For the partisan of deadly nonsense, the person on the other side is neither right nor wrong, since rightness and wrongness are never to be discussed: the person on the other side is merely a jackass, a bigot, ignorant, uninformed, pathetically stupid, Neanderthal, reactionary, bitter, a yokel, a class-traitor, and racist, racist, racist, and racist.
If you are arguing with someone, say, who has a better education than you, a higher I.Q., with perhaps a doctorate in law and a career as a journalist and a published series of books on his resume, that does not matter. The mere fact that he comes to different conclusions than the Party line indicates that he is stupid uneducated Nazi bigot, and a stupid bigoted fascist racist moron.
This is argumentum ad cloaca —— ratiocination via offal. Whatever the loudest donkey laughs loudest at, you take to be untrue. Since that was the way (admit it!) you yourself were convinced, O ye of little mind, it is the first, usually the only means, to which you resort to convince others: the volume and clamor is what matters, not the content.
The reason for the inadequacy of these condemnations, the reason why they are so unimaginative, is because of the paucity of the moral vocabulary of the Left. They do not have words to express outrage, so they sneer and yodel. They are like creature struck dumb, and only able to act out their condemnation by means of antic pantomime.
The more closely they follow Marx, the more impoverished their moral vocabulary becomes. You cannot call someone evil once you accept the proposition that all standards of good and evil are merely genetically-determined group survival behaviors, or merely culturally determined artifacts, or merely ideological superstructures meant to promote class interests. Your concept has lost its referents: it can be used only metaphorically, or ironically.
Likewise, you cannot call someone damned if you don’t believe in damnation. There is no such thing as blasphemy if there is nothing sacred, supernatural, or divine.
Likewise again, you cannot call someone illogical if logic is no longer the standard used to separate self-consistent from self-contradictory statements: because then you would have to argue the merits of the case, and rely on reason, like Adam Smith, rather than on verbal fetishes, like Karl Marx.
Our Progressive detractors have to call the object of their scorn a racist (or a parallel word, such as sexist, lookist, homophobe, capitalist, colorist, agist, whateverist) because that is the only arrow in their quiver. That is the only thing they have to shoot, so they shoot, and do not care how short of the target the dart falls.
John C. Wright, “The Crazy Years and their Empty Moral Vocabulary”, John C. Wright, 2019-02-18.
March 19, 2022
QotD: The sterility of partisan political argument
March 18, 2022
The “DeSantis Doctrine”
Kurt Schlichter confesses a man-crush on Florida governor Ron DeSantis:
Governor Ron DeSantis speaking at the 2021 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida on 18 July, 2021.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
You gotta hand it to a guy who convinces Democrats to die on the hill of defending perverted groomers talking about sex with little school kids. It’s on-brand for their fellow travelers at The Lincoln Project, but you would think that Democrats actually want to win elections. But no – they want to make the schools safe for pedos, and they don’t care who knows it. But they’ll care plenty in November when parents around the country come out and vote for The Party of Not Hitting on Der Kinder.
Donald Trump has his record of achievement – economic success and peace abroad. But Ron DeSantis has the DeSantis Doctrine, sort of like the Monroe Doctrine, except instead of keeping shady foreigners out of our hemisphere, the DeSantis Doctrine keeps woke fascists out of our lives.It was DeSantis who started the fire that burned the pyre of Democrat hopes and dreams they jumped onto in their campaign against the Florida anti-grooming statute. But that’s only his latest fight with the elite. DeSantis has been laying down the law in Florida, literally, and in a way even Donald Trump never did. At some level, Donald Trump still has some residual respect for the trappings of the elite. He’s impressed by name universities and huge corporations, and for all his much-justified complaining, he still cavorts with institutions that hate him, like the NYT. He’s not yet completely done with the institutions, but DeSantis is. DeSantis is all honey badger, laying waste and making the rubble bounce.
It’s the DeSantis Doctrine, and it’s summed up this way: Your garbage institutions don’t mean Schiff to me. I am going to ruthlessly wield my power to protect normal people from your depredations. And I’m going to smile doing it.
Did the head of China-hugging Disney really think he was going to push Big Ron around? The nattering twenty-somethings and woke pronoun people in his company and on social media thought they could leverage their power to make this huge Florida employer bring DeSantis to heel over the threat that creepy weirdos could no longer chat up kindergartners about sex in schools. So this dude – who shrimps Chi Com toes even as his commie masters torment, torture, and terminate Uighurs and prop up Putin – comes out and really expects that DeSantis will fold. And then DeSantis, delighted at the chance to figuratively post a rodent skull on a pike, told the Mouse to pound some Sunshine State sand.
But I was informed by all the smart people with blue checks trapped in a vortex, which keeps them forever in the year 2005, that conservatives were supposed to hate regulation and love big corporations.
Well, things change – among them, the left, which decided that it was going to weaponize every institution against us, including corporations. A key element of that campaign is neutralizing normal people’s retaliation by barring us – through the application of principles that exist only in a paradigm that no longer does – from exercising our own power. “It’s so unseemly for a governor to attack a corporation!” Perhaps, in a world where corporations tend to literally mind their own business and not use their economic power to affect policy. But it’s ridiculous to expect that, in a world where corporations regularly use their power to affect politics, we normal people are somehow barred from using our own power – political power, including the power to regulate – to protect ourselves. You don’t get to change the rules, then expect us to remain bound by the old ones.
Well, you can expect that – many do, in fact – but Ron DeSantis scoffs at such unilateral disarmament. He’s all about the massive retaliation.
March 17, 2022
The “Three-Block”, “Four-Block”, or “n-Block” war
In The Line, Andrew Potter explains the genesis of the original “Three-Block War” idea and how a Canadian general tried to put theory into practice:
During General Rick Hillier’s first visit to Colorado Springs as Chief of Defence Staff, he takes a few minutes to talk with Tech. Sgt. Devin Fisher of NORAD and USNORTHCOM Public Affairs about Canada-U.S. Relations
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1999, a US Marine general named Charles Krulak wrote a piece in which he claimed that the future of combat for the Marines would be in urban environments in failed or failing states. In these situations, front line infantry might be doing humanitarian relief in one part of the city, performing peacekeeping duties in another, while doing intense urban combat in a third. He called this the “Three Block War“. Figuring out how to prepare and train for this scenario would be the central military challenge of the 21st century.
While the Three Block War was picked up and booted around as an interesting idea, it was never formalized into Marine doctrine. But one person who did take it seriously was Rick Hillier, the former head of the Canadian military who brought it into the Canadian forces when he took over as chief of the land staff in 2003, arguing that the Three Block War in failed and failing states was the future of warfare. He wanted a CAF that was trained and kitted out for this reality. When he became Chief of the Defence Staff in 2005, Hillier kept pushing this idea on Paul Martin and the Liberals, who loved his “vision” and firm sense of priority-setting.
In Hillier’s hands, the Three Block War concept was a disaster. Some American analysts blamed the strategy for Canada’s elevated casualty rates in Kandahar. The concept also came under considerable scrutiny from Canadian military analysts. In a highly critical paper, Walter Dorn and Michael Varey described the three block war idea as “fatally flawed“. While the Three Block War concept might have served as a useful description of a certain type of tactical reality (amplified maybe by a few too many viewings of Black Hawk Down), as a strategic concept it had a number of problems. For example, it wasn’t clear how it would apply to other armed services, or to theatres other than urban centres. It seemed to threaten the specificity of mandate and mission that is crucial to military operations. It clearly ran the risk of “block inflation” — why not throw governance, economic development, general nation building, and anything else you think you can get the military to do into the hopper? Indeed, in 2005 General James Mathis co-authored a piece proposing the concept of the four block war, which added psychological and information operations to the mix.
Ultimately, Dorn and Varey were concerned that crucial distinctions central to warfare were being elided. As they put it, the whole point of doctrine is to make a clear delineation between things that are “war” and things that are “not war”, and the Three Block War threatens to make everything into a type of war.
Two decades later the verdict is in, and it looks like everyone was right. When it comes to the tactical environment, people like Krulak, Hillier, and Mathis were more prescient than they might ever have imagined, at least if Ukraine is any template for how modern warfare is evolving. Yet at the same time, everything the critics of the Three Block War concept worried about has also come to pass: the confusion of mission and mandates, the endless proliferation of “blocks”, and most seriously, the assimilation of everything, and everyone, into “war”.
In his original article, Krulak argued that the reality of the Three Block War meant that any local engagement or interaction could have repercussions on the mission as a whole. For example, if a squad of Marines based in a “peacekeeping” block of the city gets jumpy and opens fire on a civilian truck carrying humanitarian aid (and not a truck bomb), that could have serious impacts for the entire strategic effort. And so he coined the notion of the “strategic corporal”, a front line soldier who would have the training, judgement, and moral fibre to do his or her job in a way that would always support strategic objectives.
If everything is about justice, then nothing is
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander wonders why everything these days is said to be about “justice”:
Freddie deBoer says we’re a planet of cops. Maybe that’s why justice is eating the world.
Helping the poor becomes economic justice. If they’re minorities, then it’s racial justice, itself a subspecies of social justice. Saving the environment becomes environmental justice, except when it’s about climate change in which case it’s climate justice. Caring about young people is actually about fighting for intergenerational justice. The very laws of space and time are subject to spatial justice and temporal justice.
I can’t find clear evidence on Google Trends that use of these terms is increasing — I just feel like I’ve been hearing them more and more often. Nor can I find a simple story behind why — it’s got to have something to do with Rawls, but I can’t trace any of these back to specific Rawlsian philosophers. Some of it seems to have something to do with Amartya Sen, who I don’t know enough about to have an opinion. But mostly it just seems to be the zeitgeist.
This is mostly a semantic shift — instead of saying “we should help the poor”, you can say “we should pursue economic justice”. But different framings have slightly different implications and connotations, and it’s worth examining what connotations all this justice talk has.
“We should help the poor” mildly suggests a friendly optimistic picture of progress. We are helpers — good people who are nice to others because that’s who we are. And the poor get helped — the world becomes a better place. Sometimes people go further: “We should save the poor” (or the whales, doesn’t matter). That makes us saviors, a rather more impressive title than helpers. And at the end of it, people/whales/whatever are saved — we’re one step closer to saving the world. Extrapolate the line out far enough, and you can dream of utopia.
“We should pursue economic justice” suggests other assumptions. Current economic conditions are unjust. There is some particular way to make them just, or at least closer to just. We have some kind of obligation to pursue it. We are not helpers or saviors, who can pat ourselves on the back and feel heroic for leaving the world better than we found it. We are some weird superposition of criminals and cops, both responsible for breaking the moral law and responsible for restoring it, trying to redress some sort of violation. The end result isn’t utopia, it’s people getting what they deserve.
(cf. Thomas Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just.”)
What is “climate justice”? Was the Little Ice Age unjust? What if it killed millions? Is it unjust for Mali to have a less pleasant climate than California? What if I said that there’s a really high correlation between temperature and GDP, and Mali’s awful climate is a big part of why it’s so poor? Climate justice couldn’t care less about any of this. Why not? Hard to say. Maybe because there’s no violation and no villain.
March 16, 2022
QotD: Muslim views of western culture
a collection of casinos, supermarkets and whore-houses linked together by endless highways passing through nowhere. All that money, all that effort all those resources that are wasted so that idiotic women and shallow men can prolong their lives … You see ancient women who refuse to die at a normal time and who continue to paint themselves and crave youthful lovers right to the edge of the grave … To eat tons of hamburgers and popcorn, to imbibe oceans of Coca-Cola and whisky, to watch hundreds of hours of stupid television, to copulate mechanically a few hundred times, to be on guard minute against being robbed, raped or murdered. That is the American way of life.
Our civilisation is regarded as evil, and its destruction is taken as a sacred duty for reasons both defensive and offensive.
Defensive
There can be no doubt that Khomeini was a firm anti-communist. But, unlike the timid monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula, he saw quite clearly where the true threat to Islam lay. Throughout his reign, the Russians presented at least a potential threat to the northern borders of Iran, But this was as nothing to the actual ideological threat of the west, Marxism in Iran had converted its tens of thousands, and influenced its hundreds of thousands. But western civilisation — with its clothing fashions, its films, its music, its enshrinement of individual happiness, its secular knowledge — had captured its millions. There was a “Great Satan” devouring Islam; and its body was not communism, but the West; and its head was not Russia, but America, “We must break those pens” he wrote, “that teach people there is something other than divine law. We must smash those mouths that tell the people they are free to say whatever they please, regardless of right and wrong in accordance with the commands of the Almighty”. On this reasoning, to carry the fight from Iran, or wherever, into the west, is the equivalent of turning from the periphery to the centre of an infection.
Offensive
In one of his occasional attempts at humane argument, Khomeini justified a war of extirpation against the west on the following grounds:
If one allows the Infidels to continue playing their role of Corruptors on Earth, their eventual moral punishment will be all the stronger. Thus, if we kill the Infidels in order to put a stop to their [corrupting] activities, we have indeed done them a service. For their eventual punishment will be less.
For the most part, however, it is conversion to Islam that is desired of people in the west. Only those refusing to convert are to be slaughtered. In the first instance, all those areas of the world that were once Islamic, but have since been lost, are to be restored; and all those areas that contain sizeable Moslem minorities are to be Islamised. In 1982, a new map of the world was presented to Khomeini by the Cartological Society in Teheran. It was divided into three regions, distinguished by three colours. First, in green, came the House of Islam — this being the 41 member states of the Islamic Conference, together with soviet central Asia, southern Spain, Malta and Lampedusa, Albania, part of Yugoslavia, north eastern China, parts of Siam, Burma, the Philippines, and most of Africa. The remaining areas, the red and black, were divided between communism and the west. But the final state of affairs is to be a totally Islamic world. No part whatever is to be left in the hands of the “Cross worshippers”, as the Christians are contemptuously termed. Moslems in Great Britain at the moment comprise barely three per cent of the population. Nonetheless, “[t]hose Moslems” says Dr Shabbir Akhtar of the Bradford Council of Mosques, “who find it intolerable to live in a United Kingdom contaminated with the Rushdie virus need to seriously consider the Islamic alternatives of emigration (hijira) to the House of Islam or a declaration of holy war (jihad) in the House of Rejection. The latter may well seem a kind of hasty militancy that is out of the question, though, with Allah on one’s side, one is never in the minority. And England, like all else, belongs to Allah.
March 15, 2022
QotD: Pecan pie
I won’t even discuss the lowly pumpkin pie, which reminds me of nothing more than the goo that seeps out of a broken sewage pipe or the remains of the vegetable bin after a 10-day blackout.
You apple pie people may have a point, but really, the best part of any apple pie is the crust, so just climb down off that high horse!
Blueberry you say? Yes, I will grant the glory of a well-made blueberry pie, but on the second day it is a soggy mess, while my pecan pie is a wonderful accompaniment to a great cup of coffee. And bacon. But that doesn’t even have to be said.
Key lime and Boston cream and … um … other pies are certainly good eating, but for sheer pie power and authority there is nothing quite like American pecan pie served after a sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner.
[Here’s my go-to recipe … probably from Cooks Illustrated, but I don’t remember]
CBD, “Food Thread: Family, Friends And Pecan Pie … But Mostly Pecan Pie … And Family And Friends!”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2021-11-21.
March 14, 2022
“Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover Warren Harding again …”
Kind words for the oft-maligned 29th president of the United States? Daniel J. Mitchell is all over it:
Warren G. Harding, 14 June 1920.
Library of Congress control number 2016828156
Today, we’re going to celebrate the fiscal achievements of Warren Harding.
Most notably, as illustrated by this chart based on OMB data, he presided over a period of remarkable spending discipline.
Harding also launched very big — and very effective — reductions in tax rates.
And his agenda of less government and lower tax rates helped bring about a quick end to a massive economic downturn (unlike the big-government policies of Hoover and Roosevelt, which deepened and lengthened the Great Depression).
In an article for National Review last year, Kyle Smith praised President Harding’s economic stewardship.
In a moment of national crisis, Warren G. Harding restored the economic health of the United States … America in 1921 was in a state of crisis, reeling from the worst recession in half a century, the most severe deflationary spiral on record … Unemployment, it is now estimated, stood somewhere between 8.7 and 11.7 percent as returning soldiers inflated the size of the working-age population.
Between 1919 and August of 1921 the Dow Jones average plummeted 47 percent. Harding’s response to this emergency was largely to let the cycle play out … The recession ended in mid-year, and boom times followed. Harding and Congress cut federal spending nearly in half, from 6.5 percent of GDP to 3.5 percent. The top tax rate came down from 73 percent to 25, and the tax base broadened. Unemployment came down to an estimated 2 to 4 percent … Harding was a smashing success in a historically important role as the anti-Wilson: He restored a classically liberal, rights-focused, limited government, and deserves immense credit for the economic boom that kicked off in his first year and continued throughout the rest of the 1920s.
Smith’s article also praises Harding for reversing some of Woodrow Wilson’s most odious policies, such as racial discrimination and imprisoning political opponents (Wilson also had a terrible record on economic issues).
Of course, Harding’s term is much more often remembered for the scandals, and as most modern historians are far more interested in Woodrow Wilson’s bold progressivism they almost always decry Harding and then Coolidge for dismantling a lot of Wilson’s more enthusiastic progressive projects. Even H.L. Mencken — very much not a Wilson fan — found Harding to be not to his taste in turn:
On the question of the logical content of Dr. Harding’s harangue of last Friday, I do not presume to have views … But when it comes to the style of the great man’s discourse, I can speak with … somewhat more competence, for I have earned most of my livelihood for twenty years past by translating the bad English of a multitude of authors into measurably better English. Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm … of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
March 13, 2022
Rommel Leaves Africa – WW2 – 185 – March 12, 1943
World War Two
Published 12 Mar 2022Erwin Rommel loses his command and leaves Tunisia, while change in American command there puts George Patton in charge. On the ground the Axis lose the Battle of Medenine, but in the Soviet Union, Axis forces are on the move and heading for Kharkov.
(more…)
The amazing railroad movie that damaged Buster Keaton’s career – The General
Train of Thought
Published 26 Nov 2021In this video, we take a look at the tragedy of The General and how, what is now considered a classic of the silent era, was panned by audiences upon its release. Yes, I have been watching a lot of Buster Keaton films recently, how can you tell.
The General (Give it a watch): https://youtu.be/iHlBMKtgPOA
Please subscribe for more
This video falls under the fair use act of 1976
March 10, 2022
Salvaging WW2 Battlefields – How Vehicles & Weapons Were Reused
Mark Felton Productions
Published 25 Nov 2021After the wounded and dead had been removed from a battlefield, what happened to all the military vehicles and weapons left lying around? Find out here.
Dr. Mark Felton is a well-known British historian, the author of 22 non-fiction books, including bestsellers Zero Night and Castle of the Eagles, both currently being developed into movies in Hollywood. In addition to writing, Mark also appears regularly in television documentaries around the world, including on The History Channel, Netflix, National Geographic, Quest, American Heroes Channel and RMC Decouverte. His books have formed the background to several TV and radio documentaries. More information about Mark can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fe…
Help support my channel:
https://www.paypal.me/markfeltonprodu…
https://www.patreon.com/markfeltonpro…Disclaimer: All opinions and comments expressed in the ‘Comments’ section do not reflect the opinions of Mark Felton Productions. All opinions and comments should contribute to the dialogue. Mark Felton Productions does not condone written attacks, insults, racism, sexism, extremism, violence or otherwise questionable comments or material in the ‘Comments’ section, and reserves the right to delete any comment violating this rule or to block any poster from the channel.
Credits: US National Archives; Library of Congress
Thumbnail colorisation (left image) by Paul Reynolds
March 9, 2022
Switzerland – The Heart of European Spying – WW2 – Spies & Ties 14
World War Two
Published 8 Mar 2022As a neutral country surrounded by occupied and axis countries, Switzerland was a major spy hub during World War Two. Surrounded by the Swiss Alps, the Axis and Allies fought a parallel spy war to get the upper hand.
(more…)
March 8, 2022
“Putin’s ambition to gather together ‘Russian’ lands has been clear for almost two decades now”
Katherine Bayford on the awkward situation many western nations find themselves in, being both dependent to a greater or lesser degree on oil and gas imports from Russia and also having allowed their armed forces to degrade significantly over time:
After months of military build-up and overt threats, educated, intelligent and respected experts across the West woke on Thursday, 24 February — genuinely shocked to discover that Russia had launched an invasion of Ukraine.
How is it that people paid to conduct exactly this sort of analysis could be so badly wrong? The experts who apparently completely underestimated Russia’s intention to undertake major military action, ranged from analysts and academics to President Zelensky himself. Russia’s intentions were hardly a secret. To be shocked at this invasion — not that it occurred when it did, or that it was undertaken in the particular way it was, but to be shocked at the very realistic possibility that it could have occurred — was foolishly naïve. Many of these analysts, whose careers have been built upon understanding the actions of non-western states, suffer a profound inability to understand actors with different thought patterns and belief systems. At its core, their failure seems to arise from academics, journalists and diplomats appealing to exclusively liberal fears and values. Economic penalties, the loss of reputation in liberal institutions and calls to value human rights were meant to convince a man, with minimal respect for these, to act against his own interests.
This failure of understanding limits the ability of the West to successfully counter Russian action. How can you act against an objective when you were unable to understand it in the first place? Western analysis, with its reliance on the tools of diplomacy and soft coercion, has forgotten that when soft power fails, hard power must be a credible threat. After years of managed decline, how much of a deterrent are our increasingly degraded militaries? As long as the West prioritises soft power values over hard power realities, nations who do the opposite are free to act how they may.
Russia’s attempt to reassert itself as a Great Power has been a project decades in the making. Since Putin’s ascendency to power, Russia has reached the fourth-highest military expenditure in the world; made consistent and escalating interventions in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria; enacted an increasing clampdown on dissidents; and built up a significant currency reserve. Putin’s stated belief that the fall of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” was not born of any commitment to communist politics, but spoke to the decline of Russian influence over its neighbours in the post-Soviet years that followed. Putin wishes to make Russia a Great Power that can intervene and win abroad, prop up its allies and exterminate its ideological allies on foreign ground, without fear of diminishment on the world stage.
Putin’s ambition to gather together “Russian” lands has been clear for almost two decades now. His growing nationalist rhetoric and action over the past decade should have only indicated that this ambition was strengthening. That he had interventionist, even imperial, geopolitical goals should have come as a surprise to precisely none. He has long been open about those he admires (Peter the Great), those he despises (late and post-Soviet leadership) and his opinion of Russia’s rightful place in the world (ascendant).
Francis Turner offers the first sensible explanation of the lack of Russian airpower over the Ukraine that has been puzzling experts since the very start of the war:
Everyone knows that old quote that “amateur generals study tactics, professional ones study logistics”
Well, apparently that does not apply to the Russian high command, who seem to have failed to study logistics. I admit I didn’t see this coming, but then, as I said in my last post I am not a military expert and I kind of assumed that, while Russia might have a day or two of confusion as the initial “go in fast and topple the leadership” strategy is replaced by “go slower and more methodically”, it would adjust and continue to press forward.
I appear to have been wrong in that assumption.
First, what may seem like a slight detour, many people have noted Russia’s lack of air superiority. One reason for that could be that the Ukrainians have captured Russian mobile air defense systems in full working order. Which means they have complete lists of IFF signals, scheduled changes, cryptography settings etc. etc. Now potentially the Russians can change them, but they cannot change them via a radio broadcast because the Ukrainians will listen, so the only way to do an update is via soldiers on the ground hand delivering the updates (yes they could use land lines for some of the journey, but eventually they have to download them from some computer (print them out? copy to a USB drive?) and take them to the actual piece of equipment. Which takes time. Particularly since the vehicles doing the hand delivery have to share the roads with other parts of the Russian invasion force. But as the first link in the paragraph speculates another reason could be that the Russian airforce can’t actually coordinate things so that Ukrainian air defense systems can be targeted as they defend key sites against other Russian air attacks.
Failure to be able to take out Ukrainian air defenses is, IMHO, a symptom either way and it contributes to the bigger logistics issue because it means that the only way Russian forces can get resupply is on the ground, particularly since they can’t hold Hostomel airport either.
So logistics. Nitay Arbel posted this fascinating video about how Russians do logistics in Russia (they use the railways) and how that doesn’t work in Ukraine (Ukraine has trashed all cross border rail links). So the Russians need to use trucks. This was known and the consequences/limitations of that (should have been) entirely predictable, yet the Russians seem to not figured it all out in advance and been taken by surprise. Trent Talenko has a blog post and many tweet threads about how, particularly in the inland/north of the country, the Russians have to keep their convoys on the roads and that’s a major problem.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, one of the big differences between NATO and NATO-adjacent western militaries and those of the Warsaw Pact (and those aligned with or primarily equipped by the Soviets) was the different ratio between “teeth” and “tail”. Soviet-equipped militaries emphasized the “teeth” — the tanks, the guns, the attack aircraft and helicopters, that were the striking edge of an army’s advance. NATO and other western powers were much less about the number of tanks/guns/aircraft as they were about having enough logistical backup to keep their smaller numbers of trigger-pullers fed, supported, and resupplied with ammunition. This meant to a civilian eye, Soviet armies had many more obvious combat-capable vehicles than their western equivalents. Soviet doctrine called for units to be “burned up” in combat rather than conserved even if it meant giving up territory. Soviet battle plans tended to assume an all-out attack would not need further backup, reinforcement, or re-supply, because it would either succeed completely or fail completely and further efforts would be through alternative attack paths using different formations.
From what little we can definitely see in the current fighting in Ukraine, the Russian military is still much more Soviet in organization than it is “western”. As Marko Kloos put it on Twitter:
The Battle of Flamborough Head – Nice Ship, I’ll Take It
Drachinifel
Published 28 Aug 2019Today we look at John Paul Jones’ most famous battle, where the quality of not giving up no matter the odds shines through in a big way!
Want to support the channel? – https://www.patreon.com/Drachinifel
Want a shirt/mug/hoodie – https://shop.spreadshirt.com/drachini…
Want a medal? – https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/Drachinifel
Want to talk about ships? https://discord.gg/TYu88mt
Want to get some books? www.amazon.co.uk/shop/drachinifel
Drydock Episodes in podcast format – https://soundcloud.com/user-21912004
March 6, 2022
Another Naval Disaster for Japan – WW2 – 184 – March 5, 1943
World War Two
Published 5 Mar 2022The Japanese again fail to reinforce New Guinea, losing many transport ships, and their forces there are ever more isolated. In Tunisia the Axis lose a bunch of new Tiger tanks, but in the Soviet Union it is the Axis forces that are on the offensive as Erich von Manstein’s offensive continues.
(more…)
NATO’s “responsibility” for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
In The Line‘s weekly round-up for freeloading cheapskates like me (we only get a diet version of the full post), Boris and Natasha explain why it’s all the fault of NATO and the west, and that Russia is completely innocent of any wrongdoing:
As the world continues to watch the horrors unfolding in Europe, we in our cozy Western enclaves are left to re-discover uncomfortable realities about the geopolitical circumstances around us. Namely, the world is not as safe as once we had thought, and America is not the only great power capable of inflicting atrocities on a smaller, sovereign nation for its own benefit. In fact, watching the situation in Europe play out, we’re reminded that America is not a uniquely evil entity at all — and that many of the moral errors it has committed were made precisely because the neighbourhoods in which it presumed to operate are neither peaceful, easy, nor kind.
These are old lessons of history and history — unlike ideology — is messy and complicated. And as we once again draw out those long-forgotten lessons, we find ourselves confronting old arguments as well.
Namely, we see a lot of thoughtful individuals offering the contrarian argument that NATO and the West are ultimately to blame for the invasion in Ukraine because of our military alliance’s expansion into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. This undermined the old Russian empire’s dignity, the argument goes, and fomented Cold War paranoia that was bound to break out into an aggressive military response.
We at The Line expect this decades-old position will be debated for decades more to come, but in light of the events of the last week, we find it less compelling than ever. We offer the following three problems with this line of argument.
The first is that it falls into the trap of assuming that NATO — and, by implication, America — is the Main Character of global history.
In the minds of the NATO blamers, neither Russia’s domestic political intrigues, Vladimir Putin’s personal ideological commitments and sanity, nor the histories and cultures of the actual regions in question are given greater weight than NATO’s scheming or Joe Biden’s speaking skills. The solipsism and self-regard that this argument implies is, in truth, both stunning and entirely in keeping with the United States’ national character (and the West in a broader sense). By this metric, it’s America/the West, and only America/the West, that is the true global protagonist. The rest of humanity are just bit-players in a grand Western narrative.
As Canadians, we find these assumptions particularly offensive. Ours is a country that exists between America and Russia, and while we may disagree with specific American military engagements and tactics — and will say so! — we are not hapless serfs of American imperialism. Let’s lay out our choices plainly: a middle power like Canada can ally itself with Russia, China, NATO, or find some form of interdependence with a patchwork of one-on-one military alliances. Even if we were to take our economic interdependence with America out of the equation, NATO is our best option by far. We mean … Jesus. Duh.
We will pick NATO 999 times out of 1,000 and so will most free people living in democratic societies. Because the other options are clearly, obviously much, much worse: NATO is the certified preferred military alliance of the free peoples on this planet.
We welcome historical self-reflection and improvement, but America cannot allow itself to wallow so deeply in its own self-flagellating narcissism that it forgets this fact. America is not the Main Character of our shared history, but it is a leader within the global community, and must rise to that role and NATO with it.
In the Daily Sceptic, Noah Carl notes that “the West’s response [to the Russian invasion] seems to have been slapped together on the fly amidst a storm of social media outrage”:
The West has responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in three main ways: pouring arms into Ukraine to buttress the country’s defence; imposing heavy sanctions on Russia to cripple its economy; and essentially “cancelling” Russia by shutting down its foreign media, censoring its cultural exports, and banning its athletes from international competitions.
The hope seems to be that either one of three things will happen: the Russians will be defeated or forced to withdraw; Putin will be overthrown in a palace coup or popular uprising; or he’ll be brought to the negotiating table and made to accept terms highly unfavourable to Russia. While this strategy may work, I’ve yet to read a cogent defence of it.
In fact, the strategy could have a number of negative second-order effects – i.e., unintended consequences – that haven’t been properly thought through.
As several people have observed, the West’s response seems to have been slapped together on the fly amidst a storm of social media outrage, as opposed to being carefully devised after consideration of all possible eventualities. One Substack commenter noted:
Just as COVID-19 is the first pandemic in the Age of Twitter, so the Ukraine invasion is, in some sense, the first war in the Age of Twitter. As it unfolds, we are seeing many disturbing parallels to the events of early 2020. People are rapidly normalising once-fringe ideas like a NATO-enforced no-fly zone, direct U.S. conflict with Russia, regime change in Moscow, and even, incredibly, the use of nuclear weapons. Just as with Covid, we’re seeing the rapid abandonment of longstanding Western policies. The overnight flips on German defence spending and SWIFT are like the overturning of conventional public health policies on masking, lockdowns, and so on.
Let’s deal with each aspect of the Western response in turn. Pouring arms into Ukraine may precipitate a Russian defeat. But it could just as easily prolong the conflict, leading to many more Ukrainian deaths. The Syrian civil war has dragged on for more than ten years and claimed more than 400,000 lives, in part thanks to external arming of rebel groups.
If there’s a good chance the Ukrainians can win, supplying them with arms makes sense. But if they’re unlikely to prevail, why would we want to prolong the conflict?
One possible answer is to deter the next autocratic ruler from launching a similar invasion. But how much deterrence does supplying arms really achieve, especially if Russia ends up winning? Now, entering the war on Ukraine’s side – that would achieve deterrence, but it’s something the West isn’t willing to do (for obvious reasons).
Brendan O’Neill is hoping that the conflict in Ukraine can also help end the “Age of Fragility” in the west:
It is not the most pressing question to emerge from Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine, but I have nonetheless found myself wondering – what will happen with the word “erasure” following this terrible war? Ukraine’s heroic president Volodymyr Zelensky used the e-word the other day. Russia, he said, is out to “erase our history”. The Putin regime and its marauding forces want to “erase our country, erase us all”, Zelensky cried, aptly, given the vigour and bigotry with which Vladimir Putin has mocked and violently undermined Ukrainian sovereignty. Putin clearly sees Ukraine as a joke nation that can be casually scrubbed from the map and collapsed back into Russia.
Zelensky’s impassioned, existential words got me thinking: which woke warrior here in the mercifully war-free West will dare to misuse the word “erasure” now? “Erasure” is a key buzzword in the PC lexicon. There’s trans erasure, LGBT erasure, the erasure of black women with “kinky hair”. Only erasure here doesn’t mean “the removal of all traces of something”. It certainly doesn’t mean a foreign power using brute force to extinguish your most basic rights. No, it means a gender-critical feminist turning up to your campus and saying “If you have a penis, you are a man”. It means EastEnders not having enough bisexual characters. It means being asked “Can I touch your hair?”. It means attending a museum or some other public institution and seeing that its Pride flag doesn’t include the shade that represents your femme-boy demisexual identity. All of this is very seriously described as “erasure”, as the “violent” exclusion of me and my identity. Even as bombs fall on Kharkiv and Kyiv, threatening to erase people and infrastructure, designed to erase a nation’s identity, still time-rich, experience-poor activists in the West seriously believe they are being erased by tweets and questions and opinions that differ from their own.
It remains to be seen which woke midwit will be the first to say out loud that having to walk past a statue of a long-dead Brit with iffy beliefs feels “erasing” at the same time as statues and buildings and people in Ukraine are being erased by Russian bombs. But what we know for sure, already, is that the war in Ukraine has raised burning questions not only about the Putin regime’s criminal behaviour and Ukraine’s right to self-determination, but also about us, about the West, about what we might say and do, if anything, in relation to this war in Europe. The war in Ukraine is an incredibly confronting moment for our continent. It reminds us that history is not in fact over, that unresolved questions of power and territory lurk just beneath the surface of politics, and that war is not the faraway phenomenon we thought it was. More fundamentally, it implicitly issues a challenge to the unseriousness, the smallness, of what passes for public life in 21st-century Western Europe. It asks us if we are ready for the violent return of history. The answer, right now, sadly, is No.
Over the past week, the contrast between the frivolousness of the woke West and the seriousness of threatened Ukraine, between the narcissistic obsessions of secure Westerners and the fight for survival being waged by youthful Ukrainians, could not have been more stark. On the very day Russia launched its invasion, the UK Ministry of Defence’s LGBT Network (why?) announced on Twitter that it was having a coffee morning to discuss pansexuality and asexuality. Yes, as Ukrainians hid from Russian tanks and planes, a part of the actual MoD was sipping lattes and chatting about folks who feel a “romantic, emotional and / or sexual attraction to people regardless of their gender”. Not to be outdone, the head of MI6, Richard Moore (he / him), used the occasion of Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine to issue a “series of tweets” on LGBTHM2022 – that’s LGBT History Month 2022 for those of you not abreast with the alphabet soup. “We want your help!”, Ukrainians cried. “Here’s some information about the vast spectrum of human sexual attraction”, the British security services replied.
As everyday Ukrainians pull together and arm themselves with guns and petrol bombs, the military top brass of Britain have rather different concerns. Such as why you should avoid using words like “manpower”, “strong” and “grip”. They “reinforce dominant cultural patterns”, according to a recent internal report authored by UK national security adviser Sir Stephen Lovegrove. Does that mean I’m not allowed to tell military bosses to get a grip? Apparently you should also check your white privilege and use gender-neutral language wherever possible. And let’s not forget the campaign for “vegan uniforms” in the British army. This week, as Ukraine burns, it was reported that the Ministry of Defence Vegan and Vegetarian Network (again, why?) is agitating for animal-friendly clothing and boots, excluding things like leather. Well, you wouldn’t want to be wearing the skin of a dead animal as you kill a human being, would you?
