Quotulatiousness

December 13, 2024

Modern (western) armies never seem to have enough infantry, no matter how high-tech the battlefield gets

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Over the last century, one of the apparent constants in military doctrine has been that the latest and greatest technical innovation has somehow eclipsed the importance of boring old infantry units. Tanks were the future! No, tactical airpower was the future! No, nuclear weapons were the future! No, airmobile and helicopter units were the future! No, drones are the future! Yet every time the guns started firing, the limiting factor always seemed to be “not enough infantry” (at least among western militaries). You definitely needed more specialist and support units to handle the latest whizzy toys being deployed, yet it was still the infantry who mattered in the end. That’s just me noodling … it’s only loosely related to the rest of the post.

In my weekly recommendations list from Substack, they included this post from Bazaar of War which discusses the changes in organization of tactical and operation level units over time to best meet the needs of the modern battlefield:

Command post for a single battalion-sized element in a brigade combat team.
Photo by Sgt Anita Stratton, US Army.

Modern ground forces are torn between two competing demands, for infantry and for enablers. Urban operations and large-scale combat over the past decade demonstrate that infantry remains just as essential as ever. Yet that same infantry needs a lot of low-level support just to survive and remain effective: drone operators, EW, and engineers, not to mention armor and artillery. This poses an obvious dilemma for force management—not least when faced with competing demands for air, naval, and missile assets—but also raises questions about force structure.

Organizing the Force

One of the key decisions in how future wars will be fought is what will be the primary tactical unit. Inevitably, certain command levels are much more important than others: those which require greater freedom from higher headquarters than they allow their own subordinates. This partly comes down to a question of where the combined-arms fight is best coordinated, which in turn depends heavily on technology.

This has varied a lot over time. The main tactical formation of the Napoleonic army was the corps, which had organic artillery, cavalry, and engineers that allowed it to fight independent actions with a versatility not available to smaller units. The Western Front of World War II was a war of divisions at the tactical level and armies at the operational, a pattern which continued through the Cold War. The US Army shifted to a brigade model during the GWOT era, on the assumption that future deployments would be smaller scale and lower intensity; only recently has it made the decision to return to a divisional model. Russia also switched to a brigade model around this time, although more for cost and manpower reasons.

Tweaking the Hierarchy

At the same time, certain echelons have disappeared altogether. The subdivisions of Western armies reached their greatest extent in World War I, as new ones were added at the extremities of the model standardized during the French Revolution: fireteams/squads to execute trench raids, army groups to manage large sections of the front. At the same time, cuts were made around the middle. Machine guns were pushed from the regimental level down to battalions over the course of the war, reducing the number of these bulkier regiments in a division; this accordingly eliminated the need for brigades as a tactical unit.

This continued with the next major war. More organic supporting arms and increased mobility made combat more dispersed, creating the need for supply, communications, intelligence, and medical support at lower levels. As units at each echelon grew fatter, it became too cumbersome to have six separate headquarters from battalion to field army. Midway through World War II, the Soviets followed the Western example of eliminating brigades, and got rid of corps to boot (excepting ad-hoc and specialized formations). During the Cold War, the increasing use of combined arms at a lower level caused most NATO militaries to eliminate the regiment/brigade distinction altogether: the majority favored the larger brigade, which could receive supporting units to fight as a brigade combat team, although the US Marines retained regiments as brigades in all but name (the French, by contrast, got rid of most of their battalions, preferring regiments formed of many companies).

“We Didn’t Start the Fire” (Bardcore | Medieval/Renaissance Style Cover)

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Hildegard von Blingin’
Published Jul 16, 2024

There are many covers of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” that adapt it to different times, but we wanted to give it the bardcore treatment. *Unlike the original, the list is not chronological, and jumps around in time a lot. It very loosely spans from around 400 to 1600, and is from a rather Eurocentric point of view. Thank you to my brother, Friar Funk, for devising the lyrics and providing the majority of the vocals. Many thanks as well to his new wife and our dad for joining us in the chorus at the end.

The image of the monk is from MS Bodleian 602. A scribe at his desk © The Bodleian Libraries Oxford
There are simply too many other images to credit here, but the majority are public domain from wiki media.
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QotD: Nostalgia, or “they were better people back then”

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That’s the thing about nostalgia: It assumes constant material progress. One can debate the origins and etymology of the term “nostalgia” – back in the 16th century, I think it was, they used it a few times to describe what we might call PTSD among soldiers – but it’s really a modern phenomenon. A Postmodern one, in truth — I’m talking late 20th century here. Humans have always longed for “the past”, but until the middle of the 20th century the “past” we longed for was mythical – the Golden Age, as opposed to our current Brass one.

The Golden Age was better because the Golden Men were better, not because their lives were materially better. There’s a reason all those medieval and Renaissance paintings show “historical” figures in contemporary garb, and it’s not because the Flemish Masters didn’t know about togas. Though they assumed the men of the Classical Past were better men, they assumed material life back then was pretty much the same as now, because it was pretty much the same as now. One can of course point to a million technological changes between the Roman Republic and the Renaissance, but life as it was actually lived by the vast majority of people was still basically the same: Up at dawn, to bed at dusk, birth and death and community life and subsistence farming, all basically the same. A world lit only by fire.

The modern age changed all that. At some point in the very near past, we started assuming tomorrow would look very different from today. And I do mean the very near past — there are probably people still alive today who remember people who assumed that tomorrow would be pretty much like today. Because, then, our lives are so materially different from even the very recent past, we tend to assume that our nostalgia is for material things. It’s very hard to put a name to something like the feeling “I wish we could have family Christmases again, sharing that one joke we had about how Uncle Bob always sends you goofy socks.” It’s very easy to put a name to something like “vinyl records” or “the Bob Newhart show” or “Betamax tapes”, so we use those as synecdoche.

In other words: Even though we could actually recreate the material world of 1983, and even though we think we want this, we don’t. We wish we could live like we lived in 1983, but very little of that has any relationship to the material culture of 1983.

Severian, “Nostalgia”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-19.

December 12, 2024

CHEVROLET with Cartoonist Rube Goldberg: Something for Nothing (1940)

Filed under: History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Charlie Dean Archives
Published Aug 27, 2013

Cartoonist Rube Goldberg creates a little animation to explain how fuel is converted to power in the modern automobile engine.

CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!

QotD: The “natural cycle” of empire

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the recurrent concepts in the study of history is that of the “natural cycle”, and its most enticing form is that of “collapse”. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. The Rise and Fall of Feudalism. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. All of these are, of course, ridiculous oversimplifications.

Arguably the evolution of the British Empire into a Commonwealth of 70-odd self-governing nations, many of them with stable democratic governments, who can all get together and play cricket and have Commonwealth Games (and impose sanctions and suspensions on undemocratic members): cannot be considered much of a “collapse” when compared to say the Inca or Aztec civilisations. Nor can post Medieval Europe be considered a “collapsed” version. Even Rome left a series of successor states across Europe – some successful and some not. (Though there was clearly a collapse of economics and general living standards in these successor states.) The fact that the Roman Empire survived in various forms both East – Byzantium – and west – Holy Roman Empire, Catholic Church, Christendom, etc – would also argue somewhat against total collapse. Still the idea has been popular with both publishers and readers.

Yet the “natural cycle” theory has been revisited recently by economic historians in such appalling works on “Imperialism and Collapse”, as The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. [That’s the one where the Paul Kennedy explained how US power “has been declining relatively faster than Russia’s over the last few decades” (p.665) – just before the Berlin Wall came down.]

Nigel Davies, “The Empires of Britain and the United States – Toying with Historical Analogy”, rethinking history, 2009-01-10.

December 11, 2024

The Korean War 025 – UN Forces Abandon Pyongyang – December 10, 1950

Filed under: Asia, Britain, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 10 Dec 2024

This week, UN forces in the west pull out of the North Korean capital Pyongyang. In the east, the marines continue to fight their way towards safety. Over in Washington, the aftershocks of the Chinese intervention have shaken high command as much as they have the troops on the ground, and America’s allies, especially Britain, grow alarmed over the US response.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:26 Recap
01:20 The Blame Game
03:58 Retreat in the West
07:43 The Chinese Situation
10:59 Escaping Chosin
13:57 Atoms and Attlees
18:07 Summary
18:20 Conclusion
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Rome: Part 5 – Between Two Wars, 241-218 BC

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published Jul 21, 2024

This 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.

Lecture 5: Between Two Wars (241-218 BC)

• Carthage after the First Punic War
• Carthaginian Expansion into Spain
• Rome and the East
• Rome and the Gauls
• The Emergence of Hannibal
• The Outbreak of the Second Punic War
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QotD: Simon Leys on George Orwell

Filed under: Books, Britain, China, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the very title of one of his essays, “The Art of Interpreting Non-Existent Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page”, tells you the essentials of what you needed to know about the decipherment of publications coming out of China and the kind of regime that made such an arcane art necessary, and why anyone who took official declarations at face value was at best naive and at worst a knave or a fool.

What Leys wrote in 1984 in a short book about George Orwell might just as well have been written about him: “In contrast to certified specialists and senior academics, he saw the evidence in front of his eyes; in contrast to wily politicians and fashionable intellectuals, he was not afraid to give it a name; and in contrast to the sociologists and political scientists, he knew how to spell it out in understandable language.”

Leys drew a distinction between simplicity and simplification: Orwell had the first without indulgence in the second. Again, the same might be said of Leys — who, of course, like Orwell, had taken a pseudonym, and with whose work there were many parallels in his own.

But immense as was Leys’s achievement in destroying the ridiculous illusions of Western intellectuals, as Orwell had tried to do before him, it was a task thrust upon him by circumstance rather than one that he would have chosen for himself. He was by nature an aesthete and a man of letters, and I confess that great was my surprise (and pleasurable awe) when I discovered that he was, in addition to being a great sinologist, a great literary essayist.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Rare and Common Sense”, First Things, 2017-11.

December 10, 2024

M47 – The Most Boring Tank Ever? | Tank Chat #178

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published Aug 9, 2024

The US built M47 probably isn’t the most interesting tank in history – but it was a vital part of NATO’s Cold War tank force.

Rushed into production at the outbreak of the Korean War, it never saw active service with the US military and was quickly superseded by the M48.

But large numbers were supplied to US Allies around the world – with Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Jordan, Pakistan and Austria being among the most significant users.

Probably the most famous M47 crewman of all, Arnold Schwarzenegger, served on the tank during his National Service.

00:00 | Intro
01:05 | M46 Sees Service in Korea
02:56 | Development Problems – And a Stop Gap
10:57 | Short Lived US service
12:47 | But An Export Success
15:24 | M47 plugs the gap for the US Army – goes on to serve abroad
15:46 | The Tank Museum’s M47 Restoration Project
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QotD: Nuclear deterrence and the start of the Cold War

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Understanding the development of US nuclear doctrine and NATO requires understanding the western allies’ position after the end of WWII. In Britain, France and the United States, there was no political constituency, after the war was over, to remain at anything like full mobilization and so consequently the allies substantially demobilized following the war. By contrast, the USSR did not demobilize to anything like the same degree, leaving the USSR with substantial conventional military superiority in Eastern Europe (in part because, of course, Stalin and later Soviet leaders did not have to cater to public sentiment about defense spending). The USSR also ended the war having annexed several countries in whole or in part (including eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, parts of Finland and bits of Romania) and creating non-democratic puppet governments over much of the rest of Eastern Europe. American fears that the USSR planned to attempt to further extend its control were effectively confirmed in 1948 by the Russian-backed coup in Czechoslovakia creating communist one-party rule there and by the June 1948 decision by Stalin to begin the Berlin Blockade in an effort to force the allies from Berlin as a prelude to bringing all of Germany, including the allied sectors which would become West Germany (that is, the Federal Republic of Germany).

It’s important, I think, for us to be clear-eyed here about what the USSR was during the Cold War – while the USSR made opportunistic use of anti-imperialist rhetoric against western powers (which were, it must be noted, also imperial powers), the Soviet Union was also very clearly an empire. Indeed, it was an empire of a very traditional kind, in which a core demographic (ethnic Russians were substantially over-represented in central leadership) led by an imperial elite (Communist party members) extracted resources, labor and manpower from a politically subordinated periphery (both the other Soviet Socialist Republics that composed the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries) for the benefit of the imperial elite and the core. While the USSR presented itself as notionally federal in nature, it was in fact extremely centralized and dominated by a relatively small elite.

So when Western planners planned based on fears that the highly militarized expansionist territorial empire openly committed to an expansionist ideology and actively trying to lever out opposing governments from central (not eastern) Europe might try to expand further, they weren’t simply imagining things. This is not to say everything they did in response was wise, moral or legal; much of it wasn’t. There is a certain sort of childish error which assumes that because the “West” did some unsavory things during the Cold War, that means that the threat of the Soviet Union wasn’t real; we must put away such childish things. The fear had a very real basis.

Direct military action against the USSR with conventional forces was both politically unacceptable even before the USSR tested its first nuclear weapons – voters in Britain, France or the United States did not want another world war; two was quite enough – and also militarily impossible as Soviet forces in Europe substantially outnumbered their Western opponents. Soviet leaders, by contrast, were not nearly so constrained by public opinion (as shown by their strategic decision to limit demobilization, something the democracies simply couldn’t do).

This context – a west (soon to be NATO) that is working from the assumption that the USSR is expansionist (which it was) and that western forces would be weaker than Soviet forces in conventional warfare (which they were) – provides the foundation for how deterrence theory would develop.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.

December 9, 2024

Public wash-house Liverpool (1959) | BFI National Archive

Filed under: Britain, Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BFI
Published Dec 12, 2017

Admire the industriousness of the Liverpool women who transport huge bundles of laundry to and from the local wash-house every week, crammed into old prams or balanced skilfully on their heads. The wash-house doubles as a social hub for the women, with a cafe and creche facilities. At the time of filming, this one in the Pontack Lane area was one of 13 remaining original public wash-houses in the city, although new more modernised buildings were under construction. Liverpool’s last working wash-house closed in 1995.

The peppy documentary not only looks at the modern wash-house, but introduces the story of Kitty Wilkinson, “the Saint of the Slums”, who pioneered the public wash-house movement in Liverpool during the 1832 cholera epidemic. John Abbot Productions, who made the film, specialised in sponsored non-fiction films from the late 1950s to the late 1970s.
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QotD: The downfall of Boeing

Filed under: Books, Business, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Boeing was once a young startup, founded by the eccentric heir to a timber fortune. Through a mixture of luck, derring-do, and frequent cash injections from its wealthy patron, it managed to avoid bankruptcy long enough for World War II to begin, at which point the military contracts started rolling in. Along the way, it developed an engineer-dominated, technically perfectionist, highly deliberative corporate culture. At one time, you could have summed it up by saying it was the Google of its time, but alas there are problems with that analogy these days. Maybe we should say it was the “circa 2005 Google” of its time.

There’s a lot to love about an engineer-dominated corporate culture. For starters, it has a tendency to overengineer things, and when those things are metal coffins with hundreds of thousands of interacting components, filled with people and screaming through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, maybe overengineering isn’t so bad. These cultures also tend to be pretty innovative, and sure enough Boeing invented the modern jet airliner and then revolutionized it several times.

But there are also downsides. As any Googler will tell you, these companies usually have a lot of fat to trim. Some of what looks like economic inefficiency is actually vital seed corn for the innovations of the future, but some of it is also just inefficiency, because nobody looks at the books, because it isn’t that kind of company. Likewise, being highly deliberative about everything can lead to some really smart decision making and avoidance of group think, but it can also be a cover for laziness or for an odium theologicum that ensures nothing ever gets done. Smart managers steeped in this sort of culture can usually do a decent job of sorting the good from the bad, but only if they can last, because you see there’s a third problem, which is that almost everybody involved is a quokka.

Engineers, being a subspecies of nerds, are bad at politics. In 1996, Boeing did something very stupid and acquired a company that was good at politics. McDonnell Douglas, another airplane maker, wasn’t the best at making airplanes, but was very good at lobbying congress and at impressing Wall Street analysts. Boeing took over the company, but pretty much everybody agrees that when the dust had settled it was actually McDonnell Douglas that had taken over Boeing. One senior Boeing leader lamented that the McDonnell Douglas executives were like “hunter killer assassins”. No, sorry bro, I don’t think they were actually that scary, you were just a quokka.

Anyway, the hunter killer assassins ran amok: purging rivals, selling off assets, pushing through stock buybacks, and outsourcing or subcontracting everything that wasn’t nailed down. They had a fanaticism for capital efficiency that rose to the level of a monomania,1 which maybe wasn’t the best fit for an airplane manufacturer. And slowly but surely, everything went off the rails. Innovation stopped, the culture withered, and eventually planes started falling out of the sky. And now the big question, the question Robison just can’t figure out. Why?

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Flying Blind by Peter Robison”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-06.

    1. This is how you know this story took place in an era of high interest rates!

December 8, 2024

The potential for retribution in a second Trump presidency

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Francis Christian meditates on whether or how President-elect Donald Trump will indulge in eye-for-an-eye revenge against the individuals most clearly involved in the lawfare and other attempts to derail his re-election:

It was the English poet Alexander Pope who admonished us in the manner of the New Testament that “to err is human; to forgive, divine” — Errare humanum est, ignoscere divino.

The Old Testament in contrast, has the equally familiar and perhaps far more popular, “eye for an eye“, and in one of the most revolutionary statements ever uttered, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount talked about us “having heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye’ — but I say unto you, love your enemies“.

To wish to take revenge upon one’s enemies is therefore human, but Jesus is asking mankind to rise above this basic instinct and instead, to forgive and love one’s enemies. This was all of course part of His Mission on earth — to change by His Life, His Cross and the Resurrection, the destiny of human beings from being bound to basic instincts and death — to being bound for eternal life, a different destiny and a new creation.

The mavens of Hollywood of course march to a different and more ancient tune (which has been handed down unchanged to them) and generations of movie goers and consumers of media have been brought up on the idea that revenge of the most explosively visceral kind is a good thing, even a noble thing.

My readers will undoubtedly have their own sincerely held beliefs about Jesus’ command to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us and once again, I do not wish this essay to turn out to be a sermon! What I wish to address instead, is to ask the question: what is the place for retribution, vengeance and revenge in the conduct of statecraft?

In other words, when President elect Trump said in a recently widely publicized interview that he was, “not looking for retribution, grandstanding or to destroy people who treated me very unfairly“, was he declaring a principle of statecraft that makes for a fulfilling and productive Presidency? And is this also a principle of statecraft that will “make American great again?”

In typical, inimitable and endearing Trumpian fashion, the President-elect also added the tongue in cheek comment: “I am always looking to give a second and even third chance, but never willing to give a fourth chance — that is where I hold the line!”

It could be argued from the life of no less a colossal figure than Julius Caesar that decisive and devastating revenge upon one’s enemies makes for a strong and respected ruler and nation. Whilst still a private citizen, Julius Caesar was captured by pirates on the way to the Greek island of Rhodes (to which he was travelling in order to learn oratory from the famous professor Molon). Caesar raised his own ransom — then raised a naval force, captured his pirate captors and had them all crucified.

The later assassination of Caesar and the subsequent civil wars that rocked and roiled Rome is the subject of Shakespeare’s magnificent, Tragedy of Julius Caesar. The subsequent rule of Augustus Caesar was marked by stability, expansion of the empire, the building of roads and bridges (via which the Gospel was to travel), the making of sea and land routes safe for travellers (again, to the advantage of the early Christians taking the Gospel to Asia and Europe) the consolidation of Roman power — and the rule of (Roman) law. It was also during the reign of this austere, learned emperor that Jesus was born in a manger, in the Roman province of Palestine.

H/T to Brian Peckford for the link.

President Hindenburg dissolves the Reichstag – Rise of Hitler 07, July 1930

Filed under: Germany, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 7 Dec 2024

July 1930 sees the Weimar Republic facing unprecedented turmoil. From Brüning’s budget crisis and the Reichstag‘s dissolution to Nazi and Communist clashes with state governments, Germany braces for a pivotal election in September. This episode unpacks the month’s chaos, political maneuvers, and the rising tensions tearing the Republic apart.
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QotD: Who invented the vending machine?

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This one surprised me: the vending machine was invented not for Coca-Cola or cigarettes or snack foods, but for books.

Richard Carlile was a shit-disturbing English bookseller. He insisted on selling Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason despite it being seditious and blasphemous for its attacks on organized religion, particularly the Church of England. Impressively stubborn, Carlile was arrested in 1819, imprisoned, and fined a massive £1,500 for selling Paine’s work. While a guest of the state, his wife, Jane, and other associates kept selling The Age of Reason, leading to more arrests.

Sometime around his release in 1822, Carlile came up with the idea of automating sales. His device was crude, but effective. A person inserted coins and pulled a lever that opened a compartment from which a copy of The Age of Reason could be retrieved without human intervention. Police had no one to arrest for selling seditious material.

The book vending machine didn’t keep Carlisle out of jail — he would spend nine years locked up for acts of political rebellion. Nor was he able to patent his device. I admire the hell out of him, tho.

Jump ahead to the early twentieth century and vending machines were being used in France and Germany to sell newspapers, postcards, maps, as well as books. The idea crossed the English Channel in 1937. Allen Lane, who single-handedly invented the modern paperback and founded Penguin Books with his brothers in 1935, launched the Penguincubator two years later. Based on the German machines, it was described by the Times as “an unfamiliar contraption of metal and glass”. Lane installed it at 66 Charing Cross Road, outside Collet’s bookshop.

Lane’s contraption was no more successful than Carlile’s. It got wheeled out of Collet’s shop at closing time every night and wheeled back in every morning when the shop opened. Another Charing Cross bookseller recalled seeing letters shoved under the shop’s door each morning complaining of coins lost in the machine. Customers also learned that you only had to pound the side of the box in order for it to disgorge about a third of its inventory. The Bookseller reported that when this was pointed out to the manager of Collet’s, he “gave his incontinent robot a terrific thrashing. As a result of this all the rest of the Penguin’s promptly fell out.”

That perhaps explains why I couldn’t find a mention of the Penguincubator in Stuart Kells’ otherwise excellent book, Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution.

Ken Whyte, “Have I got a business for you!”, SHuSH, 2024-09-06.

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