Quotulatiousness

February 8, 2024

The lead-up to the Russo-Ukrainian War

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Founding Questions, “El Barbudo” has a guest-post on the situation in Ukraine, including a lot of background to the outbreak of full-scale combat with Russia’s “Special Military Operation” strike that was intended to decapitate the Ukrainian government and capture Kyiv in February, 2022:

Britain’s Ministry of Defence regularly posts these situation maps through their Twit-, er, I mean “X” account. This is the most recent one from 2024-02-02.

One framing point: the Russians are fighting a conventional, industrial war, for real-world (economic, territorial and national-security) objectives. The Ukrainians are fighting a proxy information war — large-scale armed propaganda, if you will — where the primary purpose of battlefield action is to feed political-warfare objectives, and thereby maintain western support. Seen from Kyiv, the centre of gravity (the thing from which Ukraine draws its strength and freedom of action) is western support — making narrative (as seen from the west) central, while the media is enlisted as a conduit for narrative warfare. Hence, through a western media lens, what you’re seeing is carefully curated to influence rather than inform. (Nothing new here — I defer to the historians, but I think Paul Fussell made this point about World War Two. Ask yourself when was the last time you saw a dead Ukrainian soldier, intact or otherwise.)

What that means is that battlefield defeats can be managed, as long as the narrative — the core of the war, as western sponsors see it and as the Ukrainians therefore are forced to see it — can be maintained. What’s causing the current crisis is not so much the death, destruction or loss of territory (though those are real). It’s that the mismatch between rhetoric and reality has finally reached the point that people are noticing.

[…]

Ukraine has been at war with Russia in some fashion since 2013, with violence first spiking into the open in February 2014. The Ukrainians call the 2014-2022 period the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) but it involved fairly heavy fighting — against Russian-backed separatist militias in the east, and internal to Ukraine among various factions including, yes, the Banderite nationalists (“neo-Nazis”) beloved of Russian media and Canadian parliamentarians alike, though they’re less prominent now (mainly because a lot of them are dead).

We should also note how this arose — first Russia and the U.S. forcing Ukraine to give up its nukes in 1994, then NATO expansion after Bosnia, and (publicly acknowledged) US interference in Russia’s 1996 election to ensure Boris Yeltsin got re-elected, creating a sense of threat in Moscow. Then Kosovo 1999, Bush and Putin’s failed attempt to make nice after 9/11, Estonia, Georgia, the Reset Button of 2009 and betrayal over Libya in 2011. (Hillary promised no ground troops or regime change, persuading then-president Dmitry Medvedev to abstain on the UN Security Council Resolution that authorised the intervention, only to renege on all counts then laugh on live TV when she found out Gaddafi had just been sodomised to death with a bayonet).

All of which infuriated the Kremlin, and confirmed the West was not “agreement-capable” (they have euphemisms in Moscow too) leading them to intervene in Syria to support the Assad regime. Then came the Ghouta gas attack of September 2013 — in which Obama failed to enforce his own Red Line, and John Kerry had to beg Sergey Lavrov (Russian foreign minister) to save us from the consequences of our own weakness … which convinced Russian leaders we were not only threatening and untrustworthy, but also weak. More great work there.

Russia’s seizure of Crimea followed, four months after the red-line debacle. It was clearly a result of Russian hatred and contempt. (Oderint dum metuant — the hatred was long-standing; what was new was the realisation, after Ghouta, that they had nothing to fear). Crimea was also a reaction to a US-backed revolution in Ukraine (Euromaidan), and the operation’s popularity should have made it clear that Ukraine is seen by Russians, of all political orientations, as integral to their identity, along with Belarus. No Russian politician could tolerate western advisers or weapons in Ukraine … which was the policy pursued after 2014. (There’s a chicken-and-egg security dilemma here. The west was reacting to perceived aggression from Russia, which was reacting to perceived western aggression. Both sides saw themselves as innocently defensive, and the other as aggressive.) [NR: Emphasis mine.]

Putin, by Russian standards, is a relative moderate on Ukraine — he frequently gets panned by war bloggers, retired generals and divers chickenhawks for being soft on the west, not prosecuting the war hard enough. If the neocons got their way and he was regime-changed, his replacement would likely be far worse for their interests — someone like, say, Nikolai Patrushev. Putin gets painted as Hitler in the media, but this is an artefact of the Alinskyite approach American political/media players take to any conflict: first freeze the target (no negotiation is possible) then personalise the enemy via an individual leader (Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Saddam, Gaddafi, Kim etc), then paint that leader as irrational and evil (without limits, restraints or goals except to be evil). From that point, it’s good versus evil, any means necessary, war as moral imperative. Putin is the latest foreigner to get this treatment, Trump the latest domestic equivalent. Trump’s greatest foreign policy crime, in fact, may have been his willingness to treat Putin, Kim, Xi, MBS etc. as rational actors worthy of respect (for Trump values of “respect”) rather than moral pariahs. This has hilarious consequences when people previously given the pariah treatment (Maduro, MBS, the Taliban) need to be rehabilitated via creative retconning so the narrative can keep rolling.

Anyway, from 2014 to 2022 the war was pretty static, with a few bigger battles (Debaltsevo the main one), artillery exchanges and trench warfare: a foreshadowing of how things are today, though without the massive tech acceleration we’ve seen since February 2022, and far fewer casualties.

Trump’s people have suggested Putin was frightened of him, which is why Russia didn’t invade during Trump’s term. There may be some truth to that (Trump after all reversed Obama’s prohibition on lethal aid) but it’s more likely the Russians just saw Trump as dangerously unpredictable, a decision-maker who never fully controlled his own government, especially on Ukraine (see Impeachment #1). The Russian way of war involves predicting an adversary’s reaction to provocation, then doing just enough, ambiguously enough, to achieve a fait accompli without triggering a response. This goes back to Trotsky and Tukhachevsky in the 1920s, but when your adversary is Trump, it becomes impossible to predict the trigger or the reaction if you piss him off. (Qasim Soleimani says hi). There was also one particular battle in Syria in February 2018 where US SOF killed some large number of Wagner guys by refusing to play their little games, and when the Russians complained Trump basically said it served them right.

Once Trump was gone — with Washington in disarray after January 6th — the Russians sensed an opportunity, and began building up around the Ukrainian border from April 2021. Then in August, when we covered ourselves in glory during the Great Kabul Pants-Shitting, the Russians probably thought they had the measure of Biden — who they knew of old — and decided we were so flaccid they’d get away with a lightning move against Kyiv, “Crimea 2014 on steroids”. (PS: when neocons start overtly asserting, in their in-house journal, that “the Afghan withdrawal did not trigger the Ukraine invasion” you know it’s true — even if the Russians hadn’t already said as much, in as many words.)

So, the Russians tried Crimea on Steroids in February 2022 — and their plan failed by breakfast on D Day, triggering the protracted war of attrition we have now. The reasons were partly bad luck for the leading Russian air-assault units attempting to seize the airfield at Hostomel outside Kyiv, partly good initiative by U.S. and U.K. trained Ukrainian SOF and territorial defence guys, partly over-compartmentalisation on the Russian side — key players were kept out of the loop for OPSEC reasons, and the invasion was mostly planned by political hacks with limited military understanding. (Why should we have the monopoly on that?) This video is a decent open-source account of that happened.

Beretta 1915: The first of the Beretta pistols

Filed under: History, Italy, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Jun 22, 2016

The Italian military went into WWI having already adopted a semiautomatic sidearm — the Model 1910 Glisenti (and its somewhat simplified Brixia cousin). However, the 1910 Glisenti was a very complex design, and much too expensive to be practical for the needs of the global cataclysm that was the Great War. In response to a need for something cheaper, Tulio Marengoni of the Beretta company designed the Model 1915, a simple blowback handgun chambered for the 9mm Glisenti cartridge.

Only 15,300 of the Model 1915 pistol were made, because even they proved to be a bit more than the military really needed. One of their most interesting mechanical features is a pair of manual safeties — one on the back of the frame to lock the hammer and one on the left side to block the trigger. This proved a bit redundant, and the gun overall was rather large and heavy. In 1917 a scaled-down version in .32 ACP (7.65mm) was introduced which would be produced in much larger numbers. The 1915/17 would also omit the rather unnecessary hammer safety.

It is important to note that while the 9mm Glisenti cartridge is dimensionally interchangeable with 9×19 Parabellum, pistols designed for the Glisenti cartridge should never be used with standard 9×19 ammunition, as it is nearly 50% more powerful than the Glisenti specs, and doing so will quickly cause damage (and potentially catastrophic failure).

February 7, 2024

The Magician Who Fooled the Nazis (and all of us)

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Germany, History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

World War Two
Published 7 Nov 2023

Military 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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February 6, 2024

5 HEAVY Tanks | Tank Chats

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

The Tank Museum
Published Nov 10, 2023

Enjoy this compilation of classic Tank Chats presented by David Fletcher. We’ve put together David’s chats on TOG 2, FV4005, Conqueror, Conway and the 40 Ton Centurion – representing some of the heaviest tanks in our collection.
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QotD: Sparta’s actually mediocre military performance

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

Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth.

The Spartans were at best tactically and strategically uncreative. Tactically, Sparta employed the phalanx, a close-order shield and spear formation. But while elements of the hoplite phalanx are often presented in popular culture as uniquely Spartan, the formation and its equipment were common among the Greeks from at least the early fifth century, if not earlier. And beyond the phalanx, the Spartans were not innovators, slow to experiment with new tactics, combined arms, and naval operations. Instead, Spartan leaders consistently tried to solve their military problems with pitched hoplite battles. Spartan efforts to compel friendship by hoplite battle were particularly unsuccessful, as with the failed Spartan efforts to compel Corinth to rejoin the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League by force during the Corinthian War.

Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats.

Bret Devereaux, “Spartans Were Losers”, Foreign Policy, 2023-07/22.

February 5, 2024

Western Front Tank Warfare 1944

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

World War Two
Published Nov 8, 2023

Indy takes a look at the armoured beasts battling it out on the Western Front. On the German side we have vehicles like the long-serving Panzer IV, the sleek and modern Panther, and the obnoxiously heavy King Tiger. These are arrayed against the American stalwart, the M4 Sherman, and British tanks like the up-gunned Firefly, Cromwell, and Churchill.
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February 4, 2024

Is the Red Army too fast for its own good? – WW2 – Week 284 – February 3, 1945

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 3 Feb 2024

Soviet forces have reached the old German border in force, however, logistical issues and a strong enemy presence possibly threatening their flanks means that a drive on Berlin may not be doable just now. Heinrich Himmler is in charge of the new Army Group to defend the Reich, and he has a host of problems. On the Western Front, the Allies finally eliminated the Colmar Pocket, and in the Philippines, the American advance reaches Manila, and the battle for the city is about to begin.
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Civil strife in Spain before the full civil war broke out

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niccolo Soldo continues his in-depth look at the situation in Spain leading up to the outbreak of the civil war in 1936. It’s clear that bloodshed was in the immediate future — so much so that it’s almost surprising that it took as long as it did for the war to start in earnest:

Flag of Spain during the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939).
Image by SanchoPanzaXXI via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1930, almost half of all Spaniards over the age of 10 were illiterate. The country was still overwhelmingly agrarian, with a small number of very wealthy landowners owning about 2/3rds of all the arable land in Andalusia alone, employing almost a million landless campesinos at barely subsistence-level wages. Industry was almost entirely found only in the north and northeast. Industrialization was beginning to pick up pace by the turn of the century, but was still very far behind the rest of Western Europe by the time the Second Spanish Republic came into being in 1931.

Despite Spain having one foot in the past, its other foot was in the present, a present that was rapidly changing and very unstable politically. The loss of confidence in King Alfonso XIII on the part of the middle and upper classes led to his abdication which opened the door to the establishment of the Second Republic, a democracy in a time when democracy itself was under attack throughout Europe, having already lost in Russia and Italy, and on its way to disappearing in other countries, most notably Germany.

The end of the monarchy was celebrated throughout the country (with some exceptions), but not always for the same reason. Yes, anti-monarchist forces viewed the monarchy as retrograde and out of step with the modern era, but only the liberals and various republican parties were committed to democracy and parliamentary politics. The Socialists (PSOE) for example, were riven by factionalism and a generational divide whereby there were those who sought to use power in office to both settle scores with their old enemies in the military, the landowning class, and especially the Catholic Church, and to actually launch a revolution along Marxist lines. For them, the Second Republic was a vehicle for a larger goal, and not an end goal in and of itself. Anarchists celebrated the end of the monarchy, but they were opposed to any and all government on principle. For Anarchists, the Second Republic was also a path towards revolution as well. For Catalan separatists, the Spanish Second Republic was a stepping-stone towards independence, or at least towards as much political and economic autonomy as possible.

Conservatives were in a state of disarray upon the establishment of the Second Republic. Despite this condition, all the factions that could be grouped as “conservatives” largely supported the new regime … at least at the outset. Once the agenda of the first government of the Second Republic was made public, opposition began to harden.

Rather than trying to generate a grand consensus among the various factions that dominated Spanish politics, economics, and society in 1931, the liberals, republicans, and socialists who led the country from 1931-33 instead chose to attack the core interests of their political rivals to the right. The military was to be slashed via the retirement of a large number of its officer class, land was to be seized from wealthy landowners in order to redistribute it to the poor and landless, and the Catholic Church was to be stripped of its role in educating young Spaniards, with the Jesuits expelled from the country altogether, and many churches, convents, monasteries, episcopal residences, parish houses, seminaries, etc. expropriated by the Spanish state. Private Catholic schools were also expropriated and turned into government-run ones instead. The Church was also forced to pay taxes and was banned from all industry and trade, “… enforced with strict police severity and widespread mob violence”.

These attacks on the Catholic Church (which also saw the torching of churches, monasteries, and convents in 1931 as we saw in the previous entry in this series) resulted in the release of a Papal Encyclical by Pope Pius XI on June 5, 1933 entitled “Dilectissima Nobis“. In this encyclical, Pius XI decries the persecution of the Church in Spain, and asks Spanish Catholics to defend themselves and the Church from attacks by the government. He describes the attacks as “… [an] offense not only to Religion and the Church, but also to those declared principles of civil liberty on which the new Spanish regime declares it bases itself”. As we already saw previously, then-Minister of War in the Spanish cabinet, Manuel Azaña, famously declared that “All the convents in Spain are not worth a single Republican life“.

There was no attempt to build a solid democratic foundation for the Second Republic whatsoever. Instead, a cultural revolution was quickly ushered in, and an agrarian revolution was threatened, but only implemented half-heartedly. The first government of the Second Spanish Republic managed to alienate the military, the landowning class, conservatives, and the Catholic Church overnight.

On the other side of the political divide, the centrists were attacked from the left for not going far enough, fast enough. Campesinos and small landowners demanded immediate expropriation of latifundia estates to be redistributed to them. The youth wing of the PSOE urged the nationalization of all industry, which led to factionalism within the socialist groupings. Less radical socialists pointed to the extension of voting rights to women, to the enshrining of the eight hour workday in law, and to the increase in wages for industry workers as the biggest successes of the first two years of the Second Republic. These radical factions were not content with these incremental gains, and demanded “more, now!”

This radicalism culminated in the “Casas Viejas Incident”, which I described in the previous entry:

    Staying true to form, the anarchists were restless and, as is their nature, opposed the present government in Spain as they opposed all governments, viewing them as inherently oppressive. Their massive labour union, CNT, led by the vanguard of FAI, began demonstrations in various locations across the country, with the greatest actions taking place in Andalusia. Political violence ensued, with two Civil Guards wounded. The Assault Guards, set up by the new Constitutional authorities in the Republic to provide a new force to purportedly protect those who lacked protection under the Monarchy, raided the village of Casas Viejas near Cadiz. They encountered a group of anarchists locked in a house and set fire to it (while disarming others in the village who were armed), and then executed them.

This act of state violence was committed not by fascists, nationalists, royalists, or even conservatives. It was committed by a liberal-socialist regime and its purposely-created security force, against anarchists. All the parties involved in this incident would find themselves on the same side in the not-too-distant Spanish Civil War.

Johnson LMG: History & Disassembly

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, History, Military, Pacific, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Feb 29, 2016

The Johnson light machine gun is one of the lesser-known US military machine guns of WWII, although it seems to have been very popular with all those who used it in combat. Melvin Johnson made a commendable attempt to get his rifles adopted by the US military, but was unable to unseat the M1 Garand as American service rifle. However, he did make a significant sale of both rifles and light machine guns to the Dutch colonial army.

By the time those Dutch guns were ready to ship, however, the Japanese had overrun most of the Dutch islands. The guns were thus basically sitting on the docks with nowhere to go, and at that point the US Marine Corps took possession of them. Because of their short recoil action and quickly removable barrels, the Johnson guns were ideal for airborne Paramarines, and saw use in the Pacific with these forces. They were also used by the joint US/Canadian First Special Service Force in Italy.

In many ways, the Johnson LMG is similar to the German FG-42, although with more emphasis on full-auto use instead of shoulder rifle use. It fired from a closed bolt in semiauto and from an open bolt in full auto, and had a bipod both effective, light, and easily detachable. Overall the Johnson is a light, handy, and very easily dismantled weapon, and its popularity with combat troops seems well deserved.

February 3, 2024

A Day in Ancient Rome

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

toldinstone
Published Nov 10, 2023

Following Marcus Aurelius on the day of his final triumph.

Chapters:
0:00 Another day
1:05 Petitions
3:12 Breakfast
3:51 The Triumph
4:44 Romanis Magicae
5:37 Artifacts of the wars
7:09 Caesar, you are mortal
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February 2, 2024

The Sad Story of Churchill’s Iceman, Geoffrey Pyke

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published Jan 31, 2024

Geoffrey Pyke is remembered as an eccentric scientist who spewed out ideas like giant aircraft carriers made of icy Pykerete. But there was much more to him than that. He was a spy, a special operations mastermind, and his novel ideas contributed to the success of D-Day.
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February 1, 2024

The Kohima Epitaph: Britain’s Forgotten Battle That Changed WW2

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Chap
Published 9 Nov 2023

What is the Kohima Epitaph and what has it got to do with Britain’s forgotten battle that changed the Second World War? Well, those of you living in the UK and who attend Remembrance Sunday services will probably know the words even if you don’t know the story behind them:

“When you go home, tell them of us and say,
For your tomorrow, We gave our today.”

The memorial which bears those powerful words, stands in a cemetery containing the graves over over 1,400 British servicemen and memorials to over 900 Indian troops who died alongside them. They died in one of the bloodiest, toughest, grimmest battles of the Second World War. A battle sometimes called the “Stalingrad of the East.”

Outnumbered 6:1 and half of whom were from non-combat units, the multi-national British garrison stood their ground in bloody hand-to-hand fighting, refusing to retreat or surrender for two weeks until relieved. And even then the battle continued for another vicious month. That stand stopped the Japanese invasion of India in its tracks and turned the tide of the war in South East Asia. Both for its ferocity and its turning point in the war, it has been called: “Britain’s greatest battle”.

The Japanese lost 53,000 men from their army of 85,000.
The British (14th Army) lost 4,000 men killed and wounded.

This forgotten victory was made possible by General William (Bill) Slim commanding the 14th Army. Rather like the battle and the 14th Army, General Slim has not received the recognition that he is due. And yet, it is almost completely forgotten. Rather like the army that fought against the Japanese in Burma.

So, as we near Remembrance Sunday, I think it is time to reveal the story of the Battle of Kohima in 1944.
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January 31, 2024

The rise of the “Technical”

Filed under: Africa, History, Middle East, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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:

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 29, 2024

Peter Hitchens isn’t onboard with the march to yet another war

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Writing in the Daily Mail, Peter Hitchens decries the apparent drift by western politicians into yet another war:

Are we the baddies? What if the Ukraine war is just as stupid and wrong as the Iraq war, but the state propaganda has been more successful and hardly anybody has realised … yet?

Many people to this day still think the damaging and morally dubious Western attacks on Serbia and Libya were justified. Many still think the gory attempt to destroy Syria was a good thing. It took ages for opinion to swing on the Vietnam war, back in the 1960s. And, as one who opposed the Iraq war, I remember only too well just how many (who now think they were against it all the time) were fooled into backing Sir Anthony Blair and George W. Bush.

The issue is more pressing as generals and admirals warn we must live in a militarised society and prepare for what they think is an inevitable war against Russia. They could get their way. If you go on backing this policy, you could be condemning yourself, your children or grandchildren to a world of war, privation and perhaps conscription into some sort of military service.

[…]

This is what I have never been able to work out. We have a Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, who has perfected the art of shouting loudly while carrying a very small stick – thunderous, belligerent declarations while our Armed Forces melt away thanks to neglect and badly targeted spending. Perhaps, if the long-feared Russian invasion of Western Europe takes place, we can fend it off by dispatching our troops on the pestilential e-scooters and e-bikes which are this former Transport Secretary’s major contribution to the nation.

Certainly these vehicles are terrifying to those not riding them. They have nearly killed me more than once. And, piled up in heaps, they make formidable obstacles, as the people of London are finding.

What Mr Shapps does not seem to grasp is that Britain became great by staying out of continental conflicts, and letting others do the fighting. Even in the battle against Bonaparte, we paid our European allies to do most of the hard work.

Our greatness ceased when bombastic moralising took over, in 1914. We flung ourselves, supposedly nobly, into a Russo-German war. Within two years we were bankrupt, and bereft of the flower of our young manhood.

People still refuse to believe me when I say accurately that Britain has not paid off its huge 1914-18 war debts (now worth about £40 billion) to the USA. But I promise you it is true.

Four years of terrible loss left the Russo-German problem unsolved and we had to do it all again in 1939. After that we were even more bankrupt, and in 1946 had to ration bread, like some desperate People’s Republic. But for many years afterwards we were largely governed by grown-ups who had fought in actual wars and been wounded, and had seen death very near them, or endured bombing and a war economy. And so we largely stayed out of major foreign trouble.

January 28, 2024

Himmler Takes Command – WW2 – Week 283 – January 27, 1945

Filed under: Asia, Britain, China, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 27 Jan 2024

A new German Army Group has been formed, tasked with protecting the Reich from the east and commanded by none other than Heinrich Himmler, who has never held such a command. The Soviets are really on the move in the east and have even begun reaching the prewar German border. In the west the Allies have cleared the Roer Triangle and are also working hard to eliminate the Colmar Pocket. In the Far East the Americans are advancing on Luzon, and in Burma the Allies have success on the Arakan and the Shwebo Plain, and finally manage to re open the Burma Road with China.

01:27 Soviet advances in East Prussia
09:23 Hungary and the fight for Buda
11:19 Operations Nordwind, Cheerful, and Blackcock
14:23 Block 5
16:14 American advances on Luzon
18:55 Allied successes in Burma
22:06 Summary
22:26 Conclusion
(more…)

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