Well, getting started ate quite a few hours, but at least we’re going to move at a constant speed all day right? Of course not. These are humans – they need to eat (lunch), drink and relieve themselves. Men will fall out of line because they are sick or because they sprained an ankle or because they’re tired of marching and faking it (many army guidelines put the medics at the back of the marching column for this purpose). To add to this, wagons get stuck in the mud, mules and horses get stubborn or lame (that chance may seem low, but remember we’re dealing with thousands of animals – small percentages add up fast when you have a few thousand of something).
For reference on how much time this can eat up, 1950s US Army marching regulations (this is again FM21-18 “Foot Marches”) suggest that “battle groups or smaller” (800 men or less, generally – so small, fast-moving infantry) can “under favorable conditions” (read: good, modern paved roads in good weather) make 15-20 miles in a continuous eight hour march. A forced march – marching longer than 8 hours and at a higher than normal pace – can cover more ground (c. 35 miles in a day in some cases) but such a pace will wear out an infantry force fast.
At the end of the day, the army needs to arrive at its planned camp site [early] enough to make camp. Cooking needs to be done. Food that was foraged by flanking units needs to get to the camp, be recorded and stored (or processed and eaten) – speaking of which, note that we haven’t even discussed flankers, scouts and foraging parties. Wages may need to be paid, paperwork needs to be done. In many armies, the camp will need to be fortified – the Romans built a wood-palisade fortified camp every night on the march. And then everyone goes to sleep around 9pm. And that, to be clear, is when everything works like clockwork – which it never does.
For a large army, the breaking camp, waiting to begin marching, waiting for the last man to arrive, dealing with pack animals and wagons slices a few hours off of that eight hour march routine. All of which is why a normal large body of infantry moves something closer 8-12 miles per day than the 24 miles (8 hours x 3.1mph) per day implied by Wikipedia’s Average Human Walking Speed.
Historians doing studies of campaigns thus tend to use these sorts of rule-of-thumb speeds without much feeling the need to explain why armies move so slow because I think they expect that most of their readers are either fellow historians or former soldiers and in either case, already know. These rules of thumb, in turn, derive from staff planning in the age when armies still mostly walked to war (especially the 1800s and early 1900s): those staff office planners would have (and presumably still do have) elaborate tables of how many men can move how fast over what sort of roads in what kind of weather – because bad staff work multiplied over massive armies can mean catastrophic logistics and timing failures (see: Frontiers, Battle of the (1914) for examples).
If anything, for a medieval army of conscripts, fresh from a successful battle, with a long supply-train moving off of the main roads, 12 miles per day is actually quite fast. Large armies with lots of wagons often strayed into single-digit marching speeds. And, to be clear, marching speeds are highly variable based on terrain and the rest.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How Fast Do Armies Move?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-06.
September 8, 2022
QotD: Pre-modern armies could not march much faster than 8-12 miles per day … on good days
August 30, 2022
A cynical (or realistic) view of the fighting in Ukraine
Severian put up a guest post at Founding Questions from “Pickle Rick” analyzing a recent article in the Marine Corps Gazette on the Russo-Ukrainian War so far:
Marinus divides Russian operations, and operational goals, thus tactics, into three discrete geographic parts. Northern Raiding and feints realized through mobile warfare, Southern Occupation through clear and hold, and Central Attrition operations through artillery firepower.
1. Northern operation. Marinus’s central thesis is that the Northern operation was a giant raid, intended to fix Ukrainian commanders’ attention on the threat to Kiev, and prevent them from reinforcing their defenses in the south. In this, mobile warfare, using the battalion tactical group, was the main strategy used. Marinus posits that taking and holding Kiev was never a goal in this operation. Left unsaid in his assessment were two key points that go beyond his narrower operational focus.
First, I’m sure that the Ukrainian Army’s top command was likely not in complete control of defensive strategy or deployment. Zelensky, the Ukrainian Auto Parts King — (“I make politics for the Ukrainian working man, because that’s who I am, and that’s who I care about!”), and his American “advisors” were. Note that we have no idea who Ukrainian General Marshall is, who his Supreme Commander Eisenhower is, or his battlefield Patton is, even if one existed. I mean, we got fawning coverage of President Comedian, looking tough in his cammies on TV, a lot — by which I mean every fucking day, a mythical fighter ace, the “Ghost of Keeeeeev”, but nobody wanted to manufacture a real hero Uke general, steadfastly leading his troops with steely eyed resolve from the front?
C’mon, that’s Propaganda 101. Shit, even Big Red let Marshal Zhukov ride a white horse at the Victory Parade.
I don’t think that is inadvertent. The goons at State and the Clown Intelligence Agency, having engineered one coup, sure as fuck don’t want an actual no shit popular hero, ethnically Ukrainian general to be a viable political alternative to the UAPK they handpicked and installed after this clown folds the Big Top. (Francisco Franco, Kemal Ataturk, or Wladislaw Sikorski say hi from history!). To hear it from the Ministry of Propaganda, Zelensky is commanding the troops himself, and that’s for once likely not far from the truth. It’s Zelensky being “advised” by whatever retards from [Washington DC] who are actually commanding the Ukes, which brings me neatly into my next point — Putin and his generals initiated this feint to Kiev precisely because they correctly predicted that Zelensky and his American masters would expect it and react to it as they did, regardless of anything the Ukrainian generals said.
Why is that, you might ask? Because that is the only strategy that AINO’s Very Clever Boys, Girls and Trannies can conceive of, and the only way they conduct war. Send in the Air Force to blow up everything in an enemy capital, launch a blitzkrieg style invasion aimed at cutting off the enemy army, encircling it, forcing the unmotivated piss poor enemy conscripts to surrender in place or die trying to pull back, and driving on to the capital to pull down the statues of the recently deceased or deposed Dear Leader who was The Next Hitler, declare victory, then institute Regime Change and Operation Endless Occupation. Putin and the rest of his generals are just stupid vodka fueled gopnik Ivans, and couldn’t possibly be headfaking us and outsmarting us. We went to West Point and Harvard, and are automatically the Best and Brightest. Remember when the MoP and the Fistagon were squeeing like little girls at those incompetent Ivans floundering about within artillery range of Keeeev, and the 100 mile long convoy that everyone saw “stuck” on the road to the Sacred Capital, that was so visible and obvious you could see the fucker from space, that just sort of disappeared, along with the great and decisive Battle of Keeeeev that was going to be a bloody defeat for the evil Russians?
You’ll never hear anyone ever admit it, but they just got posterized because their hubris and arrogance was exactly the thing [Putin] used against them.
маскировка (Maskirovka), you stupid fucks, is a Russian MILITARY CONCEPT, and you forgot it. Check yo self before you wreck yo self, as von Clausewitz wrote. Master P didn’t fight your war, he fought a modern Kabinettskreige and that is fought for an entirely different set of objectives, as we will see below.
2.Southern operation. This is the forgotten stepchild of the war so far, but quietly could be the one front with the longest lasting strategic effects. Marinus disposes of this front relatively quickly, noting that it really is operationally the bread and butter of traditional warfare, take ground and hold ground, move on to the next objective. Strategically, this is different from ground taken in the northern front or even parts in the central, however.
The object here is permanent occupation and Russification to deny the rump state of Ukraine any coastline and landlock it. This, unlike territory in the north or even in the Donbass, is not a bargaining chip on the table at the peace talks. Denying this to the Ukrainians after the war prevents them from ever “inviting” any US Navy ships into the Black Sea to base themselves at a Ukrainian port and serve as a potential casus belli, hamstrings Ukraine from seaborne economic activity with Turkey across the Black Sea, thus making sure whatever left of Ukraine is unable to function without massive land route economic as well as military aid, making it a drain, not an asset, to Globohomo and AINO.
[…]
3. Central operation. Marinus here details the real decisive front in the war, calling it “Stalingrad in the East” (Clunky, since Stalingrad was a very different kind of battle, but it has name recognition as a byword for the Eastern Front and the Russian way of war). Honestly, it is far more like a giant Battle of Verdun, but only for one side.
Here is where I’m going to proclaim how happy my artilleryman’s heart is […] because Marinus says that in the Russian way of winning wars, you can’t spell PARTY without ARTY. Not Special Operations Operating Operationally, not drone warfare “fought” by fatass pimply nerds in some air conditioned room half a world out of danger, not bombs away from 30,000 feet, or armored divisions imitating Rommel. Fucking old school howitzers, chucking metric tons of high explosive on infantry, dropping regimental sized TOT and Shake and Bake when they get in the open. I predicted that here in the beginning of the war and a lot of you can look that shit up if you don’t believe me. Guess we ain’t obsolete anymore, assholes.
Everything the Russians are doing in the Donbass and Central front, operationally and tactically, hinges around artillery as the decisive arm, the fulcrum that the other arms orbit around, which is very, very different than the American way of war. Again, as in the north, the Americans “advising” the Ukes had never, literally never in living memory, faced an enemy with air superiority and firepower superiority, much less both combined. They have absolutely no answer for it.
How did Rome defend its empire? ⚔️
HistoryMarche
Published 29 Apr 2022🚩 In this video we analyze the three defensive strategies the Roman Empire deployed from c.27BC to 350 AD, as described in Edward Luttwak’s book The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire.
(more…)
August 13, 2022
QotD: Erich von Manstein
In the Britain of the Sixties, a certain mystique still attached to the generals of the Third Reich. In their stylish uniforms and their gleaming jackboots, they had swaggered. Only two, Keitel and Jodl, were executed at Nuremberg; the rest got away with murder.
Even some of those who were convicted of war crimes had friends in high places. One of the most prominent was Erich von Manstein, the architect of many German victories both in the Battle of France and on the Eastern front. He was also complicit in the genocide of more than a million Jews and others by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine.
Yet Churchill was among those who successfully campaigned to have Manstein’s 18-year sentence reduced to 12, of which he served only four.
Manstein’s memoir Verlorene Siege (translated as Lost Victories) appeared in 1958, a key text in the mythology that depicted the Wehrmacht as “clean” and laid the blame for war crimes on Hitler. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the postwar Federal Republic, also played his part in the rehabilitation of Manstein, on the grounds that West German rearmament required a sharp distinction between the Nazis and an untainted military tradition as the basis for the new Bundeswehr.
Daniel Johnson, “The moral blindness of Putin’s generals”, The Critic, 2022-05-10.
August 11, 2022
QotD: Logistical limits to Spartan military action against Athens
During the first phase of the Peloponnesian War, called the Archidamean war, after the Spartan king who conducted it, Sparta invaded Attica functionally every year in an effort to inflict enough agricultural devastation that the Athenians would be forced to come out and fight […] The core problem is that it just isn’t possible to do a meaningful amount of damage in the short campaigning season before the army has to go home.
And I want to be clear just how long they bang their head against this rock. The Spartans invade in 431, besiege a minor town, accomplish nothing and leave (Thuc. 2.18-20), and in 430 (Thuc. 2.47), in 429, because of a plague in Athens, they instead besiege tiny Plataea (Thuc. 2.71ff) and then leave, but in 428 they’re back at it in Attica (Thuc. 3.1), and in 427 (Thuc. 3.26), and in 426 but turn back early due to earthquakes (Thuc. 3.89). But they’re back again in 425 (Thuc. 4.2), leaving each time when supplies run out. Sparta mounts no attack in 424 because Athenian naval raiding forces them to keep the army at home (Thuc. 4.57); in 423 they have a year-long truce with Athens (Thuc. 4.117). They only finally suggest the creation of a permanent base in Attica in 422/1 (Thuc. 5.17) but the war ends first (they’ll actually fortify a small outpost, Decelea, only when the war renews in 413).
Thucydides is in several cases (e.g. Thuc. 3.1.3) explicit that what causes these armies to fail and disperse back home is that they run out of supplies. They are two days – on foot! – from a major friendly trade port (Corinth), and they run out of supplies. Their last invasion was six years after their first and they still had not resolved the logistics problem of long-term operations in what is effectively their own backyard.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
July 12, 2022
QotD: Greek city-state logistics in the time of the Peloponnesian War
Greek logistics in this period in general were very limited compared to either Macedonian or Roman logistical capabilities in subsequent centuries, or contemporary Persian logistics capabilities. Ironically, the most sustained study of classical Greek logistics concerns the campaigns of Xenophon (J.W. Lee, A Greek army on the March (2008)), meaning that it concerns not polis amateurs but an army of mercenary professionals, and yet compared to what the Macedonians would be able to do (see D.W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (1978)) half a century later in the same terrain, even these Greek logistics – probably the gold standard of their time – are astoundingly underdeveloped.
Put very briefly: Greek armies seem to have had relatively little carrying or logistics capacity. They did not seem to have generally moved with sufficient engineering tools or materials for effective field fortification or siege warfare. This is compounded by their inability to mill grain on the move (something Macedonian and Roman armies could do), which compounds problems of using local supply. You can eat unmilled grain (it can be roasted or boiled into porridge, but this is less than ideal. What they do tend to have is a high number of non-combat personal servants (precisely the sort of fellows good Roman or Macedonian generals drive out of the camp as soon as possible), who impose additional logistics burdens without much increasing the operational range or endurance of the army. Consequently, Greek armies struggled to stay out in the field throughout the year, whereas Roman and Macedonian armies were routinely capable of year-round campaigning.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
July 8, 2022
The Russian way of war
In First Things, George Weigel identifies what we’ve learned about the Russian “way of war” from the ongoing conflict with Ukraine:
Four and a half months after Russia invaded Ukraine on the Orwellian pretext of displacing a “Nazi” regime — a regime that enjoys a democratic legitimacy absent from Russia for two decades — what have we learned about, and from, the Russian way of war?
We have learned that the Russian way of war is inept strategically, tactically, and logistically: an army using inferior equipment, bereft of competent non-commissioned officers, and replete with ill-trained draftees; an army that relies on brute force to bludgeon its way toward its objectives. We have learned that the Russian way of war willfully obliterates cities and deliberately destroys economic infrastructure. We have learned that the Russian way of war targets hospitals and schools, cultural and educational institutions, churches, synagogues, and mosques in an attempt to eradicate a culture and a nation that Russian president Vladimir Putin insists has no right to exist, save as a Russian vassal. Thus the twenty-first-century Russian way of war breathes the spirit of eighteenth-century imperialism, with President Putin comparing himself to that quintessential Russian imperialist, Peter the Great, and telling schoolchildren asked to name Russia’s borders in a geography bee that “the borders of Russia never end”.
We have learned that the Russian way of war is insensible to casualty rates, its own army’s and Ukraine’s. We have learned that the Russian way of war includes abandoning the Russian dead or disposing of their remains in mobile cremation units, so that body bags don’t flood the home front and raise questions about the wisdom of Putin and his generals. We have learned that the Russian way of war includes the humiliation, torture, and probable execution of prisoners of war. We have learned that the Geneva Conventions on the humane treatment of POWs mean no more to the Russian military and its political masters than does the Fifth Commandment.
We have learned that the Russian way of war includes the use of cluster munitions and unguided missiles specifically forbidden by international law. Thus the Russian way of war systematically violates the two in bello (war-fighting) principles of the just war tradition: proportionality of means (no more force than necessary to achieve a legitimate military objective) and discrimination (non-combatant immunity). We have learned that the Russian way of war features widespread rape, gross theft, and the summary execution of civilians, as well as kidnapping civilians in Russian-occupied territories, relocating them, and attempting to coerce them into renouncing their Ukrainian allegiance.
We have learned that the Russian way of war includes illegal blockades of Ukrainian ports to prevent grain shipments, thus threatening starvation in Third World countries. We have learned that the Russian way of war includes energy blackmail, threats of nuclear-weapons use, and blatant bullying of other countries, including Lithuania and Kazakhstan.
QotD: Sparta’s vaunted hoplite phalanx differed little from hoplite armies from other Greek cities
That comes with all sorts of implications. The Spartans used the same military equipment as all of the other Greeks: a thrusting spear (the dory), a backup sword (a xiphos or kopis; pop-culture tends to give Spartans the kopis because it looks cool, but there is no reason to suppose they preferred it), body armor (either textile or a bronze breastplate), one of an array of common Greek helmet styles, and possibly greaves. We might expect the Spartiates – being essentially very wealthy Greeks – to have equipment on the high end of the quality scale, but the Perioikoi, and other underclasses who fought with (and generally outnumbered) the Spartiates will have made up the normal contingent of “poor hoplites” probably common for any polis army.
Xenophon somewhat oddly stops to note that the Spartiates were to carry a bronze shield (kalken aspida; Xen. Lac. 11.3 – this is sometimes translated as “brass” – it is the same word in Greek – but all Greek shield covers I know of are bronze). This is not the entire shield, as in [the movie] 300 – that would be far too heavy – but merely a thin (c. 0.25mm) facing on the shield. It’s odd that Xenophon feels the need to tell us this, because this was standard for Greek shields. Perhaps poorer hoplites couldn’t afford the bronze facing and used a cheaper material (very thin leather, essentially parchment, is common in many other shield traditions) and Xenophon is merely noting that all of the Spartiates were wealthy enough to afford the fancy and expensive sort of shield (it has also been supposed that elements of this passage have dropped out and it would have originally included a complete panoply, in which case Xenophon is just uncharacteristically belaboring the obvious).
The basics of the formation – spacing, depth and so on – also seem to have been essentially the same. The standard depth for a hoplite phalanx seems to have been eight (-ish; there’s a lot of variation). The Spartans seem to have followed similar divisions with a fairly wide range of depths, perhaps trending towards thinner lines in the fourth century than in the fifth, though certainty here is difficult. The drop in depth may be a consequence of manpower depletion, but it may also indicate a greater faith held by Spartan commanders of their line’s ability to hold. Depth in a formation is often about morale – the deeper formation feels safer, which improves cohesion.
It’s hard to say if the Spartan phalanx was more cohesive. It might have been, at least for the Spartiates. The lifestyle of the Spartiates likely created close bonds which might have aided in holding together in the stress of combat – but then, this was true of essentially every Greek polis to one degree or another. The best I can say on this point is that the Spartan battle record – discussed at length below – argues against any large advantage in cohesion.
That said, the Spartan battle order does seem to have been notably different in two respects:
First: it had a much higher ratio of officers to regular soldiers. This was clearly unusual and more than one ancient source remarks on the fact (Thuc. 5.68; Xen. Lac. 11.4-5, describing what may be slightly different command systems). Each file was under the command of the man in front of it (Xen. Lac. 11.5). Six files made an enomotia (commanded by an enomotarchos); two of these put together were commanded by a pentekonter (lit: commander of fifty, although he actually had 72 men under his command); two of those form a lochos (commanded by a lochagos) and four lochoi made a mora, commanded by a polemarchos (lit: war-leader) – there were six of these in Xenophon’s time. Compared to most Greek armies of the time, that’s a lot of officers, which leads to:
Second: it seems to have been able to maneuver somewhat more readily than a normal phalanx. This follows from the first. Smaller tactical subdivisions with more command personnel made the formation more agile. Xenophon clearly presents this ability as exceptional, and it does seem to have been (Xen. Lac. 11.4). Hoplite armies victorious on one flank often had real trouble reorganizing those victorious troops and wheeling them to flank and roll up the rest of the line (e.g. the Athenians at Delium, Thuc. 4.96.3-4). The Spartans were rather better at this (e.g. at Mantinea, Thuc. 5.73.1-4). They also seem to have been better at marching and moving in time.
Now, I do not want to over-sell this point. We’re comparing the Spartans to other hoplite forces which – in the fifth century especially – were essentially dumbfire missiles. The general (or generals) point the phalanx at the enemy, hit “go” and then hope for the best. Really effective command – what Everett Wheeler refers to as the general as “battle manager” – really emerges in the fourth century, mostly after Spartan power was already broken (E. Wheeler, “The General as Hoplite” in Armies of Classical Greece, ed. Wheeler (2007)). While “right wing, left wheel” is hardly the most complicated of maneuvers (especially given that the predictable rightward drift of hoplite armies in battle meant that it could be planned for), compared to the limitations of most hoplite forces, it marked the Spartans out as unusually adept.
More complicated Spartan maneuvers often went badly. Spartan forces at Plataea (479 – Hdt. 9.53) failed to effectively redeploy under orders, precipitating an unintended engagement. Plugging a gap in the line once the advance was already underway, but before battle was joined (something Roman armies did routinely) was also apparently beyond the capabilities of a Spartan army (Thuc. 5.72). While the Spartans are often shown in popular culture with innovative tactical formations – like the anti-cavalry wedge or anti-missile shield-ball (both of which, to be clear, are nonsense) formations in 300 – in practice the Spartan army was tactically uncreative. Like every other hoplite army, the Spartans formed a big rectangle of men and smashed it into the front of the enemy’s big rectangle of men. Notably, as we’ll see, the Spartans made limited and quite poor use of other arms, like light infantry or cavalry, even compared to other Greek poleis (and the bar here is very low, Greek combined arms, compared to say, Roman or Macedonian or Persian combined arms, was dismal). If anything, the Spartans were less adaptable than other hoplites.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.
July 5, 2022
The Republic of China’s “Porcupine strategy”
Originally published in the New York Sun and reposted by the New English Review, Conrad Black believes any attempted amphibious invasion of Taiwan will become the worst invasion outcome since the Athenians assaulted Syracuse in 414-413 BC:
Taiwan relief map.
Library of Congress Geography & Map Division via Wikimedia Commons.
There has for some time been a good deal of flippant talk about a Communist Chinese invasion of the Republic of China on Taiwan, as if that would be a simple military undertaking. It seems to be inadequately appreciated that Taiwan has thought of little else for many years, and is, unlike Ukraine, a very prosperous and technologically sophisticated country that is armed to the teeth with the most advanced American weaponry, and has plotted out a defense in depth that is called its “porcupine strategy”.
Though it is probably accidental, “porcupine” is the word applied to Switzerland by Adolf Hitler in 1941, when, after careful analysis by the German General Staff, he concluded Swiss defenders would inflict a much larger number of casualties on a German invasion force than could possibly be justified by the occupation of the country. (It can be lamented that more recent Western strategists did not apply the same test to Afghanistan.)
Comparisons with Ukraine are inapplicable, other than the fanatical determination of the defenders. Most obviously, Taiwan is not only an island but the Formosa Straits are three to four times as wide as the English Channel from the southern British ports to the beaches of Normandy. The People’s Republic of China would have no choice but to attack amphibiously as they could not possibly imagine success with fewer than 500,000 combat soldiers and no force remotely as large could be parachuted onto Taiwan.
A strike force of 500,000 would probably have to be supplemented by a follow-up force at least as large, all conveyed in a huge armada of slow and vulnerable craft. Taiwan has been supplied with the precise ground and air-launched missiles that the Ukrainians have used to such deadly effect in the Black Sea, including the sinking of the Russian flagship, the heavy missile cruiser Moskva.
Taiwan has a front-line Air Force of about 300 of the latest fully equipped fighter and interceptor aircraft that along with shore batteries could rain a dense and prolonged fire of missiles upon any invasion fleet. Such a fleet, even in the best of weather, would plod through open water for at least ten hours. They would be sitting, or at least slowly moving, ducks throughout that journey. It brings to mind the conclusion of one of Churchill’s Demosthenean addresses in the autumn of 1940: “We are still awaiting the long-promised invasion; so are the fishes.”
June 30, 2022
What’s the military version of the saying “Get woke, go broke”?
Chris Bray on the largely self-inflicted damage suffered by the US Army during the last few years, leading to (among other things) significant recruiting shortfalls:
The American military is running a social trust test for the larger society, and the results are remarkably clear.
Remember that the Biden administration opened with an ideological assault on the armed forces, ordering a training stand-down to harangue servicemembers about politics.
[…]
While the public framing was vague, the training wasn’t: It ran in a single direction. Servicemembers reporting on their “extremism” training to members of Congress described sessions in which the military warned them against white nationalism and the dangers of far-right sentiment, but didn’t mention Antifa (or ISIS, but whatever), hammering the January 6 narrative but deflecting questions about riots and arson in the summer of 2020. In uniform, troops did “privilege walks” and unpacked their white privilege in supervised discussions. Extremism, it turns out, is only one kind of thing, on a single end of the political spectrum.
Pursuing the theme of politically purified armed forces, three retired US Army generals published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for a political commissariat in the American military: “In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.” More domestic political spying will make our institutions healthy, they explained.
[…]
The result of woke leadership, politicized military service, Covid vaccine mandates that decline to take safety concerns and religious objections into account, and wars fought for no point or objective:
[…]
And a generation shrugs.
The military is only the most obvious, most centralized example of a burgeoning withdrawal from institutions crippled by lost trust. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment declined by 662,000 in a single year. Meanwhile, public school enrollment in California is imploding. The LAUSD, which was closing in on 800,000 students twenty years ago, is now moving in the other direction, and closing in on 400,000.
Institutions can shit on people, and push them past their limits, and make absurd and unkind demands of them. Until they can’t.
There will be more of this.
June 29, 2022
QotD: How Cadet Che shows that West Point isn’t West Point anymore
Bad as that is, there’s much worse. Notice the passivity of it all. What were any of the parties involved trying to accomplish? If Cadet Che had wanted to get kicked out of the service (as it seems finally happened, according to the linked article), there are a million easier ways. In fact, cadets at West Point are volunteers. The Army makes a big production out of this: If you can’t hack it at the Point, you’re simply not officer material. All it takes is a letter to the commandant, and you’re out — Cadet Che could’ve been drinking beer with his fraternal socialist comrades at Big State 24 hours after turning in his resignation.
Even the kid’s form of “protest” was passive. There’d be a certain utility, I suppose, for the Revolution if the kid had written “I’m a Communist sleeper agent” on the inside of his hat — evidently our standards are so lax that we don’t do basic background checks on our potential military officers. But he didn’t write that. Instead, he wrote “Communism will win,” a passive, bloodless statement … and that’s it.
The passivity is the truly terrifying part. A West Point graduate is among the elite if anyone is — he has command of at least a platoon of heavily armed trained killers, and the radio one of them carries has the power to call in armor, air strikes, cruise missiles … and yet, not “I’m a communist,” not “¡Viva la Revolución!,” not even “Lenin lives!” Just … “communism will win.” How, comrade?
Severian, “The Man of the Hour”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-22.
June 6, 2022
“I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials”
George Mason, quoted in the title of this post, had a very expansive view of the US militia. Most Americans of the day did not seem to share this view, as Chris Bray explains:
How Congress may have visualized the individual minutemen who would compose the militia of the United States after 1792.
Postcard image of French’s Concord Minuteman statue via Wikimedia Commons.
In the second Militia Act of 1792, Congress defined a uniform militia in all of the states:
That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia … That every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball … and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.
So, by federal law, every military-age white male in the country (except men who were exempted by the states, like clergymen) had to report to the local militia commander to be enrolled in their local company, and had to own a long list of equipment, and had to show up to train with that equipment when ordered.
They mostly didn’t. For decades, states reported their militia enrollment to the War Department, and it sometimes appeared that some states, by trying really hard, sometimes almost made it to something in the neighborhood of half participation. In 1826, the Barbour Board — named after Secretary of War James Barbour — evaluated the unmistakable failure of the federally defined uniform militia, and suggested trying again with a smaller group of select militiamen. The board’s report was universally ignored, because by 1826 the federal government, like, couldn’t even: Everyone knew the model of widely shared militia service had failed.
Historians have usually described the failure of universal white male militia service in the early republic as a top-down policy blunder in which political leaders didn’t try hard enough to make the thing work. But a marginal historian named Chris Bray, in a dissertation that generated no excitement of any kind in academia, argued that the universal white male militia obligation was doomed by something else: widespread irritation and popular resistance. The militia obligation reached into the lives of militiamen in ways they didn’t expect and wouldn’t tolerate, so they stopped showing up.
There are many different ways to tell this story, but let’s do it quickly.
QotD: Eisenhower’s D-Day speech to the troops
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-1. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 6th, 1944
I’ve highlighted an image of the signed document itself to show the various components of the ancient battle speech (following my numbering above): [https://acoupdotblog.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/breaking-down-the-speech.png?w=689]
Apart from a slight alteration of the order, it is not hard to assign this speech to the same genre as Sallust’s Catiline speech or even Thucydides’ speeches at Delium (Thuc. 4.92-95). As we’ll see, it is certainly not the case that there is no other way to structure a pre-battle exhortation (although, I should note that the standard text of the other famous pre-D-Day General’s speech, Patton’s speech to the Third Army, hits the same notes, but with more words – mostly profanity). But this is the standard structure of a battle speech in the Western literary canon, and speeches with this standard structure, or variations of it, appear frequently.
I think a reader might particularly be caught by the emphasis on a section stressing how formidable the enemy is and how great the danger is (“He will fight savagely”). That seems an odd thing to stress! But it is an important part of the structure of these speeches; it is almost never left out. When paired with the general’s own cause for hope, acknowledging the fearsome nature of the enemy and the general terror of battle is a way to inoculate the soldiers against the seizing fear of battle. The Greeks saw the fear of battle as two distinct elements, deimos (δεῖμος) – the creeping dread before a battle, and phobos (φόβος) – the sudden paralyzing panic in combat, the sharp fear that causes men to flee. If the encouragement of the speech (and the general’s presence) is meant to defuse deimos, openly discussing the fearfulness of the enemy (but couching it in terms of how it may be overcome) is meant to rob phobos of his sting. You do your soldiers no favors by concealing from them the terror they will experience regardless.
Now the bulk of Eisenhower’s D-Day order is dedicated to the fourth part, stating the ground for encouragement, generally framed by the reasons the general is confident despite how fearsome the enemy is. One form of encouragement is a recounting of the noble deeds of the soldiers themselves. One of the marks of good generalship for the Romans was if a general could go up and down the line, calling out individual soldiers and reminding them of great deeds they had performed (Caesar does this, for instance; note Catiline’s opponent, Marcus Petreius encourages his soldiers this way, calling out each one – his is an army of veterans – by name, 59.4). Alternately – especially for a fairly green army where no one has done any great deeds yet – the general might stress the great valor of their forefathers, or the honor of their city or state. The emotion being touched here is pretty clearly pride, tapping into a desire not to let one’s self, one’s community or one’s comrades down. That’s an effective rhetorical tactic; as we’ve discussed, the fear of shame is an effective combat motivator (where so many other motivations fail). Appealing to pride is a good way to arouse that fear of shame, as the two emotions are deeply connected. Alternately, a general may not a superiority in numbers, materiel, tactical position; he may discuss his battle-plan and how it is likely to bring victory. For forces defending on their own ground, the home-field advantage may be stressed.
You want to understand the “fearsome enemy” motif and the “grounds for encouragement” motif working best as a pair.
Consider it this way: you are about to take a very important test. If I, having already taken the test, tell you “oh, don’t worry, the test is easy,” that will help dispel your dread (deimos) before it, but when you sit down with the test paper and read the (quite difficult) questions, the seizing fear (phobos) hits you, and your overall performance is reduced. That seizing panic clouds your thoughts and costs you vital time; in a battle, it might cause you to flee or get you killed. But if I tell you “the test is hard, but (you’ve studied effectively/you can pick up points on XYZ section/etc.)” it not only diminishes the dread before the test, but serves to mentally prepare you for the shock of seeing the real thing. Indeed, I turn your fearful mind into my friend – when the real thing fails to live up to your worst nightmares, you’ll draw confidence from that. When the test turns out to be exactly like I said, the encouragement carries more weight because of the reliability of the warning. I am not dispelling your fear – because this is battle and everyone is afraid and no words can take that away – I am mentally preparing you for your fear. There’s an element of CBT in this: validate the emotion, suggest more helpful ways to think about it, and direct the mind towards behavioral solutions.
Finally, I think it is worth noting what is not generally here. While the speaker is likely to reflect on glorious deeds of the soldiers, or other soldiers like them, or their ancestors, there is generally not a focus on how fearsome or scary or strong they are because no one feels scary or strong when they are terrified. “You’ve done this before” is a good line (so is “our people have always beaten their people”) but “Remember, we are lions” is not. No one feels like a lion when they are receiving indirect fire and cannot fire back; no one feels like a lion when their buddy just went down next to them and there’s nothing they can do about it. Remember: the purpose of the speech isn’t to pump someone up before the charge, it is to emotionally prepare them for the moment when the emotional momentum of the charge is spent and the fear of death comes crashing in to replace it.
Likewise, while “the cause” often figures into such speeches, it does so as a subordinate element; some kind of group membership – the nation, the polis, the legion, comrades-in-arms – is often more prominent (note how Eisenhower’s speech crafts concentric circles of groups that the listener belongs to, watching and depending on the listener; “liberty-loving people everywhere” -> “the United Nations” and “our Allies” -> “our homefront” -> finally “us” and “we”). While it took until the late 1940s for group-cohesion-theory to really emerge on its own, these sorts of speeches show an awareness of what seems to be a timeless truth: the cause may get you to the battle, but only comrades will hold you in it when the dying starts (on this, note especially J. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1997)).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VII: Hanging by a Thread”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-12.
June 4, 2022
Falklands Conflict Aftermath | The global impact of a 74-day conflict
Imperial War Museums
Published 1 Jun 2022The Falklands Conflict of 1982 only lasted for 74 days, but it had lasting consequences which continue to be felt today. Prior to 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s government was planning major defence cuts including withdrawing the military from the South Atlantic. Instead, they spent nearly £3 billion defending British sovereignty of the Falkland Islands, and to this day maintain a garrison there. What was the effect of this short conflict for Argentina, Britain and the Falkland Islands, and what impact did it have around the world?
Correction: The video states that Port Stanley was granted city status in 2002, this should be 2022.
Thanks for watching IWM’s 5 part series on the Falklands Conflict. Please like and subscribe for more, and let us know in the comments below what you’d like to see next.
Explore and licence the archive films in this video: https://film.iwmcollections.org.uk/c/…
CREDITS
Mount Pleasant images, Crown copyright, April 2022
Margaret Thatcher images © University of Salford Press Office
Landmine clearance photos via Safe Lane Global
Sound effects via ZapSplat
June 2, 2022
For Queen and Country (2010)
emptyangel
Published 14 Jun 2011“Documentary following the Grenadier Guards as they prepare to lead the 2010 Trooping the Colour. But these men have had precious little time to prepare; as fighting soldiers, they have just spent six months on the front line in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. This is the story of how one and a half thousand men and women join together to create one of the greatest military ceremonies on earth. It is a ceremony with just one standard: Excellence.”
