Fields of Blood

Hi, I am trainautist. You may remember me from such threads like "Powerlevels, nuclear plants and power supply during wartimes" or "Trainautism, why trains are the arteries of your military and how to protect them".
Today I would like to talk with you about another topic I find interesting. Agriculture and it's military applications.

Just to get the obvious thing out of the way first: An army marches on it's stomach. This is so obvious I won't even bother explaining it. Feel free to discuss the best kind of crops to grow for food purposes.

I am more interested in another aspect of warfare and agriculture.
To all of you who have been in the army, how often did you actually train fighting in some fields, or orchards? Probably never. Military training areas are mostly natural areas, with some meadows, some forests, some mountains, some rivers…pretty much every terrain you can encounter in nature. Some training grounds even pride themselves with their pure natural areas, and with how well they take care of the environment.
This is a noble thing of course. Protecting your country contains protecting the environment thereof, and some species that have died out "in the wild" can only survive in biomes provided and protected by the training grounds. If any of you Americans have ever been to Grafenwöhr you have seen some of the most beautiful nature Germany can provide. That place is like a jewel. A mine infested, UXO polluted jewel of natural beauty, but a jewel never the less.

According to the UN nearly 50 million square kilometers of land are used for agricultural purposes. The entire land area of planet earth (including deserts, Antarctica, permafrost areas, and otherwise uninhabitable zones like the Chernobyl and Fukishima nogo-zones) is 148 940 000 square kilometers (roughly 150 million). Roughly one third of ALL land on earth is used in some way shape or form to produce foodstuffs.
If you assume that warfare would only take place in areas where humans actually live (so excluding uninhabitable zones) that percentage would only increase, since nobody performs agriculture in uninhabitable places.

You can probably see what I am trying to point at. It's very likely that warfare will take place in an agricultural zone, and we have MANY historic examples of that. Look up any war footage from any war where video footage was a thing. You will be hard pressed to find videos that do not feature some sort of agricultural area, unless you pick exclusively urban combat video footage.
So why on earth are there barely any training areas for combat in agricultural areas? Especially since they can be utilized so easily for your own advantage if you know how.
Rape and corn are very good examples of this.
You can hide entire artillery batteries inside a field of corn. Even if the vehicles are very tall, as long as the barrels don't extend beyond the highest corn plants the vehicles will be practically invisible from the sides, and can be camouflaged from the top by pulling a net over them and weaving a thick layer of corn plants into said net. It's gonna be a lot of effort (a lot more than hiding it in some wooded area), but it's doable, and if you just want to hide it from ground observation (because you already have air superiority) it's as easy as driving the fucking vehicles into a field.
Rape is even better for hiding infantry. Have you ever crawled through a rape field? Rape plants grow a natural thick roof of plant matter over head that completely hides you from view. It also protects against wind and kinda works against rain.
Yet training focuses almost exclusively on natural areas, or urban areas. Sure, it's more likely that combat will take place inside a city, because those are centers of population, production and power, but most cities are surrounded by agricultural land, and in order to get to a city (or defend it's perimeters) you will have to fight there.

What other crops and applications can you think of? Would smaller field with many different plants work better, or are large fields with monocultures the optimal solution?

Other urls found in this thread:

landespflege.de/schriften/DRL_SR62.pdf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared#Commonly_used_sub-division_scheme
reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-maplesyrup/with-maple-syrup-tariff-canada-u-s-trade-dispute-spills-beyond-metals-idUSKCN1J02MS
theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/01/canada-tariffs-maple-syrup-imported-from-us
vermontmaple.org
mainemapleproducers.com
twitter.com/AnonBabble

As someone who travels quite a lot through the Great Hungarian Plain (or the Alföld, as we really have no need for such a grandiose name) I actually think quite a lot about this. This is what I see if I keep looking at the side of the road:
Now, as you can see there are two more important features here: tree lines and running water. The field itself is a few hundred metres of open ground, because for most of the year nothing grows on them. But even in this great plain they aren't completely flat, therefore you could find some minimal cover and concealment if you crawl on the ground. But of course it's not enough against combined mortar and machine gun fire. The tree lines are quite fascinating, because they can be indeed nothing more than a line of trees, but more often than not they are so unkept you'd need a machete to go through them. Which also means that a tree line next to a road is perfect to set up an ambush. The running water can slow down infantry and be a serious problem for vehicles. And even more importantly they can often turn the fields into fields of mud, as Germans experienced it during ww2, when they lost several vehicles to the unexpected mud. Really, you can't even dig a trench, because it will be instantly filled with water. Put it all together, and you can see why IFVs are a must in this part of Europe.

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I agree, many areas over here look very similar (the further north you go the wider the fields become and the fewer treelines and streams you get), and it would be retarded not to train your troops how to survive in such an area.
Of course survival would be trivial, food and water can be easily provided for from the nearest village (agriculture is always in close proximity to human settlements by it's nature) or one of the streams nearby (human settlements require sources of water).
The things that are more important would be proper camouflage, estimating distances based on the width of fields (a) and proper light discipline (b).

(a) Something that is very interesting about modern agriculture is the use of machines, which leave tracks in the fields they work upon. These tracks have a set width that never changes. This information can be used in combination with milliradians to calculate the distance to a target quite precisely.

(b) If you have ever lived in an agricultural area you have probably taken a walk across some fields at night. It's astonishing how far you can see things in extremely flat and open terrain. A single source of light (like a fire, or a torch) can be seen for many kilometers and give away your position. This is not as big of a problem in forests or cities, because there are trees and walls to absorb this light. If an enemy can see your campfire from three fields over, because you forgot to put up a light shield, you are begging for an artillery strike.

you dont fight in fields because there isnt really anything to fight for there.
unless you are mad cunt and plan on burning all fields down they are just a free manevour space

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What grabs my mind is that the fighting between two infantry platoons without vehicles will be taking up positions in the tree lines and firing at the enemy until either one side decisively wins or both sides run out of ammo. After all, the ground is not perfectly open, but you still don't have enough cover to run from one tree line to the other without being exposed. Now, the infantry platoon that has something like vid related will most likely win.

Alternatively you could walk into the nearby village and grab the map of the parcels. Now you know the exact position of every building and every tree line in the area. Of course you could even digitalize those and give them to every grunt, but that only works if you are on the defending side, or you have moles everywhere.

That's the entire point of my OP. Fields are not always flat open spaces. While most of the time they are, there are times when the crops that grow on them can and should be used for your own tactical advantage.

Distributing maps is, for historical reason, seen as a great risk. Maps were expensive to create, and hold great power. Distributing them to a soldier not only means that you entrust them with said power, but you also risk losing the map to the enemy in case the soldier dies or is captured.
The Russians learned this the hard way in WWII. They lost a lot of the map material during the early days and weeks of operation Barbarossa, and had to rely on maps they captured from German officers and Feldwebel and Officers. After WWII the Russians began creating one of the greatest map arsenals known to man, maps that were so precise that they are used to this day as valuable resources and supplementary data for satellite observation.
But that's another topic for another autistic thread.

Easily deployable smoke is the main factor that limits your ability to lock down an entire field. You can have a platoon composed entirely of machine gunners and automatic grenadiers, but they can't shoot at something they can't see (Blind fire ceases to be an option when ammunition becomes a problem).
Reconnaissance (in force if necessary) to figure out where the enemy MG/GL positions are and deploying smoke right in front of them to cover your troops (or deploying smoke in the path you want to take) is cheaper than calling for artillery or mortar support to take out the enemy static positions.

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t. has never been in the military
Visit a Truppenübungsplatz of your choice during an open day, Zivi. They are honestly the most beautiful places I have seen in my entire life.
landespflege.de/schriften/DRL_SR62.pdf

...

When I lived in Germany the nature and wildlife was pretty good, even had wild boar and shit running around in the woods. My only complaint is that in most forests, they've obviously been artificially grown and planted because all the trees are in perfect orderly rows and columns, it's almost too German

Wild boars are often treated as a pest, because they tear shit up, including farmland.
Good thing they are delicious, though.

That is precisely what I am REEEing about. Most forests around here are basically just fucking tall cornfields.

If a cow ever got the chance…

All animals are heterotrophic and at least opportunistic carnivores.

Vid related

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Yeah, kek. Oddly loads of conifers too, not that many in the UK apart from up north and in Scotland, so it was odd to see so many in Germany where the climate is pretty warm compared to England.
All the dead orange-coloured needles on the forest floors really makes you realise why flecktarn has orange in it though, kek

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I unironically started doing that once on a clearing on my property.

Kek
Tbh, I think it's mostly because conifers can't be coppiced or pollarded easily like non-coniferous trees, so to harvest them, you need to pretty much just cut down the whole tree. So it makes sense to just replant all the trees in rows like a field if they're going to be routinely completely cut down for wood.


Yeah, I know someone who's dog got fucked up by a boar in the woods near Fallingbostel.
And yeah, they are delicious, had wild boar sausages and bacon once.
The muzzie fears the boar, kek.

Except for where you trampled the crops driving into the field.

Also, freshly turned earth sucks to walk through. It hasn't been compacted and there's no plant matter holding it together so it sticks to your boots something fierce. By the time you get to the other side of the field you're carrying around a melon sized dirt cod on each foot.


Nah, what you do is you plant saplings on a four foot grid. Maybe closer. The strong ones crowd out and kill the weak ones, so you know whatever survives to maturity is the best the genetic lottery has to offer.
Or you could just let it grow into a woodlot naturally, but you'll end up with a plot full of garbage species not useful for anything but burning and fenceposts.

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*starting

Good thread you fucking autist

I have thought about the land around where I live which is mostly rolling hills and grass with the occasional forest both real and pine trees for timber. I think that it is the perfect terrain for a modern calvery (more of a dragoon really). Because you are never more than 1 km from high ground so your forces goal should be to move across the valley floor as fast as possible and then establish a position on the high ground.
I know what your saying ifv and I agree that will be the centerpiece of the mounted squad but our rural roads are piss poor and almost always at the bottom of a hill meaning that they will be ambush prone if the infantry aren't screening ahead which will reduce movement to a march unless your screening infantry are not infantry but Calvary. The horses will also allow more ammo and heavy weapons to be carried making the quickly established positions o. The high ground more formidable.
The fact that every thing is grassy pastorial land also helps to reduce the burden of feeding the horses. it should also be possible to make amour for a house that can easily stand up to 7.62 or equivalents and riders since the horse takes most of the weight

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Hello, young-user. How are your early twenties going?

Blame Versailles. After WWI a lot of wooded areas had been cut to produce wood for mining, coaling and heating, as well as construction work (and obviously to be turned into stocks for everybody's bolt action raifu), coupled with the reparations Germany payed in part in wood there was a massive demand for a quick growing, sturdy, and mostly straight wood material, that could also be turned into coal easily.
Turns out that spruce is perfect for this, and that you can quickly grow large amounts of it.
So it was decided to plant spruce literally everywhere you needed to produce wood.
This also brought about a special kind of hunting, where you set up clear long paths in a forest by cutting down a single line of trees. Then the animals are scared from one side to the other, effectively forcing them through a nice long kill zone.

Stay home, pseudo Kraut.

Cavalryfags need not apply.
t.1914
Mules are nice though.
Corb Lund is dope as well.

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That reminds me, horses apparently eats small chicks too. Well, eat might be too strong a word since they don't actually swallow it they spat it out instead

Why tho.
I could only ask about it because i have zero knowledge when it comes to these battlefields and i am but a mere layman when it's about tactical planning

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Couple of months away from failed wizardry, ackshually. They wanted to send me to Lüneburg, but I was busy with trade school.

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This is why Panama boot soles are the best, because they clear mud and dirt

Wouldn't it be cool though

Your missing the point though less calvery more mounted rifles who can each carry a grenade launcher rifle and anti tank weapon with ammo and be effectively armoured well still being highly mobile. Scouting for and screening there ifv which will be tasked with doing most of the damage. They will dismount to fight. Because of the terrain vehicles can't move freely as there could always be an ambush around the next bend and you can never know if the enemy is above you. All still land that has been cleared for farming just live stock on pastures not crops. The terrain is also why Calvary have a chance you can keep your horses safe at the bottom of a hill well you fight from a quickly established position that is brisling with heavy weapons and the support of a ifv. To quickly overwhelm the enemy and run. I was thinking 1 ifv with its crew and the squad leader with coms to hq and 10 mounted men with 20 horses

You know it goes down to T4, right?

Useable for every position
Useable for every position with specific exceptions
Useable if specific health problems are resolved
Not useable.
All it means is that you can't be used on every position.
>t. T2, can't be AA missile operator because of eyesight.


Cavalry is dead, just as Dragoons are, which is exactly what you are describing minus the IFV.
Holy shit nigger, learn how to spell.
If your horse gets even a single stray shrapnel to the legs it's going to be out of action, and packing replacement limbs is not nearly as easy as you may think. This isn't 40k enough.
You would need to either cool the organs, or keep them on a host body, which would be an unholy abomination. Then some surgeon would have to implant the limb on the injured animal and you have to pray it works, because if it doesn't and the horse won't recovers within a day you wasted billions of Dollar'e'doos on the Lockmart Medical division.
Just use motorized infantry. If your tire gets shot you can put on a new one and repair the old one in the mean time (or get a replacement).

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I meant bottom of the barrel of T2. That fucking cognition test on those """"computers"""", though. Pretty sure they thought I was retarded or just pretending. But I really tried, man. ;_;
t. red-green weakness and other miscellanea

You could put drones on the IFVs. It's even better if you have a mortar carrier around, so they can instantly request a strike on the enemy. If you worry about jamming, just use tethered drones, or laser-directed if you want to be more sci-fi.

2 horses 4 each man we have fuck tonnes of them here and a lot of grass. Horses are disposable military vehicles are expensive and not produced in nz and this is the type of farm land we have

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I bet If you stopped dumping all the poor sheep you shagged to death in one place you'd have some nice level soil to till.
Please change places with me, Kiwi-sama.

It's called Canterbury it's a terrible place that's why God keeps earthquaking the place

Colourblindness is shit. I am sorry fam.

Looks entirely passable for a Toyota. What kind of plants grow there naturally? Anything edible or good for camo?

I ain't colorblind, tho. Dindu downboat nuffin either, famdingo.

It was all forest like pic related and tussock on top but we cut it down and grew grass so it's all grass now. There is still alot of forest but for the most part it's uninhabited. You could get a Toyota through most of it but not all the helix is very well regarded here. But the issue is in the rough terrain you are constrained to the roads and my goal with the dragoons is to scout the road ahead while the ifv is still moving so that there is never a nasty suprise around the next bend. See second pic horses can climb the hill to the side and do it silently

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As for edible there's lots of cow sheep deer and wild pigs rabbits and goat but not many crops most of the country ranches and slot of the crops are for winter feed for stock. Some areas have slot of orchards and winyards though

He’s from my area, you know that old Ambulance he has in lots of his videos? It belongs to my dad’s friend and I have been in it once or twice while I was younger.
off-topic sage

For densely wooded areas I'd take a horse, honestly if a Ural can't go through an area a horse will.

I think I'd not have a good time if I went to Germany again. I'd probably get arrested for me being me.

I visited the south for the first time last year. Oh boy where there a lot more black and brown people than in the North. But I did end up drinking with two turkroaches in Stuttgart.

If you're going to write in English, be aware of what we call things.

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Rape's a common enough term. Canola's the more popular phrase now but rape's still accepted in most circles.

I tend to be blunt and have zero qualms calling a spade a spade.

The plant is still known as Rapeseed. Canola is just the oil from it.

City slicker detected.

(one and a half heils)
My parents instilled too much feefees into me so I’m only super racist in my mind unless I’m 100% sure the person I’m talking to is ray cis.

Rather, suburbanite.

If you live in a city you’re a city slicker, doesn’t matter which part of the city.

So I have had a little bit more of a think about concealment in corn fields.
It's quite simple really: what is rule number one of obtaining material for concealment?
Get it from a place where the enemy won't notice it's absence. Just dig up a few corn plants from the sides of the fields, drive your vehicle into the field, merrily crushing as many plants as you need to.
Then you simply transplant the plants you dug up from the side of a field (or another field nearby) into the place of the plants you crushed. Then dig up some more plants and glue them on top of your vehicle using duct tape. Sure, any kind of rough wind will blow them over, but it's better than nothing. You can also couple this with a camo net, to ensure the cut plants won't be blown over as easily.


Another thought were fired towards the end of summer and at the beginning of harvesting season of any crop.
Not only can you use the smoke of burning fields to conceal your own movements, but if an enemy has their camps in a treeline, or directly in a field, using just a few illumination or incendiary rounds will set fire to it quite easily. Sure, it won't necessarily be harmful to the enemy, but it will light them up in the dark, and if they don't deal with the fire soon it could devour some of their supplies, or even cause some ammunition to cook off.
This is very dependent on circumstance though, and it will certainly not work every time you try it.

A soldier dropping to the ground in a field of wheat or any other plant is easily concealed behind for any observer looking on at normal eye level. Shooting at something you can't see is impossible, bit how would a bullet behave if shot through a couple of meters of normal wheat? Of course it will be slowed down, but by how much? How shallow of an angle is still lethal for a soldier lying on the ground? Will the rounds be deflected in a certain direction (up or down)? Has anyone done any research on this, and if yes, where can I find it?

another question to piggy back on yours: How well to different crops mask the IR signatures of people? I know that sometimes different crops are used to hide marijuana outdoors because marijuana has a different IR signature. Are there any crops that can either A. mask a human's IR signature or B. match it pretty well so that it ends up washing out your own IR signature?

Plants are full of water, they absorb IR almost perfectly. The problem is that most forests usually aren't thick enough to completely block infrared, so someone looking at you can see a moving flicker of lights through branches/leaves of the brush.

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That really depends on the kind of ground cover in the particular forest.

What part of the IR spectrum are you talking about? Night vision would be blocked by thick foliage, thermal is a different story.

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I'm assuming trees with a high canopy and brush lower down.

Both are blocked by foliage, the only question is if there's enough foliage to do it. Thick conifer forests would work, as would jungles. Deciduous forests at winter wouldn't work, and even summer their foliage usually isn't thick enough to block a moving, glowing body.

Never been to Stockholm, no.

I should have probably >inb4 ed the rape jokes.

Are you all going to ignore the Ameritard asking about which part of the IR SPECTRUM?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared#Commonly_used_sub-division_scheme
Canada, dear ladies and gentle-strelok.

I didn’t realize they made IR cameras that only deal with a small selection of wavelength from what is IR. All the IR cameras I’ve seen deal with most of what is considered IR.

Be quiet Canada

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So most IR cameras do only deal with a limited section of IR waves?

Careful, we might stop shipping you maple syrup
reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-maplesyrup/with-maple-syrup-tariff-canada-u-s-trade-dispute-spills-beyond-metals-idUSKCN1J02MS
theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/01/canada-tariffs-maple-syrup-imported-from-us

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There are bad ideas, there are downright self-destructive ideas and then there's a fucking leaf!

actually, I'm threatening to deprive the leafs

Oops… completely misunderstood.

>Canada has to import their most iconic product from the U.S.

Please someone make a "shut up I'm gonna fuck your wife now" edit out of this!

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So why can't I find any 100% US made syrup in stores? Do companies cut Canadian syrup with the US syrup so they can sell it cheaper?

No idea, but your Aunt Jemima's is corn syrup, not maple. If you want the good stuff, you may have to go to the source.
vermontmaple.org
mainemapleproducers.com

I guess IR cameras only detect limited IR wavelengths then. Truly by saying
enough times you can prove or correct anything.

There is no escape from your life as a Canuck

Facts=proven

Its called cultural landscape. If an ethnic group inhabits a land long enough, their culture will terraform the land to the point they become inseparable.
The land will resemble the culture and the culture will resemble the land.


Don't go into the wheat fields in Germany, the Roggenmuhme will get you.

Nigger What do you think Night vision versus thermal imaging devices are?
By your logic all night vision devises would also be thermal sensors and vice versa, which is so false I can't even comprehend how retarded you must be to not understand.
IR (for Infra Red) is a spectrum of light with a wavelength that is longer than that of visible light. IR ranges from Near Infra Red (N-IR 0.7 micro meters, commonly used in night vision devices) all the way to Far Infra Red (F-IR, up to 1 milli meter, used in infra-red spectroscopy).
Between these two wavelengths there are multiple different sub categories too, for example mid wavelength infra red, or long wavelength infrared, which are both used in thermal detection.
You need a specialized sensor for detecting each band of wavelength though.

Just because nobody bothers to prove you wrong doesn't meant that you are right. Sometimes it simply means that you are just such a massive fucking faggot that people feel too disgusted to reply to you.


Now back on topic: Agriculture.
The supply of seeds is volatile. The three companies that produce plant seeds world wide are Monsanto (now owned by Bayer), DuPont and Syngenta. A German owned company, an American owned company, and a Chinese owned company.
While their production facilities are world wide, what would happen if the supply dried up due to war?

Yes. It was horrible. My anus will never be the same again.

I've seen US made maple syrup in trader joes and sometimes local places that produce them directly.

You do what farmers have done since the dawn of agriculture – save some of your crop as seed to plant next year.
It's what we should be doing now, except Monsanto and Co consider it a violation of their ((intellectual property)).

As a first generation German diaspora who studies forestry, I am shocked at how many Euros and Brits here don't seem to get that there's no such thing as "untouched nature". Even here in the US the Indians played a big role in managing the land. Back in Europe, the industrial revolution and ww1 and 2 destroyed much of the forest land. prior to that forests have always been managed by peasant farmers, and even before the Romans reached the Rhine, German tribes were felling trees, farming, and hunting. The fact is that artificially planted forest is better than having it converted to farmland or housing for economic reasons. The foundation of forest management in the US is largely thanks to German foresters and early American foresters that were educated in France, England, and Germany. Carl Schenk is a name that comes to mind.

cellulose is digestible and will give calories.
it's used on shredded cheese in burgerland. keeps the cheese from sticking together once bagged.


yes.
you have been eating sawdust.

if you buy low quality (((cheese))) made by the guberment so the dairy prices dont drop because of extra production then yes
but most of the time they use potato or corn starch

The problem is, that many of these plants suffer heavily from inbreeding, since they all come from very very few mother plants.
A farmer attempting to create his own strain from a pack of seeds may run into problems later down the line, when he notices that all of his fields are literally filled with plants that won't even produce crops.

It causes flatulence, tastes like shit, and fucks with bakers, who now have to adjust their all flour based dough to compensate for a material that absorbs a lot of water but doesn't increase volume all that much.

Are any of the old trainautist threads archived?
I'd like to dig through them in case of useful info I never read.

My culture is NOT something to toss around in a sentence, cunt.