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How the Pentagon Got Its Shape
Pcol writes "The Washington Post is running a story on the design process for the Pentagon building and why it ended up with its unusual shape. In July 1941 with World War II looming, a small group of army officers met to consider a secret plan to provide a permanent home for War Department headquarters containing 4 million square feet of office space and housing 40,000 people. The building that Brig. Gen. Brehon Burke Somervell, head of the Army's Construction Division, wanted to build was too large to fit within the confines of Washington DC and would have to be located across the Potomac River in Arlington. "We want 500,000 square feet ready in six months, and the whole thing ready in a year," the general said adding that he wanted a design on his desk by Monday morning. The easiest solution, a tall building, was out because of pre-war restrictions on steel usage and the desire not to ruin Washington's skyline. The tract selected had a asymmetrical pentagon shape bound on five sides by roads or other divisions so the building was designed to conform to the tract of land. Then with objections that the new building would block views from Arlington National Cemetery, the location was moved almost one-half mile south. The building would no longer be constructed on the five-sided Arlington Farm site yet the team continued with plans for a pentagon at the new location. In the rush to complete the project, there was simply no time to change the design."
Here is the printable version ...
as noted at the bottom,
this this is an excerpt from an upcoming book The Pentagon: a History by Stephan Vogel. Newspapers tend to do these reprints over 3-day weekends since
not a lotta news happening -
here's something ... uhhhhh ... exciting happening today ... ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Ever heard of the law of fives ?
That's a pretty good cover story. Really they had to radiation-shield the pentagram that locks down the devil at its center, with lots of authoritarian human bodies to absorb the extremely high frequencies that scorch souls.
--
make install -not war
Historical trivia on how one of the most known military buildings in the world came to be, I'd say. If they thought the Pentagon was built that way to fit the enormous pentagram in the basement and that the US military is run by devil worshippers, they'd simply do so. Right up there with the flat earth society and those that believe the moon landing was a hoax. Both of which should be put on a one-way rocket to crash into the moon's surface, HHGTTG style so they'd hopefully realize their error along the way, but that's a different story.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
How the Pentagon Got Its Shape... (It's pentagonal.)
This vividly reminds me of "the time when the milkman was 47 minutes late"
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Sorry but this isn't the 2nd century BC where all you needed to go to war was to pick up a spear and put a helmet on. Amateur 'pickup' armies don't work, and will be easily destroyed by a full-time professional army.
One could take the cynical route, and say that the Congress is as anti-war as it is anti-corruption. A more realistic read might be that the niceties of actual states carrying out "diplomacy by other means" using uniformed organizations along civilized lines is simply OBE.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
At least they were honest back then. Now it is called the "Defense Department"?! HA!
Mind | Body | Spirit | Cash
..."Rectangle", "Quadrilateral", and "Square", tested poorly in focus groups.
wow an anti-conspiracy theory guy on Slashdot? I didn't think you guys existed.
Bobo Mahoney
You mean all those conspiracy web sites that claim that the shape of the pentagon and capitol hill are giant satanic drawings are bullshit!?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
If you are in IT, construction, or just about any other business where one has to deal with stringent project deadlines, you know exactly how true this situation is.
But simple truth is way too mundane when compared to the rich fantasy available with conspiracy theories, Freemason plotting, The New World Order, Zionist global domination, Extraterrestrial influence, etc.etc. ad nauseam!
You are aware of what was happening in 1941 right? I mean, I know ignorant opinionated drivel like yours can be lazy, but I would assume you have at least been through the basic history of the whole WWI/WWII/Cold War progression.
Beyond that, you are yet another one of those fools that blames the military for any of this crap. The military does what it is told to do by civilian authority, just like the constitution says. The civilians say they can't do something, and that means they can't do it. You want to fix this, quit bitching and trying to screw over the men that serve their nation, and go fix the men that serve themselves (politicians). Further, while not paying politicians sounds very attractive, it would just further the whole lobbyist problem. When the military DOESN'T do what the civilians tell them, you have a military coop, and I am reasonably certain you would rather have the military continue to follow bullshit directives from idiot civilians that you can replace democratically than have to deal with a military coop (which by the way would probably rather quick once you opted to quit paying them).
The idea that you could fight and win in modern warfare just by grabbing a bunch of untrained people and not paying them is just unbelievably ignorant of what the military does. Beyond that, I seriously doubt you are aware of or give a damn about what the military does that ISN'T part of our idiot politicians agendas. The US military is usually one of the first responders to natural disasters globally, and other humanitarian things. Here, this is why we should definitely quit paying them.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
In more innocent days, the center ring, lower level of the Pentagon contained a mini-shopping mall (called the Concourse) with department stores, a bookseller and other shops, restaurants, a Post Office, and businesses such as dry cleaners. It was also a major transfer point for people taking public transportation (at that time it would've been all buses) into and out of Washington, DC.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Trivia: the Pentagon was constructed without regard for the curvature of the Earth. That's right, they just flattened the site out without even considering the effects of the curvature of the Earth.
This is proof that the Flat Earth Society was working in league with the Satanists and the Teamsters to create the cold war. Stalin was in on it, and so was Eisenhower and Truman. Pudge knows, but he's not saying. He's avoiding military service, because if he were caught by the terrorists in Iraq and the secret got out, it would be the end of our way of life. I salute you, Pudge, for keeping our secrets safe within the borders of the nation, and away from the terrorists in Iraq. Such a brave man.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
WW2 was a special time in the history of the public service. Projects were approved and built at a pace that embarrasses us today. Sure, the military had a bureaucracy but there was a war to be won. Everyone focused on being effective. Petty bureaucrats with petty bureaucratic concerns were swept aside.
The lessons were learned in WW1. When that war started, the British officer corps was incompetent. They were in charge of the empire's troops and there were massacres of Canadian, Australian, Newfoundland etc. troops. The colonies weren't about to put up with that. In fact there is a story that the Canadian prime minister hauled the British prime minister out of his chair by his lapels and made it very clear that, if there was another such massacre, the Canadians were going home. The incompetent British officers were replaced by competent colonials. By the time the Americans arrived, they had some very good models of military efficiency to copy. (You could also make the argument that they weren't that stupid in the first place.) In any event, when WW2 came along, the lessons learned in WW1 were still living memory.
Sadly, given enough peace time, the fat bloated bureaucracy rears its ugly head again. The meritocracy is suppressed. If we had to build another Pentagon today, it would cost too much and take too long, and some company close to certain politicians would get rich. In fact, looking at the corruption and waste of money in Iraq, I'm feeling very depressed.
Actually, that was from a headline from the first post-9/11 issue of the Onion.
More correctly, it was a headline they thought went a little too far, and was not actually used. If memory serves it was something like "America Stronger Than Ever, Say Quadragon Officials."
~Philly
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Sides.
At the risk of being way off-topic, the truth is the best flame-bait. Different people have different versions of the truth - try talking sense to anyone who believes in "Intelligent Design". Or who thinks Iraq isn't another Viet-Nam. Or who thinks Windows is the only "legal" operating system.
Kevin Smith on Prince
If the full-time professional army was allowed to fight like their enemies in Iraq do, then the situation there would be different.
If we were actually fighting a War of Conquest, as people seem to insist that we are, then the situation would be different. We aren't fighting a War of Conquest though. We are fighting some sort of wet-dream nation-building exercise created by the Neo-Cons that assumed we'd be welcomed as liberators and only planned on being there for six months or so after the war. We are fighting Dubya's war because he had to one-up his Dad and go to Baghdad.
Irregular/guerrilla warfare only works if you assume that the occupying power has to follow certain conventions and rules of war that you (as the guerrilla) don't. If the occupying power is free from any political constraints then the guerrillas are screwed. Guerrilla warfare never worked against Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.
It also never really worked against the early Romans. They were only too happy to slaughter entire villages. Kill every male of military age and sell the women and children into slavery. Yeah, it's not pretty, but by the rules of the day it worked quite well. Lay down your arms and you can join the empire, resist us and we will crush you utterly and enslave any survivors.
People who accuse the United States of trying to "conquer" Iraq or Afghanistan don't know what true conquest is.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
As they say, the Devil is in the details...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
wow an anti-conspiracy theory guy on Slashdot? I didn't think you guys existed. - it is, of-course, a conspiracy.
You can't handle the truth.
They're using this fictional history as a way to cover up that Yog-Sothoth is imprisoned in the center. Certainly the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon was an attempt to free Yog-Sothoth (see the "Elder Sign" section).
Ah, never mind, I'm sure they'll get it right in rev 2.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
So we shouldn't bother honoring the persons killed in past wars in defense of our nation because we disagree (however strongly) with the war going on today?
Good solid thinking.
One area where the Brits and Americans had to relearn the lessons of World War I was anti-submarine warfare. Only after many ships were sunk, and lives lost, did they reinstitute the convoy system that had proved so successful in the previous war. It was if the allied navies had suffered a collective attack of memory loss and were determined to repeat all of their previous mistakes. In contrast, the Germans had developed and practiced new tactics to make more effective use of their modernized submarine fleet. The damage to the allies was only limited by the relatively small size of the German submarine fleet and design deficiencies in their torpedoes.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Perhaps if you stopped watching Fox News or drinking out of the toilet you'd know this already.
Lancet had Iraqi casualties at 655,000 and that was over a half year ago and doesn't count military.
And of course, that doesn't count what we did in Afghanistan, where we spent months bombing civilian targets that lay along the pipeline routes, bombings that took place long before we went after Tora Bora and bin Laden. And missed.
Add the sanctions under Clinton responsible for at least a half-million Iraqi dead. Add the millions dead from the Iran-Iraq war, which we clearly instigated. Or the Gulf War, which we probably manufactured (see April Glaspie). The depleted uranium getting into everything, including the mothers breast.
Most of the Bush White coming out of Afghanistan since the invasion is destined for Iraq as well, so we need to consider that too.
It is genocide and in truth the number is way over a million, it's in the many millions.
Your saying otherwise is no different than the "good" Germans denying the "Holocaust".
Please, have the heart to become human again, and stand against this atrocity.
--
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Like most people, I'm disgusted by the actions of those guards at Abu Ghraib. However, the suggestion that the guards at Abu Ghraib would have signed up anyway is contrary to experimental data. The prison environment converted normal Stanford undergraduates into abusive prisoners and a well-established professor into a vindictive superintendent.
There are two types of people: those prepared for the zombie apocalypse and those who will be eaten.
I totally agree. Like all open source ventures, the quality just isn't there. The proprietary masons would have done it properly.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Oh wait...
We weren't allowed to go after major NV cities/production centers, we weren't allowed to bomb Chinese supply convoys, often weren't allowed to go north of an imaginary line drawn on the map by our politicians.
Yeah, Vietnam is such an example of how unrestrained warfare can't work.
Please note that I don't like some of what happen in vietnam. On the other hand, we could of avoided much of it if it wasn't for politicians running the war. You don't win a war by holding back.
I also feel that part of the problems we're having in Iraq is that we've gotten too clean with our attacks. People are more afraid of the terrorists than they are of us.
I don't read AC A human right
Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember the Vietnam war, but I do. The US was never officially at war against North Vietnam, they spent ten years helping South Vietnam fight the Viet Cong insurgents. They dropped a few million tons of bombs in North Vietnam, for sure, just like they did on the Viet Cong supply routes in Laos and Cambodia, but they never attempted to invade North Vietnam.
If the US had wanted to win the Vietnam war they should have invaded North Vietnam. Land there in an amphibious attack and war would have been won in a matter of weeks. Likewise, if they want to win the Iraq war now, they should invade Syria and Iran. If the US Army had stopped at the German border after liberating France from Nazism they would have lost WWII.
Ever since Truman refused the MacArthur request to attack China during the Korea war, the US has had this doctrine of limited wars, fighting proxy armies as if the power behind them did not exist. A very expensive way to obtain limited results.
I thought everyone knew this, but I guess not...
A pentagon is a very traditional shape for fortifications. Reason is very simple. If you have a pentagon shaped fort then each side of the fort can provide supporting fire to its two adjacent sides.
A sides on a square fort cannot provide supporting fire at all. Sides on a hexagonal fort can but with a hexagonal fort you can only get 50% of the defenders firing against an attack on a side. With a pentagonal fort you can get 60%. This basic fact makes a pentagon the most effective shape for a fortification, assuming no terrain features to change the situation.
It would be an amazing coincidence if The Pentagon was pentagonal for any reason but this.
People who accuse the United States of trying to "conquer" Iraq or Afghanistan don't know what true conquest is.
Only those here in the US; those abroad (and especially local to those areas) do know what it is, but don't think we have the balls to outrage the whole world by doing it. The complaints are a political ploy.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The real reason was that certain other countries had a building with FOUR sides and the people who built the pentagon were thinking, fuck it all, we're going to FIVE BLADES..errr SIDES!!!
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Screw the pentagon, i want to know how this military building got its shape.
Most of the Slashdot community? Most of Americans? Most of Government? Most of humanity?
Just who are you trying to dehumanize with that statement?
Earlier up this thread you said "The symbols are important, only because our population is comprised mainly of poor fools who know how to respond to nothing else."
Setting aside your hubris and arrogance, the point that you have failed to grasp is that the Pentagon's shape may not be as "Symbolic" as previously surmised. But please continue to embarrass yourself and wallow in self pity all you like, it may be totally off topic, but it is a bit entertaining.
The French resistance may have made life hot for the Nazi troops once in a while, but they had very little to do with why Germany lost the war, and they certainly didn't drive the Germans out of France. The real reason was that Germany was fighting on two fronts (western and Russian) and got over-extended, so was vulnerable to a concerted invasion force, and it wouldn't have mattered where that happened.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The problem with Iraq is that it is full of Iraqis.
You can't handle the truth.
I dunno, non-rectangular buildings are rare. Given the high profile nature of this one, and the fact that its shape became its name, the fact that it has a really mundane reason behind its unique design is interesting to me. You can imagine all sorts of strategic or philosophical reasons why they might have singled out a pentagonal ring shape for the building. But, it's none of those... it's just a quirk of history, and the explanation of that quirk was newsworthy to me. It's also interesting as a window into bureaucratic decision making.
To be specific, WWII starts in around 1939. The US is eventually involved, and ends the war in 1945, at which time the UN is set up. In 1947 the US forms a plan to rebuild europe, which is completed by 1952. 7 years after the war ended and four year after the plan was implemented.
Um... it's worth mentioning that at the time we were rebuilding France, Germany, Italy, and every other spot in Europe that got economically and physically trashed during that war, we did NOT have religiously-driven suicidal crazies trying to kill pizza-shops full of their brothers and cousins in order to terrorize them out of wanting a democracy in which evil things like Women Reading Books, Music Being Played In Public, and Daughters Choosing Their Own Husbands might come about. There weren't well-financed groups of hidden Nazis willing to kill themselves and everyone in a vegetable market because a cave-dwelling extremist with buckets of cash has pursuaded them that Allah will open the doors to Virgin-Mart on their behalf if they can cause as much horrifying death as possible to scare people out of wanting a simple democratic, constitutional governement, and scare them back into settling for a brutal, theocratic, medieval-style thugocracy. With nukes.
It's not the same thing. Oh, and neither has it been 7 years since the end of hostilities or even close to it, because the people stoking the current conflict (the Iranians) are still busy DOING it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The article details that Army officials noted with pleasure how the pentagonal shape recalled the era of pentagonal shaped fortifications.
Anyway, if you read at least the first page of the article you would have learned that the Pentagon was originally sited close to Arlington National Cemetery on an oddly shaped tract of land bounded on five sides, thus necessitating the five-sided nature of the building. When members of Congress and other officials protested that the monolithic design would obscure the view of Washington from L'Enfant's tomb, the building was moved to its current location.
When I was about nine years old, my father and I were discussing the shape of the Pentagon and the reasons for the unique shape of the building. I concluded that perhaps the shape recalled the branches of the military of government that occupied the various wings of the building; Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Joint Chiefs/Secretary of Defense. That's what I thought, at least.
Ahh your solution is to kill everyone who isn't you.
I bet you didn't play very well with others at school, or were you the one they all made fun of and this is what you turned into?
The other way to stop people whose country you royally fucked up from trying to kill you is to simply STOP.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
The Romans needed 200 years of constant warfare to pacify Hispania, in spite of using the genocidal means the parent describes. The Roman republic was characterized by an incredible degree of persistence in military matters. This was how they won their wars, not by superior military leadership/organization/technology.
Can we please get rid of the attitude that WWII started on 7 December 1941. I always find it interesting that the British (and even the occupied Dutch) declared war on Japan the same day the Americans did, but not only did the Americans take two years to declare war on Germany, they didn't even declare war on Germany first--Germany declared war on the US! Looming indeed!
Kind of true. There are five sides, with five dedications - Army, Navy, Air Force, Civil Servants, and Pentagon senior leadership/SECDEF. The Coast Guard is not part of the Department of Defense (except during times of war) and the Marines are part of the Department of the Navy.
Er.. WWII started in 1939 (with pre-war practice in China starting in 1931-37). By 1941 it was well under way.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
From the summary: "In July 1941 with World War II looming"
A wee bit late, no?
Nah. The U.S. Constitution allows the government to raise and support Armies (but with a two year limit on funding at a time.) Plus it allows the government to 'provide and maintain a Navy.' And the Commander in Chief is in charge of the Army, Navy, and Militia. The militia clauses allow the government to organize militias, draft people for the militia or use State militias.
So the Constitution allows America to have an Army, a Navy, and a Militia. Not only is your militia only idea bogus, it's frightenly naive and suicidal.
I mean really, do you expect everyone will just jump into their family F-16s and Abrams tanks, gas up at the local Citgo, load up on cluster bombs and depleted uranium tank rounds at Wal-Mart, and then head down I-85 to the Middle East and war?
Relying on untrained and minimally equipped militias will get you squashed by anyone with a professional army and a desire for conquest. The French had a professional army right up until the German Blitzkrieg. A French militia-only "army" would have died so quickly that the British expeditionary force would have been wiped out and England would have been without a professional army. With no British army, surrounded by u-boats, and the Battle of Britain starting weeks earlier, means the Germans could have conquered England. With England gone, the u-boats would have wiped out all US Atlantic shipping. Which means that by the time America geared up for war, we wouldn't have a way to invade Europe. Germany then starts up an atomic bomb program, improves its V2 rockets to be intercontinental or ship launched, and *poof* the last of the Free World is gone.
Hell, we saw the "power" of militias in the Revolutionary War, where militia men were required to fire three rounds before fleeing and letting the professional Continental army fight. Seriously, if George Freaking Washington didn't exclusively rely on militias, why should we?
The reason we have a standing professional army is because the risk of not having one is intolerable. All a militia will do is enable you to fight a guerilla style war in your home town. Personally, I much prefer to fight them over there, on our terms, on their soil, killing their civilians, and destroying their way of life over my own and my family's.
Castrating the military won't banish the spectre of war. Look towards your political leaders. It's their job to win wars before they start.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
I wouldn't say that one should use the ZP Experiment to excuse or condone torture, so much as to explain and avoid it. Simple third-party oversight can do wonders, as the experiment showed. Which was lacking, for example, at Abu Girhab. But it's also common wisdom that you don't have regular army perform police duties.
Reference also the Milgram Experiment. Or even his lesser known one, where he determines how many people, on average, have to be standing on a street corner, staring at nothing in the sky before passers-by start looking too.
Men in Black summed it up best: 'A person is smart. People are dumb.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Hold up... skyline!! What skyline? DC has laws stating that no buildings may be over 20 feet taller than the width of the street they face. What DC has is a profound lack/i> of skyline!
Poor urban planning and laws like this have, of course, caused many of the city's problems. The sprawl around DC is absolutely unbelievable.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The English and French leadership used their own men as cannon fodder thought out WWI.
Tactics simply hadn't caught up with weapons. Modern infantry tactics are all about mobility and flanking. America learned that in the Civil War. England and France had not learned it in WWI.
General Pershing was a hero for telling the English and the French that there was no way in hell American troops would be put under the incompetent English and French officer corps.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I actually think that the Pentagon is beautiful. However, I think its shape is too distinct, and is prone to aerial attack. A pilot would easily find it even without a map. Shouldn't such an important building have an ordinary shape, be camouflaged, or lie completely underground?
"1. army"
"War Departmnet" = Army (this is before the Department of Defense)
"2. navy"
Department of the Navy != War Department (see previous parenthetical)
"3. air force"
Army Air Corps was War Department at the time still.
"4. marines"
Department of the Navy
"5. coast guard"
Department of the Navy during wartime, Department of Commerce during peacetime (at the time)
So, at the time of the building's construction, only two of the five you listed were being considered, and they were the same branch at the time.