Soldier Reacts to Attack on Titan Season 1 Episode 1

hey guys it's paul combat veteran mma fighter youtuber and today i'm going to be checking out a a hit anime series called attack on titan now attack on titan is a it looks like a fantasy horror type of anime um based on a hugely popular manga of the same name now uh i will say that i cannot do a live reaction here on youtube um the uh owners of the titan franchise are zealous about copyright as as they should be right they work really hard to make this a beautiful anime series and you should watch it on the authorized platforms so i'm going to stick a link below to crunchyroll right watch it for sure and then come by and we'll talk a little bit about my reaction so really this is going to look more like a breakdown especially about the tactics that you see used and sort of the geopolitics i mean there's there's so much great material here just in episode one so before we get into it be sure hit that subscribe button tell the youtube algorithm that i am making quality content by hitting like and of course um if there's anything i miss in my analysis right without spoiling it for me um let me know in the comments below okay having done that let's get into my thoughts so uh my my overall thoughts first off on the titans and the survey corps as a concept so it seems like the uh defensive system that humanity relies on inside the walls is a pretty common to a lot of militaries where they have a garrison and a field army this is actually how rome organized their armies in the empire where younger fitter troops doing their first period of military service would serve as the uh we're going to say offensive troops of the empire and then older more experienced troops who had completed several years of service would be the garrison troops and garrison troops were generally seen as a little bit lesser a little bit lazier a little bit less hard but again you're talking about seasoned campaigners um who were very very experienced in their own right and so it's sort of interesting to me again that you see this this complete distinction in the survey core and garrison where it looks like the garrison is really not very competent not very highly trained not very serious and the survey core in contrast takes incredible casualties does an extreme amount of offense and encounters the enemy constantly and this is a absolutely terrible way to organize a military for the exact reasons that you see right you have this veteran survey corps who basically run their personnel into the ground right you just go out and out and out until it appears like you die and you have this garrison core that has zero experience in the field a more logical way to do it would be to have some sort of either rotational system where you spend a year with the survey core and when you complete your time there and you've encountered a number of these titans and you're experienced and you're not going to be paralyzed when you see one then you transition to work the rest of your career in the garrison right that would be just a more logical way for a military to run and that's again how uh rome ran its militaries i gotta say i love the animation i love the dream like sequences or the dream sequences i love their willingness to play with the speed of slow things down speed things up really helps create a cool temporal effect as you watch the show which is which is pretty cool uh i one interesting note about the backpacks the kids were collecting firewood in believe it or not they are actually the exact style of a very traditional korean farmer's backpack it's one of the earliest really human backpack styles that was ever developed the only earlier one was um used found in the swiss alps by someone called otsi the iceman he's a frozen mummy from about oh i want to say the bronze age maybe and he has a simple cloth a-frame backpack as well so it's interesting to see there's a really strange blend of technology right because you saw the uh bell right so there's a church bell so they have uh iron working obviously the the uh omnidirectional 3d movement devices um seem like they are you know more advanced than our modern technology uh but everyone appears to be living like something between either uh middle-aged medieval peasants or maybe up to uh sort of pre-industrial maybe 1900s type sort of rural europe maybe okay something two other things that i think are really interesting about the survey core and the garrison core is so the survey core seems to have a phenomenal casualty problem right and this is just for most militaries this is usually a sign of a crisis right and you know when you have these we'll say a 50 casualty rate right 50 being only half of your people can return the next day or the next mission and this is a huge problem for a bunch of reasons but the biggest one is what's sometimes called the organizational death spiral and this actually the example they that's classically used is in the second world war uh among german fighter pilots now what happened there and what's appears to be happening in the survey corps is that you have this very high attrition rate right um in a skill in a soldiering profession where s where uh skill counts for a lot right like an experienced fighter pilot is 10 times as effective as a novice fighter pilot and it seems like similar with the survey core right thinking three-dimensionally fighting these very strong uh enemy on a highly technical level is a really really really high demands a high level of skill but when you have that organization begin to take higher rates of casualties then it can train up new folks right how does it solve the problem right because you have to be able to continually run survey core missions and so what you do is you recruit lower quality candidates you spend less time training them and you promote them quicker well what's the problem the problem then becomes your average quality of soldier is worse and what happens then they die faster your attrition rate goes up and it gets higher and higher and higher right as you as because the second generation right has even less training has even less experience and they get promoted even more recklessly and so the end state you have is what we saw in that survey corps commander where what commander in front of not only his troops but his own people right is going to admit publicly that they're not doing their mission that they're not do that they didn't make a difference like why would you follow a commander that doesn't even believe he himself is doing anything that's relevant you know and all think about what those survey course soldiers must have felt you come back you've watched your friends and comrades get killed you took immense personal risk for a commander that can't even make pretend like your mission means anything why would you even want to work with this guy again and he has an emotional breakdown in the middle of it in the middle of everybody you know again a good commander when you have doubts and fears that you there's a place to express them right but it's not to your subordinates and it's definitely not to the public right that's what you have um your fellow commanders for right that's why they traditionally would have like an officer's mess so you could go with your other commanders and you could have it have a drink or if you're deployed you know play some poker and just be like oh my god i can't i can't keep doing this what are we doing out here how do i do this and you talk it out right if you have a good commander you know that that the next level up you can vent to a good commander and he or she will know like hey this person they're getting pretty burned out they can't they're really losing their edge maybe we need to rotate them to the garrison for a while right so that's a way and that is a that's the the way that you should be doing it as a combat leader and oh my god showing a mother her son's mutilated corpse what are you insane like that commander should be fired in a heartbeat right one of the the whole the whole reason not the whole reason but you know one of the reasons military funerals especially of combat dead are so procedural and so ceremonial is because we imbue something really traumatic and pretty horrible right the death of a young fit capable person at the hands of someone who hates them right and we have to give it that comforting ceremonial part to remind us the living that what they fought for was meaningful and what you've done is you've taken that away from that poor mother right and you've instead replaced her last memory of her son as this awful grisly corpse that's yeah i mean i'm hoping in the next episode you see this commander get utterly completely fired um yeah the other cr the other failure of command i saw here is the garrison core the garrison core man listen especially if you have nothing better to do you should have what we call what we used to call base defense drills and these are drills that you run again and again and again and again on exactly what to do if x happens if y happens if z happens and you run them continuously right and sometimes you do so with no notice or with virtually no notice and the reason is because you want to stay sharp but also because you you have to have things run on autopilot right so the fact that one of your core defensemen defense garrison members is out checking on his i don't know girlfriend the doctors the doctor's wife like no the garrison should have an exact drill if the wall is breached teams alpha and bravo go to the wall and try to block it off teams charlie and delta are going to go to to contain any titans that enter the breach and teams you know echo and and kilo are going to do set up a command post or something or start evacuating people right and obviously if the survey court seems to to understand that you are most effective in groups operating together right then one garrison corps member should absolutely not be in a situation where they are operating by themselves so again this is like a total command failure but what's interesting is that a lot of this dynamic uh military operational doctrine is relatively new right and it's pretty common in western countries but in a lot of traditional medieval societies that may not have been the perspective right and especially in societies that be end up glorifying the military oftentimes these militaries lose a lot of their combat prowess in extended periods of peace time right they become focused on things like internal politics on ceremonial projections of power and they kind of lose sight of what it is that their core mission is at its most fundamental and it seems like that was the case here again these you see these are these are military members with very beautiful jackets intricate unit patches and you know definitely a big ego but they don't seem to respect the fact that the reason you get to prance around in your fancy uniform is because you put in the work right just like ranger regiment you know they let them have their fun haircuts they get slick looking berets but ultimately the reason they get away with it is because those guys do work all right the last comment i'm gonna weigh in on the survey core from episode one or i'm sorry the garrison court from episode one is the sunk cost fallacy this is when aaron argues that if he doesn't join the survey corps then all their previous casualties will have been in vain now this is what in economics and international relations and politics we call the sunk cost fallacy and what that means is that you see how much effort something has taken and you say i've put in so much effort that to stop now would be foolish right this would be like and the military analogy right is is for example someone invents the steam engine right suddenly the age of transportation and ships has fundamentally shifted and you've put the age of sail to bed but a lot of navy said guys we have plans to build 16 new beautiful sailing vessels we can't stop now we've already started but here's the thing they're junk the sailing right sailing vessels were junk the day someone devised the coal steamship and so the sunk cost fallacy would say oh we've already started we have these big plans everyone's invested in them we've allocated money and we've already started so it would be a waste to not finish them but in fact it is a waste to finish them right because you're never going to get back the time that you've already spent so but you can get back the time you haven't yet spent just like the survey court right yes their old tactics were bad high casualties minimal gain not really high return but that doesn't mean that just because the old way wasn't working that it's disrespectful to their memories to come up with a new better tactical choice okay you know that that's all i've got right now in terms of tactical analysis of the survey core and titans and all this other stuff but man there's a ton of material i'm already hooked um and if you guys like this video again this is a new topic for me it seems really cool but ultimately um i'm not going to make videos that no one's going to watch right so if you enjoy it man hit the like button subscribe uh i thank you guys for watching the whole thing also check out my merch uh follow me on instagram i've got a second channel all of it and of course thank you guys for watching and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Combat Veteran Reacts

Views: 3,225

Rating: 4.9222221 out of 5

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Id: Oh5ki3YzwcA

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021