Quotulatiousness

September 18, 2023

Learning lessons from the plight of the British army in 1940

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

Lessons from history are only occasionally learned easily … they’re more likely brought to our attention by the Gods of the Copybook Headings after we’ve suffered some awful setback. As the latin tag would have it, Si vis pacem, para bellum: if you want peace, be prepared for war. Most western democracies refuse to believe this is true, and one of the easiest things for peacetime democratic governments to do is to short-fund the military and use the “savings” for more politically popular things that will help them get re-elected. The Canadian government has been a shining example of this since the late 1960s, with no end in sight.

A recent book on the British army, tracing its decline from the end of the First World War to the defeat in the Battle of France in 1940 shows just how quickly a world-beating army can be reduced to second-best in its next conflict. Richard Dannatt & Robert Lyman, the authors of Victory: the British Army 1918-1940 to Defeat, had an article in the Sunday Mail, illustrating the parallels between the army in their book and the British army today:

WHEN IT comes to national defence, never take your eye off the ball. That is a lesson we can and must learn from history. Because the disturbing fact is that this country did just that in the 1920s and 1930s in the aftermath of the First World War and the result very nearly cost us our freedom as Hitler’s forces threatened our shores.

Britain won the war in 1918 but then shamefully lost the peace as our army was allowed to atrophy.

It is often forgotten how professional the British Army had become by 1918, to pull off a stunning battlefield victory over the Germans in northern France in the final Hundred Days of the war.

It had been a long time coming after years of static trench warfare and no decisive breakthrough, just massive loss of life in the blood baths at Ypres, Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele.

But finally, at the Battle of Amiens, British commanders — often wrongly caricatured as dunderheads and “donkeys” leading lions – demonstrated that they were able to understand and master the intricacies of the modern battlefield. With their sophisticated co-ordination of all elements of combat power — infantry, artillery, air power, armour — the stalemate was broken.

Modern war-fighting skills, technology and methods — learned at great cost in lives over the previous three-and-a-half years — secured victory for the British Army and its allies in 1918 as the Germans admitted defeat and sued for peace.

And yet little more than 20 years later, the boot was on the other foot as the next generation of German soldiers poured into France and defeated the Allies in a lightning campaign that ended with British troops fleeing from the beaches of Dunkirk.

How had victory in 1918 turned so quickly to defeat and humiliation in 1940?

The answer is that it had become the deliberate policy of successive British governments to downgrade the Army — a lesson we must learn today, with a new Defence Secretary who knows little about the brief.

Spending on defence was dramatically slashed amid an ill-thought-through assumption that there would not be another major war within ten years and so.

So far as the then government was concerned, the “war to end all wars” (as the Great War was dubbed) had done its job. There was no need to consider or plan for a future one, whether in policy, financial or practical terms. Everything was an issue of money as budgets were decided by Treasury civil servants with no military advice.

The principal reason why the Army was so unprepared for war in 1939 was that the British government, through faulty defence planning and financing in the previous two decades, made it so.

September 15, 2023

Learning to handle mules to accompany Chindit columns in WW2

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robert Lyman posted some interesting details from veteran Philip Brownless of how British troops in India had to learn how to handle mules and abandon their motor transport in order to get Chindit columns into Japanese territory in Burma:

A fabulous drawing from Jungle, Jungle, Little Chindit (1944)

Soon after our return from the Arakan front in the autumn of 1943, we were in central India, and had been told that the whole division was to be handed over to General Wingate and trained to operate behind the Japanese lines. All our motor transport was to be taken away and we were to be entirely dependent upon mules for our transport.

The C.O. one evening looked round the mess and then said to me “You look more like a country bumpkin than anybody else. You will go on a veterinary course on Tuesday and when you come back you will take charge of 44 Column’s mules.”

I had never met one of these creatures before. On arriving at Ambala I reported to the Area Brigade Major who wasn’t expecting me and seemed to have no clue about anything. He said “You’d better go down to the Club and book in”. I reported to the Club, a comfortable looking establishment, and they seemed to have a vague idea that a few bodies like me might turn up on a course and were apologetic that I would have to sleep in a tent but otherwise could enjoy the full facilities of the Club. I was shown the tent, an EPIP tent or minor marquee, with a coloured red lining and golden fleur de lys all over it, (very Victorian) with a small office extension with table and chair in front and another extension at the back with bath, towel rail and a fully bricked floor. Having lived either in a tent or under the stars in both the desert and the Arakan for the last 2 years, this struck me as luxury indeed. Even better, I took on a magnificent bearer, with suitable references, whom I found later was some kind of Hindu priest. I soon got used to having my trouser legs held up for me to put my feet in, and being helped into the rest of my clothes. I had a comfortable 3 weeks learning all about mules.

I discovered all sorts of things like the veterinary term “balls”, which were massive pills which were given to the mule by – first of all grabbing his tongue and pulling it out sideways so he couldn’t shut his mouth on your arm, and then gently throwing the ball at his epiglottis and making sure it went down. Then you let go of his tongue and gave him a nice pat. One of our lecturers, an Indian warrant officer, knew his stuff well and was so pleased about it that when he asked a question he would give you the answer himself. He liked being dramatic and loved to finish a description of some fatal ailment by saying “Treatment, bullet”.

Many of the men in our battalion were East Enders; others came from all over Essex. A few were countrymen, two were Irish and knew all about horses, one sergeant had been in animal transport and one invaluable soldier had been an East End horse dealer. The large majority had had nothing to do with animals: however, the saving grace was that English soldiers seem to be naturally good with animals and soon learned to handle them well. I arranged to get some instruction from the nearby unit of Madras Sappers and Miners and we borrowed a handful of trained mules from them for the men to practise handling, tying on loads and learning to talk to them.

Then came the great day when we were to draw up our main complement of animals, about 70 mules and 12 ponies. We were dumped at a small railway station. It was all open ground and there was a team of Army Veterinary Surgeons to allocate fairly between the three battalions, the Essex, the Borders and the Duke of Wellington’s. Lieut. Jimmy Watt of the Borders was a pal of mine: he and I, with a squad of men were to march them back nearly 100 miles to our camp, sleeping each of the five nights under the stars. As soon as we arrived at the disembarkation site I got all our mule lines laid out, with shackles (used to tie mules fore and aft) and nosebags ready. I had also picked up the tip that the mules would be wild, having spent three days in the train, and almost impossible to hold, so I instructed our men to tie them together in threes before they got off the train. As all three pulled in different directions, one muleteer could hold them. Not everybody had learned this trick so the result was that wild mules were careering all over the place, impossible to catch. When our first handful of mules arrived, they were quickly secured in a straight line and fed. They were familiar with lines like this and cooled down at once, long ears relaxed and tails swishing amiably. When the wild mules careering round saw this line, they said to themselves “We’ve done this before” and came and stood in our lines. We shackled them and I picked out the moth-eaten ones and sent them back to the vets who kept sending polite messages of thanks to Mr. Brownless for catching them. We finished up with a very good set of mules. Jimmy Watt and I had a bit of a conscience about the Duke of Wellington’s so we picked them out a really good pony. We felt even worse a few weeks later when it was sent back to Remounts with a weak heart! The Brigade Transport Officer visited us the second evening so Jimmy Watt and I walked him round rather quickly, chatting hard, to approve the allocation of animals, and he agreed with our arrangement.

In a highly optimistic mood early on, I decided to practise a river crossing. We marched several miles out from camp to a typical wide sandy Indian river, 300 yards across, made our preparations, i.e. assembling the two assault boats, making floating bundles of our clothes and gear by wrapping them in groundsheets, unsaddling the animals, and assembling at the water’s edge. A good sized detachment of muleteers was posted on the opposite bank ready to catch the mules. The mules waded into the shallow water but no one could get them to move off. We tried all sorts of inducements in vain and then suddenly, one sturdy little grey animal decided to swim and the whole lot immediately followed. Calamity ensued! Mules are very short sighted and could only dimly see the opposite bank but downstream was a bright yellow sandy outcrop and they all made for this. The muleteers on the other bank, when they realised what was happening, ran through the scrub and jungle as fast as they could, but the mules arrived first and bolted off into the wilds of India. I swam my pony across with my arm across his withers and directing him by holding his head harness, the gear was ferried across and the mule platoon, with one pony, began the march back to camp. Deeply depressed, I wondered how to tell the C.O. I had lost all his mules and imagined the court martial which awaited me (or, serving under General Wingate, would I be shot out of hand?) An hour and a half later we came in sight of the camp and to my utter astonishment I could see the mules in their lines. When I arrived at the mule lines, the storeman met me and said that the whole lot had arrived at the double and had gone to their places. He had merely gone along the lines, shackling them and patted their noses. Salvation! I kept quiet for a bit but it got out and I was the butt of much merrymaking.

September 11, 2023

How the Russian Army Collapsed

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 9 Sept 2023

As 1917 began, the Russian army was larger and better-equipped than ever before. Within weeks, the Tsar and his dynasty were gone, and by the summer, the Russian army was disintegrating before the eyes of its generals — but how exactly did one of the most powerful armies in the world collapse?
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September 9, 2023

The US military’s recruiting crisis

Filed under: History, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As I joked earlier this year after one or another of the US services reported falling significantly short of their recruiting goal, “I find this hard to believe now that Uncle Sugar is not only willing to fund your gender transition, but will then guarantee that you won’t be sent into a combat zone.” Kulak has been reading some histories of the 20th century and was surprised to find that the recruiting problem faced by most military organizations in that time was having too many good recruits:

This was after WW1! Millions of young men had just died as part of regiments many little different than this. And yet there was this much demand from young men to be part of the martial world.

This is because the Military and military life was ACTUALLY a good career move, and ACTUALLY formed life long bonds in the early 20th century.

Amidst the population boom of the early 20th century and all the excess young men with little inheritance… the military and militia life was a major vehicle for social mobility and aspiration and forming social connections…

So what changed? Why is it almost completely the opposite in early 21st century America?

These attitudes survived the world wars, even the western front of WW1 …

But they were devoured by Vietnam and the Civil Rights era.

Implicit in a lot of 19th and 20th century militarism was the vision of “Every Soldier a Citizen, Every Citizen a Soldier” this ethos was first expressed during the french revolution … It was aspirational. The subjects divorced from the state and military were now armed and able to participate in civic and military life, they were now citizens … of course by the early 20th century this sounds very menacing… Soldiers must obey orders, every day … if every citizen is a soldier, and bound to obey, on pain of death, that’s Totalitarianism.

You can make a strong case that US military recruiting never fully recovered from the Vietnam era, even through the temporary boost of the post-9/11 patriotic rush.

America has gone from over 1% of the population actively serving at any one time to nearly a third of that.

The “Professionalization” of the US military to an “All Volunteer force” has in effect just been a cover for this collapse in recruiting capacity.

America’s military isn’t significantly structurally different. These aren’t really professionals.

Your average 3 year contract private isn’t making some obscene Yuppie amount of money for his ambitious professional commitment. A private makes under 30k a year. A Second Lieutenant, with a university degree and years of professional development, who may have had to plan out his career from 16 years old getting a Congressman’s letter of recommendation to attend West Point or another service academy … Makes 40-60k a year.

US GDP per capita is 72k. If that Lieutenant had gone to a second tier school and gotten a Computer Science degree he’d be making 6 figures and have vastly more control over his life.

It’s not a good career move, in the 1780s or 1900s and ambitious scion of a decayed noble family desiring to conquer the world might want to become an artillery officer… Today he wants to work on wall street or at Google.

Even if you’re starting out from a very rough place there ar almost certainly a dozen better things you could do to advance yourself faster, for better money, and with less effort than joining the Military.

The only appeal of the US military, for decades now, has been to people who really want to escape their situation, who really felt they needed to hard reboot their life, or who are really drawn to military life out of sheer love of it.

And then the Army went woke.

The long-serving senior officers of every branch of the US military are now locked in to pushing diversity in all its manifold ways, to the point of knowingly discouraging non-diverse service members out of the way to make room for this month’s gender, racial, or other quotas.

So America’s effective recruitment capacity and civic feeling will continue to collapse even as Americans hate each other and their government even more.

You think recruit capacity is bad now? Wait til they imprison Trump.

September 4, 2023

QotD: Historical rice farming versus wheat or barley farming

Filed under: Asia, China, Food, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Because rice is such a different crop than wheat or barley, there are a lot of differences in the way that rice cultivation shapes the countryside. […] The thing to note about rice is that it is both much more productive on a per-acre basis than wheat or barley, but also much more labor intensive; it also relies on different forms of capital to be productive. Whole-grain wheat and brown rice have similar calorie and nutritional value (brown rice is somewhat better in most categories) on a unit-weight basis (so, per pound or ton), but the yield difference is fairly large: rice is typically around (very roughly) 50% more productive per acre than wheat. Moreover, rice plants have a more favorable ratio of seeds-to-plants, meaning that the demand to put away seeds for the next harvest is easier – whereas crop-to-seed ratios on pre-modern wheat range from 3:1 to 10:1, rice can achieve figures as high as 100:1. As a result, not only is the gross yield higher (that is, more tons of seed per field) but a lower percentage of that seed has to be saved for the next planting.

At the same time, the irrigation demands for effective production of wet-rice requires a lot of labor to build and maintain. Fields need to be flooded and drained; in some cases (particularly pre-modern terrace farming) this may involve moving the water manually, in buckets, from lower fields to higher ones. Irrigation canals connecting paddies can make this job somewhat easier, as can bucket-lifts, but that still demands moving quite a lot of water. In any irrigation system, the bunds need to be maintained and the water level carefully controlled, with also involves potentially quite a lot of labor.

The consequence of all of this is that while the rice farming household seems to be roughly the same size as the wheat-farming household (that is, an extended family unit of variable size, but typically around 8 or so members), the farm is much smaller, with common household farm sizes, even in the modern period, clustering around 1 hectare (2.47 acres) in comparison to the standard household wheat farms clustered around 4-6 acres (which, you may note with the yield figures above, lands us right back at around the same subsistence standard).

Moreover, rice cultivation is less soil dependent (but more water dependent) because wet-rice farming both encourages nitrogen fixation in the soil (maintaining the fertility of it generally without expensive manure use) and because rice farming leads naturally to a process known as pozdolisation, slowly converting the underlying soil over a few years to a set of characteristics which are more favorable for more rice cultivation. So whereas with wheat cultivation, where you often have clumps of marginal land (soil that is too wet, too dry, too rocky, too acidic, too uneven, too heavily forested, and so on), rice cultivation tends to be able to make use of almost any land where there is sufficient water (although terracing may be needed to level out the land). The reliance on the rice itself to “terraform” its own fields does mean that new rice fields tended to under-produce for the first few years.

The result of this, so far as I can tell, is that in well-watered areas, like much of South China, the human landscape that is created by pre-modern rice cultivation is both more dense and more uniform in its density; large zones of very dense rice cultivation rather than pockets of villages separated by sparsely inhabited forests or pasture. Indeed, pasture in particular seems in most cases almost entirely pushed out by rice cultivation. That has very significant implications for warfare and I have to admit that in reading about rice farming for this post, I had one of those “oh!” moments of sudden understanding – in this case, how armies in pre-modern China could be so large and achieve such massive local concentrations. But as we’ve discussed, the size of an army is mainly constrained by logistics and the key factor here is the ability to forage food locally, which is in turn a product of local population density. If you effectively double (or more!) the population density, the maximum size of a local army also dramatically increases (and at the same time, a society which is even more concentrated around rivers is also likelier to allow for riverine logistics, which further improves the logistical situation for mass armies).

But it also goes to the difficulty many Chinese states experienced in maintaining large and effective cavalry arms without becoming reliant on Steppe peoples for horses. Unlike Europe or the Near East, where there are spots of good horse country here and there, often less suited to intensive wheat cultivation, most horse-pasturage in the rice-farming zone could have – and was – turned over to far more productive rice cultivation. Indeed, rice cultivation seems to have been so productive and suitable to a sufficient range of lands that it could push out a lot of other kinds of land-use, somewhat flattening the “ideal city” model that assumed wheat and barley cultivation.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-04.

August 19, 2023

QotD: The third system (or “Modern system”) of war

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

Armies in this modern system [discussed here] still aim to control territory, as with second-system war, but they no longer square off in open fields. Rather, relying on cover and concealment to mitigate the overwhelming firepower a modern battlefield covered with machine guns, artillery and airpower, they aim to disorient and overwhelm the decision-making capabilities of their enemy with lightning mechanized offensives.

What happens when two current-day modern systems meet? We don’t really know, though there is a lot of speculation. One of the things which made the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia so closely watched last year (in 2020, for those reading this later) was that it provided a chance to see two sides both with (sometimes incomplete) access to the full modern kit of war – not only tanks, jets and artillery, but cyber warfare, drones and so on. The results remain to be much discussed analyzed, but it may well be that a fourth system of war is in the offing, defined by the way that drone-based airpower combined with electronic surveillance and cyber-warfare redefined the battle-space and allowed Azerbaijan in particular to project firepower deep into areas where Armenian forces considered themselves safe.

But I shouldn’t get too off track. The point of all of this is that these systems of war are not merely different, they are so radically different that armies created in one system often fundamentally fail to understand the others (thus the tendency for second and third system armies to treat first system war as some strange new innovation in war, when it is in fact the oldest system by far). As we’re going to see, the aims, experiences and outcomes of these systems are often very different. They demand and inculcate different values and condition societies differently as well.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.

August 14, 2023

QotD: The US Army in the Korean War

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Korea was the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals, by legions. It was fought by men who soon knew they had small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought by men whom the Army — at its own peril — had given neither training nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.

The Army needed legions, but society didn’t want them. It wanted citizen-soldiers.

But the sociologists are right — absolutely right — in demanding that the centurion view of life not be imposed upon America. In a holy, patriotic war — like that fought by the French in 1793, or as a general war against Communism will be — America can get a lot more mileage out of citizen-soldiers than it can from legions.

No one has suggested that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come aboard only when the ship is sinking.

The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order — our own decent order — in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world.

It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.

In the first six months America suffered a near debacle because her Regular Army fighting men were the stuff of legions, but they had not been made into legionaries.

America was not more soft or more decadent than it had been twenty years earlier. It was confused, badly, on its attitudes toward war. It was still bringing up its youth to think there were no tigers, and it was still reluctant to forge them guns to shoot tigers.

Many of America’s youth, in the Army, faced horror badly because they had never been told they would have to face horror, or that horror is very normal in our unsane world. It had not been ground into them that they would have to obey their officers, even if the orders got them killed.

It has been a long, long time since American citizens have been able to take down the musket from the mantelpiece and go tiger hunting. But they still cling to the belief that they can do so, and do it well, without training.

This is the error that leads some men to cry out that Americans are decadent.

If Americans in 1950 were decadent, so were the rabble who streamed miserably into Valley Forge, where von Steuben made soldiers out of them. If American society had no will to defend itself, neither did it in 1861, at First Manassas, or later at Shiloh, when whole regiments of Americans turned tail and ran.

The men who lay warm and happy in their blankets at Kasserine, as the panzers rolled toward them in the dawn, were decadent, by this reasoning.

The problem is not that Americans are soft but that they simply will not face what war is all about until they have had their teeth kicked in. They will not face the fact that the military professionals, while some have ideas about society in general that are distorted and must be watched, still know better than anyone else how a war is won.

Free society cannot be oriented toward the battlefield — Sparta knew that trap — but some adjustments must be made, as the squabbling Athenians learned to their sorrow.

The sociologists and psychologists of Vienna had no answer to the Nazi bayonets, when they crashed against their doors. The soldiers of the democratic world did.

More than once, as at Valley Forge, after Bull Run, and Kasserine, the world has seen an American army rise from its own ashes, reorient itself, grow hard and bitter, knowledgeable and disciplined and tough.

In 1951, after six months of being battered, the Eighth Army in Korea rose from its own ashes of despair. No man who was there still believes Americans in the main are decadent, just as no man who saw Lieutenant General Matt Ridgway in operation doubts the sometime greatness of men.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

August 7, 2023

The Longest Year in Human History (46 B.C.E.)

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

Historia Civilis
Published 24 Apr 2019
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August 1, 2023

QotD: US Army culture before the Korean War

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Doolittle Board of 1945-1946 met, listened to less than half a hundred complaints, and made its recommendations. The so-called “caste system” of the Army was modified. Captains, by fiat, suddenly ceased to be gods, and sergeants, the hard-bitten backbone of any army, were told to try to be just some of the boys. Junior officers had a great deal of their power to discipline taken away from them. They could no longer inflict any real punishment, short of formal court-martial, nor could they easily reduce ineffective N.C.O.’s. Understandably, their own powers shaky, they cut the ground completely away from their N.C.O.’s.

A sergeant, by shouting at some sensitive yardbird, could get his captain into a lot of trouble. For the real effect of the Doolittle recommendations was psychological. Officers had not been made wholly powerless — but they felt that they had been slapped in the teeth. The officer corps, by 1946 again wholly professional, did not know how to live with the newer code.

One important thing was forgotten by the citizenry: by 1946 all the intellectual and sensitive types had said goodbye to the Army — they hoped for good. The new men coming in now were the kind of men who join armies the world over, blank-faced, unmolded — and they needed shaping. They got it; but it wasn’t the kind of shaping they needed.

Now an N.C.O. greeted new arrivals with a smile. Where once he would have told them they made him sick to his stomach, didn’t look tough enough to make a go of his outfit, he now led them meekly to his company commander. And this clean-cut young man, who once would have sat remote at the right hand of God in his orderly room, issuing orders that crackled like thunder, now smiled too. “Welcome aboard, gentlemen. I am your company commander; I’m here to help you. I’ll try to make your stay both pleasant and profitable.”

This was all very democratic and pleasant — but it is the nature of young men to get away with anything they can, and soon these young men found they could get away with plenty.

A soldier could tell a sergeant to blow it. In the old Army he might have been bashed, and found immediately what the rules were going to be. In the Canadian Army — which oddly enough no American liberals have found fascistic or bestial — he would have been marched in front of his company commander, had his pay reduced, perhaps even been confined for thirty days, with no damaging mark on his record. He would have learned, instantly, that orders are to be obeyed.

But in the new American Army, the sergeant reported such a case to his C.O. But the C.O. couldn’t do anything drastic or educational to the man; for any real action, he had to pass the case up higher. And nobody wanted to court-martial the man, to put a permanent damaging mark on his record. The most likely outcome was for the man to be chided for being rude, and requested to do better in the future.

Some privates, behind their smirks, liked it fine.

Pretty soon, the sergeants, realizing the score, started to fraternize with the men. Perhaps, through popularity, they could get something done. The junior officers, with no sergeants to knock heads, decided that the better part of valor was never to give an unpopular order.

The new legions carried the old names, displayed the old, proud colors, with their gallant battle streamers. The regimental mottoes still said things like “Can Do”. In their neat, fitted uniforms and new shiny boots — there was money for these — the troops looked good. Their appearance made the generals smile.

What they lacked couldn’t be seen, not until the guns sounded.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

July 23, 2023

Explained: What Is Pace Sticking?

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

Forces News
Published 18 Sept 2021

A pace stick is a tool made of two pieces of timber that are hinged at the top.

Each summer, 18 pace sticking armed forces teams from around the world come together in an international competition at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

We look at what pace sticking involves, and the history behind it.
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July 17, 2023

Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 06 George Washington

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

Nebulous Media
Published 27 Dec 2022

Allen Guelzo joins Douglas Murray on this episode to discuss George Washington. From his early childhood to his years as president, the two analyze the founding father’s legacy. Should the first president stay cancelled?
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July 6, 2023

QotD: Liberalizing the US Army after WW2

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

In 1861, and 1917, the Army acted upon the civilian, changing him. But in 1945 something new happened. Suddenly, without precedent, perhaps because of changes in the emerging managerial society, professional soldiers of high rank had become genuinely popular with the Public. In 1861, and in 1917, the public gave the generals small credit, talked instead of the gallant militia. Suddenly, at the end of World War II, society embraced the generals.

And here it ruined them.

They had lived their lives in semibitter alienation from their own culture (What’s the matter, Colonel; can’t you make it on the outside?) but now they were sought after, offered jobs in business, government, on college campuses.

Humanly, the generals liked the acclaim. Humanly, they wanted it to continue. And when, as usual after all our wars, there came a great civilian clamor to change all the things in the army the civilians hadn’t liked, humanly, the generals could not find it in their hearts to tell the public to go to hell.

It was perfectly understandable that large numbers of men who served didn’t like the service. There was no reason why they should. They served only because there had been a dirty job that had to be done. Admittedly, the service was not perfect; no human institution having power over men can ever be. But many of the abuses the civilians complained about had come not from true professionals but from men with quickie diplomas, whose brass was much more apt to go to their heads than to those of men who had waited twenty years for leaves and eagles.

In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society.

The generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could alter the nature of the State Department. It could have abolished it, or weakened it even more than it did — but it could not have changed its nature. But the generals could not have retained their new popularity by antagonizing the public, and suddenly popularity was very important to them. Men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall rationalized. America, with postwar duties around the world, would need a bigger peacetime Army than ever before. Therefore, it needed to be popular with the people. And it should be made pleasant, so that more men would enlist. And since Congress wouldn’t do much about upping pay, every man should have a chance to become a sergeant, instead of one in twenty. But, democratically, sergeants would not draw much more pay than privates.

And since some officers and noncoms had abused their powers, rather than make sure officers and noncoms were better than ever, it would be simpler and more expedient — and popular — to reduce those powers. Since Americans were by nature egalitarian, the Army had better go that route too. Other professional people, such as doctors and clergymen, had special privileges — but officers, after all, had no place in the liberal society, and had better be cut down to size.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

June 13, 2023

After the Great War, the British army failed to plan for future conflicts

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robert Lyman outlines why Britain in general and the British army in particular were so materially and intellectually unready for the war that broke out in 1939:

… the British Army was catastrophically unprepared for war in 1939. But it wasn’t just the Army that was unprepared. Despite a last-minute rush to re-arm, so too was the whole country. In Britain a deep-seated passivity had set in following the end the Great War. This belied the reality that in Europe the ending of the war in fact opened the door to unheralded political chaos and instability that was in time to overcome the forces of stability and would lead directly to yet another devastating war. In the years immediately following the arrival of peace in 1918 Britain hoped it could close the door on any future European or continent commitment and return to the halcyon days when its only security commitments were the defence of its widely flung Empire.

The weakness at the heart of British planning for war was a direct reflection of Britain’s strategic, political, societal and economic situation during the inter-war period. Britain – both the British public and the country’s various governments – simply wasn’t mentally prepared to go to war again so soon after the trauma of the Great War. As a result, it made no proper preparation for another full-on industrial war against a peer opponent on the continent. This was fundamentally a failure of political and military imagination; the inability to think through what a potential war might look like and to prepare for this possibility accordingly.

We have identified five primary causes of the decline of British military effectiveness in 1939. In the first place there was no clear strategic plan for the Army. Strategies are determined by having a clear understanding of who a future enemy might be. Following the end of the Great War, until the late 1930s no one seemed bothered to define this essential point of direction. There was a remarkably inadequate grand strategic conversation (i.e., at a national, governmental level) about the purpose, structure, and nature of the Army. There was plenty of talking, but very little of it focused on realistic determination as to who it might have to fight, and how. This was a problem, because it meant that Britain was unable to determine the precise structure its armed forces needed to be, and its cost. Was the focus of the army to be the continent, or the Empire, or both? No one knew. As a result, the last known plan reasserted itself – Imperial defence, à la 1914. This meant that the army wasn’t structured or equipped to fight a specified enemy in a defined set of circumstances. Instead, the British Army and its cousin, the Indian Army, was expected to be a generic jack-of-all-trades, without the structure, doctrine, training, or equipment to fight the type of war it had become the master of in 1918. While there was some doctrine, and considerable doctrinal debate, little was anchored in a clear definition of what future war was expected to look like. There was no operational design for the British Army derived directly from an analysis of the threat it faced. If it had done, the BEF would have been thoroughly prepared for the German Blitzkrieg in France and the Low Countries in 1940 or the similar Japanese Kirimoni Sakusen in 1941 and 1942. The British Army wasn’t prepared to fight a first-class European Army in 1939 for the simple reason that Britain hadn’t prepared itself to do so. Likewise, when it came to fighting the Japanese in 1941 and 1942 in Malaya and Burma, the British found that not only had it failed to prepare adequately for a potential Japanese invasion of its vulnerable Far Eastern colonies, but that it had no idea as to how to fight the Imperial Japanese Army. There were two connected failures here. The first was one of strategic preparedness, the blame for which was both governmental and strategic. The second was of training, doctrine and military preparedness by the British Army in Europe and Asia to fight. When they emerged out of their assault boats at Kota Bahru on the morning of 8 December 1942 the Japanese could as well have come from Mars, given how little the British knew about them and their warfighting methods.

Second, as a country, Britain was unprepared both politically and culturally for another war so soon after the last. In 1919 the country seemed to want to look backward to embrace the days of peace that had preceded the cataclysm of war, to drape itself with Edwardian comfort. It was tired and disillusioned, and felt no victor’s triumph. The country looked to itself, and to its Empire, eschewing the complications of commitments on continental Europe that had recently resulted in the loss of so much blood. The losses sustained in the Great War resulted in the overwhelming national sentiment that war must never again be undertaken as a form of politics. Clausewitz was dead. Part of this sentiment evidenced itself in the rise of pacifism. In the army, a pervasive belief existed that the Great War was an aberration, and nothing like it would again afflict western civilisation. Any lessons from the war were therefore irrelevant to the future structures or doctrine of the British Army, for whom the defence of the Empire was the crucial issue. But whether it liked it or not, the world was changing fast, in ways that Britain struggled to comprehend and from which it could not ultimately escape. The Russian Revolution, the rise of fascist dictators in Europe, isolationism in the USA (except for a new American assertiveness in Asia) and the increasing militancy of Japan, began changing the global landscape in ways that were hard to understand for a country seemingly once in total charge of the certainties of statecraft. Now it struggled to find its way in a new world of tension, turmoil and rapid change.

Third, no one in the British Army thought to capture the reasons for operational success in 1918. The dramatic reduction in troops numbers at the end of the Great War meant that those best able to convert the learning from 1918 into doctrine left for civilian life, taking their knowledge and experience with them. It was never recovered. There was therefore no template in the years afterward on which to build a successful military doctrine based on the successful warfighting experience that had culminated in the victories of 1918.

Fourth, political naivety led to a dramatic economic stringency being applied, including the underlying Treasury assumption in the early 1920’s of the ‘Ten Year Rule’, an assumption that kept rolling over, year after year. This meant that there wasn’t enough money to do what was necessary to protect British interests from impending harm. The Army butter was thinly spread on the imperial bread, with the result that insufficient investment was made in the core of the army’s warfighting capability. This stringency was exacerbated by the impact of the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s into the early years of the next decade.

May 31, 2023

QotD: The second system of war

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

Agriculture created a stationary population that both wouldn’t move but which could also be dominated, subjugated and have their production extracted from them. Their wealth was clustered in towns which could be fortified with walls that would resist any quick raid, but control of that fortified town center (and its administrative apparatus of taxation) meant control of the countryside and its resources. Taking such a town meant a siege – delivering a large body of troops and keeping them there long enough to either breach the walls or starve the town into surrender. This created a war where territorial control was defined by the taking of fixed points.

In such war, the goal was to deliver the siege. But delivery of the siege meant a large army which might now be confronted in the field (for it was unlikely to move by stealth, being that it has to be large enough to take the town). And so to prohibit the siege from being delivered, defenders might march out and meet the attackers in the field for that pitched battle. In certain periods, siegecraft or army size had so outpaced fortress design that everyone rather understood that after the outcome of the pitched battle, the siege would be a forgone conclusion – it is that unusual state of affairs which gives us the “decisive battle” where a war might potentially be ended in a stoke (though they rarely were).

We may term this the second system of war. It is the system that most modern industrial and post-industrial cultures are focused on. Our cultural products are filled with such pitched battles, placed in every sort of era of our past or speculative future. It is how we imagine war. Except that it isn’t the sort of war we wage, is it?

Because in the early 1900s, the industrial revolution resulted in armies possessing both amounts of resources and levels of industrial firepower which precluded open pitched battles. All of those staples of our cultural fiction of battles, developed from the second system – surveying the enemy army drawn up in battle array, the tense wait, then the furious charge, coming to grips with the enemy in masses close up – none of that could survive modern machine guns and artillery.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.

May 25, 2023

The Hoplite Heresy: Why We Don’t Know How the Ancient Greeks Waged War

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

The Historian’s Craft
Published 9 Feb 2023

Hoplites are probably one of the first things that come to mind when one thinks of “Ancient Greece”. Equipped with a bronze spear and wearing bronze armor or a linothorax, and hefting the aspis — the hoplite‘s bronze shield — they fought in phalanxes. The classic mode of fighting in this formation was the “othismos“, the push, with the aim being to disrupt the enemy phalanx and break their formation. But, over the past few decades, views on hoplite warfare have been called into question and seriously revised, because there are problems in the source material. So, what are these problems, and how do historians of Ancient Greece understand hoplite warfare?

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