| From: | Robert Watkins robert.watkins@******.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Starting equipment [was: Value and so on] |
| Date: | Mon, 19 Jul 1999 16:27:27 +1000 |
> I don't see a military performing intensive medical
> modifications on it's
> regular soldiers anytime soon. Most of the cyber ware is useful
> for close in
> small scale combat only. The arena of mostly special forces and
> occasionally
> marines. And higher tech makes this more and more true. We didn't have too
> much 'war in the trenches' in Iraq and Kosovo.
In general, I would agree. Your average PFC isn't going to get extensive
cyber mods put into him. He _is_ going to be given a damn good set of
armour, not to mention training with BattleTac gear, but that is different.
Your average PFC may well go out and get stuff put him off his own back,
especially low-cost/high-gain stuff like a smartgun link, and I can see an
army subsidising this to a degree (for example, issuing smartgun adaptors
free of charge). (On a side note, I would see this even more likely in the
police forces, where many officers go out and purchase their own sidearms,
anyway)
> > Conscript militaries drop in utility as the sophistication of
> warfare goes
> > up. You can teach a man to stand in line and load and fire a
> musket quite
>
> The best military in the world. With the highest tech and highest level of
> training is a conscription military located in the middle east...
> The Israelis have motivation. And that makes them darn good.
Special case, Arcady. A conscript army implies that the people in the army
are not particularly willing to serve. As you said, the Israelis have
motivation. In addition, the core of their army is still the regular army,
made up of volunteers, who get the bulk of the training; the conscripted
units are mostly support units, AFAIK.
The typical modern image of a conscript army is the army fielded by the US
in Vietnam: low motivation, low discipline, and generally under-performing.
The Russian model was also similar.
It is generally accepted that a modern, regular army needs intensive
training. That training requires too much of an investment to see the
trainee bugger off after their two years service.
> The toughest marines among all the nations that the US sees
> as allies are
> also from a conscription country. And while the South Koreans
> don't have the
> raw technology and well trained regular troops that we in the US
> have; their
> marines are something to be feared. What they call a marine and
> have in the
> thousands we call a 'Seal' or a 'Ranger' and have only in elite units. And
> they too are this way due to motivation; as their northern enemy has some
> 80000 soviet trained special forces troops who our (US) military admits to
> being hands down better than any special forces troop we have. And I might
> add that those boys in North Korea are also conscripts.
IIRC, Soviet Spetnaz troops were NOT conscripts. Sure, they were recruited
from the conscript base, but they had to volunteer to go through Spetnaz
training (or could drop out back to a regular unit after being drafted for
Spetnaz training). I would imagine that the NK troops had a similar set up.
I also would imagine that the South Korean forces are similar: heavily
trained volunteers backed up by relatively untrained conscripts, though I'd
think that the South Korean troops would probably have non-conscript NCOs (a
big departure from the Soviet model)
Again, it comes down to economics: it makes little sense to train a
conscript, who will leave in two years, when you can train a volunteer who
is here for a tour-of-duty, and is likely to sign on again afterwards.
--
.sig deleted to conserve electrons. robert.watkins@******.com
