• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Bad ideas in military history

jimbob said:
People have mentioned the LCS, which looked flawed from the start.

The M-class submarine was pretty dumb too.
Click to expand...

I don't think battlecruisers were a bad idea, they just became obsolete once fast battleships became a thing. Having a ship that could easily outgun any heavy cruiser but out run a battleship makes plenty of sense if used correctly.

LCS is a sort of double disaster. For one its seeking a solution for a problem that did not exist. That the US Navy needed a ship with full capability, like a helicopter pad, ASW and sophisticated AA weapons, that we already have but... this one would have a draft of just 14 feet rather than 30 feet for our DDG's... so it could operate slightly closer to shore?!? WTF, WHY? We have missiles with over the horizon range! Oh and then there was the whole modularity thing, that they could take one ship and just plug and play different roles into it. That never even came close to working.

And then, one of them in particular (there are two competing classes), I can't remember which, has just been plagued with problem after problem. Like the hull keeps cracking open. I've also read articles that they grossly underestimated how many crew members would be needed. So there aren't enough berths, the galley is undersized, and crew members have to work double shifts all the time.
 
Last edited:
lobosrul5 said:
I've also read articles that they grossly underestimated how many crew members would be needed. So there aren't enough berths, the galley is undersized, and crew members have to work double shifts all the time.
Click to expand...

I read that they calculated the time needed for this or that task by having the most experienced professionals do it - fair enough. Plus a lot of automation. But that made many tasks essentially part time, so each crew member was to rotate through a number of different tasks per day or week...

...and ended up not being very good at any of them (or good but too slow), at least not to do it well enough or fast as the person who had been doing that task and little else for 20 years, the person whose work the time/completion estimate was based upon.

So they shredded a few transmission doohickeys and other odds and ends before admitting that things take longer if you don't have specialists doing it, and longer work completion times require more crew members and....

They are retiring some of those already after less than a decade in service.
 
Some mistakes are of the sort that get repeated.

Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld on Iraq in 2003: "We will be welcomed as saviors and the invasion will pay for itself!"

Putin/Shoigu/Gerasimov on Ukraine in 2022: "We will be welcomed as saviors and the invasion will pay for itself!"

(At least Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld allocated enough resources to complete the initial invasion even if Rummy tried to cheapskate his way through the followup. :rolleyes:)



Germany at Stalingrad 1942: "We can totally supply this encircled area by air."
France at Dien Bien Phu 1954: "We can totally supply this encircled area by air."
USA after Khe Sanh in 1968 "Woah, that actually worked this time!"
 
About Battlecruisers.

They were intended for more than just hunting cruisers. They were supposed to be on the flanks of the line of battle. When they actually tried that in the first world war it did not work out so well.

The thing was, when the British finally started building them, the Japanese were using pre-dreadnaught battleships built by the British and using brand new optics also provided by the British to sink the Russian navy. Prior to those optics, battleships could not hit much at range. The Battlecruiser speed would have protected them in place of the armor. But it didn't work out that way.

Once those optics became widely available the battlecruisers on the flanks of the line of battle became more of a liability than an asset. Since they had the guns of a battleship but not the armor they were tempting targets at Jutland.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_gun_fire-control_system#Pre-dreadnought_control_system
 
Last edited:
USA in Berlin 1948: "We can totally supply this encircled area by air."

---

Meanwhile, some enterprising Ukrainians have mounted a light machine gun on a hexacopter drone.
 
lobosrul5 said:
I don't think battlecruisers were a bad idea, they just became obsolete once fast battleships became a thing. Having a ship that could easily outgun any heavy cruiser but out run a battleship makes plenty of sense if used correctly.
Click to expand...

There's another aspect there too: cruiser. Cruisers used to be defined by the ability to, you know, cruise. Battleships used to have shorter range before WW2, making them somewhat problematic at hunting cruisers anyway. (You're not going to chase them very fast if you have to have an oil tanker following you.) Then the Iowa class came out, actually having a longer range than most cruisers, and then the nuclear power came out.
 
lobosrul5 said:
Terror bombing seemed to have worked for them in forcing Holland to surrender. That's the only instance that I know of that it worked.
Click to expand...


Actually, not so much. We discussed this in the appeasement thread a few years ago.

Dave Rogers said:
The Dutch armed forces were already falling apart when Rotterdam was bombed, and the Luftwaffe was able to attack at short range with maximum bombloads and no effective opposition; a Dutch surrender was purely a matter of time, with the bombing just speeding things up a bit.
Click to expand...

SpitfireIX said:
Just to add to what Dave wrote, by the time Rotterdam was bombed, the Dutch government and royal family had already fled, given permission for the commander of the army to surrender at his discretion, and directed him to avoid any pointless sacrifice of life.
Click to expand...
 
Yeah, terror bombing seems to work just fine when it's driving home exactly how defeated you are or are about to become. But it seems to not work at all when people see it as something they can and will endure while they continue fighting.
 
theprestige said:
Yeah, terror bombing seems to work just fine when it's driving home exactly how defeated you are or are about to become. But it seems to not work at all when people see it as something they can and will endure while they continue fighting.
Click to expand...

This probably. The Russians appear to be losing so their bombing looks like desperation. The Germans bombing England was pretty clearly because that's all they could do. Allied mass bombing campaings were bad but I don't think the Germans realized till the end that it wasn't just for the same reason as the German bombing of London.

Nukes in Japan were at the end when it was pretty clear Japan had lost but not not clearly if they hold out for some sort of negotiated peace. Bombs that could destroy whole cities at one go made, well no point in negotiating, even then there were some folks who didn't won't to surrender.
 
Oh, the Japanese knew they'd lost. They'd known for months. They had in fact already intended to surrender... just on THEIR terms. Well, a rapidly dwindling list of terms, and finally just one: that the Emperor would continue to be, well, Emperor, at least symbolically, and would not be charged with any war crimes. The US rejected that, and would accept only unconditional surrender, as per the Potsdam Declaration.

The nukes and the USSR's declaration of war may have pushed them over that boundary, but basically they already knew they're screwed. Even their hope for the USSR as mediators was just to get a conditional surrender instead of unconditional.

Funny thing is, have you looked at what the Japanese head of state is still called? Yeah... about that...
 
Galaxie said:
Are battlecruisers still considered a bad idea, or has the thinking shifted to 'they were fine but they used them wrong'?

I recall Beatty's understated line at Jutland: "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today", after two blew up spectacularly. That seems to have been partly due to design, and partly due to powder handling.

---

Along the same lines, I've never been able to decide if armored cruisers were a bad idea from the start or if I'm just blinded by hindsight.
Click to expand...

The original idea was fine: Fast enough to run from anything you can't outgun, and outgun everything else. The Battle of the Falkland Islands was proof of the concept, though even then the BC's were lucky because their shooting was terrible and the Germans had no AP ammo left.
But as soon as the enemy had ships of comparable speed and armament, it all went out the window.

Armored cruisers were fine for their time. Basically the frigates of a hundred years earlier. But against anything in the 2nd decade of the 20th century, including torpedo armed destroyers and submarines, useless.
 
Going away from modern warfare:

Col Von Donop assaulting Fort Mercer during the American Revolution with minimal cannons and *no* siege ladders. The irony is that a seige ladder is part of the Von Donop crest. The result was the majority of battle casualties Hessians took during the entire war.

And bad decision by the British Commanders goading the man into making the unprepared assault just to teach those grumpy Hessian officers a lesson. Of course the Brits lost a couple of ships in the attack.
 
Last edited:
dudalb said:
Which brings up the Japanese Balloon attack on the US.......
Click to expand...

Was that actually that bad an idea, or was it something that used minimal resources and achieved almost nothing?
 
jimbob said:
Was that actually that bad an idea, or was it something that used minimal resources and achieved almost nothing?
Click to expand...

It used up resources, and achieved absolutely nothing, is good enough for me to count it as a bad idea. Maybe not as bad as some of the others, but yeah.
 
1. The US Army going to the gray ACU uniforms, and the US Navy's blue berry uniforms. Totally unnecessary, and in the case of the Army, the gray uniforms got guys killed.

2. Operation Iraqi Freedom. Total miscalculation, waste of lives and resources. Destroyed US credibility. The sad thing is Saddam would have either eventually given the world a reason to invade, or there is a good chance he would have been Arab-Springed.

3. Ham & Olive Loaf MREs. War crime in peace time.

4. COP Keating, Afghanistan. Everyone involved with the establishment of this outpost in that location should have been courtsmarshalled, and shot.

5. Operation Anaconda, 2002. Poorly conceived and planned. The US Army made the same mistakes the Soviets did in that same area, but with the knowledge that the Soviets blew it. We did the exact same thing. Only our precision weapons made the difference. Better planning, and less interference from SecDef Rumsfeld might - MIGHT - have resulted in the capture or killing of Bin Laden at Tora Bora, and saved us 19 years, thousands of lives, and billions of dollars.
 
HansMustermann said:
It used up resources, and achieved absolutely nothing, is good enough for me to count it as a bad idea. Maybe not as bad as some of the others, but yeah.
Click to expand...


I mentioned this in a thread here about unusual aircraft. It wasn't necessarily a bad idea, but it proved to be unsafe and unneeded and was abandoned before ever entering production.
Convair F2Y Sea Dart, a supersonic jet seaplane, developed when it was unknown whether supersonic jets would be able to use aircraft carriers. A test pilot was killed when his plane disintegrated in the air.
 
While you do make a good case, I'll tend to give a pass to ideas that existed only on a drawing board or as a test prototype and then cancelled. Sometimes you have to go empirical and actually do the full scale experiment before you know for sure that it doesn't work.

That's why I went with things like the Volksjäger program that actually got put into mass production, and actually got thousands of kids killed when, yeah, it came unglued in the air or some control surface just flew off.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom