I’ve focused on game morale systems here, but of course this blends over into film as well, where the “mooks” often charge the heroes seemingly utterly heedless of their losses – frequently despite the fact that the last identical group of mooks to do so just got taken apart before their very eyes. And invariably they do this until they are so beaten that they switch to the other binary state, simply running away.
Actual armies have far more than two states of morale and behaved in far more dynamic, unpredictable and interesting ways!
The first problem with this “binary model” of morale is that it assumes just a single factor (“leadership” or “morale”) but in practice we ought to be thinking about at least two different ingredients here: morale and cohesion.
Morale is the commitment the combatants have to their leadership and their cause. To simplify a bit, we might say that soldiers with good morale believe three things: that their cause is a worthy one, that they are on the road to success and that their leaders have a good (enough) plan to achieve final victory. Poor morale can result from a breakdown in any of those three elements: troops might for instance believe both in their goal and its eventual possibility but not in their leaders to produce it (this seems to have been the case, for instance, in the French Mutiny of 1917). On the other hand, regardless of the charisma of leaders, few people come to a war intending to die in it; if the cause appears impossible, morale will sink regardless. And armies that do not believe in the cause at all are extremely difficult to motivate by other means.
On the other hand cohesion is the force that holds a specific unit together through the power of the bonds holding the individual combatants to each other and/or to their (generally junior or non-commissioned) officers. There are a lot of ways to build that cohesion: people are generally unwilling to abandon neighbors, close friends and relatives, for one. They are also reluctant to expose themselves to shame at home for having done so; shame is one of the few things people fear as much, if not more than, death. For armies that can’t rely on that sort of organic cohesion, it can be built by reconstructing the soldier’s unit as his primary social group. Drill can do this: it creates an experience of shared suffering and achievement which bonds the soldiers together creating strong “artificial” cohesion.
These two ingredients have different roots, but they also function differently. The formulation that has always stuck with me is one from James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1998): morale (McPherson discusses it under the heading of “the Cause”) will get men into uniform, it will sustain them on large marches and cold nights and it will get them to the battle, but it will not get them through the battle. Instead, cohesion (the “comrades” of the title) gets men through the terror of actual combat, when fear has driven “the cause” far from mind. But of course cohesion isn’t enough on its own either, since it provides no reason to advance or attack or really to do anything at all except stick together.
Adding further complication to this, morale and cohesion are not, as they often exist in games, inherent properties of a unit, but rather emergent properties of the interactions of a whole bunch of individuals. In a strategy game, units exist primarily as extension of the player’s will; in film units typically exist as extensions of their commander’s or the main character’s will (note how common it is that right as the hero begins winning his duel with the villain, so too his army begins winning the battle). But of course actual armies are composed of lots of humans, each with their own individual will and agency.
Those humans are continually making calculations about risks, goals and survival. It’s not hard here to see why, by the by, morale won’t carry troops through high risk conditions: if your only goal is to survive to experience the end-state of the war, then it is always in your interest to let someone else do the dying; it doesn’t serve your end to stay in a high risk position. By contrast, if you are held there by the fear of shame if your close comrades see you run, that still applies. Thus these calculations get progressively more “primal” as the sense of danger rises (fear makes a mess of those higher brain functions), but they do not stop.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIC: Morale and Cohesion”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-01.
May 17, 2026
QotD: Battlefield morale and cohesion in movies/games versus real history
May 16, 2026
The failure of Operation Crossbow in 1943-45
Timing is everything in war — well, if not everything, it’s extremely important. An example was the development delays for the German V-1 and V-2 systems that kept them from being a potentially devastating weapon against the Anglo-American invasion forces on D-Day. Secretary of Defense Rock explains why allied air attacks to suppress the German launch sites were an almost unmitigated failure:
German A4 or V-2 replica at Peenemünde
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Two campaigns separated by 50 years — the Anglo-American CROSSBOW campaign against German V-weapons in 1943–1945 and the “Great Scud Chase” of Desert Storm in 1991 — suggest that what is happening over Iran today is not a deviation from the norm but simply a repeat of it. As Colonel Mark Kipphut argued in his 1996 study comparing the two campaigns, the failure to internalize CROSSBOW’s lessons was itself one of the reasons those same failures were repeated in 1991; the present campaign against Iran suggests we might still not have learned them.1
The first lesson of CROSSBOW is that fixed infrastructure is easy to destroy and that adversaries do not stay fixed for long. British intelligence had received “reliable and relatively full information” on German long-range weapons as early as November 1939 two months into the war.2 It wasn’t till four years later, in 1943, that Allied photo-reconnaissance first identified the German “ski-sites” in northwestern France, named for the curious shape of one of the buildings on each launcher complex.3 Within weeks, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey would later report, ninety-six sites had been cataloged, and a sustained bombing offensive against them had begun. Of these ninety-six sites, no more than two were ever used operationally.4 On its face, this was a complete victory. Allied airpower had, by direct attack, denied the Luftwaffe permanent launching infrastructure before the V-1 campaign could begin.5
The Germans drew the obvious conclusion. The Survey noted that during the period of the Allied counterattack, the Germans developed methods for launching V-1s and V-2s from small, inconspicuous sites that required minimal engineering work and freed firing operations from the elaborate sites originally planned.6 These were the “modified sites”, first photographed on April 26, 1944, which were well camouflaged, dependent largely on prefabricated buildings, of which more than sixty had been identified before the first V-1 was launched in England in mid-June.7 The “modified sites”, the Survey concluded plainly, were “heavily bombed without marked effect on the scale of effort”.8
Kipphut, working from the same primary documents, formalizes the consequence as a two-phase division of the campaign. CROSSBOW I, running from April 1943 to early June 1944, was a qualified success: it delayed the start of V-weapon attacks by an estimated three to six months and so allowed OVERLORD to proceed before the full weight of Hitler’s missile arsenal could be brought to bear.9 Eisenhower himself wrote that had the Germans perfected the weapons six months earlier, the invasion of Europe would have been “exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible”, and that a sustained V-weapons attack on the Portsmouth-Southampton embarkation area could have caused OVERLORD to be written off entirely.10 CROSSBOW II, however, the campaign to suppress launches once they had begun, was in Kipphut’s assessment a “dismal failure”; despite thousands of sorties against more than 250 targets in the critical summer of 1944, the Germans averaged just over 80 launches per day, and German sources contend they never failed to launch on account of either Allied air attack or weapons shortages.11
A World War II map shows the two areas where the Germans were setting up their secret “V” weapons to bombard England (right, center). These are the areas in which the Royal Air Force and 8th Air Force heavy bombers concentrated their bombs in order to knock out the weapons — part of the pre-invasion plan. This event was given the operational code name Crossbow during World War II. The grouping (left, center) is the site of the Invasion of Normandy.
The implications for Allied resource allocation were severe. Between the beginning of May 1943 and the end of March 1944, nearly 40% of Allied reconnaissance sorties over Europe were devoted to supporting CROSSBOW, with those planes taking more than 1.25 million photographs and service members preparing more than 4 million prints for study and analysis.12 Over the course of the campaign, U.S. and British air forces flew approximately 68,913 sorties against CROSSBOW targets and dropped roughly 136,789 tons of munitions.13 During the thirteen-month peak period from August 1943 to August 1944, the joint strategic-bomber effort absorbed 13.7% of its sorties and 15.5% of its tonnage on V-weapon targets.14 By the autumn of 1944 and into the winter, RAF Fighter Command devoted 79% of its offensive sorties to CROSSBOW.15 Eisenhower, faced with the apparent failure of CROSSBOW II to suppress the launches that began on D-Day plus seven, directed that V-weapon suppression take priority over all other Allied air operations, including direct support to the Normandy lodgment and the Combined Bomber Offensive.16
That bombing, which failed against the dispersed V-2 launch sites, was almost overdetermined. The Survey concluded bluntly that after the initial Allied success, the firing sites for V-2s were small, well camouflaged, and made poor targets for bombers.17 No comparable problem arises with a factory complex. The V-2 launcher, like the modified V-1 ramp, was small, mobile, and concealable, and the strategic-bomber instrument was designed and procured to flatten large, stationary targets. In the end, Kipphut notes, silencing the V-weapons required ground forces to overrun the launch sites.18
- Mark E. Kipphut, “Crossbow and Gulf War Counter-Scud Efforts: Lessons from History”, Counterproliferation Paper No. 15 (Maxwell AFB, AL: USAF Counterproliferation Center, February 2003), 1–3. Originally published in Airpower Journal, Winter 1996.
- Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 3, Europe: Argument to V-E Day: January 1944 to May 1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 89.
- United States Strategic Bombing Survey, V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign, Military Analysis Division, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C., January 1947), 5–6.
- Ibid, 6.
- Craven and Cate, eds., have a full chapter on the operational history of CROSSBOW, 84-106.
- Ibid, 2.
- Ibid, 6.
- Ibid, 6.
- Kipphut, 7–8.
- Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 260, quoted in Kipphut, 5.
- Kipphut, “Crossbow and Gulf War Counter-Scud Efforts”, 8, citing Phillip Henshall, Hitler’s Rocket Sites (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 187.
- Craven and Cate, eds., 89.
- Kipphut, “Crossbow and Gulf War Counter-Scud Efforts”, 8
- USSBS, “V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign”, 28.
- USSBS, “V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign, 28”; Kipphut, 8–9.
- Kipphut, 5.
- USSBS, “V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign”, 7
- Kipphut, 10.
Indonesian M95/51 Mannlicher Carbine & Short Rifle Converted to .303 British
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Dec 2025When Indonesia won its independence in 1949, its military had a real mess of different equipment. The SMLE was adopted as the first standard rifle, but these were in short supply and a lot of Arisakas and Dutch Mannlichers were also in the country’s possession. Looking for a weapon for rural police using the now-standard .303 British cartridge, the Indonesian government decided to revisit a program to convert 6.5mm M95 rifles and carbines to .303 — something initially done with Australian help in 1941.
With Australian advisors from Lithgow, the Indonesian PSM factory gear conversions in 1951, and continued them into early 1955. In total, 13,999 M95/51 conversions were made, 9,904 of them carbines and 4,905 short rifles. They were made by reboring the original 6.5mm barrels to .303 and reaming the chambers out (although this does result in a slight double shoulder to fired cases). The carbines (with 19″ barrels) were fitted with a variety of muzzle brakes, and made for an as-yet unidentified pattern of bayonet. The short rifles (with 26″ barrels) were given new 2-position rear notch sights, but left using standard Dutch M95 bayonets.
The guns were used in police and possibly military training roles until removed from service in 1961. A batch was sold as surplus in 1962 to InterArms, and another batch was found in the late 1970s and sold to Odin in the early 1980s. The InterArms guns tend to be in better condition, and have intact Indonesian markings, where the Odin guns are generally rougher and have the government property marks ground off.
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May 15, 2026
“One of the most iconic pictures of WWII” – the seen and the unseen, USN edition
CDR Salamander posts an iconic US Navy photo from late 1944, showing the unparalleled naval might of the American efforts against Japan. But, as with Bastiat’s famous economic essay, there are the obvious things we see and the important but unseen things that matter just as much:
Murderers’ Row. Ulithi anchorage, December 8th, 1944. Just three years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
One of the most iconic pictures of WWII.
The carriers are (from front to back): USS Wasp (CV-18), USS Yorktown (CV-10), USS Hornet (CV-12), USS Hancock (CV-19) and USS Ticonderoga (CV-14).
The oldest of those ships, Yorktown, was only 19 months old. The youngest, Hancock, was commissioned only a little under eight months earlier. All were laid down and took from a bit under three to a bit under four years to build.
Just a year prior, the US Navy was so short of aircraft carriers, it had to borrow a carrier from the Royal Navy.
At first glance, it appears to be a flex of American naval power at flood tide — the aircraft carrier’s unassailable invincibility manifest — and it is. However, when you dig deeper, it has a more important story. It gives a warning. It informs us today, if we are willing to listen.
It isn’t about the power of being the world’s greatest shipbuider, that we were. It isn’t about an unequalled ability to project national will across the Pacific like no nation ever has in human history, which it is.
No. That isn’t what it tells us that is most important.
As we have done more than once over the last two decades, we’re taking a holder of a front row seat on the Front Porch and CDR Salamander Plank Owner Sid’s comments, in this case from yesterday, and bringing it to a standalone post.
Most of this post is his. The insight certainly is.
The actual story this picture tells is much more sobering, right there in plain sight, but you can’t see it.
The reality is that on the day this picture was taken, the Fast Carrier Task Force (TF 38/58) was down an entire Task Group from where it started two months earlier.
USS Franklin (CV-13) was severely damaged on 27 OCT by kamikaze and had to return [to] CONUS for repairs.
USS Belleau Wood (CVL-24) was severely damaged in the same attack.
USS Princeton (CVL-23) was sunk on 24 OCT by a Judy dive bomber.
USS Essex (CV-9) had a devastating hit by a kamikaze on 24 NOV followed by a disabling machinery casualty requiring a trip back to CONUS for repairs.
USS Enterprise (CV-6) departed a few days earlier for repairs in Pearl Harbor.
All the carriers in this picture had been damaged to varying degrees. Damage that today would require a trip to the yard to fix, like the absent Enterprise and Essex.
For example Ticonderoga (fourth Essex in the line from the bottom) would take damage to her radar waveguides in January. That could not be repaired forward and she would have to return to Bremerton as well.
Bloodier Than Verdun? Winter Battles on the Eastern Front 1915
The Great War
Published 16 Jan 2026The first four months of 1915 witnessed a titanic struggle on the Eastern Front, in East Prussia, the Carpathians, Bukovina, and at Przemysl. Both sides suffered staggering casualties that surpass those of the Somme or Verdun the following year. Ironically, the Austro-Hungarians lost far more men trying to save Przemysl than there were in the fortress.
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May 14, 2026
Why did the Romans defeat the Macedonians and Seleucids so easily?
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 19 Nov 2025Today I try to answer several questions about the confrontation between Rome and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Eastern Mediterranean — espcially the Macedonians and Seleucids. In contrast to the monumental struggle between Rome and Carthage, where Hannibal in particular inflicted very costly defeats on the Romans, the wars with the “sophisticated” military powers of the east seem much more one sided — brief and decided by a single pitched battle. How fair is the sense that these conflicts were “easier” for the Romans to win, and if they were — why was this?
May 13, 2026
The Korean War Week 99: The War’s Most Humiliating Crisis – May 12, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 12 May 2026The world turns it’s eyes to the UN POW camp at Koje-Do island when the Communist POWs in one of the compounds kidnap the Camp Commandant, an American General no less, and issue demands that they say must be met before his release. Can this be settled diplomatically, or is the army going in in force?
00:00 Intro
00:54 General Dodd Kidnapped
04:09 Koje-Do Phase Two
07:04 Dodd on Trial
13:18 The POWs Demands
18:30 Summary
19:03 Conclusion
19:54 Call to Action
May 11, 2026
The History of SPI: Part 1 / Simulations Publications Inc. / Wargaming History
Legendary Tactics
Published 18 Dec 2025Remember the golden age of wargaming? This is THE definitive history of SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.), one of the most influential publishers in tabletop gaming. From its groundbreaking magazine Strategy & Tactics to iconic titles like War in the East, StarForce, and Terrible Swift Sword, SPI reshaped what board wargames could be — and built a passionate community along the way.
This is Part 1, where we delve into the origins of SPI and Strategy & Tactics Magazine, and the people and games that were part of it.
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May 10, 2026
QotD: The cavalry
Combat Boot, “So, ‘capbadges’, what’s that all about then?”, combatboot.co.uk, 2020-11-13.
May 9, 2026
M1E5 Experimental Paratrooper Garand
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Dec 2025In January 1944 men of the 93rd Infantry Division field-modified an M1 to give it a shorter (18″) barrel, and the rifle was sent back to the US and tested by the Infantry Board. The idea was that a rifle like this might be of use to paratroopers, being more powerful than the M1A1 Carbine they were already using. The job of exploring the idea was given to John Garand at Springfield Armory, and he began work that same month.
One example was made in the spring of 1944, using an underfolding stock designed by Garand (for which he received a patent in 1949). It was 5″ shorts and 1.2 pounds lighter than a standard M1, but exhibited excessive blast and concussion. The initial design used the folding stock with a traditional grip, and this was found uncomfortable (no surprise there). The rifle was refitted with a rather odd steel pistol grip, but this was also not a great solution. By this time testing found the whole thing undesirable and it went no farther.
Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this truly unique specimen from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts: https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
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May 8, 2026
How Hitler Wasted Germany’s Deadliest Weapon – Nazi Rearmament 01 – U-Boat Type VIIC
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 7 May 2026Early in World War II, German U-boats came dangerously close to starving Britain into submission. The Type VII submarine — especially the VIIC — became the backbone of the Kriegsmarine‘s Atlantic campaign, sinking thousands of Allied ships and threatening to win the Battle of the Atlantic.
But despite its devastating effectiveness, the U-boat war ultimately failed — and not just because of Allied countermeasures.
In this documentary, Spartacus Olsson breaks down how Adolf Hitler’s strategic miscalculations, competing naval doctrines, and direct interference undermined Germany’s most effective naval weapon. From the clandestine development of submarines after the Treaty of Versailles, through Admiral Karl Dönitz’s vision of a tonnage war, to the catastrophic losses of German submariners, this episode examines how Nazi rearmament translated into wartime reality — and failure.
Featuring detailed analysis of Type VII design, production, deployment, and combat performance, this video reveals how industrial limitations, political priorities, and technological shifts turned a war-winning weapon into a death trap.
This standalone episode complements the Death of Democracy series by showing what Hitler actually did with Germany’s rearmament- and why it fell short.
QotD: North Vietnamese intelligence failures in the Tet Offensive
… and it didn’t happen, because they, the North Vietnamese, had faulty intel.
The Americans suffered from the “intel to order” problem too, of course, which we in the civilian world call “telling the boss what he wants to hear”. But the NVA had it much worse, since that’s a much greater structural problem among Commies. Indeed, the Americans got at least one high-level defector during Tet — a lieutenant colonel I think — who only defected because the units he was supposed to command in the “general uprising” didn’t exist. They were purely paper fantasies, straight out of some commissar’s head.
And that’s what made [US Army military analyst Joseph] Hovey’s report so easy to dismiss. Hovey himself said it — it looks like they’re planning to do X, Y, and Z, but that would only make sense if they’re making a big mistake about the balance of forces. The US had pretty good intel on the ARVN and the political mood of South Vietnam. But they for some reason assumed that the NVA had basically the same information, so all of the NVA’s calls for a general uprising — which the NVA absolutely meant, and indeed were counting on — were easy for US analysts to dismiss as mere propaganda.
Severian, “Book Rec: Tet, Intelligence Failure”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.
May 6, 2026
The Korean War Week 98: No Peace at Panmunjom – May 5, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 5 May 2026At the end of last week the UN presented a peace package proposal to the Communists at the peace talks, but that package has been rejected. The only issue still left to clear up is that of POW repatriation, but that seems insurmountable, at least for the time being. In the field, there are ambushes, skirmishes, and night patrols, but still no larger scale actions, and the temperature at Koje-Do POW camp continues to rise and rise, perhaps nearing a boiling point.
00:00 Intro
01:34 Recap
02:09 The Package Rejected
03:58 Night Patrols
08:32 The Fighting
14:13 Koje-Do
15:58 Summary
16:15 Conclusion
Carney panders to the Euro elites and his TDS-afflicted base
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Ben Woodfinden explains Prime Minister Mark Carney’s constant pandering on the international stage:
The average voter won’t care, but the more Carney lays out his worldview the more the contradictions and incongruences in his thinking (or lack of sincerity) become apparent.
In his famous Davos speech he said “we actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be”. But the way he talks about and sees Europe does not fit this, and this statement is bizarre.
We should absolutely be pursuing closer ties to Europe, but it is delusional if he actually believes the new international order will be “rebuilt out of Europe”.
Europe for all its grand aspirations cannot even defend Ukraine by itself and without American help. Europe would need something like 300,000 additional troops and €250 billion a year in extra defence spending just to deter Russia without the Americans.
NATO’s own Secretary General told the European Parliament in January that Europe “cannot at the moment provide nearly enough of what Ukraine needs to defend itself today, and to deter tomorrow”, and that without American weapons “we cannot keep Ukraine in the fight. Literally not.” Rutte told European lawmakers that anyone who thinks Europe can defend itself without the US should “keep on dreaming”. Four years into the most serious land war on the continent since 1945 and this is where we are. That is not a continent about to anchor a new international order.
The world order is quickly is reorganising, yes. But around a US-China axis, not Brussels. The eurozone is forecast to grow 0.9% this year. China at 4.5%. China accounts for roughly 30% of global growth, Europe’s share of global GDP keeps shrinking. Europe is just one of many players. Again if you take Carney seriously here, it’s silly. Build closer ties with Europe yes but do not believe this is the next superpower.
But I suspect this is actually just another sign that Carney is good at politics — he knows exactly what the Davos crowd, his boomer base and media admirers want to hear and he is very good at giving it to them. Flattery has done him enormous favours in European capitals. But telling European elites the future runs through them is not realism, it is the opposite of realism. It is telling people what they want to hear, not the truth.
L. Wayne Mathison also comments on Carney’s profound europhiliac positions:
Europe is not the model. It is the warning label.
High regulation. Weak growth. Expensive energy. Soft defence. Endless bureaucracy.
America built. Europe managed. America innovated. Europe regulated.
And Carney wants Canada rebuilt “out of Europe”?
No thanks. Canada needs strength, productivity, energy, defence, and sovereignty, not Brussels-style decline with better catering.
May 5, 2026
QotD: Why China never adopted war elephants
Trautmann (2015) finds the solution in land-use patterns: China had simply converted so much of its pasture and forest to crop-land, in a densely settled city-and-agriculture land-use pattern that incorporating large numbers of elephants was not just prohibitive, but also culturally foreign. And there’s something to this, though I don’t buy it completely. Absolutely, Chinese land-use patterns would make elephants a lot more expensive to maintain than in India or even Rome. Highly productive farmland would likely have to be turned over to elephant pasture. That said, Chinese rulers had embraced the chariot and cavalry, so such things could be done, if the military or political calculus made them worth doing. But they weren’t done.
Instead, I tend to think that the same basic calculus that applied for Rome applies neatly for China – elephants fare poorly in societies with access to large numbers of disciplined infantrymen who can be trained in anti-elephant tactics. And this was certainly true of China, which had disciplined infantry to spare. Also, Han armies seem to have relied on close integration of missile weapons and polearms, meaning that they had the same sort of integrated light infantry support that the legion of the Roman Republic did. Later Chinese armies, as Trautmann briefly notes, had no problem defeating elephants in battle.
As with Rome, in China, elephants seem to have been a military solution looking for a problem to solve – and never found it. For one Chinese dynasty after another, the major military threats were either peer competitors (during periods of political fragmentation) whose disciplined infantry armies were no more vulnerable to elephants than Rome’s, or else steppe nomads. Given the tremendous logistical difficulties of operating even small armies out on the open steppe, attempting to take war elephants there would have been the height of stupidity. Elephants weren’t going to stop the Mongols – to be fair, not much stopped the Mongols (we’ll get into India, Mughals and elephants next time).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part II: Elephants against Wolves”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-02.
