There are a few basic behaviors of iron that fundamentally control what blacksmiths are going to do with it in this stage. To begin with, we need to introduce some terminology to avoid this coming confusing: a given piece of metal can be hard (resistant to deformation) or soft; it can also be ductile (able to deform significantly before breaking) or brittle (likely to break without deformation). This is easiest to understand at the extremes: a soft, brittle material (like a thin wooden dowel) takes very little energy and breaks immediately without bending, while a hard, ductile material (the same dowel, made of spring-steel) bends more easily under stress but resists breaking. But it is also possible to have hard brittle materials (pottery being a classic example) which fiercely resist deforming but break catastrophically the moment they exceed their tolerances or a soft, ductile material (think wet-noodle) which bends very easily.
(I should note that all of these factors are, in fact, very complex – far more complex than we are going to discuss. In particular, as I understand it, some of what I am using “hardness” to describe also falls under the related category of yield strength. Hopefully you will all pardon the necessary simplification; if it makes you feel any better, ancient blacksmiths didn’t understand how any of this worked either, only that it worked.)
Of course these are not binaries but a spectrum. Materials have a degree of hardness or ductility; as we’ll see, these are not quite opposed, but changing one does change the other – increasing hardness often reduces ductility.
The sort of things that pre-modern people are going to want to be made in iron are going to have fairly tight tolerances for these sorts of things. Objects that had wide tolerances (that is, things which could be weak or a little bendy or didn’t have to take much force) got made out of other cheaper, easier materials like ceramics, stone or wood; metals were really only used for things that had to be both strong and relatively light for precisely the reasons we’ve seen: they were too expensive for anything else. That means that a blacksmith doesn’t merely need to bring the metal to the right shape but also to the right characteristics. Some tools would need to finish up being quite hard (like the tip of a pick, or the edge of a blade), while others needed to be able to bend to absorb strain (like the core of a blade or the back of a saw).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It, Part III: Hammer-time”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-10-02.
June 17, 2022
June 11, 2022
The steam engine — one of the keys to the industrial revolution — was actually pretty late to be invented
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes gives the first part of what promises to be a fascinating deep dive into steam engine development pre-dating the commonly accepted chronology of its invention:
What did I discover that so shocked me? When researching my last post on the inventors surrounding Prince Henry in the 1610s, and because I’ve been looking into the history of energy at the urging of Apoorv Sinha and others at Carbon Upcycling, I had a read through the published work of one of the inventors, Salomon de Caus.
De Caus often features in histories of the steam engine, as someone who in 1615 wrote about and depicted the expansive force of steam — heat up water in a copper vessel with a narrow tube coming out the top, and see how water or steam can be made to rise! He was even briefly known as the “true”, French inventor of the steam engine, because of a nineteenth-century hoax.
To historians of science and technology today, however, de Caus’s illustration is pretty unremarkable. He usually just gets a brief name-check, more or less copy-pasted from older histories. This is because the expansive force of steam would turn out not to be all that important in the development of the steam engine, as we’ll see, and because it was ancient.
3D animation of an aeolipile or Hero’s engine.
Animation by Michael Frey via Wikimedia Commons.Hero of Alexandria, writing sometime in the first century, had already exploited the fact that when you boil the water in a metal vessel with a long, narrowing spout, the steam will come out with quite some force. This aeolipile, as it was sometimes called, was known and used throughout the middle ages and well into the seventeenth century. Sometimes it was shaped a bit like an alchemist’s retort, and known as the “philosophical bellows”. Other times, it was shaped as a human face, the steam issuing from its mouth — like the Greek god Aeolus, blowing the wind.
This was no mere toy, but found plenty of practical use. The spout of the philosophical bellows was often directed at a lamp’s flame, to have a sort of blow-torch effect. It was used, for example, to do finer tasks like bending glass pipes, or in fine metalwork — there are loads of accounts of this throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, with some authors even talking about its merits relative to other instruments, suggesting real-life use. Its heat could, apparently, also be used to get fires going in wet weather, or from damp wood (provided you had some dry wood on hand to get the aeolipile itself going).
It could also be put to more sophisticated uses. Hero explained how the principle of thermal expansion — of either water or air — could be exploited to spout steam or even wine onto an altar’s fire to make it flare, to make water issue from a fountain, to make miniature dancers rotate and jump up and down, and to push air through bird-shaped automata to make them sing. A 1630s English version claimed to make the figure of a dragon hiss.
It could even be used to do some light mechanical work. Hero described a version that might make a hollow ball spin, by having the steam issue from bent nozzles. He even described a version where water could be forced by steam from one container into another, which would pull on a weight to open some doors. Taking his idea and running with it, engineers from at least the fifteenth century onwards wrote about directing the aeolipile’s narrow spout at miniature turbines to turn a roasting spits above a fire — suggested in Italy in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, and in a 1551 Ottoman manuscript by Taqi ad-Din — or to do light industrial work like stamping ores and minerals into powders.
The principle of using heat to expand air or steam was even tried for much heavier-duty tasks. In 1605, the French inventor Marin Bourgeois developed an air-powered gun — known as the “wind-gun” — which used air that was pumped and compressed into the barrel. Within just a couple of years, having heard of the demonstration before the French court, and after paying a visit to Bourgeois, the mathematician David Rivault began experimenting on how the same effect might be achieved by heating water in a cannon. In the same decade, the Spanish military engineer Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont also tried to use the expansionary force of steam to drive water up and out of mines — essentially, an industrial version of what Hero had done with fountains.
June 8, 2022
The Story Behind the Dambuster Raid – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 7 Jun 2022The thousand-bomber offensive was about to begin as Air-Marshall Harris was assembling his forces. Yet one man was to challenge his strategy. The aircraft designer Barnes Wallis thought: “What if there was a way to destroy Germany’s industrial might not by simply dropping thousands of bombs over its cities, but by a precision strike against its dams?” For this, a new kind of bouncing bomb was to be delivered.
(more…)
June 1, 2022
How To Kill A U-Boat – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 31 May 2022How to kill a U-Boat? The threat of the illusive and nearly undetectable submarines had been on the mind of every Allied naval planner since the Great War. As the Kriegsmarine once more unleashed its wolfpacks to the high seas, it became a race against time to find a way to stop the deadly stalkers from beneath the surface.
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May 28, 2022
“… the only thing that is history are any immediate hopes for a more competitive communications marketplace in Canada”
Michael Geist pans the latest official misinformation from the federal government on telecommunications legislation:
Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne unveiled the government’s proposed new telecom policy directive yesterday, hailing it as a “historic step”. However, a closer look at the policy suggests that the only thing that is history are any immediate hopes for a more competitive communications marketplace in Canada. Once again, the government has shown itself unwilling to take a strong stand in favour of consumers and competition, instead releasing a directive that largely retains the status quo and sends the message to CRTC Chair Ian Scott to stay the course. Indeed, the primary purpose behind the announcement would appear to be an attempt to shield the government from criticism over its decision to leave the controversial CRTC decision on wholesale Internet access intact, thereby denying consumers the prospect of lower costs for Internet services.
While the new proposed policy directive features much needed details and helpfully replaces the 2006 and 2019 directives that often conflicted and enabled the CRTC to pay little more than lip service to the issue, it sends a strong signal that it is happy with the Commission’s current approach. For example, the directive’s summary on measures to address wholesale Internet access are all about the status quo: “requiring large companies to continue to give access to competitors” or “directing the CRTC not to phase out the existing model for wholesale access.” These are not instructions to change.
The same is true for mobile wireless competition. Rather that using the opportunity to accelerate competition through mobile virtual network operators, the CRTC is instead to directed to improve its hybrid MVNO model “as necessary”. A full MVNO model? The government says it is prepared to support it “if needed”. Based on the current market, it apparently believes it isn’t needed.
QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with tactical air power
But how much airpower does it take to really move a division out of position? In 1944, at the start of Operation Cobra as part of the Normandy breakout, it was necessary for US forces to move the powerful armored division Panzer Lehr out of its prepared positions outside of St. Lo. Over the course of an hour and a half, the U.S. Eighth Air Force hit Panzer Lehr with approximately three thousand aircraft, including 1,800 heavy bombers (each of which might have had bomb-loads of c. 2-3,500kg; the attack would have been the equivalent of about 13,000 Farman F.50s (of which only a hundred or so were built!)). By this point, even medium bombers carried bomb loads in the thousands of pounds, like the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, with a bomb load of 3000lbs (1360kg). This was followed by a hurricane artillery barrage! Despite this almost absurdly awesome amount of firepower (which, to be clear, inflicted tremendous damage; by the end of Operation Cobra, Panzer Lehr – the heaviest and most powerful Panzer division in the west – had effectively ceased to exist), Panzer Lehr, badly weakened was still very capable of resisting and had to be pushed out of position by ground attack over the next three days.
Needless to say, nothing on offer in 1918 or for a decade or more after, was prepared to offer that kind of offensive potential from the air. That kind of assault would have required many thousands of aircraft with capabilities far exceeding what even the best late-war WWI bombers could do. Once again, while close air support doctrine was developed with one eye on the trench stalemate and the role airpower could play in facilitating a breakthrough and restoring maneuver (either by blasting the breakthrough or – as in Soviet Deep Battle doctrine – engaging enemy rear echelon units to bog down reinforcements). But the technology wasn’t anywhere near the decisive point by 1918. Instead, the most important thing aircraft could do was spot for the artillery, which is mostly what aircraft continued to do, even in late 1918.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
May 22, 2022
HMCS Bras D’Or; The world’s fastest warship and the pinnacle of hydrofoil development in Canada
Polyus Studios
Published 3 Feb 2022Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudiosHMCS Bras D’Or was the pinnacle of over 100 years of hydrofoil development in Canada. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell and ending with the Proteus, hydrofoils held the promise of faster travel over the waves. Unfortunately the technology never found a comfortable fit in either military or civil fleets. It was designed to be an ASW hunter but by the time she was ready, the Navy was settled on using the now familiar Destroyer/Helicopter combos.
0:00 Introduction
0:29 Alexander Graham Bell and Casey Baldwin
2:28 The R-100 Massawippi
5:46 The R-103 Baddeck
7:15 The Rx
8:48 Anti-submarine warfare hydrofoil concept
12:24 FHE-400 Bras D’Or
17:23 Testing and refinement
19:25 Cancellation
20:18 Proteus
20:45 ConclusionMusic:
“Denmark” – Portland Cello Project
“Your Suggestions” – Unicorn Heads#BrasDor #CanadianAerospace #PolyusStudios
May 21, 2022
Ukraine & T-72: The death of the tank? | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 20 May 2022Tank Museum Curator David Willey explores the current conflict in Ukraine and the performance of the T-72 tank; putting it into historical context and exploring other times during the last hundred years when the death of the tank has been predicted.
Consider becoming a Patreon Supporter today: https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum
00:00 | Intro
00:40 | Wider context
11:01 | Tanks in History
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May 17, 2022
The Canadian government has a much more expansive view of “use of journalistic content” than most Canadians do
Michael Geist continues looking at the differences between what the Canadian government says they’re trying to do with their Online News Act (Bill C-18) and how the actual wording of the bill will operate:
Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.
But is it reasonable to legislate that posting a news headline constitutes making that news content available? Can Canada even do that and still remain compliant with international copyright laws under the Berne Convention which require countries to feature an exception for quotation? Indeed, international copyright law recognizes the critical importance of enabling quotation free from limitations as an essential element of expression, yet Bill C-18 adopts an approach that may violate that principle by requiring compensation for quotation.
Sub-section (b) moves far beyond reproduction into a realm that bears little resemblance to use or a reasonable definition of “making available”. It covers facilitating access to news by any means. In what way is facilitating access to news the same as making it available (much less using it)? A facilitating access to news standard is virtually limitless: newsstands, news screens in elevators or taxis, television manufacturers, or newspaper box makers can all be said to be facilitating access to news. The bill limits its scope to DNIs, but the policy principle that this bill is simply compensating for the use of content is twisted beyond all recognition.
In fact, it is clear that this extreme approach is precisely what the government intends. By citing examples such an indexing, aggregation or ranking of news content it is saying that virtually anything that a platform does – linking to news articles or merely to news organizations, indexing content at the request of the news organization (even if the actual content is not openly available as is the case with paywalled sites), or creating a list of news articles on a given topic are all “facilitating access to news content” which requires compensation.
Would Canadians agree that this link to the front page of the Globe and Mail is making the Globe‘s available? If this link appears on Google or Facebook, the government says that it is. If someone searches for newspapers in Montreal to learn more about developments in the city, is the list of newspapers in that city making the content available? Once again, the government says that it is.
The initial debate on Bill C-18 featured several interventions about the problems of misinformation. In light of the actual provisions in the bill, claims that it simply requires compensation for use might ironically be fairly characterized as misinformation. Unfortunately, the problematic claims associated with the bill don’t stop there as tomorrow’s post on market intervention will illustrate.
May 11, 2022
QotD: The TV treadmill
“All this beautiful stuff we’re seeing is shot in the highest definition known to mankind, right?”
“Right. Nothing else looks like this. But it sells TVs. What you really want, is …” and he led us over to some other TVs that looked just as good. I wondered aloud whether the entire 8K product line existed just to make us more likely to heed the wisdom of the salesman and lay out some money for the 4K.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2022-02-07.
May 3, 2022
Is all of social media just a “giant domestic surveillance operation”?
Severian posted this last week, but I’m only just getting caught up now:
I was wrong about Musk buying Twitter. Lot of that going around — the Z Man got a whole podcast on “avoiding error” from his misread of the situation. It’s well worth a listen. I, too, had a “hot take” on Musk’s offer — not that it was particularly hot, as most folks on this side were saying it, but I too thought it was a stunt. After all, Musk, like Bezos and all the other “new commerce” billionaires, don’t exist without massive government support. I figured his “offer” was stoyak — he’s got something in the works in the Imperial Capital and needed to play hardball with somebody.
But I was also working off my longstanding assumption that Twitter, Faceborg, and all the rest are essentially CIA / NSA fronts. When I first heard about Facebook, my first thought was “Wait, don’t we already have Friendster? What does this bring to the table?” My second thought was the first one I’d had about Friendster: “That’s clever, I guess, but how on earth is this going to make money? Even if they saturate it with ads, to the point where it’s unusable — which will happen in about two weeks — they can’t monetize your personal data any farther. People are pretty set in their habits — once the algorithm figures out you’re the kind of guy who likes anime and New Wave music, any further data is useless.”
Being a much more naive, trusting sort back then, I figured it was just stupidity. You know, Pets.com level stupidity. The VC boys were trying to get another dotcom bubble inflated, because if the first one proved anything, it’s that people are dumb and will keep falling for the same obvious scam over and over. I could hear them in the board rooms: “This time, instead of sticking ‘cyber’ in front of everything, we’ll call it ‘Web 2.0.’ Cha-ching!”
Obviously that didn’t happen. So I went with the common explanation that was floating around in those days, that “social media” sites made their money by selling your data to advertisers. But that doesn’t pass the smell test either. For one thing, as I said above, your habits don’t change very much. For another, as anyone who has any experience with them knows, those algorithms really suck. The other day, for instance, I was listening to some old music one of the streaming music sites. And I mean really old. Nothing I’d played the whole morning had been composed after the 17th century, but the service’s algorithm was convinced that what I’d really like to listen to next was some rapper.
Indeed, the whole point of the ads on Pandora, Spotify, whatever seems to be: To annoy you to the point where you pay for their premium service. Pandora, for instance, either really really really believes I want a Surface Pro 8 and some Taco Bell, or they’re just playing those ads every two songs to annoy me into buying the premium service (which is every ad that isn’t Surface Pro or Taco Bell). Which is just bizarre, because I haven’t had Taco Bell since college — which was 30 years ago, and I paid cash — and this essay right here is the first time I have ever even typed the words “Surface Pro 8”, much less looked at the product.
I really wouldn’t be surprised that the “algorithm” is reading itself. Hey, this guy sure has seen a lot of ads for Taco Bell and Surface Pro! He must really want some!
But the algorithm for companies whose entire business model is e-commerce is no better. Amazon seems to have gone to a “push” model — they must be selling their suppliers on the idea that they can push you stuff, which is why they always pimp the same four or five items in the “Amazon’s Choice” recommendations, no matter what you’re searching for. And these again are laughably wrong — the only things I get off Amazon are used history and philosophy books, and stuff for my dog. Based on this, they have concluded that what I’m really looking for are chick lit and beach gear.
Given all that, I came to the conclusion that “social media” (and Amazon too, probably) really only have one customer, who really does have a use for your data, and that customer’s initials are CIA. It’s a giant domestic surveillance operation.
And why wouldn’t it be? The Regime has had a legitimacy problem for a long time, and a “feedback loop” problem for longer than that. Even if we assume no ulterior motives whatsoever — fat chance, but let’s stipulate — the fact remains that public opinion polling, however you want to define it, has a similar problem as psychological studies. Since the vast majority of study participants are college undergrads, what you get is WEIRD — that’s Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, and also in a very narrow age range. Psych studies that purport to be universal are, at their very best, snapshots inside the head of the BCG.
If you haven’t encountered the Basic College Girl, he provided a thumbnail sketch here.
April 25, 2022
Trudeau’s Liberals shocked to discover that not everyone wants the internet censored
The free segment of The Line‘s weekend round-up looked at the federal government’s gone-wrong public consultation about their proposed internet censorship Online Harms bill:
Your Line editors have been diligently seeking out educated comment about the Liberals’ forays into Internet regulation and censorship; as we suspected, they are finding out the hard way that determining which speech is fit to be heard is a philosophical fools’ errand. Only a very little research into the history of liberal norms around free speech could have spared them the trouble, but, alas, this seems to be the lesson that every generation needs to re-learn from first principles.
Well, a little out-of-school learning landed in the laps of the Liberals back in September of last year via a seven-page letter written by Michele Austin, then-Twitter Canada’s head of public policy. She took the government’s proposed Online Harms Bill to task in a submission that was only revealed when this country’s lone Internet warrior, Saint Michael Geist (*sign of the cross*), filed an Access To Information request revealing Austin’s scathing critique.
To wit:
Sacrifices freedom of expression to the creation of a government run system of surveillance of anyone who uses Twitter. Even the most basic procedural fairness requirements you might expect from a government-run system such as notice or warning are absent from this proposal. The requirement to “share” information at the request of Crown is also deeply troubling.
It’s rare to see a piece of proposed legislation so poorly conceived, so profoundly over-reaching, that virtually every organization asked to comment on it proves to be against it. But so it was. As Geist notes, even organizations that one would imagine to be at least nominally in favour of a regulatory regime intended to crack down on unequivocally harmful Internet carcinomas like child porn, hate speech, and terrorism, in fact came out against it. The National Association of Friendship Centres, Canadian Centre for Child Protection, Safe Harbour Outreach Project, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, and the National Council of Canadian Muslims all noted that the government’s proposal stood to do much more harm to their respective communities than it would prevent.
Again, even a little bit of historical research would have demonstrated that those dastardly, evil, liberal values of “free speech” have traditionally done more to help marginalized communities than hinder them. But we digress.
Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has subsequently announced the government would halt its Online Harms Bill, presumably in the wake of the disastrous consultation process. So the protests did, indeed, work. But as Geist rightly notes, the fact that he even had to spend months formally seeking out these submissions to be publicly released ought to raise serious questions about this government’s commitment to openness and transparency in how it approaches one of the most foundational freedoms we have as citizens. This is not a government that is philosophically well equipped, nor technically able, to control access to information in the way it so clearly wishes to. Something to keep in mind when evaluating its other Internet bills, C-11 and C-18.
I used to regularly post links to Michael Geist’s work, but at some point in the last few months his RSS feed went down and I stopped getting updates. I’ve relinked to his Twitter feed, which hopefully will provide notice when he publishes something on this file.
Today’s post identifies at least four problems. First, lack of transparency runs counter to promises of an open, transparent government. @justintrudeau even introduced a bill on open by default in 2014. Disclosures only via ATIP are not transparency. 2/5
Second, notion that the government was simply consulting on some ideas and will now course correct requires Canadians to overlook the reality that the actual plan was to introduce this as a bill last year. This was the Internet regulation plan. 3/5
Third, “What We Heard” report from @pablorodriguez significantly understated the extent of the public criticism and feedback. Recommendations omitted, criticisms softened. Having now seen the actual submissions, I feel misled. 4/5
Most importantly, this is part of a larger Internet regulation plan:
1️⃣Bill C-11 opens the door to regulating user generated content
2️⃣Bill C-18 mandates payments for links
3️⃣Online harms wasn’t an outlier. It reflects plan for regulating the Internet.
5/5
April 23, 2022
Historic “innovation prizes” (somewhat) debunked
In the most recent Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes does a bit of heavy lifting to debunk some accreted nonsense about the origins and success of early innovation prizes:
Admiral of the Fleet Sir Cloudsley Shovell (1650-1707).
Portrait by unknown artist from the National Maritime Museum collection via Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday I had a piece in Works in Progress magazine, on the best ways to design modern innovation prizes — and why many of them fail.
I examined the famous “Longitude Prize” of 1714, and in the process busted some major myths about it. Almost every element of the popular story is wrong — something that experts on the topic like Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt have been going on about for years. The popular story’s hero, John Harrison, often portrayed as an inventor shunned by a haughty scientific establishment, actually received massive amounts of funding from the committee for awarding the prize. The story’s villain, the Astronomer Royal Neville Maskelyne, was no villain at all. And there’s very little evidence that the prize actually incentivised people to innovate. The Board of Longitude, for that matter, ended up more like a grant-giving agency — a kind of navigation-themed DARPA — than just a committee of prize judges.
You can read the full piece here.
So what is the rest of this week’s newsletter about? Well, I’d like to take the chance to bust even more myths about innovation prizes!
Let’s start with a fairly small one, to do with longitude, that I’d missed. Take the narrative about the 1707 naval disaster off the Isles of Scilly, which led to the demise of the wonderfully-named admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. The disaster is usually cited as having been the direct cause of the institution of the 1714 reward, and, of course, gives most Youtubers, bloggers, and TV presenters discussing longitude the opportunity to say the name “Sir Cloudesley Shovell”. Who wouldn’t?
I had already been sceptical of the disaster’s relevance to Parliament’s creation of the longitude reward, because of the seven-year delay. I had then noticed, when researching for the piece, that the disaster was hardly mentioned at all by those lobbying for the reward, by those consulted on it, or by the MPs who voted on it. It seemed to be irrelevant as a cause, so I repurposed that part of the popular story to simply use as a general example of a naval disaster caused by not knowing one’s position at sea.
But even my downgrading of its relevance, it turns out, may have been over-generous. Yesterday, after I published my piece, Richard Dunn pointed out to me that not only was the 1707 disaster irrelevant as a cause of the 1714 reward, but that the disaster itself may not have had very much to do with a specific failure to find longitude. It certainly wasn’t singled out as a cause at the time.
As for the actual causes, they were probably compass error, inconsistent charts, and even uncertainty over the fleet’s latitude, not just its longitude. And to the extent that not knowing the fleet’s longitude appears to have been a major part of the problem, it was also related to failures to accurately calculate longitude on land — something that could already be done using existing techniques. The navigational text-books, for example, disagreed on the position of Cape Spartel, in Morocco, from which the fleet departed and took its bearings. As the maritime historian William E. May put it, when he looked into the detail of the fleet’s route and navigational measurements, “the errors in longitudes in the accepted text-books must have introduced a danger just as great as any errors in reckoning the longitude.”
QotD: The “Modern System” of combat
The modern system assumes that any real opponent can develop enough firepower to both obliterate any fixed defense (like a line of trenches) or to make direct approaches futile. So armies have to focus on concealment and cover to avoid overwhelming firepower (you can’t hit what you can’t see!); since concealment only works until you do something detectable (like firing), you need to be able [to] move to new concealed positions rapidly. If you want to attack, you need to use your own firepower to fix the enemy and then maneuver against them, rather than punching straight up the middle (punching straight up the middle, I should note, as a tactic, was actually quite successful pre-1850 or so) or trying to simply annihilate the enemy with massed firepower (like the great barrages of WWI), because your enemy will also be using cover and concealment to limit the effectiveness of your firepower (on this, note Biddle, “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare” Foreign Affairs 82.2 (2003); Biddle notes that even quantities of firepower that approach nuclear yields delivered via massive quantities of conventional explosives were insufficient to blast entrenched infantry out of position in WWI.)
That means that modern system forces are focused on cover and concealment in defense, but on mobility – often very rapid mobility – in attack. The doctrines that developed to operationalize variations on the modern system (Bewegungskrieg, Deep Battle, AirLand Battle, and so on) all relied (intentionally or not) on pushing the tempo of an attack beyond the ability of a defender to coordinate a defense, on the theory that this would produce tactical and even operational collapse. That theory, it turns out, works very well, but it comes with some costs (I should note here I am stretching the definition of Biddle’s “modern system” a bit and also glossing over a lot of detail in maneuver warfare doctrines).
The thing is, embracing the Modern System is hard. Actually pulling this off requires a relatively high degree of training. It also requires delegating a lot of authority down to lower officers and NCOs. You need both because individual small units need to keep moving and maneuvering even when they may not have time to get direct orders from above, and they need the freedom to respond to local conditions and utilize local terrain, often down to the squad or fireteam level. In turn, that means it is really hard to do if your common soldiers are undertrained, simply illiterate, or if (as in an authoritarian regime) you can’t trust your officers with any kind of independence. Modern authoritarian “coup-proofing” makes it practically impossible to actually implement the modern system effectively (which is part of why most tin-pot dictators produce such poor military performance; though note that not all authoritarian regimes need to coup-proof in this way).
It’s also expensive. Getting the mobility to pull this off on the operational level means mechanizing almost everything in your army, so that the infantry and artillery can keep up with the advance units and so that the logistics can keep up with them. Doing that requires a lot of command sophistication, but it also just requires a ton of hardware. Everything needs to be motorized, mechanized and portable, and then all of that needs to be tied into radio communications, GPS, and so on. And because you’re delegating authority down to smaller and smaller units, those units need all of that expensive communications, and so on. All of that hardware costs a fortune.
But – and this is the core of Biddle’s argument – when modern system armies encounter armies that have not implemented the modern system in conventional pitched battle, the result is generally a crushingly one-sided affair. That’s going to matter a lot for the analysis going forward: so far, it doesn’t seem possible to hold territory (meaning not fighting as guerillas, but actually engaging in positional warfare in the Maoist sense) with a non-modern system army against a modern system army. Non-modern system armies that try get pretty badly wrecked. The 1991 Iraq war is the traditional case study in just how badly wrecked: the coalition (using the modern system) took 292 KIA; 776 WIA compared to the Iraqi Army (without the modern system) suffering 25,000+ KIA and 75,000+ WIA. That stunning lopsidedness is going to matter a lot for the argument going forward.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-20.
April 19, 2022
QotD: “Bog iron” in ancient and medieval society
One distinction here is between bog iron and iron in ore deposits. Bog iron is formed when ground-water picks up iron from iron-ore deposits, where that iron is then oxidized under acidic conditions to form chunks of iron minerals (goethite, magnetite, hematite, etc.), typically in smallish chunks. Bog iron is much easier to smelt because it contains fewer impurities than iron ore in rock deposits, but the quantity of iron available from bog iron is relatively low (although actually renewable, unlike mines; a bog can be harvested for iron again after a few decades as the processes which produce the bog iron continue). Because of its low output, bog iron tends to be an important part of the iron supply only when production is relatively low, such as during the Pre-Roman Iron Age in Europe, or the early medieval period.
But what I want to stress here at the outset is that while the local variety of iron may vary based on conditions, iron ores are sufficiently common that prior to the industrial revolution, it wasn’t generally necessary to trade or transport them over long distances because most areas have deposits. There are some exceptions (Japan is notoriously mineral poor – my limited geological understanding is that this is common in volcanic land formations – and while it does have some iron deposits, they are few and relatively small), but for the most part, getting iron ore was not hard. As we’ll see, timber availability was actually often a more pressing limitation on iron exploitation than the ore itself […]
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.
