Well, if by indigenous we mean “the minimally admixed descendants of the first humans to live in a place”, we can be pretty confident about the Polynesians, the Icelanders, and the British in Bermuda. Beyond that, probably also those Amazonian populations with substantial Population Y ancestry and some of the speakers of non-Pama–Nyungan languages in northern Australia? The African pygmies and Khoisan speakers of click languages who escaped the Bantu expansion have a decent claim, but given the wealth of hominin fossils in Africa it seems pretty likely that most of their ancestors displaced someone. Certainly many North American groups did; the “skraelings” whom the Norse encountered in Newfoundland were probably the Dorset, who within a few hundred years were completely replaced by the Thule culture, ancestors of the modern Inuit. (Ironically, the people who drove the Norse out of Vinland might have been better off if they’d stayed; they could hardly have done worse.)
But of course this is pedantic nitpicking (my speciality), because legally “indigenous” means “descended from the people who were there before European colonialism”: the Inuit are “indigenous” because they were in Newfoundland and Greenland when Martin Frobisher showed up, regardless of the fact that they had only arrived from western Alaska about five hundred years earlier. Indigineity in practice is not a factual claim, it’s a political one, based on the idea that the movements, mixtures, and wholesale destructions of populations since 1500 are qualitatively different from earlier ones. But the only real difference I see, aside from them being more recent, is that they were often less thorough — in large part because they were more recent. In many parts of the world, the Europeans were encountering dense populations of agriculturalists who had already moved into the area, killed or displaced the hunter-gatherers who lived there, and settled down. For instance, there’s a lot of French and English spoken in sub-Saharan Africa, but it hasn’t displaced the Bantu languages like they displaced the click languages. Spanish has made greater inroads in Central and South America, but there’s still a lot more pre-colonial ancestry among people there than there is pre-Bantu ancestry in Africa. I think these analogies work, because as far as I can tell the colonization of North America and Australia look a lot like the Early European Farmer and Bantu expansions (technologically advanced agriculturalists show up and replace pretty much everyone, genetically and culturally), while the colonization of Central and South America looks more like the Yamnaya expansion into Europe (a bunch of men show up, introduce exciting new disease that destabilizes an agricultural civilization,1 replace the language and heavily influence the culture, but mix with rather than replacing the population).
Some people argue that it makes sense to talk about European colonialism differently than other population expansions because it’s had a unique role in shaping the modern world, but I think that’s historically myopic: the spread of agriculture did far more to change people’s lives, the Yamnaya expansion also had a tremendous impact on the world, and I could go on. And of course the way it’s deployed is pretty disingenuous, because the trendier land acknowledgements become, the more the people being acknowledged start saying, “Well, are you going to give it back?” (Of course they’re not going to give it back.) It comes off as a sort of woke white man’s burden: of course they showed up and killed the people who were already here and took their stuff, but we’re civilized and ought to know better, so only we are blameworthy.
More reasonable, I think, is the idea that (some of) the direct descendants of the winners and losers in this episode of the Way Of The World are still around and still in positions of advantage or disadvantage based on its outcome, so it’s more salient than previous episodes. Even if, a thousand years ago, your ancestors rolled in and destroyed someone else’s culture, it still sucks when some third group shows up and destroys yours. It’s just, you know, a little embarrassing when you’ve spent a few decades couching your post-colonial objections in terms of how mean and unfair it is to do that, and then the aDNA reveals your own population’s past …
Reich gets into this a bit in his chapter on India, where it’s pretty clear that the archaeological and genetic evidence all point to a bunch of Indo-Iranian bros with steppe ancestry and chariots rolling down into the Indus Valley and replacing basically all the Y chromosomes, but his Indian coauthors (who had provided the DNA samples) didn’t want to imply that substantial Indian ancestry came from outside India. (In the end, the paper got written without speculating on the origins of the Ancestral North Indians and merely describing their similarity to other groups with steppe ancestry.) Being autochthonous is clearly very important to many peoples’ identities, in a way that’s hard to wrap your head around as an American or northern European: Americans because blah blah nation of immigrants blah, obviously, but a lot of northern European stories about ethnogenesis (particularly from the French, Germans, and English) draw heavily on historical Germanic tribal migrations and the notion of descent (at least in part) from invading conquerors.
One underlying theme in the book — a theme Reich doesn’t explicitly draw out but which really intrigued me — is the tension between theory and data in our attempts to understand the world. You wrote above about those two paradigms to explain the spread of prehistoric cultures, which the lingo terms “migrationism” (people moved into their neighbors’ territory and took their pots with them) and “diffusionism”2 (people had cool pots and their neighbors copied them), and which archaeologists tended to adopt for reasons that had as much to do with politics and ideology as with the actual facts on (in!) the ground. And you’re right that in most cases where we now have aDNA evidence, the migrationists were correct — in the case of the Yamnaya, most modern migrationists didn’t go nearly far enough — but it’s worth pointing out that all those 19th century Germans who got so excited about looking for the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat were just as driven by ideology as the 21st century Germans who resigned as Reich’s coauthors on a 2015 article where they thought the conclusions were too close to the work of Gustaf Kossinna (d. 1931), whose ideas had been popular under the Nazis. (They didn’t think the conclusions were incorrect, mind you, they just didn’t want to be associated with them.) But on the other hand, you need a theory to tell you where and how to look; you can’t just be a phenomenological petri dish waiting for some datum to hit you. This is sort of the Popperian story of How Science Works, but it’s more complex because there are all kinds of extra-scientific implications to the theories we construct around our data.
The migrationist/diffusionist debate is mostly settled, but it turns out there’s another issue looming where data and theory collide: the more we know about the structure and history of various populations, the more we realize that we should expect to find what Reich calls “substantial average biological differences” between them. A lot of these differences aren’t going to be along axes we think have moral implications — “people with Northern European ancestry are more likely to be tall” or “people with Tibetan ancestry tend to be better at functioning at high altitudes” isn’t a fraught claim. (Plus, it’s not clear that all the differences we’ve observed so far are because one population is uniformly better: many could be explained by greater variation within one population. Are people with West African ancestry overrepresented among sprinters because they’re 0.8 SD better at sprinting, or because the 33% higher genetic diversity among West Africans compared to people without recent African ancestry means you get more really good sprinters and more really bad ones?) But there are a lot of behavioral and cognitive traits where genes obviously play some role, but which we also feel are morally weighty — intelligence is the most obvious example, but impulsivity and the ability to delay gratification are also heritable, and there are probably lots of others. Reich is adorably optimistic about all this, especially for a book written in 2018, and suggests that it shouldn’t be a problem to simultaneously (1) recognize that members of Population A are statistically likely to be better at some thing than members of Population B, and (2) treat members of all populations as individuals and give them opportunities to succeed in all walks of life to the best of their personal abilities, whether the result of genetic predisposition or hard work. And I agree that this is a laudable goal! But for inspiration on how our society can both recognize average differences and enable individual achievement, Reich suggests we turn to our successes in doing this for … sex differences! Womp womp.
Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.
1. aDNA works for microbes too, and it looks like Y. pestis, the plague, came from the steppe with the Yamnaya. It didn’t yet have the mutation that causes buboes, but the pneumonic version of the disease is plenty deadly, especially to the Early European Farmers who didn’t have any protection against it. In fact, as far as we can tell, in all of human history there have only been four unique introductions of plague from its natural reservoirs in the Central Asian steppe: the one that came with or slightly preceded the Yamnaya expansion around 5kya, the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, and an outbreak that began in Yunnan in 1855. The waves of plague that wracked Europe throughout the medieval and early modern periods were just new pulses of the strain that had caused Black Death. Johannes Krause gets into this a bit in his A Short History of Humanity, which I didn’t actually care for because his treatment of historic pandemics and migrations is so heavily inflected with Current Year concerns, but I haven’t found a better treatment in a book so it’s worth checking it out from the library if you’re interested.
2. I cheated with that “pots not people” line in my earlier email; it usually gets (got?) trotted out not as a bit of epistemological modesty about what the archaeological record is capable of showing, but as a claim that the only movements involved were those of pots, not of people.
April 4, 2024
QotD: What we mean by the term “indigenous”
March 23, 2024
The Roman Army’s Biggest Building Projects
toldinstone
Published Dec 15, 2023The greatest achievements of the Roman military engineers.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:38 Marching camps
1:36 Bridges
2:40 Siegeworks
3:26 PIA VPN
4:32 Permanent forts
5:49 Roads
6:24 Frontier defenses
7:41 Canals
8:21 Civilian projects
8:54 The aqueduct of Saldae
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March 21, 2024
QotD: South Africa under Thabo Mbeki
Things look very different when political considerations force the majority of an organization to be underqualified (and there are simply not very many qualified or educated black South Africans today, and there were even fewer when these rules went into effect). A shock on that scale can lead to a total breakdown in function, and indeed this is precisely what happened to one government agency after another. Johnson notes that this issue, and particularly its effects on service provision to the rural poor, pit two constituencies against each other which many have tried to conflate, but are actually quite distinct. The immiserated black lower class (which the ANC purported to represent) didn’t benefit at all from affirmative action because they weren’t eligible for government jobs anyway, and they vastly preferred to have the whites running the water system if it meant their kids didn’t get cholera. The people actually benefited by Mbeki’s affirmative action policies were the wealthy and upwardly-mobile black urban bourgeoisie, a tiny minority of the country, but one that formed the core of Mbeki’s support.
That same small group of educated and well-connected black professionals was also the major beneficiary of Mbeki’s other signature economic policy: Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Oversimplifying a bit, BEE was a program in which South African corporations were bullied or threatened into selling some or all of their shares at favorable prices to politically-connected black elites, who generally returned the favor by looting the company’s assets or otherwise running it into the ground (note that this is not the description you will find on Wikipedia). The whole thing was so astoundingly, revoltingly corrupt that even the ANC has had to back off and admit in the face of criticism from the left that something went wrong here.
What made BEE so “successful” is that it was actually far more consensual than you might have guessed from that description. In many cases, the white former owners of these corporations were looking around at the direction of the country and trying to find any possible excuse to unload their assets and get their money out. The trouble was that it was difficult to do that without seeming racist, because obviously racism was the only reason anybody could have doubts about the wisdom of the ANC. The genius of BEE is that it allowed these white elites to perform massive capital flight while simultaneously framing it as a grand anti-racist gesture and a mark of their confidence in the future of the country.
This is one particular instance of a more general phenomenon, which is that at this stage pretty much everybody was pretending that things were going great in South Africa, when things were clearly not, in fact, going great. But this was the late 90s and early 00s, the establishment media had a much tighter hold on information than it does today, and so long as nobody had an interest in the story getting out, it wasn’t going to get out. Everybody who mattered in South Africa wanted the story to be that the end of apartheid had resulted in a peaceful and harmonious society, and everybody outside South Africa who’d spent decades supporting and fundraising for the ANC wanted this to be the story too.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: South Africa’s Brave New World, by R.W. Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-03-20.
March 12, 2024
Vektor CP-1: Recalled to the Mother Ship
Forgotten Weapons
Published Dec 8, 2023The Vektor CP-1 was developed by Lyttleton Engineering Works (who owned the Vektor brand) in 1995 for a South African Police contract. They lost that contract to the Republic Arms RAP-401, but decided to put the CP-1 onto the civilian market instead. It was a pretty decent seller for them, and after a couple years they started importing it into the US. Things went bad when it turned out the the gun wasn’t quite drop-safe, and in late 2000 they were recalled for a repair. Some were repaired and returned to owners, but a great many were simply repurchased by Vektor instead. In light of the recall and potential future problems with the US legal outlook, Vektor USA was dissolved circa 2001.
Mechanically, the CP1 is a gas-delayed blowback pistol in 9mm Parabellum. It came with 12- and 13-round magazines (10 rounds in the US, because of the Assault Weapons Ban). It was hammer fired, and used a polymer frame (the first such made in South Africa). Its futuristic design lines are very deliberate, and its biggest shortcoming is a fairly heavy trigger, for being single action only. It has a somewhat unorthodox trigger safety, and also a Garand-style manual safety in the front of the trigger guard.
In today’s video, we will take a look at both an original configuration example and also one rebuilt after the recall, with a new firing pin block mechanism.
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March 6, 2024
QotD: Mansa Musa’s disastrous foreign aid to Cairo
As a practicing Muslim, Mansa Musa decided to visit Mecca in 1324. It is estimated that his caravan was composed of 8,000 soldiers and courtiers — others estimate a total of 60,000 — 12,000 slaves with 48,000 pounds of gold and 100 camels with 300 pounds of gold each. For greater spectacle, another 500 servants preceded the caravan, and each carried a gold staff weighing between 6 and 10.5 pounds. When totaling the estimates, he carried from side to side of the African continent approximately 38 tons of the golden metal, the equivalent today of the gold reserves in Malaysia’s central bank — more than countries like Peru, Hungary or Qatar have in their vaults.
On his way, the Mansa of Mali stayed for three months in Cairo. Every day he gave gold bars to the poor, scholars, and local officials. Mansa’s emissaries toured the bazaars paying at a premium with gold. The Arab historian Al-Makrizi (1364-1442) relates that Mansa Musa’s gifts “astonished the eye by their beauty and splendor”. But the joy was short-lived. So much was the flow of golden metal that flooded the streets of Cairo that the value of the local gold dinar fell by 20 percent and it took the city about 12 years to recover from the inflationary pressure that such a devaluation caused.
Orestes R Betancourt Ponce de León, “5 Historic Examples of Foreign Aid Efforts Gone Wrong”, FEE Stories, 2021-06-06.
February 26, 2024
Rome: Part 4 – The First Punic War 264-241 BC
seangabb
Published Feb 25, 2024This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.
• Growth of Tensions between Rival Powers
• Differences of Civilisation
• The Outbreak of War
• The Course of War
• Growth of Roman Sea Power
• The End and Significance of the War
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February 22, 2024
The Malayan Emergency – Britain’s Jungle War v Communists
The History Chap
Published Nov 16, 2023Britain’s Victorious Jungle War Against the Communists
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https://www.thehistorychap.com
February 19, 2024
QotD: Cleopatra VII Philopator
Cleopatra, of course, has all of that reception layered on too. In antiquity and indeed until the modern era, she was one of the great villains of history, the licentious, wicked foreign queen of Octavian’s propaganda. More recently there has been an effort to reinvent her as an icon of modern values, perhaps most visible lately in Netflix’ recent (quite poorly received) documentary series. A lot of both efforts rely on reading into gaps in the source material. What I want to do here instead is to try to strip some of that away, to de-mystify Cleopatra and set out some of what we know and what we don’t know about her, with particular reference to the question I find most interesting: was Cleopatra actually a good or capable ruler?
Now a lot of the debate sparked by that Netflix series focused on what I find the rather uninteresting (but quite complicated) question of Cleopatra’s heritage or parentage or – heaven help us – her “race”. But I want to address this problem too, not because I care about the result but because I am deeply bothered by how confidently the result gets asserted by all sides and how swiftly those confident assertions are mobilized into categories that just aren’t very meaningful for understanding Cleopatra. To be frank, Cleopatra’s heritage should be a niche question debated in the pages of the Journal of Juristic Papyrology by scholars squinting at inscriptions and papyri, looking to make minor alterations in the prosopography of the Ptolemaic dynasty, both because it is highly technical and uncertain, but also because it isn’t an issue of central importance. So we’ll get that out of the way first in this essay and then get to my main point, which is this:
Cleopatra was, I’d argue, at best a mediocre ruler, whose ambitious and self-interested gambles mostly failed, to the ruin of herself and her kingdom. This is not to say Cleopatra was a weak or ineffective person; she was very obviously highly intelligent, learned, a virtuoso linguist, and a famously effective speaker. But one can be all of those things and not be a wise or skillful ruler, and I tend to view Cleopatra in that light.
Now I want to note the spirit in which I offer this essay. This is not a take-down of the Netflix Queen Cleopatra documentary (though it well deserves one and has received several; it is quite bad) nor a take-down of other scholars’ work on Cleopatra. This is simply my “take” on her reign. There’s enough we don’t know or barely know that another scholar, viewing from another angle, might well come away with a different conclusion, viewing Cleopatra in a more positive light. This is, to a degree, a response to some of the more recent public hagiography on Cleopatra, which I think air-brushes her failures and sometimes tries a bit too hard to read virtues into gaps in the evidence. But they are generally gaps in the evidence and in a situation where we are all to a degree making informed guesses, I am hardly going to trash someone who makes a perfectly plausible but somewhat differently informed guess. In history there are often situations where there is no right answer – meaning no answer we know to be true – but many wrong answers – answers we know to be false. I don’t claim to have the right answer, but I am frustrated by seeing so many very certain wrong answers floating around the public.
Before we dive in briefly to the boring question of Cleopatra’s parentage before the much more interesting question of her conduct as a ruler, we need to be clear about the difficult nature of the sources for Cleopatra and her reign. Fundamentally we may divide these sources into two groups: there are inscriptions, coins and papyrus records from Egypt which mention Cleopatra (and one she wrote on!) but, as such evidence is wont to be, [they] are often incomplete or provided only limited information. And then there are the literary sources, which are uniformly without exception hostile to Cleopatra. And I mean extremely hostile to Cleopatra, filled with wrath and invective. At no point, anywhere in the literary sources does Cleopatra get within a country mile of a fair shake and I am saying that as someone who thinks she wasn’t very good at her job.
The problem here is that Cleopatra was the target of Octavian’s PR campaign, as it were, in the run up to his war with Marcus Antonius (Marc Antony; I’m going to call him Marcus Antonius here), because as a foreign queen – an intersecting triad of concepts (foreignness, monarchy and women in power) which all offended Roman sensibilities – she was effectively the perfect target for a campaign aimed at winning over the populace of Italy, which was, it turns out, the most valuable military resource in the Mediterranean.3 That picture – the foreign queen corrupting the morals of good Romans with her decadence – rightly or wrongly ends up coloring all of the subsequent accounts. Of course that in turn effects the reliability of all of our literary sources and thus we must tread carefully.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Reign of Cleopatra”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-05-26.
1. Or even just the seventh!
2. This is not to diminish the value of reception studies that trace the meaning a figure – or the memory of a figure – had over time. That’s a valuable but different lens of study.
3. It’s not all Octavian, mind. Cicero’s impression of Cleopatra was also sharply negative, for many of the same reasons: Cicero was hardly likely to be affable to a foreign queen who was an ally of Julius Caesar.
February 13, 2024
QotD: War elephant logistics
And that begins almost literally at birth. For areas where elephants are native, nature (combined, typically, with the local human terrain) create a local “supply”. In India this meant the elephant forests of North/North-Eastern India; the range of the North African elephant (Loxodonta africana pharaohensis, the most likely source of Ptolemaic and Carthaginian war elephants) is not known. Thus for many elephant-wielding powers, trade was going to always be a key source for the animals – either trade with far away kingdoms (the Seleucids traded with the Mauyran Indian kingdom for their superior Asian elephants) or with thinly ruled peripheral peoples who lived in the forests the elephants were native to.
(We’re about to get into some of the specifics of elephant biology. If you are curious on this topic, I am relying heavily on R. Sukumar, The Asian Elephant: Ecology and Management (1989). I’ve found that information on Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) much easier to come by than information on African elephants (Loxodonta africana and Loxodonta cyclotis).)
In that light, creating a breeding program – as was done with horses – seems like a great idea. Except there is one major problem: a horse requires about four years to reach maturity, a mare gestates a foal in eleven months and can go into heat almost immediately thereafter. By contrast, elephants reach adulthood after seventeen years, take 18-22 months to gestate and female elephants do not typically mate until their calf is weaned, four to five years after its birth. A ruler looking to build a stable of cavalry horses thus may start small and grow rapidly; a ruler looking to build a corps of war elephants is looking at a very slow process. This is compounded by the fact that elephants are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity. There is some speculation that the Seleucids nonetheless attempted this at Apamea, where they based their elephants – in any event, they seem to have remained dependent on imported Indian elephants to maintain the elephant corps. If a self-sustaining elephant breeding program for war elephants was ever created, we do not know about it.
To make matters worse, elephants require massive amounts of food and water. In video-games, this is often represented through a high elephant “upkeep” cost – but this often falls well short of the reality of keeping these animals for war. Let’s take Total War: Rome II as an example: a unit of Roman (auxiliary) African elephants (12 animals), costs 180 upkeep, compared to 90 to 110 upkeep for 80 horses of auxiliary cavalry (there are quite a few types) – so one elephant (with a mahout) costs 15 upkeep against around 1.25 for a horse and rider (a 12:1 ratio). Paradox’s Imperator does something similar, with a single unit of war elephants requiring 1.08 upkeep, compared to just 0.32 for light cavalry; along with this, elephants have a heavy “supply weight” – twice that of an equivalent number of cavalry (so something like a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of cost).
Believe it or not, this understates just how hungry – and expensive – elephants are. The standard barley ration for a Roman horse was 7kg of barley per day (7 Attic medimnoi per month; Plb. 6.39.12); this would be supplemented by grazing. Estimates for the food requirements of elephants vary widely (in part, it is hard to measure the dietary needs of grazing animals), but elephants require in excess of 1.5% of their body-weight in food per day. Estimates for the dietary requirements of the Asian elephant can range from 135 to 300kg per day in a mix of grazing and fodder – and remember, the preference in war elephants is for large, mature adult males, meaning that most war elephants will be towards the top of this range. Accounting for some grazing (probably significantly less than half of dietary needs) a large adult male elephant is thus likely to need something like 15 to 30 times the food to sustain itself as a stable-fed horse.
In peacetime, these elephants have to be fed and maintained, but on campaign the difficulty of supplying these elephants on the march is layered on top of that. We’ve discussed elsewhere the difficulty in supplying an army with food, but large groups of elephants magnify this problem immensely. The 54 elephants the Seleucids brought to Magnesia might have consumed as much food as 1,000 cavalrymen (that’s a rider, a horse and a servant to tend that horse and its rider).
But that still understates the cost intensity of elephants. Bringing a horse to battle in the ancient world required the horse, a rider and typically a servant (this is neatly implied by the more generous rations to cavalrymen, who would be expected to have a servant to be the horse’s groom, unlike the poorer infantry, see Plb. above). But getting a war elephant to battle was a team effort. Trautmann (2015) notes that elephant stables required riders, drivers, guards, trainers, cooks, feeders, guards, attendants, doctors and specialist foot-chainers (along with specialist hunters to capture the elephants in the first place!). Many of these men were highly trained specialists and thus had to be quite well paid.
Now – and this is important – pre-modern states are not building their militaries from the ground up. What they have is a package of legacy systems. In Rome’s case, the defeat of Carthage in the Second Punic War resulted in Rome having North African allies who already had elephants. Rome could accept those elephant allied troops, or say “no” and probably get nothing to replace them. In that case – if the choice is between “elephants or nothing” – then you take the elephants. What is telling is that – as Rome was able to exert more control over how these regions were exploited – the elephants vanished, presumably as the Romans dismantled or neglected the systems for capturing and training them (which they now controlled directly).
That resolves part of our puzzle: why did the Romans use elephants in the second and early first centuries B.C.? Because they had allies whose own military systems involved elephants. But that leaves the second part of the puzzle – Rome doesn’t simply fail to build an elephant program. Rome absorbs an elephant program and then lets it die. Why?
For states with scarce resources – and all states have scarce resources – using elephants meant not directing those resources (food, money, personnel, time and administrative capacity) for something else. If the elephant had no other value (we’ll look at one other use next week), then developing elephants becomes a simple, if difficult, calculation: are the elephants more likely to win the battle for me than the equivalent resources spent on something else, like cavalry. As we’ve seen above, that boils down to comparisons between having just dozens of elephants or potentially hundreds or thousands of cavalry.
The Romans obviously made the bet that investing in cavalry or infantry was a better use of time, money and resources than investing in elephants, because they thought elephants were unlikely to win battles. Given Rome’s subsequent spectacular battlefield success, it is hard to avoid the conclusion they were right, at least in the Mediterranean context.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part II: Elephants against Wolves”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-02.
February 11, 2024
Inkunzi PAW aka Neopup – 20mm Direct-Fire Grenade Launcher
Forgotten Weapons
Published Jun 22, 2018The Inkunzi PAW (Personal Assault Weapon) is a 20mm shoulder fired semiautomatic grenade launcher designed by Tony Neophytou (and previously known as the Neopup). It is a creative and very interesting weapon system, both from a mechanical perspective and also from a question of practical application.
The PAW has a 6-round detachable rotary magazine, and an effective range of 1000m for area targets and 600m for point targets. Its purpose is to give the individual soldier an explosive area-effect weapon that fires like a rifle. To this end, the ammunition has been developed to give a muzzle velocity of 1000fps (310m/s), giving it a far flatter trajectory and shorter flight time than a 40mm grenade, either low pressure or high. It allows rapid repeat shots, rapid reloading, and easy target transition. The high muzzle velocity (for a grenade launcher) makes range estimation and engagement of moving targets much simpler than with the rainbow-like trajectory of 40mm systems. For specialized modern applications like guarding against one or more vehicle suicide bombs, fast-moving pirate skiffs, it seems extremely compelling. That utility extends to typical targets as well, like light armored vehicles, buildings, gun emplacements, and even something as simply as a patch of brush with an enemy hiding within somewhere. Typical small arms fire requires a substantial expenditure of ammunition for targets like those, while an explosive 20mm projectile can neutralize them in one or two rounds, without the need for a direct hit. The lethal radius of a 20mm HEI shell is between 6 and 18 feet (2m – 6m) depending on who you ask. That’s a significant margin of error.
Mechanically, the PAW is a simple system to disassemble, and it uses a quite clever inertial locking system which is clean and reliable. The unique layout with the grip on the right side is done to accommodate the hydraulic recoil system, which allows the action to slide back into the stock assembly on each shot. This absorbs much of the recoil and spreads its effect out on the shooter, making it not unpleasant to shoot. An easy stowage feature allows the gun to be locked in its compressed configuration, shortening it for transit and also offering a way for the gun to be carried with a round chambered and ready to use, but with the trigger safely disconnected to prevent accidental firing for troops in armored vehicles or helicopters.
Compared to the American XM-25, the PAW strips away the overcomplications of laser designation and complex projectile fusing, which are arguably not really necessary anyway. It offers a simple and effective system, with tremendous firepower as well as suppression capability (nothing says go away quite like rapid fire explosives). It does this with a larger magazine and more compact and lighter weight design, no less.
It is rare to find a truly unique and innovative firearm these days, but that is exactly what Tony Neophytou has done here. The design is elegant in its simplicity, and well refined. It truly offers a unique set of capabilities — while it has been purchased in limited numbers by several smaller militaries, I hope to see it given serious consideration by some first-tier forces, as I think it has tremendous potential.
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February 7, 2024
The Magician Who Fooled the Nazis (and all of us)
World War Two
Published 7 Nov 2023Military deception is tricky. Sometimes you need to destroy a crucial piece of war industry or make an entire harbour disappear. Who do you call for this sort of job? Well, someone who knows a thing or two about tricking the eye. You need a professional magician. You need Jasper Maskelyne. But is there more to this illusionist than meets the eye?
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January 31, 2024
The rise of the “Technical”
Kulak at Anarchonomicon considers the innovation and adaptability that Chad’s ragtag forces displayed in the late 1980s to drive Libyan forces out of their territory, specifically the military use of Toyota pickup trucks as improvised gun carriages:
The Great Toyota War of 1987 was the final phase of the Chadian-Libyan conflict. Gadhafi’s Libyan forces by all rights should have dominated the vast stretches of desert being fought over: the Chadian military was less than a 3rd the size of the Libyan, and the Libyans were vastly better equipped fielding hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers, in addition to dozens of aircraft … to counter this the Chadians did something unique … They mounted the odds and ends heavy weapons systems they had in the truck beds of their Toyota pickups, and using the speed and maneuverability of the Toyotas, managed to outperform Libya’s surplus tanks and armored vehicles. By the end of the Chadian assault to retake their northern territory, the Libyans had suffered 7500 casualties to the Chadians 1000, with the Libyan defeat compounded by the loss of 800 armored vehicles, and close to 30 aircraft captured or destroyed.
The maneuverability and speed of the pickups made them incredibly hard to hit, and the tanks in particular struggled to get a sight picture … strafing within a certain range the pickups moved faster across the horizon than the old soviet tanks’ main gun could be hand cranked around to shoot them.
Since then Technology has become the backbone of insurgencies, militias, poorer militaries, and criminal cartels around the world. The ready availability of civilian pickups, with the ability of amateur mechanics to mount almost any weapon system in their truck-bed means that this incredibly simple system is about the most cost-effective and easy way for a small force to make the jump to mounted combat and heavy weapon.
But these weapons are far less asymmetric than motorcycles. The increasing importance of mobility means even the most advanced armies are getting in on the game. The US Army is currently converting a portion of its Humvees to have their rear seat and trunk cut out for a truck bed so that they can run a mobile light artillery out of it:
Popular Mechanics article – https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a28288/hawkeye-humvee-mounted-howitzer/
The importance of instant maneuverability far outstretches any advantage armor can give in this application. Since artillery shells are radar-detectable, and, follow a parabolic arc, their origin point is easily calculable. Thus shoot and Scoot tactics are necessary since it may only be a minute or two from firing a volley that counter artillery fire might be inbound.
Aside from The bemused jokes that the US is finally catching up with the tech Chad had in the 80s, The truth is most advanced forces have always had something light with a heavy gun that can travel at highway speeds … the fact the US is now converting Humvees to have full light artillery pieces is only really a continuation of the trend of semi-auto grenade launchers, TOW missiles, or anti-tank guns being placed on light fast vehicles since WW2.
The remarkable thing about the technical isn’t that they’re some unique capability militaries can’t use … most poorer countries field something equivalent (the Libyans seemed to have screwed up the unit composition of their force) … Rather the unique advantage is how easy and cheap they are for non-conventional or poorer forces to home assemble.
US combat-ready Humvees cost the military into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, a cost that is presumably even higher as they’re modified to carry heavy weapons systems.
As ridiculous as a Toyota with an Air-to-Ground rocket pod, or a repurposed anti-air gun might be, they’re cheap. The pickup truck new is $20,000-50,000, though I suspect any irregular force would pay closer to 1000-5,000 for something decades old, if they pay at all. Likewise, they’re trivial to source, which is good if sanctions or anti-money laundering laws are trying to stop you from buying anything, and as the Chadians proved: pretty much any captured or surplus heavy weapon will go on it.
This gets irregular forces into the mounted combat game … but it does slightly more than that. Pickup trucks, as any perturbed Prius driver will tell you, are shockingly common … perhaps one in 10 or more vehicles out there are some form of pickup truck. This not only makes them easy to source, but it disguises them and allows them to operate hidden amongst the rolling stock of civilian vehicles, requiring either visual identification or extensive intelligence work to tell them from mere civilians.
ISIS forces near Mosul shortly after its fall.
This combination of mobility, resemblance to civilian vehicles, and ability to deploy heavy weapons was used to devastating effect by the Islamic State during the 2014 Fall of Mosul. Striking quickly while Iraqi national tanks were deployed elsewhere the small Islamic force entered the city at 2:30 am, striking in small convoys that overwhelmed checkpoints with their firepower, executing and torturing captured Iraqi soldiers and targeted enemies as they went. Even after taking into account desertions and “ghost soldiers” (fake soldiers meant to pad unit numbers so corrupt officials could collect their pay) which significantly reduced the 30,000 Iraqi army and 30,000 police within the city … Even after allowing for all that, the Iraqi national forces still outnumbered the 800-1500 ISIS fighters at a rate of 15 to 1.
YET ISIS was able to achieve a total victory and take the whole of the city within 6 days.
2 years later it would take the Iraqi government with American backing 9 months to retake it.
How? How does a force of 1500 at most, most without any formal training, overwhelm and defeat a force of 12,000-23,000, which at least has some training, better equipment, and has an entire state behind it? How did ISIS do this entirely without air support? Even as the Iraqi government bombed them from helicopters?
How did they take in 6 days what would take the Iraqi government with full American backing 9 months to retake?
Well, they made the Iraqis break and run.
January 20, 2024
The British Empire would have failed a proper cost-benefit analysis
At the Institute of Economic Affairs, Kristian Niemietz is working on a paper on the economics of empire that, as he shows in this article, indicates that the empire was never a winning economic proposition for Britain as a whole, no matter how well certain well-connected individuals and companies benefitted:
The British Empire in 1914 (via antiquaprintgallery.com)
But is it actually true that imperialism makes countries richer? Does imperialism make economic sense?
This question was already hotly debated at the heyday of imperialism. Adam Smith believed that the British Empire would not pass a cost-benefit test:
The pretended purpose of it was to encourage the manufactures, and to increase the commerce of Great Britain. But its real effect has been to raise the rate of mercantile profit, and to enable our merchants to turn into a branch of trade, of which the returns are more slow and distant than those of the greater part of other trades, a greater proportion of their capital than they otherwise would have done […]
Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.
He believed that Britain would be better off if it dissolved its Empire:
Great Britain would not only be immediately freed from the whole annual expense of the peace establishment of the colonies, but might settle with them such a treaty of commerce as would effectually secure to her a free trade, more advantageous to the great body of the people, though less so to the merchants, than the monopoly which she at present enjoys.
The liberal free-trade campaigner Richard Cobden agreed:
[O]ur naval force, on the West India station […], amounted to 29 vessels, carrying 474 guns, to protect a commerce just exceeding two millions per annum. This is not all. A considerable military force is kept up in those islands […]
Add to which, our civil expenditure, and the charges at the Colonial Office […]; and we find […] that our whole expenditure, in governing and protecting the trade of those islands, exceeds, considerably, the total amount of their imports of our produce and manufactures.
If imperialism was a loss-making activity – why did Britain and other European colonial empires engage in it for so long?
Smith and Cobden explained it in terms of clientele politics (or Public Choice Economics, as we would say today). Somebody obviously benefited, even if the nation as a whole did not. And the beneficiaries were politically better organised than those who footed the bill.
This proto-Public Choice case against imperialism was not limited to political liberals. Otto von Bismarck, the Minister President of Prussia and future Chancellor of the German Empire, hated liberals in the Smith-Cobden tradition, but he rejected colonialism in terms that almost make him sound like one of them:
The supposed benefits of colonies for the trade and industry of the mother country are, for the most part, illusory. The costs involved in founding, supporting and especially maintaining colonies […] very often exceed the benefits that the mother country derives from them, quite apart from the fact that it is difficult to justify imposing a considerable tax burden on the whole nation for the benefit of individual branches of trade and industry [translation mine].
In his writing about the economics of imperialism, even Michael Parenti, a Marxist-Leninist political scientist (who is, for obvious reasons, popular among Twitter hipsters), sounds almost like a Public Choice economist:
[E]mpires are not losing propositions for everyone. […] [T]he people who reap the benefits are not the same ones who foot the bill. […]
The transnationals monopolize the private returns of empire while carrying little, if any, of the public cost. The expenditures needed […] are paid […] by the taxpayers.
So it was with the British empire in India, the costs of which […] far exceeded what came back into the British treasury. […]
[T]here is nothing irrational about spending three dollars of public money to protect one dollar of private investment – at least not from the perspective of the investors.”
This leads us to a curious situation. Today’s woke progressives disagree with their comrade Parenti on the economics of empire, but they do agree with Britain’s old imperialists, who argued that the Empire was vital for Britain’s prosperity.
Why Tyrian Purple Dye Is So Expensive | So Expensive | Insider Business
Insider Business
Published 21 Jan 2023Making authentic Tyrian purple dye starts with extracting a murex snail gland. After a series of painstaking steps, Tunisian dye maker Mohamed Ghassen Nouira turns as much as 45 kilograms of snails into a single gram of pure Tyrian purple extract. When he’s done, he can sell it for $2,700. Some retailers sell a gram of the pigment for over $3,000. In comparison, 5 grams of synthetic Tyrian purple costs under $4.
So, why is real Tyrian purple so hard to make? And is that why it’s so expensive?
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January 15, 2024
SS77: South Africa Builds a GPMG on the Shoulders of Giants
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Oct 2023In the 1970s, South Africa began looking for a domestic-production GMPG to replace its inventory of FN MAG machine guns. The MAG was an excellent weapon, but the ones in South Africa were getting old and worn out, and with the country under international embargo over Apartheid, new guns and parts were not available from FN.
The SS-77 (named for its two designers, Richard Joseph Smith and Lazlo Soregi) began development in 1977, with initially prototypes built by Lyttleton Engineering Works in 1978. The design took elements from several other excellent machine guns — the side-locking action form the SG43 Goryunov, the barrel release and feed mechanism from the MAG, and the gas system from the PK. After an extensive series of testing and tweaking, the gun was formally adopted by the South African Defence Forces in 1986, and went into serial production. Despite the development cycle, the guns still proved to have significant problems in the field. The gas piston was liable to break, along with problems of broken extractors, loose pins, and other issues. The guns were actually recalled from military service and rebuilt in the early 1990s. Following that redesign program, the gun has proven very reliable and successful in service.
A Mini-SS design was also adopted, essentially the same gun scaled down to 5.56mm. Initial plans were to produce a conversion kit to allow the regular SS-77 to use either caliber, but these were never actually produced.
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