User:W. B. Wilson/thoughts

1. Internet behavior and Wikipedia
Although online bulletin boards were operating decades ago (modem dial-in and the board was almost always monitored by a SysOp), the emergence of the web enabled mass communication over the data network we now refer to as the Internet. While enabling mass communication offered the promise of widespread interaction on a scale never before seen, it also had a downside in that all aspects of human communication came online, including the boorish ones.

Antisocial behavior on the internet
As one surveys interaction on the internet, it also seems, at least for forums that discuss topics that make people excitable, there is a higher propensity for antisocial behavior than one experiences in face-to-face communication. My personal experiences have been on forums discussing history and military topics. It is dismaying to note how much antisocial and/or counterproductive behavior is paraded in these forums, but typically by only a handful of the forums' users. There are many types of such behavior, but types often encountered include those who aggressively address topics with preconceived notions, those who personally attack other users, or those who goal seems to be "winning arguments" no matter how much their own presentation becomes self-contradicting or exercises in outright hypocrisy. Much of the behavior is so provocative that the users would not dare to so behave in face-to-face communication but somehow believe it is permissible to do so in online communication. The end result of the appearance of such users when not confronted by moderators is a rapid cessation of reasonable discourse on the forum with an attendant drop in the value of the forum's content.

There are rarer instances in which apparently knowledgeable users suddenly appear in a forum, provide support for someone else who is party to an existing discussion or dispute, and then disappear -- what one might refer to as a "hired gun" who has been called upon for assistance via channels external to the forum. When one recalls the original purpose of the internet was to enable widespread communication, the sheer amount of malignant online social behavior can be mildly depressing.

What does this have to do with Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a widely read internet resource and has been characterized as being on the whole almost as accurate as "standard" encyclopedias. Of course, quality varies by article in Wikipedia, although one could easily argue that Wikipedia certainly trumps the standard works in terms of having a far broader collection of editorial viewpoints. (And one should never forget that standard encyclopedias are but the products of corporations who edit those products to cover those topics and present those viewpoints which target segments of society with enough education and money to pay a substantial amount for the products -- not exactly a situation free of conflict of interest.) But the popularity of Wikipedia as an information source also makes it a target for both malignant social types as well as other users, who although of apparently sound psychology, are what one could term agents for various extremely focused interests -- corporations, governments, religions and other spiritual movements, and popular movements pushing political agendas of many stripes. My impression is that while anyone might have points about which they are passionate, the bulk of the editors on Wikipedia are not "agents". Yet the agents have an effect disproportionate to their actual numbers. They have introduced, well, let's just say many articles that have been tainted by propaganda; and, the agents are often fierce defenders of their edits. The most skilled of them can call upon others (either other users or the digital inventions we refer to as sockpuppets) to present the appearance of a community of users who are terribly concerned that their beloved notions may be under question. The effect can either be additive in that material is placed into Wikipedia or subtractive in instances where censorship is attempted. Besides the corrosive effects on Wikipedia content, the agents have the additional effect of demoralizing average editors who quickly lose desire either to edit certain topics or to edit Wikipedia at all, believing that the project has come to be dominated by antisocial fanatics. It is clear that such disputes against agents can be won by the "rest" of the community, but it is frankly time-consuming and at times dismaying to do so. In the worst instances, the agents succeed in driving legitimate editors away -- a loss for all readers.

2. Misleading notions about the Soviet Army of the Second World War
There seem to be certain widespread notions about the Soviet Army of the 1930s and 1940s. These notions were probably originally conceived to assist in the understanding of certain terms and concepts. As such, they may be useful in varying degree to understanding some aspects of Soviet organization and operations; but, when these notions are subjected to detailed examination, their degree of accuracy is something less than desirable. Editors writing about these topics on Wikipedia should understand at least some of the detail underlying these concepts rather than simply repeating distorted versions of the topics.

The use of the corps as a command echelon
A persistent myth about Soviet organization is that the use of corps as a command echelon was completely abandoned by the Soviet Army in the aftermath of the German invasion of 1941. It is true, that for the Soviet forces engaged against the Germans, the use of corps HQ practically disappeared, but only for a period of several months. By November 1941, the Soviet order of battle showed only one rifle corps headquarters still active among the forces fighting the German invasion. By early 1942, however, the Soviets began to reactivate rifle corps headquarters for use as an intermediate command echelon between the rifle armies and rifle divisions. Doubtlessly, the direct command of divisions by army headquarters resulted in too-large spans of control for army commanders and the Red Army desired to reintroduce the rifle corps headquarters once enough experienced commanders and staff officers were available. By the end of 1942, 21 rifle corps headquarters were in action with Soviet forces engaging the Germans. This grew to over 100 by the end of 1943, and reached a peak of 174 either in action against the Germans or as part of the strategic reserve of the Stavka by the end of the war with Germany in May 1945. The use of rifle corps headquarters never disappeared entirely from the Red Army during World War II, as rifle armies in areas not fighting the Germans (such as the Far Eastern military region) maintained their use of rifle corps headquarters during the entire war.

Comparisons of Soviet formations to German or Allied formations
This is actually a series of notions that probably had their origin in two sources. The first was a desire by authors to provide western readers a basis of comparison to understand the personnel strength of Soviet formations such as fronts, armies, corps, divisions, etc., since the strength of these formations often varied from what might be considered as "normal" for German or Allied counterparts. The other source for certain of these notions was the German-authored historiography of the Russo-German War that appeared soon after the conclusion of the Second World War. The U.S. historian David Glantz has cogently argued that the German military leaders in that war had only a poor grasp of their Soviet enemy and that this uncertainty is reflected in the poor factual quality their memoirs display in cases where the Soviet Army is discussed. These German authors and ex-generals also tended to play games with historiography; criticizing, on the one hand, a Soviet rifle army that only possessed as many men as a German corps, yet proudly recounting, on the other hand, instances in which recently resupplied German divisions or corps administered a sharp defeat to a Soviet unit of nominally larger size. The basic assertion of such tales (that is, "division X beat up corps Y") is likely to be true, but a firm understanding of the event rests upon knowing the personnel and matérial strengths as well as how well supplied both forces were at the time of the engagement -- details which this group of German authors hardly ever provided in their memoirs.

Rifle units
A critical fact to understand about Soviet organization is that while they were sometimes (perhaps more often than not) triangular in their organization, the number of units assigned to a headquarters (particularly in the case of rifle divisions in a corps, rifle corps in an army, and armies in a front) could vary from two to some number under ten. This variation by itself makes it misleading to characterize, for example, a Soviet rifle army as being roughly equivalent to an Allied or German corps.

Another fact that is not widely known about Soviet unit organization is that it was heavy on "teeth" and very light on "tail". Rifle division strength quotes often seem undersized when compared to German or Allied divisions, but these quotes are again misleading without knowing the essential context of how the rifle divisions were structured: without the entire battalions of logistics support found in German or Allied divisions, the Soviet units are unlikely to "measure up" in terms of personnel. Fair enough, but the rub comes when one wishes to characterize all rifle divisions as being of regimental or brigade strength in western terms and doesn't realize this comparison may not bear out in terms of unit firepower. One example may suffice to bring out this point more clearly. Soviet front headquarters developed schemes for downsizing rifle divisions in the face of staggering infantry losses -- but the downsizing affected primarily the rifle companies in the division and did not necessarily impact units providing machine gun, mortar, infantry gun, or artillery support -- all of which were the primary producers of rifle division firepower.

Given these troublesome details, how is one to view, say, a Soviet rifle division with a strength of 7,000? Certainly, in terms of strength, it could be counted as a "western brigade", but it would be wise to recall this "brigade" might well possess artillery support far in excess of what a typical brigade could count as organic firepower. A closer western equivalent to worn-down rifle divisions would be what the British termed a brigade group in the war; this was three infantry battalions reinforced by artillery, engineers, etc. The difficulty of assessing true unit size because of this variation in personnel strength continues up through the echelons of rifle corps and rifle army -- all strongly impacted by the strengths of their constituent rifle divisions.

Tank and mechanized units
A complicating factor in evaluating Soviet corps is that the armored forces used the echelon designator "corps" to refer to units that were comparable in personnel strength and firepower to late war Allied armored divisions. These "corps" were made up of four smallish brigades, and of those that were retained in active service after the war, all were eventually retitled as divisions in the late 1940s. Cavalry units were also organized into corps, but the primary subordinate units of these corps were brigade-sized cavalry divisions. Finally, there were also artillery and air defense corps, but these echelon titles represented more an ever-greater grouping of guns than a proper tactical formation.

Fronts
The front command echelon is often compared to the army groups of the German and Allied forces, but once again, the comparison is rough and one does well to recall that the number of rifle armies subordinated to a given front could vary widely depending on the missions assigned to the front, the period of war, and the status of the front commander in the eyes of Stalin and the Stavka. Examples of this variation include the strength of the Northern Front during the Leningrad Strategic Defensive Operation of 1941 (153,000) and the strength of the 1st Ukrainian Front in the Vistula-Oder Strategic Offensive Operation of 1945 (1,083,800).

A further disconnect of the western notions regarding Soviet military organization is that it while it compares Soviet corps to Allied or German divisions or Soviet armies to Allied or German corps, the front is directly aligned with Allied or German army groups -- missing the echelon western outlook refers to as the "field army". In truth, Soviet armies were often small enough in personnel strength to be compared to, say, U.S. or British army corps. But the discussion needs to go further and point out that the fronts varied widely enough in size and capability that some of the fronts were only roughly equivalent to an Allied or German field army while other fronts met or perhaps even outstripped the combat power of Allied and German army groups. Of note is the peak strength (four field armies) of the U.S. 12th Army Group at the conclusion of the campaign in northwestern Europe: 1.3 million men; hardly larger than the figure given above for the 1st Ukrainian Front in January 1945. For comparison to the strength of a U.S. field army, the estimated strength of the U.S. 3rd Army was 314,814 men at the end of August 1944.

Games with numbers
Soft factors such as leadership aside, there are analytical methods available to quantitatively compare different armies. A basic method is to assess the weight of fire a given unit can produce in one minute. For this exercise, I looked at the automatic and indirect fire weapons of a 1943 Soviet rifle division and a 1943 U.S. infantry division. Defensive weapons such as antitank guns and bazookas were ignored, as were almost all of the 50-caliber anti-aircraft machine guns in the U.S. division as they were employed primarily as a defensive weapon. For comparison, I've also included a modified version of T. N. Dupuy's Quantified Judgment Model which includes the effects of weapon range. The rifle division does not compare badly at all: I leave it to the reader to make their own judgment of how much the Soviet weight should be downgraded because of attrition (50% etc.). Then compare nine of the Soviet rifle divisions (a combined arms army) to three of the U.S. divisions (a corps) -- the Soviets still come out on top, and this is a basic analysis that ignores corps and army combat assets such as heavy artillery. While such analyses are not foolproof, they are useful as they provide rough numerical comparisons and remove some of the "kind of like this but more like that" nature of qualitative discussions.

3. On the goals of military organization articles in Wikipedia
There is a certain amount of repetition in some articles concerning military organizations. As I have devoted almost all of my efforts to articles concerning World War II, it is in that time period where I have noted this effect.

The repetition tends to occur in articles about divisions, corps, and field armies; and, it is a re-telling of the same battles over and over again. My view on this is still forming, but the repetition seems both unnecessary (because it is already told in other articles) and misplaced. For the Second World War, at least, the "doer" level of the operational echelon of the war was that of the divisions and independent brigades. Above the divisions, the corps, field army, and army group headquarters were organizations whose components were tailored and varied for specific battles and campaigns. Their true role was more that as elements of organization rather than as fixed tactical organizations themselves.

My take is that the articles on the echelons higher than division should more properly focus on where these headquarters fit into the overall theater organization and which units were subordinated to them during various phases of the war. A brief summary of major operations the headquarters took part in should be in the article, but this section of the article should not recapitulate what other articles already discuss in detail unless there is some unique mission or aspect that was assigned the headquarters at a particular point in the war. An exception to this suggestion could be the capture or occupation of an area so large that it took the entire corps to accomplish the mission -- a situation that is not so common as one might suppose. Put briefly, an article about a headquarters should be about the headquarters and not its subordinate units.
 * Should it be about the decisions and actions of the HQ in coordinating subordinate units - a decision to commit a reserve division by a corps HQ, for example.. ? Apologies for intruding.. Buckshot06 (talk) 18:26, 25 December 2011 (UTC)