Thread 64440239

What exactly is a cargo cult, when used in the military sense of the word?

it's muh dik

it's that guy's dik

Semantic rot killed the concept.

>>64440239 (OP)
Mindless imitation of something going solely off of apperances with no understanding of the functionality behind it.

Copying the form of something, without understanding its function and expecting the same result. An example would be Afghans partner forces in the mid 2000s putting carry handles on their railed handguards, as they saw Americans doing it but didn't understand the bureaucratic reasoning (ie, you are issued a carry handle and separately to that a new optic, you must take them and both must be returned. as a result, while some buried them in their backpacks, some mounted them to the far side of their RIS) and just thought that it was what cool guys did; and that they would be as capable and effective if they emulated them. Its often misused as though it means copying in any capacity, as /k/ is full of retards.

>>64440239 (OP)
Is there even a military sense of the word? It's an islander religion, part of which involves carrying out rituals in an attempt to receive supernatural rewards. In some of these rituals they imitated military drills and other "white people things". So it's tangentially related to military stuff at best.

a cargo cult is when someone replicates some of the steps of success without understanding how they contribute to a desired outcome or integrate with other steps in the process

>when used in the military sense of the word?
pretty much any time a third-world military procures or uses advanced equipment. pic related: Saudi Arabian "special operations troops", equipped with seemingly totally random shit

>>64440256
could also use them as a ghetto foregrip

>>64440259
I figure that using the very same tactics of the Great and Glorious War We Won 500 Years Ago unchanged would be a good example of this. Not drawing inspiration, but quite literally performing the exact same tactics, expecting the exact same results, although ancient tactics also still tend to work quite well

>>64440274
cargo cults are specific in that the lessons and techniques are blindly copied from someone else without ever having been understood. actual IRL cargo cults build big wooden radar dishes because they think radar dishes cause airplanes to deliver boxes of material goods.

>>64440281
Very well, then mine's indeed not a good example

>>64440239 (OP)
Since all the other anons already gave good definitions, here's an example:
China building carriers, a horribly expensive tool for projecting power across the globe, when its immediate geopolitical interests lie in its own backyard. They do this because America has carriers and America has an effective navy, so the assumption is that having carriers makes for an effective navy. This isn't true, they would be better off investing more in submarines and those new dorito regional bombers. Airbases in mainland china can reach Japan and Taiwan easily

Same goes for the UK and Italy to some degree, but in their case you can argue the carriers exist to supplement US power projection
Captcha: 0 TYS0N

>>64440239 (OP)
>What exactly is a cargo cult, when used in the military sense of the word?
You are a nigger from nigger africa fighting some shitty little bush war. You see French vehicles with boxes on them, and these vehicles with boxes seem to magically emerge unscathed from your RPGs. You take some plywood or metal or whatever, make some box shapes and attach them to your vehicle. You now have your own magic box and are protected from RPGs.

Cargo cults are a form of sympathetic magic. You could think of it as an extreme example of "function follows form"; the core of the cargo cult (and all sympathetic magic) is the idea that simulacrum of an object contains the properties of an object. It's the same idea behind a poppet and linked to the concept of macrocosm and microcosm - as above, so below. You observed planes coming and going from a runway, so if you make your own runway then planes will come to it.

>>64440453
>China building carriers, a horribly expensive tool for projecting power across the globe, when its immediate geopolitical interests lie in its own backyard
China just looks in the future when pan American world collapses and nobody enforces free naval travel anymore (we already see this with Houthis)
China economy depends on teh global maritime cargo travel most so they prepare this tool of canon boats diplomacy.
Fleets cant be build in a year, that takes decades so they are investing today.

>>64440269
Would be nicer for resting it on a wall or window frame without the peq tilting the gun

>>64440453
This relies on the Chinese being happy to allow the US to guide international trade as it has been since the end of WW2, forever.
Their immediate interests are in their own backward, but their future interests are projecting power and protecting trade with countries in Europe and South America, which requires a strong blue water navy.
Its better to have one before you need it than be too late.

>>64440239 (OP)
When you want to do some innovation for the sake of innovating, it's what you call people who want to do it the old way.

>>64440453
I think Iran is a greater offender as they have next to no navy as is much less reason to project power and have no ability to produce naval aircraft or naval aviators yet they still made a carrier. China has globe-spanning aspirations and has some use for a mobile airbase that can quickly scurry about the SLC to avoid threats unlike terrestrial airbases, the move to a carrier isn't completely monkey see monkey do

>>64440521
>>64440239 (OP)

I'm rather surprised nobody is mentioning the original examples for a "cargo cult" in which Africans were creating radar dishes out of straw and thinking it would work.

the name however comes from a group of SEA imitating military maneuvers in the hopes that it would lead the military to drop supplies. considering they kept doing it long enough to be noticed, they may have succeeded.

>>64440274
It's not that at all. It's summoning the holy white people, that's it.

>>64440239 (OP)
A lot of good definitions have been given so allow me to give an example instead. Slat armor had been proven and even tested by Russia before round 2 of Ukraine. However, they needed a way to deal with top-attack ATGMs. So, knowing that slat armor stops anti-tank missiles, they put slat armor on the roofs of their tanks. However they failed to understand that RPG warheads act differently to Javelin warheads, namely Javelins have tandem charges that cut through slat armor. Of course they later said it was an anti-drone measure but we all know the initial purpose. I would argue cope cages, unlike a lot of the other shit Russia uses that people call it, is an actual example of cargo cult behavior

>>64443181
You can take the Africans out of Africa but...

>>64443181
Because its implicit? Anybody familiar with the term knows the backstory, so it would be redundant to present it as an example.
>>64443199
That would be true if you accept the narrative that they were for javelins, and not grenades or IDF; but the only source claiming that they were for javelins were telegram blogs who were guessing just as much as anybody else was.

>>64443199
Funny enough your understanding of Slat-vs-HEAT is just as wrong.
Slat armor, aka statistical armor, works by causing a fuze malfunction and damaging the liner (RPG have a self-destruct that can still work because it's on the base), if the warhead is tandem or not is irrelevant.
It doesn't works against a Javelin because of the fuze but it works against things like the PG-7 or the tandem PG-7VR. And depending what Germans did with the fuze, it could work against the Panzerfaust 3 because it has the same "geometrical vulnerability".

>>64443261
Well fuck I learned today

>>64443199
No, no good definitions, but >>64443195
aka the only definition. Stupid rituals to summon white people, the stick made fighter jet and runway is a ritual. This applies to NOTHING ELSE.

>>64440239 (OP)
>What exactly is a cargo cult, when used in the military sense of the word?
The PLA

>>64443431
>Stupid rituals to summon white people
>>64443431
>The PLA
yup