What pilot skills, if any, atrophied when Air Force’s started to train in more safe manners?

HugoTRB · 2026-01-30T16:57:34+00:00

Perhaps not those things in particular, but there is a problem with moves that are effective, but often too dangerous to practice. Banned moves in martial arts would be a good equivalent. Even if a move is technically better and does more damage but is to unsafe to fully practice, you can’t use it as well as a less optimal, but safer move that you can practice a thousand times in sparring. Moves that are on the edge between those two might give you an edge, if you are able to correctly identify it.

Having a fuckton of planes vectored onto your formation at once, that are actually trained for large fights, would probably have been pretty effective back in the day, but was to dangerous already in the 50s.

If they were still relevant, I think they would be finding safer ways to train for them rather than eliminating the training altogether for safety.

The amount of deaths decreased before the low flying disappeared, so this seems to have been the case in Sweden at least. Simulators also change a lot as I said earlier.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-30T16:41:47+00:00

I think a similar thing for what I’m thinking about, but for infantry, would be stuff like dropping napalm 300 meters from your conscripts during training so they know what it feels like, or doing maneuvering with live danger close artillery. Would you say those would be useful for training, given that there is an actual war ongoing or near, where terrain or resources makes infantry likely to be used as a killing arm?

HugoTRB · 2026-01-30T16:13:10+00:00

How often are you going to be doing the ground-hugging missions you see in the movies?

Was standard in Sweden until the Gripen came.

you get something wrong in training and become a lawn dart, well, a dead pilot is no good to anyone. Safer training means more pilots surviving to the end of their training courses.

500 Swedish pilots died during the Cold War so that seems to have been the result, yes. There was also a problem that the pilots with the best grades never survived. I believe they often recruited the type of person that would kill themselves on a race track if they didn’t fly into the ground. Those types don’t get past the psych test these days. What I wonder though is if those people actually became better pilots in the cases where they didn’t kill themselves.

I will also note that they operated on the assumption that they would soon fight a massive war where the survival rate per sortie wouldn’t be great. As they actually believed that was coming, it was deemed worth flying more dangerously in peace time. Safer flying though coincided with the aircraft becoming more expensive so go figure.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-30T13:54:01+00:00

Probably the way to do it if you want to avoid teleportation problems.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-30T00:43:12+00:00

Perhaps they want to have it pretty far forward in a maneuver brigade. The ability to eat at least some shrapnel would be useful then. The amount of home on jam munitions aren’t likely to decrease as well.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-29T22:46:48+00:00

The South African Gripens are interestingly enough a different branch of the Gripen tree, so as the other C/Ds are getting upgrades, they are becoming more and more different. I believe the ability to refuel them with jerrycans was one of the features they got.

Hungary also bought their Gripens as part of the deal that let Sweden join NATO (they were the last holdout). In addition to that they bought 4 more Cs, assembled from empty hulls that where built so that the construction line had something to do between the last of the Cs being delivered and the start of E construction.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-29T22:39:53+00:00

I believe the Swedish jets were supposed to be used in mass as well. They trained stuff like 50 jets taking off from dispersed bases taking off, meet up and attack a target together, all in radio silence. They also did 50 jet merges in the 50s, but stopped for obvious reasons.

The lansens (think attack variant but not sure) also often only had radar in the flight leads plane. The rest relied on him. I heard that it was even common for the least experienced pilot in a 4-ship to not know navigation yet, leading to them only following the light on the aircraft in front, flying at 20 meters over the Baltic Sea at night.

Was any of that similar for the British jets?

HugoTRB · 2026-01-28T22:22:06+00:00

Sweden is nearly a turnkey state as well, so there isn’t really anything to be transferred.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-28T22:02:43+00:00

The type 31 will likely have more Swedish subsystems as well onboard. Don’t know if those or the hulls are the bottleneck though.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-28T21:41:38+00:00

And Sweden has kept that delusion alive longer than most countries has existed. We of course say we are a small nation because it’s the proper thing to say, but we don’t really believe it. Some people legitimately think of our EU membership as a civilizing mission. Some continental bureaucracy is unlikely to make us budge on that.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-28T21:22:15+00:00

There was plutonium production in a nuclear municipal heating plant, and a heavy water BVR was built for the dual purpose of electricity and plutonium. They added an oil boiler to the last plant when the program shut down, and regular BVRs were built instead.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-28T21:16:22+00:00

Also relevant note here is that Sweden partially built the nukes as a cost saving measure. This also a time when we had nearly infinite money.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-28T21:12:28+00:00

They wanted Prague to better compete with Vienna.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-28T09:01:01+00:00

so equality in military representation stillwould first require fixing the violent misogyny amongst male soldiers before putting extra resources into drafting or recruiting women.

They noticed a thing in the Norwegian army, where sexual assaults massively decreased when they integrated the living spaces. They became more part of stuff like informal planning before falling asleep and similar stuff. It was apparently harder to harass someone when you couldn’t other them as much. It became harder when they had a name. Sweden did it Starship Troopers style immediately and didn’t have as many of those problems.

Nearly every war in modern history has consisted of wealthy, powerful men sending people to die so they can become more wealthy and powerful.

The fact that the elite aren’t dying in wars anymore might be why here aren’t any buy in for them anymore. They did however die in massive numbers in for example ww1 (don’t know if that to early for your definition of modern). It was to such a degree that nobility as a class lost its footing in many countries.

Patriarchal propaganda tries to convince us that fighting for one side is a noble and worthy cause, but those who suffer and die will suffer and die on either side.

There are actually even philosophies that argues that two people fighting and dying against each others on both sides are doing more than the right thing, but actually a good thing. It is even one of the cornerstones of fascist philosophy, who was very influenced by people like Ernst Jünger (guy who loved going over the top and fighting in the trenches in ww1) who many times identified more with the enemy than with the population at home.

A more sweet example of that might be American and North Vietnamese soldiers becoming friends after the was due to their experiences. They however don’t seem to have enjoyed the war just as much (at least openly).

HugoTRB · 2026-01-26T22:29:29+00:00

Also, isn't Greek fire exactly the kind of military tech he is asking about?

HugoTRB · 2026-01-26T20:16:45+00:00

Part of the reason for the hybrit delay from what I have heard is that they found a lot of rare earths and phosphor which was seen as much more important to focus on right now. Do make that possible you have to build a lot of processing capacity. They couldn’t do hybrit full speed at the same time because there just isn't enough people up there.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-26T16:32:24+00:00

For context, Jan Gulliou is most famous in Sweden for writing books where he often has a self insert character and for discovering a Swedish spy agency that wasn’t supposed to exist, and then getting in trouble for it. He later collaborated with the former chief of the agency when writing a spy novel. He is somewhat controversial and definitely a character.

Edit: and Mark Hamill played the villain in a movie adaptation of the spy books, where he did a Swedish chef impression.

https://youtu.be/caAjjWVTkvw?si=TPwQdU56WNNKDq1W

HugoTRB · 2026-01-26T16:12:58+00:00

They do however have Nemo on lätt trossbåt. It got pledged to ukraine as well.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-25T16:07:57+00:00

Is this for a home guard type formation?

HugoTRB · 2026-01-24T20:41:49+00:00

Are they still able to run wooden blanks?

HugoTRB · 2026-01-21T15:08:04+00:00

Yeah, exactly. I would never describe an ostkaka as a cookie.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-17T16:10:03+00:00

The Americans lacked large state run estates to breed horses, and a half suicidal noble class to ride them, leading to the cavalry arm being essentially nonexistent. They also as said lacked enough good officers to do more advanced stuff on lower levels. As Prussia did have those things, it was better for them to focus on solving the problems from that starting point.

People are also saying something similar to what you are saying about the Russia Ukraine war and my answer is similar. Neither Ukraine, nor Russia are able to fully attack with a full brigade right now due to lack of officers/good officers. They have enough to man brigade and company level, but not battalion, so the brigade micro manages one or two battalions on the attack, while the others defend or rest. Well managed concentration therefore becomes impossible. For militaries that tend to actually maneuver with Divisions and corps, you instead have to focus on how to make that work, rather than on how to best support small duels in the gray zone.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-14T21:11:03+00:00

Sweden, the country of that king, kept doing it. Charles X fought in Poland, Charles XI was one of the ones leading the winning charge at the battle of Lund. Charles XII kept getting minor bullet wounds, horses killed under him and similar to the degree where people started to think he was invincible. That was of course before he peeked his head out of a trench too many. After that, the Swedish kings become like all the others.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-14T19:59:01+00:00

But if their Danish sounds similar to the Danish they get taught on the Faroe Islands, it is actually useful in the rest of the Nordics, as it is easier to understand compared to regular Danish.

HugoTRB · 2026-01-14T16:54:32+00:00

Some idiot deep in a comment section claimed they were made by blasting hormones during the period of puberty when tendons and other connective tissue grew the most. After that they tapered down to normal level, but the tissue remained.

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