Jay Peterson
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Marines v. Rome? OK...

9/27/2015

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I'm gonna have to answer this "Marines vs. Rome" thing, aren't I?

Shit...


ok.


(I haven't read Rome Sweet Rome. This is me pulling things from my ass)


This assumes I'm in charge (Col. Peterson, 35th Marine Expeditionary Unit, thank you), that the MEU travels from Afghanistan to within a few day's march of Rome, and it lands in 23 B.C.


By that year, Augustus had seriously drawn down the army in a massively short-term expense, leaving a lot of Italian farms to veterans and going from 60 legions down to 28. Legions were chronically undermanned to begin with, so I'd be facing about 135,000 men, not 330,000 as popular mechanics mentioned.


So let's say my entire MEU is on the same FOB (bullshit, but whatever). That gives me about 2,300 Marines and sailors, plus a handful of contractors or so. We go to bed in Helmand Province and wake up in Italy the next morning with a legion (A single one with engineers and cavalry, maybe 5,000 men) outside the perimeter. GPS, satellite and comm outside our own nets are down, but we have power.

The Romans attack first. Counterattacks are proportionate. Arrows and pilums will be met with small arms and machine gun fire. Trebuchet volleys will be answered with 155mm howitzers (I've got an artillery battery with me, and while GPS is down, there's still polar and shift, and lensatic compasses work just fine).

That first encounter WILL be a rout of Rome. Send my QRF out and see if there's any wounded I can have treated and interrogated. Launch a raven (drone) to recon our area and have my S-2 start making new maps.


By dinnertime I'll confirm the approximate year and location I've been transported to, and start weighing options. They soon boil down to "conquer quickly or be wiped out slowly."


So we prepare to sack Rome. First things, preparations.


- All personnel ordered to have a bayonet or Kbar on them at all times. Pre-gunpowder times means we keep our pre-gunpowder weapons close.


- Scour my ranks for anyone with a schoolboy's knowledge of Latin or greater. Get them to work making phrasebooks for S-2. Language barrier is gonna be big.


- Scour my ranks for anyone who can competently ride a horse. Commander's intent is at least a company-size cavalry element.


- Engineers retrieve any siege engines from the battlefield and see how we can reverse-engineer and/or improve them. Steal bodies from the avionics and airframe platoons of the air element and whoever in CLB you need.


- MCMAP instructors start bringing out the knife and bayonet sections of the course and begin instructing the entire MEU up to brown belt level. Just on those portions.


- Shut down my armor, AAV, and LAR platoons. They guzzle fuel, the armor is excessive for our needs and there's little we can do with the 120 we can't do elsewhere. Strip them down for parts and easily cut sections. Cycle the personnel into the infantry (and cavalry, for those skilled as such).


- EOD, we now have a lot of tank rounds we won't be using. See if we can rig these with some sort of proximity fuse so we can launch them by trebuchet and magonel. Same thing for 155. Howitzers might wind up being too heavy for us to take, but we can use the ammo at least.


- Infantry start foraging parties. I have 2300 mouths expecting three squares daily. When possible, buy all the food they can. With the junked tanks, AAV's and other vehicles, we have a trade good in high-quality steel scrap, which any local blacksmith will shit his pants over. Speaking of blacksmithing, see if we can recruit a few. Our O/A welding rigs will run out of fuel quick, and my engineers will need some education in the old-fashioned methods.


How I actually take the city will depend on reaction. Ideally I'd keep any bird bigger than a raven grounded until I see troops massing, then send my cobras on strafing runs. Gatling guns and hellfire missiles are gonna be hell on a legion camp. But I'd likely need a ground/air assault to get as much of my people and stuff within the walls of Rome period, and set up my new OP there.

So, that's my from-my-ass before I've had coffee on a lazy Sunday morning response.
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You're an actor? Learn to shoot a gun.

9/25/2015

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Don't worry. The idea throws some people for a loop. But there's a logic to it. Syd Field famously said all drama is conflict. And "show, don't tell," is the most-cited rule one of filmmaking. Which means sooner or later, an actor is going to be performing a physical conflict. And the number one interpersonal weapon of our time is the handgun.

(Do handguns come out in every conflict? No. But if you look at what crops up again and again, pistols are in the top three along with hand-to-hand and improvised weapons.)

Effectively, shooting's as essential a skill to an actor today as skill with a rapier was to Shakespeare. We're in the middle of a more or less equivalent era.

And now there's some wondering how I got to that conclusion. Let me elucidate.

Shakespeare lived during the rise of the rapier, a weapon that's lousy on a battlefield but proved handy for civilian use. The design also made it easy to customize for those who liked to flaunt their wealth and style. And while any gentleman could (and many did) take the time to use it, there were a number of (usually younger and hot-tempered) men who practiced as often as their lifestyles would let them.

At the same time, a number of masters popped up, establishing schools and writing manuals. Agrippa and Morozzo already had manuals published by the start of Shakespeare's career. George Silver, Fabris, Di Grassi, and Capo Ferro were all published by the time Shakespeare had penned his last play.

What this meant was that every year, more and more members of Shakespeare's audience were educated about rapier combat: how it worked, what was possible, what was likely, and what was preposterous. He and his actors needed to know their stuff or pay for it at the box office (or in flying tomatoes).

Fast forward to today, where the handgun (a weapon of extremely limited use on the battlefield) is being owned and carried by more average Americans every day, in a trend that's been lasting 30 years or more. In 1986, 16 states banned ordinary citizens from carrying concealed weapons. By the turn of the millennium there were only seven. The last holdouts (Illinois and D.C.) had their laws struck down by Supreme court decisions in 2013. Today there's an estimated 12 million concealed license holders all across the country.

An entire cottage industry follows the customization and decoration of these weapons, from the commercial to the gaudy to the beautiful.   

And since the 1960's the practice of handgunnery has evolved from a training system for police officers into a martial art. Masters like the late Jeff Cooper, Mossad Ayoob, and Don Mann are writing books and teaching classes across the country. Different schools of thought and techniques are cropping up all the time. My own gun classes for actors evolve about every six months nowadays.

In other words, safety and aesthetics aside, it's getting harder and harder for an audience to suspend disbelief in an untrained gun-toting actor. So if you're going to tread the boards, you might want to get in some range time too.
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quoting myself

9/23/2015

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"Gunners are polite to a fault, and not just because they've done the mental arithmetic of 'kind to the waiter = more ass for me!' (though they've probably done that as well). They will 'sir' and 'ma'am' people relentlessly, often in the tinge of a southern or Texan accent acquired at a former duty station. This courtesy continues until someone gives reason not to be treated so. In which case the offender is christened with the new name of 'motherfucker,' and treated accordingly."
- excerpt from "What to do when you're not actively shooting."
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Campus ND

9/16/2015

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A professor in Idaho, newly armed for this semester, apparently shot himself in the foot, in front of his students.
Not linking the addicting info article because I'm on a phone and don't feel like fisking it or correcting its lies. But I will touch on a few things.
One, I'm adding a class called, "when you're not shooting" to my repertoire. I don't care how many gunfights someone (or the character they play) gets into. The vast majority of an armed person's time is spent just like everyone else's: standing up, sitting down, walking around, having lunch, taking a shit, what have you. And a lot of programs put so much emphasis on the firing line that they have no time for, "take a shit without a negligent discharge."
Which is in fact what happened the last time I heard of an armed teacher having an ND. She removed her weapon in an appendix holster, took a shit, put her skirt back on, tried to slip the holster back into the skirt, and ND'd. It's a needed part of training.
Second, people complaining the campus wasn't shut down and an alert given. Those are for active shooter incidents, not ND's. All that was needed was an ambulance for professor numbnuts, not a lock down.
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Something struck me the other day about microagressions

9/13/2015

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A lot of dangerous professions (the military, firefighting, ect) have reputations for hazing. And while it has some societal reasons, establishing hierarchy and whatnot, it's primary purpose is to push the newbie's buttons until they no longer work. Logic being, if someone flies into a mindless rage upon hearing a graphically detailed sexual fantasy involving their mother, how are they going to be able to do their jobs when bullets start flying? Simplistic, but effective when done well and for the right reasons. It's an inoculation against stress, knowing harder things are to come.

Microaggressions and their treatment work on the exact opposite principle. The smaller and more trivial an offense is registered, then the stress that can be exerted on that person increases. And the affects of that have disturbing implications.


The last parallel I found was in 16th century France. Height of the dueling craze. Proving one's honor and nobility became harder and harder with the rise of the merchant class. When anyone who sold enough wool could have a sword and a coat of arms, what made you better than them? Thus dueling evolved from a way to solve a judicial conflict into a way to settle matters of "honor," which ranged from talking smack about one's lady to whether their clothes were in fashion. By the tail end of the craze, a third of France's noblemen were dead.


We see it in other cultures today. Being asked out by a guy and turning him down in parts of India is an offense worthy of having acid thrown in the face of the young lady who dares.


Here, on the other hand, we're turning to a shaming mob to get our justice, rather than our judicial system. Some pizza joint in east bumblefuck that's never catered since they opened wouldn't cater a gay wedding? Form an internet mob and force them to close and the owners to go into hiding.


This is why treating microagressions seriously is a bad thing. They spawn epidemics of hatred when encouraged.

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There was that one stretch of time that day...

9/11/2015

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... after we all said "What? Why?" but before we remembered to be assholes again.
And we jammed the unholy fuck out of the phone network, trying to tell people we loved them.
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    Jay Peterson

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