#Military Engagement

[trendynewsnow]

North Korean Troops Join the Ukraine Conflict Alongside Russia

North Korean Troops Engage in Ukraine Conflict In a surprising development, North Korean military forces have reportedly joined the fray in Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. This engagement marks the first encounter between North Korean troops and Ukrainian forces, who are currently occupying a substantial portion of Russia’s Kursk region. The information comes from both a senior Ukrainian…

[furious-blueberry0]

Unpopular opinion but I really think we should explore the idea of the Coruscant Guard of being cops of the worst kind far more

[serpentface]

Interview Question for Etsushir:

What was the vibe like as a foot soldier during the suppression of the North Finn Rebellion? Did it feel doomed from the start or did it only fall apart once the Odomache was assaulted and killed?

[vultures-and-scavengers]

cullen is 100% unqualified.

cullen is unqualified for the role he ends up playing, but also there is NO ONE in thedas who would be qualified.

he is creating an entirely new military and on a massive scale. he is not taking a place in an already established structure. you can be a general who spent their life in the military, but if that military has been around, then you are not creating a power structure, you are taking your place in one. much of this has been organized for you.

and militaries are not just infantry. you need to set up A LOT.

you need construction. you need to be able to house your people. you need fortifications to project your objectives. you need storage space because you will need a fuck ton of supplies. you might need bridges and you might need walls and you need to be able to be flexible with what you have the ability to build.

you need acquisitions. you need to know appropriate amounts of supplies you need. you need to be able to outfit your soldiers with the gear they need, which can change depending on their assignment. you need to know the supplies you're acquiring come from reputable sources and are not sabotaged in any way. you need to have redundancies within your supply chain.

you need transportation. you need to be able to move people. you need to be able to move food. you need to be able to move weapons and armor. you need these transports to be secure and well guarded. you need to (probably) vary their routes so you don't risk predictable convoys being seized. you need animals to provide transportation. you need stablehands who also need housing and pay and food and supplies. you need to feed the animals. you need to fulfill your animals' needs adequately. you need medical care for your animals.

you need personnel management. you need to feed them. you need to manage morale and you need to manage pay. you need to know how to encourage cohesion within units while making sure those units can work with others. you need to assign differing specialties and duties appropriately and you need to provide guidance for how each role should be filled.

you need to train them. this is not just swinging a sword; this is enemy recognition, this is how to work within a rank structure, this is how to operate within a highly regulated environment. you need your people to be educated enough to handle what tasks they need to carry out. you need exercises and wargaming so your people know what to expect from the field.

you need coherent rank structure. you need uniforms so your people know who they are and who those around them. you need to plan units with different capabilities that also fall within a coherent rank structure. you need to have emblems for ranks that are easy to read. you need guidelines and standards for what is expected of different ranks because different ranks have vastly different responsibilities. you need to have standards for promotion and demotion.

you need regulation. you need to ban criminal activity. you need standards for discipline. you need to write all the guidelines and be able to provide them to your units. you need one set of rules that all your units adhere to. you need to balance the needs of the people serving with the regulations that need to be written. you need appropriate ways to alter regulations and then publicize these changes.

you need doctrine. you need to plan out how you fight and why. how do you strategize. how do your larger tactics filter down to the smallest fighting units. how centralized or how flexible is your command structure. how are you appropriately using the resources you have. how do you work with allies. why are your units set up the way they are.

you need health services. you need pest management. you need disease control. you need battlefield medicine. you need standard guidelines for triage and care that all your healers understand so they're not doing wildly different things. you need care for long term issues like broken bones. you need to consider what to do with people who are in long-term care. you need to consider what happens to those who are injured and no longer able to serve.

you need security. you need to know your communications are encrypted, obfuscated, or otherwise made difficult to intercept. you need counterintelligence. you need to have guards on patrol. you need to secure your food and water sources. you need to secure incoming shipments.

this is not at all a complete list. but cullen has to find people who can organize all of this, or he has to organize it himself. he is starting from scratch. the inquisition has nothing at the beginning. there is not a single person in thedas who knows how to come up with all this on the scale that the inquisition will require of cullen and with haste.

the inquisition's army must respond to multiple unprecedented threats: hole in the sky raining demons, tears in reality all over ferelden and orlais, red templars, a tevinter cult led by a returned darkspawn magister with a quasi-archdemon, and an army of mind-controlled wardens and demons.

respond. not plan for. they have to pivot and face these things, which all present different challenges and require different tools and methods to fix.

so yes. he is unqualified. fucking find me someone who isn't.

[emblemxeno]

Rant ahead.

Honestly part of my confusion at people trashing on Engage's designs for either being too out there or crazy is that this is the same fandom that venerates Pantsless Marth, Dong Armor Alm, Pegasus Knights with short skirts and thigh highs, mages who don't have armor or practical clothes most of the time, the very existence of the dancer class, etc.

These things are classic and funny to poke at, but they were also things that happened 30+ years ago. Do you not think that Marth going commando and Jagen having eye gouging shoulder spikes in 1990 wasn't just as ridiculous, gaudy and impractical as Hortensia's cupcake circus dress in 2023? In Engage's immediate predecessor you had classes with tit separaters, characters with drill hair, Dorothea in opera garb during war time, Hilda's timeskip fit which looks like a prototype Hortensia fit, Petra's timeskip fit, Kronya's existence, and Female Byleth in general.

Impracticality and overdesign is the weakest criticism you can give FE designs. I get it, we long for the GBA era, but let's be real: those designs were made to complement class design in part to compensate for having character mugs and game sprites as the only constant presentation of the characters. "Crazy" designs and high fantasy armor and clothes started with the more decadent characters in the Tellius games because they had models and didn't have to strictly adhere to class design elements anymore.

[world-of-wales]

❥ UPCOMING ENGAGEMENTS

The Prince of Wales, on behalf of the King, will attend the Sovereign’s Parade at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire on Thursday 12th September.

[decepti-geek]

tbh an important part of my take on the 'don't be like Sentinel' question is that hours earlier D16 had very decidedly assumed leadership of the High Guard, after which any attempt at resolving his very understandable personal trauma via murder was also, on a wider affects-everyone/your-new-power-means-something scale, inherently going to count as a military coup.

yknow. the thing Sentinel did to assume power/hand it over to the quintessons in the first place

[oreolesbian]

the absolute lack of media literacy from people who haven’t even seen oppenheimer is making my head spin but whatever

[hellothepixel]

"The story isn't the focus of ultrakill" i will ultrakill you if you say that again

[trendynewsnow]

Families of Israeli Hostages Demand Action Following Hamas Leader's Death

Families of Israeli Hostages Urge Government Action After Hamas Leader’s Death The families of numerous Israeli hostages currently held in Gaza delivered a poignant and impassioned televised statement on Saturday. They called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to act decisively following the recent killing of Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar. The families urged for a hostage and cease-fire…

[worstloki]

People who think Palestinians wanting equal rights to live on their own land equates to wanting to genocide Jewish people are actually telling on themselves

[commsroom]

It’s my birthday too! !! Happy Birthday! I wanted to ask you about Jacobi since he rotates around my brain like he’s on a microwave plate 24/7. Just, general Jacobi thoughts, go crazy , I think about him all the time

yayy, shared birthday!! i hope you had a good one. you're actually the second person who told me it was their birthday too... june 21st birthday club!!

i feel a little guilty saying this, since it was your birthday too, but jacobi is one of my least favorite characters. not to say i don't have things to say about him, but. i don't care for him at all.

some things i can say about jacobi:

i think the most compelling thing about him is that his character arc is a perfect loop back around to his backstory mini episode - two people are dead. he feels responsible. he's out of a job. what now? in things that break other things, he deflects. he rationalizes - "it wasn't anyone's fault; everyone was just doing their jobs" - but is that really true? or is that what he has to tell himself in order to live with himself, and to keep doing the work that he wants to do. when jacobi says "i was wrong and people died, and the only thing i can do is not be wrong again" to kepler in the finale, it's as much about the deaths that weigh on him. maxwell's most of all.

... and i think there's potential for change there, now that he's able to confront it, but in a lot of ways that's the start of a character arc rather than the culmination of one. i will never believe that jacobi wants to spend any more time around minkowski, eiffel, and hera (nor vice versa, really) - they are also the people who killed maxwell to him, and they will never be "his" people. but i think if you were going to write about post-canon jacobi and that theme of survivor's guilt + escaping destructive cycles, lovelace would be a good counterpart to him for that - she's further along on that journey, he expresses a kind of respect and even almost-friendship for her that he doesn't for the rest of the hephaestus crew, and she has a more... biting sense of humor; i think they could actually be friends (or at least narrative parallels) given the right conditions.

and speaking of narrative parallels: he actually has a lot in common with minkowski. jacobi plays at being a rebel, a loose cannon, etc. because it gets people's guards down, but he's very, very patient, calculating, and measured. he is not an impulsive person, and more than that - he's a follower by nature, and a rule follower. jacobi doesn't believe in the "bigger picture" for his own sake, but he is deeply committed to maxwell's bigger picture. he wants to be told what to do, he wants to feel like he has a purpose within a greater system/structure, and - crucially to dirty work - he wants to be able to shirk responsibility when something goes wrong. jacobi craves certainty, he needs that faith in the judgment of the people who give him orders, and i think what dirty work does by positioning jacobi and minkowski as narrative foils highlights a lot of similarities in their faults.

(it does drive me a little crazy when people compare him to eiffel or say they'd get along under different circumstances, like... no? for all his other faults, eiffel is distinctly anti-authoritarian and sincere. they're like, coworkers with different politics who would really rather not speak to each other if at all possible.)

appearance-wise: i firmly believe he needs glasses (the line about his eyesight not quite being good enough is the kind of thing he'd downplay + it's a fun inverse of people drawing maxwell with glasses when she canonically doesn't need them), he has very specific military masculinity issues (thanks to his father) (and gabriel urbina once said jacobi's car is probably the civilian model of something used in the military) so i think he keeps his hair very short, and. i actually don't think he has notable burn scars. i respect that it's a distinct design choice, but canonically i think it makes more thematic sense that he wasn't personally, physically hurt by that accident (and i think someone would probably have made a remark about visible burn scars on the guy insisting he "is that good" with explosives.)

[hanzajesthanza]

i was so caught up in the examination of dehumanization in the imperialist regime in cahir’s character that i forgot he was supposed to be in love with a 15 year old

[youredyingthatsallthereis]

i love and post a lot about entomologist roach but what about roach who got his callsign because he was terrified of insects and someone saw him freak out when he saw a cockroach

[sylvanfreckles]

I just keep imagining the conversation between the summoner or divine dragon or whoever and Chrom when they were trying to put him in the emblem bracelet...

Chrom walks in with a handful of protein bars and Robin tucked under his arm, like an oversized cat. "Okay, ready."

"Ready--what? Why are you bringing Robin?"

"In case I get bored. I might want someone to talk to."

"But as soon as we put you in the bracelet you'll be asleep until you're summoned for battle!"

"Well, sometimes I talk in my sleep."