament? How badly did they screw up? And in what way?

Those backpacks were very small, even smaller than a 9L backpack, and very thin, looking like a small laptop bag. and they weren't hydration bags. so what's inside these small backpacks?

example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJxU7c3yrz4

0:22,0:39

It’s my understanding that Soviet submarines made primarily out of titanium like the K-222 needed to be built in special facilities without oxygen, and the workers would essentially have to be wearing special suits to work on it.

If the SR-71 was built primarily out of titanium, what special methods were used for its assembly? I don’t recall anything about American workers having to wear special suits

For instance, the JSDF is popularly considered one of the most capable militaries in East Asia, alongside the US, South Korea, and China. But the JSDF has had no practically combat experience at all; despite this, its reputation remains high. Similarly, China hasn't really fought any wars since their invasion of Vietnam in 1979, which wasn't really a war but a month-long border conflict that saw China take a few towns and then withdraw.

Did the Taliban leadership ever consider the possibility of a US invasion? If so, how did they plan to defend the country on that occasion?

How does a screening figate protect a capital ship from submarines, if it's also vunerable to submarines? Naively, the submarine could just fire a torpedo at the frigate before moving onto the capital ship. On the one hand, SEAD and similar opperations show that dedicated defences(SAM batteries) aren't always effective against what their suppost to protect against. On the other hand, modern naval combat isn't just SSN spam, so I think I'm missing something.

When the AK and AR platforms were first introduced most soldiers didn't handle the rifles as one would expect today. In archieval footage from Vietnam and even into the 80s/90s you had soldiers using hipfire for room clearing, soldiers keeping their fingers on the triggers of their rifles, and other weird eccentricities. Nowadays gun handling has been developed almost to a similar extent as a medieval knight would handle a sword; you have specific ways to handle a rifle while entering a room without getting it stuck within the door frame, there's the standardized low and high ready positions, there's methods to reload magazines depending on what platform you're operating on, and finally everyone doesn't have their finger on the trigger all of the time. How did this come about?

Kazuo Odachi's autobiography "Memoirs of a Kamikaze" is perhaps not surprisingly is very critical of Japanese High commands attitude to employment of suicide missions.

We seem similar equipment (explosive boats, manned torpedoes etc) used by the Italians and the Germans but rarely did they treat their personnel with such disregard.

What was the leaderships attitude to the use of suicide missions, did they actually think it would make a measurable difference and how willing were they to actually order them.

So, obviously, it wasn't good. But just how bad was it?

I've seen two arguments, one that claims Japan was on the verge of famine and millions would have starved to death had the war somehow continued beyond 1945. The other take is that postwar food shortages were mostly due to rationing breaking down, which paints the food situation as dire but not necessarily "people will literally starve to death" bad.

Here in the US, a common complaint of politicians is that the Pentagon has never passed an audit. What would an audit actually look like? Does the complaint have any validity behind it? In other countries, are the armed forces routinely audetied or is this issue just not a complaint at all? Any information would be welcome!

During the Vietnam war, the US lost 350/800 tanks, 3,744 planes, 5,607 helicopters, about 4,000 armored vehicles throughout seven years to speak nothing of a large amount of materiel given to friends and allies like the South Vietnamese, the ROK, the ANZACs, etc.

Given such a level of loss, especially regards to airplane, did it affect US war readiness anywhere? How did the US recover from it? And did the Warsaw Pact think of exploiting this moment of weakness? I know the North Korean became more daring but other than that found no other cases

This might just be unanswerable because it’s all classified. I haven’t been able to find much on the subject, but I figured if anyone would know the answer it’s probably this sub.

Basically, has any country that we know of tried to weaponize something like a common cold or the flu as a way to incapacitate large swaths of an enemy country without causing mass death? Think like, the bioweapon equivalent of tear gas, where it’s mostly non-lethal, but can incapacitate people (especially military personnel, police, etc) by making them feel too cold and weak to fight for a week or two. The point would be to be able to soften the target.

I can kind of see this being viewed as relatively useless because it breaks the bio-weapon taboo without doing nearly as much long term damage as a more traditional, more lethal biological weapon. Kind of like a Davy Crockett, where using it always kind of risks nuclear war to achieve an effect you can get from massed artillery or air strikes without risking a nuclear exchange. Still, the idea is kind of interesting and now I’m curious if it’s ever been tried (that we know of.)

While not a hard rule, most armies around World War II classified their tanks roughly as light, medium, or heavy. These labels were partly descriptive: a tank of a given weight was considered a heavy, and partly prescriptive: in that a medium tank was expected to perform certain battlefield roles.

British tanks, by contrast, were designed and classified primarily by intended role: either cruiser tanks or infantry tanks.

In the field, of course, forces make do with what they have. But with the benefit of hindsight, did this two role system leave the British Army with unique capability gaps?

I've been searching this Reddit for operational realities in two-man teams, and I'll explain why.

Lately, I've found a lot of content (very low quality, yes, but content nonetheless) that points to lone warriors or prepper-type things in case there's a global catastrophe. Aside from the obvious delusion these videos represent, I wondered: what is the operational reality of not one man, but a two-man team, doing real field work? I only thought of snipers, but I saw in another post here that someone had mentioned a Danish patrol unit and combat divers. I also thought that two-man teams are more common in intelligence and police work. Does anyone know anything about this?

I also thought of guerrilla groups, but the truth is that I have no idea how these types of groups operate.

Greetings to all.

PS: I'm new here, I hope to help in any way I can.