Reply #33: Not so much my problem [View All]

[14thColony]

Actually I live in Europe, or at least on a large island off the coast of Europe, and travel to the US as little as possible. Even then I've had enough dealing with TSA. Their pompous attitude is what really gets me. As an 18-year military officer with considerable experience, I know what efficiency in a security setting looks like, and that ain't even close. As I said before, it's the facade of security. They'll continue to catch the complete idiots now and then (even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while) but a trained operative would have very little trouble getting past them.

****************************warning: pedantic and pointless crap from this point on, and completely off-topic**************************************

As an aside to the main thread here, while the British had somewhat adopted the armored warfare theories of B.H. Liddel Hart, the French really had not. Up until early 1940 the tank was seen by the French as very much an infantry support weapon, and were assigned usually in company strength to support infantry units as mobile gun platforms. This was in contrast to the Germans who, themselves drawing on Hart's work, had organized regiments and even entire divisions of tanks to use as armored 'fists' in the attack. The French belatedly organized four armored divisions in early 1940, but it was too late in the game to try to build decades of armor doctrine, and the French armored divisions were largely ineffective despite the impressive technical superiority of the French tanks and their overall larger numbers. Again, the French planned for the last war, not the next war. But that's what everyone tends to do, so not their fault by any stretch. As an army they put up quite a fierce resistance to the German forces, and on a number of occasions they were the ones who saw the Germans off the field.

Pointless trivia for you: the commander of the French Army's 4th Armored Division (by far the most effective one) was a colonel named Charles de Gaulle.