The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 8 Dec 2021December 7, 1941 is remembered as the date that will live in infamy, but that term was spoken by President Franklin Roosevelt on December 8th. Nowhere was the weight of history more obvious than in the territory of Hawaii.
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December 7, 2024
Aftermath: December 8
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December 6, 2024
Hegseth is clearly unfit to be Secretary of Defense because LOOK! A SQUIRREL!
I don’t recall having heard Pete Hegseth’s name before Trump nominated him to be the next Secretary of Defense, but Chris Bray clearly thinks the accusations are purely partisan:
Pete Hegseth is being Kavanaughed. And the only people dumb enough to fall for it are Republican senators.
I was willing to hear arguments that Hegseth wasn’t the best choice for Secretary of Defense. In his 40s, he’s on his third marriage, and while the rape allegation from his visit to a conservative conference in Monterey is clearly false, I was wide open to the argument that his actions demonstrated poor judgment. I was prepared to hear an argument. Like many combat veterans, Hegseth had some post-war chaos in his life. Discussion was merited.
But the more these arguments have been made, the dumber they’ve become. We’ve seen this play, and we know the third act: more heat, less light, the descent into completely irrational ranting.
Let’s pretend to take this number at face value, for the sake of argument, though Warren is egregiously misrepresenting the estimate about unreported assaults. Let’s just look at the structure of the claim: In 2023, while Lloyd Austin was the Secretary of Defense, 29,000 troops were sexually assaulted. Therefore, Pete Hegseth must never become the Secretary of Defense.
This is the kind of argument people make when they’re piling on, in an atmosphere of hysteria. It has no logic or order to it, and it does the opposite of the thing it’s intended to do: It depicts current leadership as failures, while arguing against a course correction. Bob punched me in the face, which proves that John is very bad. This is currently the logical structure of half the “news”.
In another Martha-do-you-hear-yourself moment, Lloyd Austin himself recently attacked Hegseth for arguing that women shouldn’t serve in the combat arms:
But read this carefully, and look for the own-goal:
Women serving in combat are facing more danger than men, Austin said.
Therefore, women should serve in combat. Explain the logic, Lloyd. Amazingly, the journalist who reported Austin’s comments missed the implications, mindlessly typing up the claim that women in combat are in more danger than men, then — next paragraph! — framing that statement as a rebuke to someone who warned that the service of women in combat “made fighting more complicated.” We’re not discussing; we’re ritually lining up behind our teams.
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The Halifax Explosion | A Short Documentary | Fascinating Horror
Fascinating Horror
Published Feb 23, 2021“On the 6th of December 1917 two ships collided in the mouth of Halifax Harbour in Nova Scotia, Canada …”
► Suggestions: hello@fascinatinghorror.co.uk
MUSIC:
► “Glass Pond” by Public Memory#Documentary #History #TrueStories
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December 5, 2024
Mélanie Joly in Halifax, demonstrated her belief that “communication” is much more important than “action”
In The Line, Matt Gurney continues his report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum, where the Trudeau government’s representatives were Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Bill Blair, the Minister of National Defence:
Whoo boy. Mélanie Joly has got to go. Now. Today, if possible. Because we’ve got problems enough without, uh, well … maybe I should just explain what happened.
Joly is, of course, our foreign affairs minister. She and Bill Blair, the national defence minister, constituted the “star power” the Trudeau government sent to the Halifax International Security Forum, which I attended late last month. Joly would have, no doubt, taken part in many direct meetings with allied counterparts and various stakeholders behind closed doors during the three-day event. I can’t tell you what happened there. I can tell you, though, what happened during her public, on the record appearances. One of them in particular. And I can tell you what happened after it.
It wasn’t good.
I covered a bit of the basics about the Forum itself — what it is, who funds it, who shows up — in my last column about this year’s event, so I’ll skip the recap this time. Except for this: the event schedule is divided up into on-the-record panel discussions, off-the-record sessions (generally, those are the more interesting ones), and just lots of slack time for networking and gabbing over coffee and routinely excellent food. Joly took part in two of the on-the-record sessions. In one, she gave introductory remarks. They were about what you’d expect. The other time, she was a panelist. And that’s the one where things went wrong for Joly.
Joly was on a panel titled “Era of Unity: Victory for Ukraine”, moderated by Russian political dissident and chess grandmaster (uh oh) Garry Kasparov. Kasparov can be an aggressive moderator, and he and Joly sparred about the value of the United Nations. (I’m more of Kasparov’s view on the value of the UN, to put it mildly, but Joly more or less held her own under his questioning.) Kasparov followed up with a question about tangible support by Canada for Ukraine. He set it up as a hypothetical — he alluded to the recent re-election of Donald Trump, and noted that there are many who’d be happy to sell out Ukraine to secure some kind of peace with Russia. “Will Canada step in … will Canada play a bigger role? Canada is an important country, as you said,” Kasparov put to Joly. “When you have free time from diplomatic victories at the United Nations,” he asked, a bit mockingly, “can you help Ukraine win?”
Oh dear, I thought. This could be bad.
And it was. And then it got worse.
To Kasparov’s specific question — would Canada help Ukraine win? Would Canada step up and do more? — Joly replied at length about how much she believes in defence. And collaboration. And working together with allies. And why we need an Arctic strategy. And the value of deterrence. And the need for a stronger security architecture in the Indo-Pacific. And then some stuff about North Korean missiles. And then a nice bit about Canada’s long friendship with Ukraine. And how Canada, even though we’re smaller than the U.S., will always advocate for Ukraine at the NATO table.
I haven’t quoted directly from what the minister said. I am conscious about not wanting this entire column to become long quotes. You can see the entire exchange between Kasparov and Joly here, starting at around the 37 minute mark. What I can tell you as someone who watched it in person was that there was a real vibe shift — see, I can talk about vibes, too! — in the room as Joly spoke. Kasparov had asked a straightforward question and he’d gotten an answer that seemed as if Joly was envisioning a globe in her head, and spinning it, and just commenting on everything that came to mind as a different region came into view. Oh! There’s the Indian Ocean! Say something about the Indo-Pacific!
It was bad. Everyone in the room knew it was bad, with the possible exception of Joly.
But Joly hadn’t hit bottom yet.
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December 4, 2024
The Korean War Week 024 – Marines Attacked at Chosin Reservoir – December 3, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 3 Dec 2024On and around the frozen waters of the Chosin Reservoir, the US Marines and the Chinese Communist forces fight out a brutal battle. In the west, the Chinese offensive continues. For the UN forces, there is no chance of victory, but living to fight another day may yet be possible.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:48 Recap
01:11 Chosin Reservoir Prelude
03:58 Yudam-ni
06:32 Task Force Faith
08:25 Hagaru
12:58 The Aftermath of Chosin
14:49 The Tokyo Conference
15:56 Wawon and Kunu-ri
20:30 Summary
20:42 Conclusion
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Admirals belatedly realize it might be useful to be able to reload those fancy missiles at sea
CDR Salamander has been banging this drum for a long, long time, but it appears that the US Navy is finally acknowledging that being able to reload the (many) Vertical Launch System (VLS) missile cells on ships somewhere other than a fully functional naval base would be more than a nice-to-have capability:
Reloading a VLS cell on a US Navy ship in port.
Photo attributed to defunct website defense-aerospace.com.
If you have made the horrible error of not reading every post here, over at the OG Blog and listening to every Midrats, then you may be new to the issue of being able to reload our warships’ VLS cells forward.
Slowly … a bit too slowly … Big Navy has decided that those people in the 1970s (who still remembered fighting a contested war at sea) might have been right all along. With SECNAV Del Toro’s encouragement, we continue to try to find a way to get the surface force a capability to reload forward.
There is plenty of room on the bandwagon and we’re glad to hoist everyone onboard the reload/rearm party-bus. If you need to catch up, the issue continues to break above the background noise, and WSJ has a very well produced article on it that requires your attention.
However, I got a little bit of an eye twitch at this pull-quote:
Until recently, the Navy didn’t feel much need for speed in rearming its biggest missile-firing warships. They only occasionally launched large numbers of Tomahawk cruise missiles or other pricey projectiles.
Now, Pentagon strategists worry that if fighting broke out in the western Pacific — potentially 5,000 miles from a secure Navy base — destroyers, cruisers and other big warships would run out of vital ammunition within days, or maybe hours.
Seeking to plug that supply gap, Del Toro tasked commanders and engineers with finding ways to reload the fleet’s launch systems at remote ports or even on the high seas. Otherwise, U.S. ships might need to sail back to bases in Hawaii or California to do so — putting them out of action for weeks.
Yes, I am going to do this, and you’re coming along for the ride.
In the name of great Neptune’s trident … THIS IS NOT A NEW REQUIREMENT!!!
My first “… shit, we need to be able to do this …” was during the DESERT FOX strikes against Iraq in 1998. I cannot remember if it were USS Stout (DDG 55) or USS Gonzalez (DDG 66) that we put Winchester on TLAM by the third day … but except for the ships we left on the other side of the Suez (who we would put to good use later), the rest of our TLAM ships and submarines were about done.
The fact we threw away an ability to reload/rearm forward was an old story inside the surface Navy when I picked it up in the last years of the previous century. We had a clunky erector set like contraption that was hard to use and took up VLS cell space, but instead of finding a better way, we just chunked the whole idea, slid in our Jesus Jones CD, and figured we had ownership of the seas until the crack of doom.
There is nothing “until recently” about this. Not to get off topic, but the real story here is why time and again this century’s senior leadership decided it was “too hard” or “too dangerous” while they were in full knowledge not just of the operational experience demanding this capability, but what we discovered over and over again in wargames.
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December 3, 2024
Canadian Armed Forces: Can the RCN Really Stop Russia and China in the Arctic?
Esprit de Corps Canadian Military Magazine
Published 2 Dec 2024Vice Admiral Angus Topshee recently told the National Post that the Canadian Navy is able to defend our Arctic waterways against China or Russia … without help from our allies (aka the US Navy). It is time to target just what the heck the Admiral is talking about!
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Evolution of Airborne Armour
The Tank Museum
Published Jul 19, 2024Lightly armed airborne troops are at a huge disadvantage when faced with regular troops with heavy weapons and armour. In World War II this led to huge losses for paratroops on Crete and at Arnhem. Since then, many attempts have been made to level the playing field, to give airborne soldiers a fighting chance.
From the Hamilcar gliders of World War II to the C17 Globemaster, we look at how to make a tank fly.
00:00 | Intro
00:47 | The Origins of Airbourne Operations
02:34 | Gliders
07:20 | A Tank Light Enough to Fly?
09:02 | Success & Failure
14:24 | Post-War Solutions
17:41 | Better Aircraft – Better Tanks?
20:15 | Strategic Deployment
21:39 | ConclusionThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé. This video features imagery courtesy of http://www.hamilcar.co.uk/
#tankmuseum
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December 2, 2024
“I think we’re moving out of the ‘FA’ stage into the ‘FO’ era on that one, friends”
In a rare sighting of a Matt Gurney column from The Line outside the paywall, he shares some of his thoughts after attending this year’s Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia:
For those who don’t know, the “Forum”, or HISF, is an annual gathering of military leaders, defence and intelligence experts, and others whose work relates to defence and security issues, from across NATO and the Western alliance broadly. Funded by NATO, the Canadian government and private-sector sponsors, it is something of a jewel in Canada’s defence crown, a chance to bring some very powerful and influential people to a gorgeous Canadian city to wine and dine them, in hopes that they don’t realize our military is a disaster that is largely incapable of contributing to our collective defence. The agenda is always divided into a mix of free time for social networking, off-the-record chats (which are generally the most interesting) and also a series of on-the-record events that can be quoted from, and which are broadcast live online.
[…]
In our latest episode of The Line Podcast, we discussed this at length, in the context of the ICC issuing arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his now-former defence minister. I quipped on the pod that the “rules-based international order” is a lot like the “sanctity of marriage”. It’s something we talk about as if it exists, and we’d all like it to exist, but it really doesn’t. It just doesn’t. It’s an ideal worth striving for, but not actually a thing that exists and can be counted on. The Line had also previously written about our belief that there is no rules-based international order in a prior dispatch, and then ran a counterpoint to that perspective by a reader who disagreed. It was a good counterpoint! It didn’t change my mind.
Shearer tackled the question directly, and so perfectly that I think his answer has changed my view of the situation. It hasn’t changed my opinion, but it has changed how I’m going to describe it. Here’s what Shearer said (I’ve tidied up the quote a tiny bit for clarity, but you can watch the whole thing around the 39-minute mark of this video). For context, the panel was about the so-called “CRINKS” — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, and the challenge they are posing to the Western alliance. I’ll include Coomarasamy’s question, and then show you what Shearer said that made me go “Huh”.
Coomarasamy: Are we in a world now where we can’t really talk about a rules-based international order, but two separate, competing ones?
Shearer: That’s a big question. I think the rules-based order, frankly, turns out to have been, in hindsight, a power-based order. It was unchallenged U.S. military power that made possible the liberal order of the last 50 years. With all its benefits for so many countries. Was the U.S. always a perfect hegemon within that system? Occasionally not. It would shift its weight around, and there were consequences from that. But overall, it worked because the United States was a relatively benign hegemon.
That’s it. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly what I have intuitively felt in the last few years, and haven’t done a good enough job explaining. I grasped it in a big-picture intellectual sense, but I hadn’t been able to shrink it down into a single sentence like that. When Shearer said that the rules-based order was, actually, a U.S. military power-based order, it clicked in my brain. That’s the way to articulate it.
For the last few decades, we thought we were living in a rules-based-international order, and planned our lives around that. But what we were actually living in was a global order led by a relatively benign global superpower and preserved by its astonishing military power.
And that world is ending.
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USS Constitution – “Old Ironsides” – 1950’s newsreel
Charlie Dean Archives
Published Jan 1, 2014USS Constitution is a wooden-hulled, three-masted heavy frigate of the United States Navy. Named by President George Washington after the Constitution of the United States of America, she is the world’s oldest floating commissioned naval vessel. Launched in 1797, Constitution was one of six original frigates authorized for construction by the Naval Act of 1794. Joshua Humphreys designed the frigates to be the young Navy’s capital ships, and so Constitution and her sisters were larger and more heavily armed and built than standard frigates of the period. Built in Boston, Massachusetts at Edmund Hartt’s shipyard, her first duties with the newly formed United States Navy were to provide protection for American merchant shipping during the Quasi-War with France and to defeat the Barbary pirates in the First Barbary War.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cons…
CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!
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December 1, 2024
“Huntziger must be shot!” – WW2 Commentary 1939-1940
World War Two
Published 30 Nov 2024Today Indy and Spartacus sit down to answer all kinds of questions about the first year of WW2. How phony was the Phony War? How do you go around the Maginot Line? And much more! Also, Indy sings a song about Charles Huntziger.
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November 30, 2024
Forgotten War Ep 5 – Chindits 2 – The Empire Strikes
HardThrasher
Published 29 Nov 202402:00 – Here We Go Again
06:36 – Perfect Planning
13:16 – Death of a Prophet
14:51 – The Fly In
18:56 – Dazed and Confused (in the Monsoon)
20:40 – Can’t Fly in This
31:54 – Survivor’s ClubPlease consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
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$7 BILLION – Is Ajax Worth It? | Tank Chats #177
The Tank Museum
Published Aug 2, 2024This is how the UK’s newest armoured fighting vehicle, Ajax, has been described time and time again by the British media. With repeated delays and continual bad press, the Ajax programme has been subject to much scrutiny over the course of its procurement and development. Public opinion of this vehicle is, in a word, poor.
But is this perception wholly accurate, or is there more to the Ajax story?
In this video, David Willey guides us through the problematic history of the Ajax family, discusses its reconnaissance capabilities on the modern battlefield and hears from members of the British Army who have had a chance to put this vehicle to the test.
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November 29, 2024
Why the Communists subjugated half of Europe
World War Two
Published 28 Nov 2024From the Bolshevik Revolution to post-war dominance, Stalin’s plans forever changed Europe’s political landscape. Discover how the Soviet Union used ideology, diplomacy, military power, and ruthless suppression to control Eastern Europe and establish a new world order.
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November 28, 2024
Town-class destroyers – Guide 400
Drachinifel
Published Aug 3, 2024The Town class destroyers, old Wickes, Clemson and Cadwell class vessels of the US Navy, transferred to the British Royal Navy and others, are today’s subject.
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