OTD Military History
Published 23 Jun 2023The grave of General Sir Arthur Currie in Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal, Quebec. Arthur Currie was the commander of the Canadian Corps from June 1917 to the end of World War 1. Appointed as the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University in 1920, he held that position until his death in 1933.
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October 8, 2023
The Grave of Canada’s Greatest General: Sir Arthur Currie
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September 28, 2023
North Korea’s special train for “Dear Leader”
In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams discusses the North Korean leader’s special train, used to transport Kim Jong Un to destinations within North Korea and further afield to Russia, China, and other rail-accessible destinations:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s private train in China in 2010.
It was pulled by two heavy locomotives. Next an armoured anti-aircraft wagon. After the baggage car came the leader’s steel-plated Pullman, followed by a command coach containing a conference room and communications centre. Connected to them, the 22-man security detail travelled in their own rolling stock. Beyond was a dining car, two coaches for guests, and of all things a bathing wagon, then a second dining car. Bringing up the rear were two sleeping cars, a press wagon for the news hounds, another baggage car and finally another anti-aircraft wagon. The coachwork was of the finest materials, hardwoods and high-grade leather, armour-plated, and bristling with guns and radio antennae. Outside in all weathers, day and night, other protective guards swept along the tracks.
There was something charmingly old fashioned about the decision of Kim Jong Un, leader of North Korea, to travel by train to meet his fellow dictator, Vladimir Putin. Over here, even when buffered by a railcard, Network Rail can sometimes fail spectacularly as an ambassador for this effortless mode of transport. Yet, we forget how important journeying by train was and remains. Important figures frequently opt for the smooth clickety-clack over air or road for their expeditions. The method is discreet, away from prying eyes, yet connected to a nationwide network that avoids congestion. Passengers can wine and dine, sleep, relax, study, converse and think. Rail lines are easy to guard, whereas the boulevards are full of threatening traffic and potential ambush points. Franz Ferdinand, Reinhard Heydrich, Charles de Gaulle and John F. Kennedy found this out to their cost between 1914 and 1963. Fatally in three out of four cases.
Some leaders have a phobia about flying. Stalin was one, which was why the only summit meetings he attended, at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, were ones connected to Moscow by rail. Perhaps President Putin, a known fancier of custom-built rolling stock, will now fear a weird kind of Karma for having arranged the eternal flight of his former chef, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The president has several trains, each containing an identical office to those in his state dacha, the Kremlin and St Petersburg. All look the name, making it impossible for the viewer, and potential assassin, to know where he is. Maybe his long-distance travel plans will be dictated by iron roads from now on?
[…]
The North Korean’s father, Kim Jong Il, hated taking to the air, instead relying on his old green-and-yellow-liveried rolling stock to convey him around his hermit kingdom. Loaded with extravagant foods, fine wines and attended by glamorous staff, the elder Kim used it on the last state visit of a North Korean to Russia in 2002. “It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese or French cuisine,” remembered one journalist. “Live lobsters were taken to stations along the route, with cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy”. However, the size, opulence and weight of this upmarket rolling McDonald’s restricted its speed to a graceful 40mph. Kim Senior’s Great Continental Railway Journey took one month. Michael Portillo, eat your heart out.
Paranoid about their personal security, the Kim family have traditionally relied on around 90 special carriages, usually made into three trains. The first handles advance security; the next carries the Kim entourage; whilst the last houses bodyguards and other personnel. The middle train, with its wall-mounted lighting, beds, sofas and armchairs reupholstered in “tasteful” reddish-pink leather (I know), was the one in which the current Kim lounged on his way to summits in Beijing and Hanoi, and travelled south in 2019 to meet President Trump in the Korean Demilitarised Zone.
The recent state visit of Kim aboard the twenty-hour Pyongyang to Vladivostok Express, no stops, should give us pause for thought. With him travelled officials closely connected with his weapons development and military science teams, and his younger sister, Kim Yo Jong. In addition to being the regime’s propagandist-in-chief, she acts as gatekeeper to her overweight, chain-smoking brother, who became leader after the sudden death of their father in 2011. Kim’s North Korean Night Mail carried a significant assembly of his regime’s inner circle.
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September 23, 2023
“Canada is, as a whole, a naive, spoiled country that stands a pretty good chance of getting punched in the face by reality”
In The Line, Matt Gurney praises both the delivery and the content of a recent report by the Business Council of Canada urging Canadian governments to pay a lot more attention to economic security issues that seem to be almost universally neglected in favour of mediagenic gestures and battlespace prep for the next election.
Business Council of Canada report – https://thebusinesscouncil.ca/report/economic-security-is-national-security/
But as I was reading the report, there was this nagging thought in the back of my mind. Why is the Business Council of Canada trying to impress upon the government (and the country at large) the importance of economic security? Why do we need a report from top business leaders to remind our political leadership that poor countries aren’t generally safe and peaceful ones, and that there are countries out there that would wish us harm and that we need to be on guard against? Like, shouldn’t we know that already? Because none of this stuff is revolutionary. It’s all extremely basic stuff that any mature country should just sort of intuitively grasp. Right?
And that’s when the shoulder-slumping realization lands on you like a ton of bricks. We should, but in this country, we don’t. We just don’t. Because, well ….
Uh oh.
It seems to me that a country shouldn’t need a report to impress upon key civilian leadership that economic prosperity is the cornerstone of all security, or that, on the flip side, security is a prerequisite for prosperity. Toronto is a fair bit rougher than it used to be these days — join us at our event next month! — but when I leave the house to run an errand, I’m reasonably confident I’m not going to be abducted by a band of roving pirates prowling the leafy streets of Leaside. When I head up north for the weekend, it doesn’t occur to me that there’ll be a checkpoint along the route, looking to shake me down or carry off my children into slavery. In the mornings, when I lurch out of bed with a groan that gets louder with each passing year, I expect that the light switch will indeed result in light and that the faucet in the bathroom will provide clean water. I don’t have to worry about whether the water treatment plant has been bombed or the power lines shelled.
Many of my Canadian readers may find the above absurd or, at least, a bit of hyperbole. But that’s the point. As I have written many times before, almost everything we do in this country, and almost our entire self-identity as Canadians, accepts internal security and safety from military attack as an ironclad given, just by default. That makes sense: that has been the norm for us, for a long time. It seems absurd precisely because how distant it seems from our normal.
But it isn’t the norm in any historical sense much beyond a human lifetime or two or three, even in Canada. And more to the point, as the voice-over guys in the commercials say, past performance may not be indicative of future results.
We are not owed prosperity in perpetuity. We are not guaranteed security by virtue of our niceness. These are precious things that require more than just good luck — and good luck, thank God, is something Canada still does seem to have. In addition to luck, though, we need realistic understandings of our strengths, weaknesses and the threats we face. We need political leadership that is mature and aware enough to understand the difference between political interest and national interest, and that is seized enough with these issues to devote the necessary resources to building up and preserving our security, from all reasonably foreseeable threats. That includes not just investments of money and people, but also simply intellectual bandwidth and emotional toil. We have to think, hard, about things that aren’t nice to think about, and have robust, effective institutions and a critical mass of people with the necessary combination of mindset, academic and professional training and lived experience to be effective at foreseeing, heading off and, when necessary, managing crises that threaten our safety and prosperity. We need a supportive bureaucracy that is efficient and task-focused and doesn’t get in the way of all this vital work.
Does any of this sound like Canada to you?!
Does it sound like the leader of any of our governments, or any of the people who’ll replace those leaders? Does it sound like any of our institutions except the ones specifically tasked with security and defence? You know, the ones we habitually starve so we can spend a few extra bucks and a bit more political capital on something a bit more pleasing to the average voter? Does it sound like the sort of thing smart, well-read and educated Canadians spare a single solitary moment thinking about as they go about their day to day lives?
Of course not. No one does, and our politics reflect this. These just aren’t issues of concern in Canada outside of the military, the intelligence agencies and a few fellow journalists and academics I could probably recount here in their totality by their first names.
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August 21, 2023
Some good reasons why the Russo-Ukraine war is misunderstood in the West
A few days back, Bruce Gudmundsson outlined a few of the reasons the Western — particularly the English-language — reporting on the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine gets it wrong:
Railways have played a significant role in warfare since at least the Crimean War.
Navvies working on the Grand Crimean Central Railway, 1854. From Thomas Brassey, Railway Builder (1969).
As I live within a bowshot of a railroad crossing, the screech of metal wheels on metal rails frequently reminds me of one of the many things that so many Anglophone commentators get wrong about the war in Ukraine. Coming from places afflicted with (hat tip to Arlo Guthrie [NR: I’d give the credit to Steve Goodman, personally]) “the disappearing railroad blues”, these writers find it hard to imagine the degree to which Russian soldiers exploit the ability of the iron horse to move vast numbers of hundred-pound artillery shells. This blindspot, in turn, causes them to place far too much importance on means of movement, such as ships and trucks, that play second fiddle in the logistical symphony that supplies Russian forces in the field.
Tales of soldiers stealing pickles from convenience stores spark thoughts of another mistake that English-speaking critics have made with respect to the Russian supply system. Wise generals, from Alexander the Great to Francisco Franco, have long deployed vast quantities of food along with their armies. Nonetheless, the enduring fondness of English-speaking soldiers for bully beef, tinned biscuits, and other meals-ready-to-eat sets them apart from most other fighting men, past or present. To put things another way, we should not have been surprised that, when organizing an invasion of one of the great food-producing countries of our planet, Russian logisticians preferred the dispatch of fuel and ammunition to the delivery of items that could have been found in every bodega along the line of march.
Anglophone analysts also drew the wrong conclusions from reports of the loss, in battle, of Russian general officers. Such casualties, they argued, stemmed from an absence of trust. That is, Russian generals were killed because, lacking confidence in the competence of colonels, captains, and corporals, they felt obliged to exercise close supervision over forces engaged in combat.
The participation of generals in firefights, however, need not reflect an absence of faith in the fidelity and abilities of subordinates. Indeed, the original gangsters of “trust tactics” often recommended that the general officers commanding formations lead from the front. I suspect, moreover, that Russian leaders also understood that seeing a general die a soldier’s death usually exercises a positive influence on the morale of his subordinates. (“Say what you will about old General Strelkov, but he never asked us to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself.”)
Finally, few who made much of the battle deaths of Russian general officers seem to have been aware that the Russian forces that crossed into Ukraine on 24 February 2022 were organized in a way that provided them with an extraordinarily high proportion of fighting generals. That is, when a peacetime formation formed a battalion tactical group, the general in charge of that organization usually took command of the unit it spawned. Thus, rather than having one general for every four or five battalions, the Russian forces of the first few months of the “special military operation” had five or six flag-rank officers for every four or five battalions.
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August 14, 2023
QotD: The US Army in the Korean War
Korea was the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals, by legions. It was fought by men who soon knew they had small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought by men whom the Army — at its own peril — had given neither training nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.
The Army needed legions, but society didn’t want them. It wanted citizen-soldiers.
But the sociologists are right — absolutely right — in demanding that the centurion view of life not be imposed upon America. In a holy, patriotic war — like that fought by the French in 1793, or as a general war against Communism will be — America can get a lot more mileage out of citizen-soldiers than it can from legions.
No one has suggested that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come aboard only when the ship is sinking.
The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order — our own decent order — in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world.
It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.
In the first six months America suffered a near debacle because her Regular Army fighting men were the stuff of legions, but they had not been made into legionaries.
America was not more soft or more decadent than it had been twenty years earlier. It was confused, badly, on its attitudes toward war. It was still bringing up its youth to think there were no tigers, and it was still reluctant to forge them guns to shoot tigers.
Many of America’s youth, in the Army, faced horror badly because they had never been told they would have to face horror, or that horror is very normal in our unsane world. It had not been ground into them that they would have to obey their officers, even if the orders got them killed.
It has been a long, long time since American citizens have been able to take down the musket from the mantelpiece and go tiger hunting. But they still cling to the belief that they can do so, and do it well, without training.
This is the error that leads some men to cry out that Americans are decadent.
If Americans in 1950 were decadent, so were the rabble who streamed miserably into Valley Forge, where von Steuben made soldiers out of them. If American society had no will to defend itself, neither did it in 1861, at First Manassas, or later at Shiloh, when whole regiments of Americans turned tail and ran.
The men who lay warm and happy in their blankets at Kasserine, as the panzers rolled toward them in the dawn, were decadent, by this reasoning.
The problem is not that Americans are soft but that they simply will not face what war is all about until they have had their teeth kicked in. They will not face the fact that the military professionals, while some have ideas about society in general that are distorted and must be watched, still know better than anyone else how a war is won.
Free society cannot be oriented toward the battlefield — Sparta knew that trap — but some adjustments must be made, as the squabbling Athenians learned to their sorrow.
The sociologists and psychologists of Vienna had no answer to the Nazi bayonets, when they crashed against their doors. The soldiers of the democratic world did.
More than once, as at Valley Forge, after Bull Run, and Kasserine, the world has seen an American army rise from its own ashes, reorient itself, grow hard and bitter, knowledgeable and disciplined and tough.
In 1951, after six months of being battered, the Eighth Army in Korea rose from its own ashes of despair. No man who was there still believes Americans in the main are decadent, just as no man who saw Lieutenant General Matt Ridgway in operation doubts the sometime greatness of men.
T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.
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August 1, 2023
QotD: US Army culture before the Korean War
A sergeant, by shouting at some sensitive yardbird, could get his captain into a lot of trouble. For the real effect of the Doolittle recommendations was psychological. Officers had not been made wholly powerless — but they felt that they had been slapped in the teeth. The officer corps, by 1946 again wholly professional, did not know how to live with the newer code.
One important thing was forgotten by the citizenry: by 1946 all the intellectual and sensitive types had said goodbye to the Army — they hoped for good. The new men coming in now were the kind of men who join armies the world over, blank-faced, unmolded — and they needed shaping. They got it; but it wasn’t the kind of shaping they needed.
Now an N.C.O. greeted new arrivals with a smile. Where once he would have told them they made him sick to his stomach, didn’t look tough enough to make a go of his outfit, he now led them meekly to his company commander. And this clean-cut young man, who once would have sat remote at the right hand of God in his orderly room, issuing orders that crackled like thunder, now smiled too. “Welcome aboard, gentlemen. I am your company commander; I’m here to help you. I’ll try to make your stay both pleasant and profitable.”
This was all very democratic and pleasant — but it is the nature of young men to get away with anything they can, and soon these young men found they could get away with plenty.
A soldier could tell a sergeant to blow it. In the old Army he might have been bashed, and found immediately what the rules were going to be. In the Canadian Army — which oddly enough no American liberals have found fascistic or bestial — he would have been marched in front of his company commander, had his pay reduced, perhaps even been confined for thirty days, with no damaging mark on his record. He would have learned, instantly, that orders are to be obeyed.
But in the new American Army, the sergeant reported such a case to his C.O. But the C.O. couldn’t do anything drastic or educational to the man; for any real action, he had to pass the case up higher. And nobody wanted to court-martial the man, to put a permanent damaging mark on his record. The most likely outcome was for the man to be chided for being rude, and requested to do better in the future.
Some privates, behind their smirks, liked it fine.
Pretty soon, the sergeants, realizing the score, started to fraternize with the men. Perhaps, through popularity, they could get something done. The junior officers, with no sergeants to knock heads, decided that the better part of valor was never to give an unpopular order.
The new legions carried the old names, displayed the old, proud colors, with their gallant battle streamers. The regimental mottoes still said things like “Can Do”. In their neat, fitted uniforms and new shiny boots — there was money for these — the troops looked good. Their appearance made the generals smile.
What they lacked couldn’t be seen, not until the guns sounded.
T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.
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July 25, 2023
If you bet on Admiral Franchetti becoming the next CNO for the US Navy, collect your winnings
I don’t follow US military appointments closely because I’m not in the military, nor an American, so the first time I think I heard of Admiral Franchetti was back in May where Brent Ramsey’s report touted her as the one to watch for the upcoming appointment as the Chief of Naval Operations (she became VCNO in September 2022). Now, CDR Salamander confirms that Admiral Franchetti is almost certainly now the “CNO in waiting”:
Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Vice-Chief of Naval Operations, US Navy.
I am sure that everyone here understands that at the end of last week white smoke rose over The Navy Yard signaling that we had an official nominee for the next Chief of Naval Operations (CNO).
Barring some Ottomanesque bureaucratic defenestration like we saw as Admiral Moran was set to be CNO after Admiral Richardson, the nominee to replace Admiral Gilday as CNO will be Admiral Franchetti — presently the Vice CNO.
Because people in DC can’t seem to keep their mouths shut when they should, unfortunately in mid-month there were some leaks coming out that Admiral Paparo would — surprisingly as the general consensus was the Franchetti was slotted to be the next CNO — be recommended to be the next CNO.
Read the link above it you’re interested in the state of play on the 13th, but things wound up heading as most thought with Franchetti getting the nod. Exceptionally well prepared for INDOPACOM, Paparo will head to there where he is expected to continue to do great and important things for the Navy and the nation it serves at at time where we have no luxury for a learning curve.
Despite Ramsey’s article not-so-subtly raising doubts about Admiral Franchetti’s qualifications for the post, CDR Salamander seems to be signally unruffled with the news:
Her wiki page has a nice concise summary;
Since promotion to flag rank, Franchetti has held appointments as: commander, United States Naval Forces Korea; commander Carrier Strike Group 9; commander, Carrier Strike Group 15; and chief of staff, Joint Staff, J-5, Strategy, Plans and Policy; and Commander, United States Sixth Fleet, Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO; deputy commander, United States Naval Forces Europe; deputy commander United States Naval Forces Africa; and Joint Force Maritime Component Commander.
- Western Pacific: she knows Korea and all associated areas. She also has Pappy coming in to INDOPACOM — an exceptional partner. I hope they have a solid professional relationship already.
- Fleet Challenges: from maintenance to readiness, her time leading CSG-9 and CSG-15 gave her a first person look at it. She knows it.
- JS J5: that speaks for itself.
- C6F et al: she knows Europe and has already built a working and personal relationship with many of her peers in NATO. She’s seen up close what they do and how they do it. Invaluable.
- VCNO: the most important. She’s seen OPNAV and the Potomac Flotilla up close. The greatest danger to her tenure as CNO — and as such our Navy and the nation it serves — is not spotty relationships with the SECNAV and his staff; it not Congress; is not the press; is not the economy; and it sure isn’t her Sailors writ large — no — the greatest threat is the long-dwell nomenklatura in a commuting distance of The Pentagon and The Hill who do not see their job as adjusting their responsibilities to support the CNO, but to bend the CNO towards their personal agendas, projects, and job security. There are some exceptional and valuable people there to support the CNO, but the organization is worm-ridden with rent seekers and bad actors. She’s seen that up close. She knows it.
Since making Flag, she managed to walk around all the rakes, had good luck and timing (part of any success), and she did a solid job as assigned. She has the right experience and performance.
I know a handful of people, some friends of mine for over two decades, who know her personally and have since they were both JOs. With one mild exception, these people I would trust my family with speak well of her. That combined with what I’ve seen in open source works for me.
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July 22, 2023
QotD: “Managing” your way to victory
There is nothing wrong with good, sound management and management theory and management science (and, yes, I believe there actually is a such a thing) have much to teach us all, including governments and the military, about how to get the most from one’s always limited resources, especially time. But, too often, in my opinion, management becomes an end in itself and process replaces critical thinking and analysis. When this happens in both the political/bureaucratic and in the military realms, as I believe it has in Canada (which has tended, since about 1970, to follow the USA almost slavishly) then I believe that our national defence is in peril.
It is common, amongst military people, to accept that there is a “master principle of war”: Selection and Maintenance of the Aim. That means that one MUST understand what one is trying to do and then focus all one’s efforts on getting that done. The corollary is that if you don’t know what you need to be doing then getting the results you want (need) is unlikely. I believe that the Canadian Armed Forces lack good strategic direction because the Government of Canada, the Trudeau government, is unconcerned with anything past the next election. I also believe that the military leadership, lacking strategic direction, simply follows whatever new process seems to be popular in the Pentagon. Canadians, therefore, are not getting value for money from either the government they elected nor from the military forces for which they pay.
Ted Campbell, “Following the blind leader (3)”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2019-05-21.
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July 6, 2023
Ursula von der Leyen touted as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s successor
In Spiked, Fraser Myers is amazed at Ursula von der Leyen’s ability to rise above her own failures time after time:
Ursula von der Leyen with German soldiers during a visit to the Field Marshal Rommel Barracks, Augustdorf, 17 July 2014.
Photo by Dirk Vorderstraße via Wikimedia Commons.
The political career of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has been defined by bungling and incompetence. She is deeply unpopular with voters, distrusted by colleagues and has regularly been mired in scandals. And yet, somehow, she manages to keep rising up the ranks of international politics.
Now von der Leyen has been tipped for another plum job on the global stage. According to reports in the Telegraph this week, US president Joe Biden is pushing for her to be named as secretary-general of NATO. He thinks she is best placed to replace Jens Stoltenberg when he steps down in 2024.
This ought to set off alarm bells. Whatever one thinks of NATO, there could hardly be a worse candidate to lead it than von der Leyen – especially right now, while war wages in Ukraine and NATO faces one of its most serious challenges in its 73-year existence.
Just look at her time leading the EU. She was parachuted into the role in 2019, unelected, over the heads of European citizens. She was a singularly unimpressive candidate. In fact, some argue that this was why she was selected. “When EU leaders picked von der Leyen … they deliberately eschewed candidates with greater experience, charisma or cunning”, according to a Bloomberg report. The European Council apparently wanted a Commission leader that it could easily push around. In the end, despite being the only candidate, she managed to persuade just nine MEPs to back her in the job.
MEPs were right to be sceptical. Her incompetence became all too clear when she faced her first major challenge as president – the Covid pandemic in 2020 and 2021. While von der Leyen boasted of taking “personal charge” of the EU’s vaccination programme, the rollout was infamously slow, lagging behind the rest of the world. At the time, fellow commissioners, civil servants and other officials were openly venting their distress with her leadership.
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QotD: Liberalizing the US Army after WW2
And here it ruined them.
They had lived their lives in semibitter alienation from their own culture (What’s the matter, Colonel; can’t you make it on the outside?) but now they were sought after, offered jobs in business, government, on college campuses.
Humanly, the generals liked the acclaim. Humanly, they wanted it to continue. And when, as usual after all our wars, there came a great civilian clamor to change all the things in the army the civilians hadn’t liked, humanly, the generals could not find it in their hearts to tell the public to go to hell.
It was perfectly understandable that large numbers of men who served didn’t like the service. There was no reason why they should. They served only because there had been a dirty job that had to be done. Admittedly, the service was not perfect; no human institution having power over men can ever be. But many of the abuses the civilians complained about had come not from true professionals but from men with quickie diplomas, whose brass was much more apt to go to their heads than to those of men who had waited twenty years for leaves and eagles.
In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society.
The generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could alter the nature of the State Department. It could have abolished it, or weakened it even more than it did — but it could not have changed its nature. But the generals could not have retained their new popularity by antagonizing the public, and suddenly popularity was very important to them. Men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall rationalized. America, with postwar duties around the world, would need a bigger peacetime Army than ever before. Therefore, it needed to be popular with the people. And it should be made pleasant, so that more men would enlist. And since Congress wouldn’t do much about upping pay, every man should have a chance to become a sergeant, instead of one in twenty. But, democratically, sergeants would not draw much more pay than privates.
And since some officers and noncoms had abused their powers, rather than make sure officers and noncoms were better than ever, it would be simpler and more expedient — and popular — to reduce those powers. Since Americans were by nature egalitarian, the Army had better go that route too. Other professional people, such as doctors and clergymen, had special privileges — but officers, after all, had no place in the liberal society, and had better be cut down to size.
T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.
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July 3, 2023
QotD: The key weakness of the royal cause in the English Civil War
[T]he power of the mighty hath no foundation, but in the opinion and belief of the people.
A king whose knights won’t ride out to battle on his behalf is just a weirdo in funny clothes. Charles I lost for a lot of reasons, but far from the least of them was that his “foundation” was badly cracked. However attached one might be to the notion of monarchy in the abstract, it – monarchy – is always intimately connected to the personality of the monarch … and Charles I was a real piece of work, even by the world-class standards of Renaissance princes. Parliament was outgunned, often outmanned, and suffered from what should’ve been a critical shortage of experienced leadership. But all those massive advantages were offset by the fact that the Royalist forces were fighting for Charles I, personally.
(This is not the place for a long discussion of the course of the English Civil Wars – and I’m not qualified to give you one in any case – but a quick look at the top commanders of the opposing sides will illustrate the point. Prince Rupert was arguably the equal, mano-a-mano, of any Parliamentary general, up to and including Cromwell. But he was still a Prince, and carried on like one (like a young one, to boot) … and even if he weren’t, he was still running the show on behalf of his uncle. Cromwell, on the other hand, inspired fanatic loyalty, not least because he embodied a cause that was much higher than himself).
Severian, “Hobbes (III)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-12.
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June 27, 2023
Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 05 Winston Churchill
Nebulous Media
Published 20 Dec 2022Andrew Roberts joins Douglas Murray on this episode to discuss Winston Churchill. The two discuss the soldier, writer and prime minister in detail, leaving nothing off limits. Should the British Bulldog stay cancelled?
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June 22, 2023
CDR Salamander’s proposal to “encourage” NATO countries to meet or exceed their agreed defence targets
Canada has been a notorious defence freeloader since the first Trudeau government took office in 1968. Every Canadian government since then — until the current government started telling our allies we had no intention of meeting our treaty commitments — has made more-or-less sincere noises about getting back to the 2% of GDP minimum defence budget and none have done much to make it happen (we’re around 1.39% at the moment). Several years ago, CDR Salamander proposed a new way to allocate NATO leadership roles according to how close to the minimum each member country has managed to get, and it’s surprising that something of the sort hasn’t already been implemented:
It should bring to the front that NATO can no longer allow unserious nations to play like they are anything but security free-riders. They need to contribute their fair share or pay some consequence. Alliances have benefits and responsibilities. You should not have one without the other.
While percentage of GDP is an imperfect measure of contribution, it is better than all the other ones. It is as simple benchmark of national effort.
As these are the best numbers we have, let’s look at 2021 and then forward.
It is amazing that after all Russia has shown Western Europe — both of its nature and the nature of modern warfare — that so many of our NATO allies continue to slow walk defense spending, doing the very minimum to be a full and fair partner in the alliance.
Russian victory — however they define it — or Russian defeat — however Ukraine defines it – will not change the geography or nature of Russia. She is not going anywhere.
[…]
There is so much deferred spending from our free-riding European allies.
Between 1999 and 2021, EU combined defence spending increased by 20%, according to reports by the European Defence Agency. That compares with a 66% increase by the US, and 292% by Russia and 592% by China, over the same period.
“Out years” are where dragons live, so anyone not on guide-slope to 2%+ by the end of 2023 — when one way or another the Russo-Ukrainian War should be over — will find someway to not get there in a wave of excuses and bluffing.
We should call their bluff.
As such, and this is generous, we need to finally pursue PLAN SALAMANDER for NATO “Flags-to-Post” that I first proposed almost six years ago.
In NATO, General and Flag Officer billets are distributed amongst nations in a rather complicated way, but this formula is controlled by NATO – and as such – can be changed.
Entering argument: take the present formula for “fair distribution” and multiply by .75 any nation that spends 1.5% to 1.99% GDP on defense. Multiply by .5 any nation that spends between 1.25% to 1.499%. Multiply by .25 1.0% to 1.240%. If you fall below 1%, you get nothing and your OF5 (Col./Capt) billets are halved.
1.25x for 2.01%-2.25%. 1.5X for 2.26%-2.75%; 1.75x for 2.76% -3.0%. 2x for +3.01%.
The math gets funky when a lot of people get over 2%, but we can refine it later. Doesn’t cost a penny and will unquestionably get the attention of those nations. Trust me on this. By January 1st, 2024 no more excuses. A small and symbolic punishment, but a good start that may be all that is needed. This is not the second half of the 20th Century any more.
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June 14, 2023
QotD: In hindsight, calling it “Operation HONOUR” was quite ironic
Loyalty up, remember?
As a young soldier, I had actually worked for this particular NCO. He was an artifact of the Old Army and had a reputation as a hardman. He liked to brag about picking Friday night fights in Native bars out on the Prairies (he wore weighted gloves for extra knock-out power). He described to us in detail what he would do to his wife after a training weekend. He told us she would never say no, followed up with a chuckle and “like she has a choice”. If you were weak in his eyes, he’d belittle you publicly as a “queer” or a “faggot”. The funny thing was that this guy was overweight and never showed up for ruck marches or PT tests. His annual conduct-after-capture briefing was basically forty minutes of “you’re gonna get raped but that doesn’t make you gay”. One of his favourite war stories was about stray dog duty in Bosnia. He’d lure in the strays with peanut butter on the end of shotgun then blow their brains out. Riveting stuff.
Overnight I had gone from from being this man’s subordinate to being his superior, so when the General said we had a duty to report, I did my duty. The next week I was in front of the Regimental Sergeant-Major being asked why I was interfering with a strong NCO’s career prospects. That’s when I learned that loyalty up meant loyalty to the Regiment, and that sensitive matters such as this were handled internally and off the record. That one-way conversation was a major push towards putting in my application for the Regular Force. I didn’t want to be around that type of nonsense (“oh my sweet summer child” says the peanut gallery). Not long after I left, my former supervisor sexually assaulted the mess steward.
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In February 2021, an investigation was opened into General Jonathan Vance, who had just finished his tenure as Chief of Defence Staff. Major Kellie Brennan, a subordinate of Vance at various times, accused him of a preventing her from disclosing their long-running affair. Since their relationship began in 2001, Vance had been married twice. DNA testing confirmed that Vance was the father of one of Brennan’s children, but he had never acknowledged or taken responsibility for the child. Vance plead guilty to obstruction of justice in March 2022 and received a conditional discharge with twelve months of probation.
The heat and light generated by an investigation of the outgoing Chief of Defence Staff led to an unprecedente level of scrutiny on the CAF’s senior leadership. In 2021 alone, the Governor General of Canada, the Minister of National Defence, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, the Vice Chief of Defence Staff, Commander Canadian Special Operations Command, and Commander Military Personnel Command, amongst others, would resign, retire, or be re-assigned amidst allegations of impropriety. Since 2021, recruiting and retention levels have continued to free fall and the federal government has set aside $900 million in class-action lawsuit compensation for current and former CAF members who experienced sexual harassment, assualt, or discrimination. The social trap has been sprung.
“Shady Maples”, “A Question of Loyalty”, The Powder Horn, 2023-03-12.
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June 13, 2023
After the Great War, the British army failed to plan for future conflicts
Robert Lyman outlines why Britain in general and the British army in particular were so materially and intellectually unready for the war that broke out in 1939:
… the British Army was catastrophically unprepared for war in 1939. But it wasn’t just the Army that was unprepared. Despite a last-minute rush to re-arm, so too was the whole country. In Britain a deep-seated passivity had set in following the end the Great War. This belied the reality that in Europe the ending of the war in fact opened the door to unheralded political chaos and instability that was in time to overcome the forces of stability and would lead directly to yet another devastating war. In the years immediately following the arrival of peace in 1918 Britain hoped it could close the door on any future European or continent commitment and return to the halcyon days when its only security commitments were the defence of its widely flung Empire.
The weakness at the heart of British planning for war was a direct reflection of Britain’s strategic, political, societal and economic situation during the inter-war period. Britain – both the British public and the country’s various governments – simply wasn’t mentally prepared to go to war again so soon after the trauma of the Great War. As a result, it made no proper preparation for another full-on industrial war against a peer opponent on the continent. This was fundamentally a failure of political and military imagination; the inability to think through what a potential war might look like and to prepare for this possibility accordingly.
We have identified five primary causes of the decline of British military effectiveness in 1939. In the first place there was no clear strategic plan for the Army. Strategies are determined by having a clear understanding of who a future enemy might be. Following the end of the Great War, until the late 1930s no one seemed bothered to define this essential point of direction. There was a remarkably inadequate grand strategic conversation (i.e., at a national, governmental level) about the purpose, structure, and nature of the Army. There was plenty of talking, but very little of it focused on realistic determination as to who it might have to fight, and how. This was a problem, because it meant that Britain was unable to determine the precise structure its armed forces needed to be, and its cost. Was the focus of the army to be the continent, or the Empire, or both? No one knew. As a result, the last known plan reasserted itself – Imperial defence, à la 1914. This meant that the army wasn’t structured or equipped to fight a specified enemy in a defined set of circumstances. Instead, the British Army and its cousin, the Indian Army, was expected to be a generic jack-of-all-trades, without the structure, doctrine, training, or equipment to fight the type of war it had become the master of in 1918. While there was some doctrine, and considerable doctrinal debate, little was anchored in a clear definition of what future war was expected to look like. There was no operational design for the British Army derived directly from an analysis of the threat it faced. If it had done, the BEF would have been thoroughly prepared for the German Blitzkrieg in France and the Low Countries in 1940 or the similar Japanese Kirimoni Sakusen in 1941 and 1942. The British Army wasn’t prepared to fight a first-class European Army in 1939 for the simple reason that Britain hadn’t prepared itself to do so. Likewise, when it came to fighting the Japanese in 1941 and 1942 in Malaya and Burma, the British found that not only had it failed to prepare adequately for a potential Japanese invasion of its vulnerable Far Eastern colonies, but that it had no idea as to how to fight the Imperial Japanese Army. There were two connected failures here. The first was one of strategic preparedness, the blame for which was both governmental and strategic. The second was of training, doctrine and military preparedness by the British Army in Europe and Asia to fight. When they emerged out of their assault boats at Kota Bahru on the morning of 8 December 1942 the Japanese could as well have come from Mars, given how little the British knew about them and their warfighting methods.
Second, as a country, Britain was unprepared both politically and culturally for another war so soon after the last. In 1919 the country seemed to want to look backward to embrace the days of peace that had preceded the cataclysm of war, to drape itself with Edwardian comfort. It was tired and disillusioned, and felt no victor’s triumph. The country looked to itself, and to its Empire, eschewing the complications of commitments on continental Europe that had recently resulted in the loss of so much blood. The losses sustained in the Great War resulted in the overwhelming national sentiment that war must never again be undertaken as a form of politics. Clausewitz was dead. Part of this sentiment evidenced itself in the rise of pacifism. In the army, a pervasive belief existed that the Great War was an aberration, and nothing like it would again afflict western civilisation. Any lessons from the war were therefore irrelevant to the future structures or doctrine of the British Army, for whom the defence of the Empire was the crucial issue. But whether it liked it or not, the world was changing fast, in ways that Britain struggled to comprehend and from which it could not ultimately escape. The Russian Revolution, the rise of fascist dictators in Europe, isolationism in the USA (except for a new American assertiveness in Asia) and the increasing militancy of Japan, began changing the global landscape in ways that were hard to understand for a country seemingly once in total charge of the certainties of statecraft. Now it struggled to find its way in a new world of tension, turmoil and rapid change.
Third, no one in the British Army thought to capture the reasons for operational success in 1918. The dramatic reduction in troops numbers at the end of the Great War meant that those best able to convert the learning from 1918 into doctrine left for civilian life, taking their knowledge and experience with them. It was never recovered. There was therefore no template in the years afterward on which to build a successful military doctrine based on the successful warfighting experience that had culminated in the victories of 1918.
Fourth, political naivety led to a dramatic economic stringency being applied, including the underlying Treasury assumption in the early 1920’s of the ‘Ten Year Rule’, an assumption that kept rolling over, year after year. This meant that there wasn’t enough money to do what was necessary to protect British interests from impending harm. The Army butter was thinly spread on the imperial bread, with the result that insufficient investment was made in the core of the army’s warfighting capability. This stringency was exacerbated by the impact of the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s into the early years of the next decade.
