Military History Visualized
Published on 22 Sep 2017Some basic introduction on Fighting Positions in Urbanized Terrain according to a US Marine Corps Manual.
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Military Operation on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) or MCWP 3-35.3 –
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January 31, 2019
Urban Combat: Fighting Positions
January 30, 2019
The past is a foreign country, part umpteen-and-one
At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian tries to gin up some sympathy for Millennial snowflakes, who feel cheated by fate (and their parents’ generation, but mostly their parents’ generation):
One of the toughest parts of looking at The Past (note capital letters) is grasping the pace of change. Oversimplifying (but not too much), you’d need to be a PhD-level specialist to determine if a given cultural production dated from the 11th century, or the 14th. The worldview of most people in most places didn’t change much from 1000 to 1300. Even in modern times, unless you really know what you’re looking for, a writer from 1830 sounds very much like a writer from 1890.*
Until you get to the 20th century. Then it’s obvious.
This isn’t “presentism” — the supposed cardinal sin of historical study, in which we project our values onto the past.** It really is obvious, and you can see it for yourself. Take Ford Madox Ford. A hot “Modernist” in his day — he was good friends with Ezra Pound, and promoted all the spastic incomprehensibles of the 1920s — he was nevertheless a man of his time… and his time was the High Victorian Era (born 1873). Though he served in the Great War, he was a full generation older than his men, and it shows. Compare his work to Robert Graves’s. Though both were the most Advanced of Advanced Thinkers — polygamy, Socialism, all that — Graves’s work is recognizably “modern,” while Ford’s reads like the writing of a man who really should’ve spent his life East of Suez, bringing the Bible and the Flag to the wogs. The world described in such loving detail in a work like Parade’s End — though of course Ford thought he was viciously criticizing it — might as well be Mars.
We’re in the same boat when it comes to those special, special Snowflakes, the Millennials. A Great War-level change really did hit them, right in their most vulnerable years. While we — Gen X and older — lived through the dawn of the Internet, we don’t live in the Internet Age (TM). Not like they do, anyway.
He does a bit of a Fisking (that’s an olde-tyme expression from when we used to knap our own flint, kiddies) of an article by a Millennial writer trying to make the case that the plight of the Millennials is comparable to that of the Lost Generation. But some actual sympathy is eventually located and delivered:
I titled this piece “Sympathy for Snowflakes,” and finally we’ve arrived. The days of life on the cul-de-sac with the white picket fence are indeed gone… but they’ve been gone for thirty years or more. They were in terminal decline since before Rush started singing about suburbs — that was 1982, if you’re keeping score at home — and what awful conformist hells they are. Ever heard the phrase “sour grapes?” I’m not going to say we invented that — after all, anything worth saying was already said by Dead White Males hundreds of years ago — but that’s why Gen X pop culture is full of rants against “conformism.” Slackers, Mallrats, all of it — sour grapes, buddy. If you in fact grew up on a cul-de-sac behind a white picket fence, your parents, who must’ve been early Gen Xers, were among the lucky few.
The difference between your generation and mine, Mr. Lafayette, isn’t what we wanted once we matured enough to start actually knowing what we wanted. It’s that my generation received rigorous-enough educations to figure out that the house on the cul-de-sac with the white picket fence is an aberration, just a flicker of static. Only one tiny group of people — middle class Americans, born roughly 1945-1965 — ever got to experience it. Young folks in the 1220s probably lived much as their parents did back in the 1180s, but modern life doesn’t work that way. These days, everyone makes do with what he has, gets on as best he can. Your generation, Mr. Lafayette, was taught to regard The Past as one long night of Oppression, and because of that, you never learned to take any lessons from it.
That’s why I’m sympathetic, even as I’m mocking you (but gently, lad, gently). That’s the real parallel between yourselves and the Lost Generation — it was done to you. You had no choice, and unlike the Lost Generation, you can’t even pin the blame anywhere. It just….kinda… happened. No wonder you feel adrift and powerless. No wonder “stand up straight” and “clean your room” seem like adages of life-altering wisdom.
So take an old guy’s advice, and READ. Read just about anything, so long as it’s published before 1950. Don’t think, don’t analyze, don’t snark, just read it. The change will come.
January 28, 2019
The Cold War – OverSimplified (Part 2)
OverSimplified
Published on 24 Jan 2019
QotD: Inequality in academia
We’ve heard a lot about the problem of inequality in America over recent years. But most of that talk has ignored one of the very worst pockets of inequality in American society. I speak, of course, of the American university system and its treatment of adjunct professors and graduate students.
Academics seem to think that the business world is a feudal environment characterized by huge status differentials and abusive treatment of underlings. They think that because, to be honest, that’s a pretty good characterization of … the modern university, where serfs in the form of adjunct professors toil in the vineyards.
Glenn Reynolds, “Trump should pity the poor PhD: New president should target worker exploitation at American universities”, USA Today, 2017-02-16.
January 27, 2019
Some reasons to be bearish on Tesla’s future
At Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer climbs back onto one of his favourite hobby horses:
Yes, I am like an addict on Tesla but I find the company absolutely fascinating. Books and HBS case studies will be written on this saga some day (a couple are being written right now but seem to be headed for Musk hagiography rather than a real accounting ala business classics like Barbarians at the Gate or Bad Blood).
I still stand by my past thoughts here, where I predicted in advance of results that 3Q2018 was probably going to be Tesla’s high water mark, and explained the reasons why. I won’t go into them all. There are more than one. But I do want to give an update on one of them, which is the growth and investment story.
First, I want to explain that I have nothing against electric vehicles. I actually have solar panels on my roof and a deposit down on an EV, though it is months away from being available. What Tesla bulls don’t really understand about the short position on Tesla is that most of us don’t hate on the concept — I respect them for really bootstrapping the mass EV market into existence. If they were valued in the market at five or even ten billion dollars, you would not hear a peep out of me. But they are valued (depending on the day, it is a volatile stock) between $55 to $65 billion.
The difference in valuation is entirely due to the charisma and relentless promotion by the 21st century’s PT Barnum — Elon Musk. I used to get super excited by Musk as well, until two things happened. One, he committed what I consider outright fraud in bailing out friends and family by getting Tesla to buy out SolarCity when SolarCity was days or weeks from falling apart. And two, he started talking about things I know about and I realized he was totally full of sh*t. That is a common reaction from people I read about Musk — “I found him totally spellbinding until he was discussing something I am an expert in, and I then realized he was a fraud.”
Elon Musk spins great technology visions. Like Popular Mechanics magazine covers from the sixties and seventies (e.g. a flying RV! a mile long blimp will change logging!) he spins exciting visions that geeky males in particular resonate with. Long time readers will know I identify as one of this tribe — my most lamented two lost products in the marketplace are Omni Magazine and the Firefly TV series. So I see his appeal, but I have also seen his BS — something I think a lot more people have caught on to after his embarrassing Boring Company tunnel reveal.
Modern advertising – “wokeness … for millennials, is basically Corinthian leather for the soul”
I’m still not caught up on all my RSS feeds, so this Jonathan Kay piece at Quillette is more than a week old, which is why we’re selling it at half-price:
… Coca-Cola doesn’t make you smile. The “Rich Corinthian Leather” that Chrysler used to upholster car seats wasn’t actually from Corinth. And smoking Virginia Slims doesn’t actually mean “You’ve come a long way, baby.” It probably just means you’re going to die of lung cancer.
But misleading as that Personna ad may have been, it had more substance than most modern commercials. At the very least, it purported to extol the actual physical quality of the product being advertised — even if the evidence presented in support of that claim was thin. Coke, Chrysler and Virginia Slims (a 1960s-era spinoff of Benson & Hedges), on the other hand, were selling fairy tales based on happiness, wealth and liberation, respectively.
A close Mad Men-era analogue to Gillette’s new ad would be this Virginia Slims ad from 1967. It starts with a woman in 19th-century clothing, staring mournfully at her feet while a sad tune plays. “It used to be, baby, you had no rights,” intones a male voice saucily. “No right to vote. No right to property. No right to the wage you earned. That was back when you were laced in, hemmed in, and left with not a whole lot to do. That was back when you had to sneak up to the attic if you wanted a cigarette. Smoke in front of a man? Heaven forbid!”
[…]
In some respects, the act of watching that ad is a voyage to a distant land: It’s not just that cigarette ads have been illegal in western countries for decades (the woman actually takes a puff — right there on TV). But the very idea that “women” smoke with a small “feminine hand” also would constitute its own sort of transphobic thoughtcrime. Nevertheless, the basic Madison Avenue impulse behind the ad is recognizable to modern eyes: There’s this cool social trend out there. Let’s present our product as part of that cool trend. In the 1960s, the cool trend was empowering women. A half century later, it’s hectoring men. In the 1960s, being progressive meant expanding the range of permissible behaviour. A half century later, it’s about imposing constraints. In the 1960’s, the puritans were the bad guys. Today, they’re the ones setting the moral agenda.
As a bonus, he also walks you through a Marketing 101 course (at least, the few things you’d remember after taking a Marketing 101 course) in his local store:
At my local Toronto pharmacy, a pack of eight Gillette “Fusion5™ ProShield™” razors goes for $42.14 (all figures in U.S. dollars) — a staggering $5.27 per razor. These are displayed, of course, at eye level, since they provide the highest profit margin. Stoop down to waist level, and you will find a package of three quad-bladed cartridges—in generic packaging, though they provide more or less the same quality shave as the Fusion5 — for just $2.26 per razor. And if you’re willing to go down to ankle level, you can get a 10-pack of “Life” brand twin blades for just 60 cents each. (They’re marked “disposable,” but I often will use the same one for several weeks.) Do the math here, and you’ll see that we are talking about an almost 10-fold difference in price for products that — notwithstanding the many protestations I’m set to receive from hipsters who shave with hand-forged titanium blades stored in sealed alabaster canisters full of ionized gas — do the same basic thing.
This is true for a lot of product categories where there are no real differences between competing products except what the geniuses in the respective corporate marketing departments can conjure up out of their collective vivid imaginations.
January 26, 2019
The Cold War – OverSimplified (Part 1)
OverSimplified
Published on 24 Jan 2019
The US Army’s tank development and “The Emergency” in Eire
A discussion on the TimeGhost forums the other day included a link to this fascinating article by World of Tanks writer The Chieftain:
Wouldn’t it have been a terrible thing if, in the middle of WW2, the people responsible for training and equipping the US Army’s armored force were taken prisoner? Well, they were.
Wait, what? I’m sure we’d have heard all about this if it had really happened, and it’s certainly news to me, so he’s just pulling the long bow here, right? Well, no, he’s not. It really did happen, but there were several reasons why it didn’t become even a nine-day wonder in 1942, because it happened in what had been the Irish Free State but known after 1937 as Éire. Ireland was neutral in WW2, and had a policy of interning combatant personnel who found themselves in Ireland during the war. Keep this in mind, as it’s the key point of the story.
Interned German military personnel at the K-Lines Internment Camp in the Curragh.
Going on another brief tangent, you may be aware of the fact that what we know as “World War II” […] is not known by that name universally. Over on the former Soviet side of the house, it’s “The Great Patriotic War”. (Well, OK, they do distinguish between WWII and TGPW, but not in everyday conversation). The Soviet Union wasn’t the only country to give the conflict a less common name: In Eire, (Ireland), it was known as “The Emergency”
The background to this is that the Irish government wanted to enact emergency powers due to the unusual state of affairs which obtained in Europe in September 1939. The Irish Constitution granted the government such emergency powers in case of war, but it wasn’t entirely sure if the war in Europe counted. So the First Amendment to the Irish Constitution was approved, to add, in effect, that “state of war” could include “wars of which Ireland is not a part if the government thinks it’s important enough.” Once that little clarification was made, the Oireachtas (Parliament) passed its declaration of a state of emergency with the Emergency Powers Act. As a general rule, the Irish ruling bodies were not fans of the concept of acknowledging that there was a war going on which they had chosen not to be a part of. It went so far that when the son of a notable member of the Irish gentry in Malahide was killed when HMS Hood was sunk, his death was noted in the Irish Times as being due to a boating incident. As a result, the entire period 1939-1946 is known as “The Emergency.”
In this, as in so many other things, Ireland is a weird place. But we digress.
In December of 1942, Lieutenant General Jacob Devers, head of the Armored Force, decided to go on a fact-finding mission to the European Theatre of Operations to see how the tank units were holding up. Well, actually, it was mainly the North African Theatre of Operations, as European tank combat hadn’t really gotten off the ground. So he took with him a couple of colleagues, including one Major General Edward Brook, two Brigadier Generals named Gladeon Barnes and William Palmer, a Colonel William Thaddeus Sexton, and to carry the baggage, a Major Earl Hormell. They set off on December 14th, going south to Brazil, Ascension, The Gold Coast, Nigeria and Sudan, arriving Cairo five days later after a distance of 11,140 miles. After spending a little time with the British, they hopped over to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. At the end of trip, they went to Gibraltar for a week to consolidate their findings 7-14 January. The result of all this flying around and taking people away from their jobs for a month was one page and a quarter of conclusions, and one half-page of recommendations (the other half is six signature blocks).
[…]
Their duty from their trip being completed, they took advantage of the fact that they were already on the other side of the Atlantic to go to the UK to check in with the goings-on there.
So they boarded their aircraft, a B-17 converted to a VIP transport role, departed Gibraltar, and set off North up the Atlantic’s Eastern edge, looping around to the West of France to avoid German interception. Their B-17 was named “Stinky”.
You can probably guess where this is going.
The daily diary of the Devers mission reads as follows:
“At 2:00pm, January 15th, departed from Gibraltar, weather splendid. At approximately 10:00am, just after daylight, sighted land which navigator described as Lundy Island. From the map, this island appeared to be 100 miles north of the point at which the plane should have turned east towards Port Reath. Retracing south, the contour of the coastline did not correspond to that on available maps. Searched for approximately two hours without finding a familiar landmark. The radio operator was unable to contact any stations. The navigator admitted that he was lost. The ground consisted of small grass fields traversed by stone walls. With the gasoline supply nearly exhausted, a crash landing was made near Athenry at 11:50am. The size of the field was such that after hitting the ground, the plane crashed through a stone wall at approximately 70 miles per hour. Although the plane was wrecked, the members of the party were uninjured. The plane was immediately surrounded by Irish civilians and members of the Home Guard. The local inhabitants were very friendly, offered food and any medical assistance necessary. Shortly thereafter, representatives of the Eire Army arrived and took charge of the situation”
Er, oops? Read the whole thing for the full story.
QotD: Racism, paranoia, and Presidential Derangement Syndrome
Political prejudice is not the moral equivalent of racial prejudice, but they operate in very similar ways, as anybody who ever has spent much time around a genuine racist or anti-Semite knows. Taxes too high? Blame the blacks. Not making enough money? Blame the Mexicans. Foreign policy seem overwhelmingly complex? Blame the Jews. Whataburger gave you a full-on corn-syrup Coke instead of a Diet Coke? Blame the blacks, Mexicans, Jews, subcontinental immigrants … somebody. Racism and anti-Semitism are metaphysical creeds, and those who adhere to these creeds see the work of the agents of evil everywhere. For them, there is no world outside race and racism.
In this, they are very similar to the Hillary Clinton–voting Manhattan balletomanes who seethe that they must endure being seated in the David Koch theater. David Koch’s brand of libertarianism is mild and constructive, and it has about as much to do with ballet as Keith Olbermann has to do with astrophysics. But for the fanatic, even to hear the name spoken is unbearable.
The people who believe that there can be no art, literature, culture, or life apart from politics are people who do not understand art, literature, culture, or politics.
Imagine being so mentally poisoned and so spiritually sick that you feel the need to organize a protest at New York–Presbyterian Hospital because the institution accepted $100 million — the largest gift in its history, being put to purely philanthropic health-care purposes — from someone whose political views are at odds with your own. Imagine what it must be like to feel that doing that is a moral imperative. Imagine sitting down to listen to a Beethoven string quartet and being filled with paralyzing anxiety that the cellist might not share your views on the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Kevin D. Williamson, “No Republicans Need Apply”, National Review, 2017-02-12.
January 23, 2019
QotD: Regulation doesn’t scale well
A nation state is, with certain exceptions such as Kiribati, a very large entity. A modern “nanny state” is conducted on a scale beyond anyone’s comprehension. The single measure that might be good for a given town in, say, West Virginia, cannot possibly be good for another in Idaho, and adds debilitating paperwork at both ends. Meanwhile, the scale of the regulation is so great, that small family operators right across the country, lacking huge resources for lobbying and propaganda, will inevitably be scrood. For the truth is big guvmint and big bidnis interface only with each other.
David Warren, “The no-brainer chronicles”, Essays in Idleness, 2017-02-16.
January 21, 2019
M551 “Sheridan” AR/AAV | DESIGN DISASTER!
Matsimus
Published on 24 Dec 2018The M551 Sheridan was a light reconnaissance tank developed by the American company General Motors in May 1960 under the designation XM551. In November 1965 approval was given for the type classification of the XM551 as Limited Production and a four-year production contract was awarded to the Allison Motor Car Division of General Motors Corporation. In May 1966 the Sheridan was classified as Standard A and by this time production was well under way with the first production vehicle being completed in June 1966. Production continued until 1970 by when 1700 M551S (or General Sheridans) had been built, of which 1570 were still in service with the US Army in 1970. The role of the M551. as originally conceived, is to function as the main reconnaissance vehicle for armour, infantry and airborne operations and arms teams not employing main battle tanks. Late in 1978, it was announced that the M551 would be phased out of service and replaced by the M60A1 MBT, apart from those vehicles allocated to the 82nd Airborne Division (57) and Arkansas National Guard (12), 330 have been assigned to the National training Center at Fort Irwin, California. These are essentially basic M551s but with visual modifications to the outside to disguise them as “OPFOR force” vehicles such as BMP-1 and ZSU-23-4.
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January 18, 2019
Tank Chats #41 Sherman Firefly | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 28 Jul 2017A Tank Chat from David Fletcher on an inspired British modification. As an all-round, general purpose tank the Sherman was one of the best of World War II, but by 1943 it was getting past its prime. An officer at Lulworth Camp, near Bovington, came up with the idea of fitting a better gun, the British 76.2mm, known as the 17 pounder. The new design would be known as the Sherman Firefly.
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January 16, 2019
QotD: Patriotism
Patriotism is the primal love of your country which pre-exists any particular notion about how its political affairs should be arranged. You can espouse a single-payer health care program (or smaller government) as a loyal citizen of Denmark. You cannot, however, be an an American patriot in that same position, though you may be a most excellent Dane. True patriotism does not require us to choose between the many constituent identities that every individual has. But it does require you to decide where your first loyalties lie.
Your patriotism may indeed lead you to advocate various changes in the government, in the belief that this will make it a better place, just as your love of your spouse may cause you to urge them to give up their soul-sucking job in corporate law and pursue the nonprofit career they’ve always dreamed of. But your love of your spouse does not, one hopes, consist primarily of plans for their future or hopes for their improvement. (If it does, you aren’t their spouse; you’re their agent). Patriotism is similar. It can survive substantial disagreement about the reasons for that love, or the sacrifices that love should entail. It can’t survive one half of the partnership declaring that they will only start loving their country after it has perfected itself. As in a marriage, that would be a very long wait.
But shouldn’t we scorn patriotism, which drives us to war and so many other awful things? No more than we should scorn the progressive ideals that have led to so much good social change, and also so much human suffering under various left-wing regimes. Ideals are dangerous things with a tendency to run amok, but no society can live without them. And I submit that no nation can live long without a pretty healthy patriotism — a powerful symbolic identity that transcends the frictions and disagreements which otherwise make it impossible to unite for any common purpose.
Megan McArdle, “In Defense of Trump’s ‘Day of Patriotic Devotion'”, Bloomberg View, 2017-01-26.
January 14, 2019
Lysander Spooner and the US postal system
Naomi Mathew recounts the battle between anarchist Lysander Spooner and the United States Post Office:
This is a story about a philosopher, entrepreneur, lawyer, economist, abolitionist, anarchist — the list goes on. As his obituary summarizes, “To destroy tyranny, root and branch, was the great object of his life.” Although he is rarely included in mainstream history, Lysander Spooner was an anarchist who didn’t merely preach about his ideas: He lived them. No example illustrates this better than Spooner’s legal battle against the US postal monopoly.
Born in 1808 in Athol, Massachusetts, Lysander Spooner was raised on his parent’s farm and later moved to Worcester to practice law. Eventually, he found himself in New York City, where business was booming — but not for the Post Office.
The Postal System of the 1840s
In Spooner’s day, government subsidized the cost of building infrastructure used for mail routes. Postage rates paid for these subsidies, which in turn made the rates expensive. For example, in 1840 it cost 18.75 cents, over a quarter of a day’s wages, to send a letter from Baltimore to New York.
Corruption was another issue facing the post office. Positions appeared to change after each election cycle, indicating political cronyism. Congress was also under pressure from the coach contractor lobby, and favorable postage routes were often given to contractors with political connections. Thanks to a legal monopoly it had enjoyed since the Confederation, the Post Office remained the sole legal mail business despite its skyrocketing costs and corruption.
In his book Uncle Sam, The Monopoly Man, William Wooldridge describes how high postal costs led some to defy postal laws: Traveling individuals doubled as temporary, private postmen. By the 1840s, these illicit services were chipping into government revenues. Eventually, a court ruled it legal for individuals (but not companies) to carry mail. As a result, underground mail enterprises sprung up. Agents covertly used the existing rails, coaches, and steamboats to transport letters. It is estimated that in 1845, a third of all letters were transported by private mail firms.
QotD: Eisenhower’s Middle East policy about-face
Unlike some American presidents, however, Eisenhower learned from his mistakes. In 1958, five years after being sworn into office, he reversed course. Rather than suck up to Egypt, Ike deployed American Marines to Lebanon to shore up President Camille Chamoun, who was under siege by Nasser’s local allies.
“In Lebanon,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs, “the question was whether it would be better to incur the deep resentment of nearly all of the Arab world (and some of the rest of the Free World) and in doing so risk general war with the Soviet Union or to do something worse — which was to do nothing.” That is almost verbatim what the British said to justify their own war against Nasser when Eisenhower slapped them with crippling sanctions.
Reality forced the United States into a total about-face. Ike’s entire Middle Eastern worldview collapsed. Even before sending the Marines to Lebanon he announced that America was taking Britain’s place as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East. He had to start over even if he didn’t want to. “Nasser,” Doran writes, “the giant who rose from the Suez Crisis, crushed Eisenhower’s doctrine like a cigarette under his shoe.”
What happened between the Suez Crisis and Eisenhower’s intervention in Lebanon? A couple of things.
Ike’s hope to bring Syria into the American orbit alongside Turkey and Pakistan collapsed in spectacular fashion. So many Syrians swooned over Nasser after Egypt’s victory in the Suez Canal that Syria, astonishingly, allowed itself to be annexed by Cairo. Egypt and Syria became one country—the United Arab Republic—with Nasser as the dictator of both.
Washington’s attempt to groom Saudi Arabia as a regional counterbalance to Egypt also hit the skids when Nasser accused the Saudis of trying to assassinate him and foment a military coup in Damascus. The Saudis responded by shoving King Saud aside and replacing him with his Nasserist younger brother, Crown Prince Faisal.
The final blow came with the brutal overthrow of the pro-Western Hashemite monarchy in Iraq and the mutilation of the royal family’s corpses in public, thus toppling the last pillar of America’s anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East. Eisenhower had no choice but to stop being clever and return to the first rule of foreign policy: reward your friends and punish your enemies.
Michael J. Totten, “We Are Still Living With Eisenhower’s Biggest Mistake”, The Tower Magazine, 2017-02.
