Quotulatiousness

April 7, 2023

Manpower shortages in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during WW1

Filed under: France, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is an excerpt from Battalion: An Organizational Study of United States Infantry, an unpublished book by the late John Sayen which is being serialized at Bruce Gudmundsson’s Tactical Notebook on Substack. While I haven’t read a lot on the AEF, as I’ve concentrated much more on the Canadian Corps as part of the British Expeditionary Force, I was aware that the American divisions were organized quite differently from either British or French equivalents. The significanly larger division organization — 28,000 men compared to about half that in other allied armies — was intended to give US Army units greater staying power in combat, but it didn’t work out as planned for many reasons:

General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces in France during the First World War.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The basic tactical concept behind the square AEF divisions under which the two regiments holding the division’s front line could be relieved by two more regiments to their rear was seriously undermined. The two regiments that were supposed to be resting were the ones that had to man all the work details. When it came time for them to relieve the front-line regiments it was, as historian Allan Millett described it, often a question “of replacing exhausted troops who had suffered casualties with exhausted troops who had not”.

It had certainly not been intended that the infantry serve as labor troops. Such tasks were supposed to have been carried out by separate regiments of pioneers modeled on those used by the French. In the French Army, pioneer regiments were lightly armed infantry serving under corps and army headquarters. They tended to consist of older men and were not the elite assault troops that filled the pioneer platoons in the infantry regiments. Though they could fight when necessary, their main function was to furnish the bulk of the semi-skilled and unskilled labor in the forward areas.

In imitation of this system the War Department raised 37 AEF pioneer regiments. These were organized as AEF infantry regiments without machinegun companies or sapper-bomber, pioneer, or one-pounder gun platoons. Only two of the 29 pioneer regiments to reach France did so before the last three months of the war. One regiment was supposed to go to each army corps and several to each army. However, the AEF pioneers proved to be so badly trained and led (even by AEF standards) that after front line service involving a mere 241 battle casualties most of the pioneers were pulled out of combat to serve as unarmed laborers far to the rear.

It wasn’t just combat casualties that reduced US divisional effectiveness:

Early planning had called for one third of all divisions to serve as replacement depots or field-training units charged with keeping the remaining combat divisions filled with men. The system broke down, however, as heavy losses forced the intended depot divisions to be used as combat units instead. Only six of the 42 AEF divisions to reach France before the Armistice (three more arrived soon afterwards) actually served as replacement or training depots instead of the 14 that were needed.

As an emergency measure, five combat divisions, and later two of the depot divisions, were skeletonized to immediately create urgently needed replacements but, of course, this rendered them useless for either combat or depot duty. Another division had to be fragmented to provide men for rear area support duties and yet another was broken up to flesh out three French divisions. Even in February 1918, (before the AEF had seen serious combat) the four combat divisions in the AEF I Corps were 8,500 men short (mostly in their infantry regiments). The 41st Division, which was the corps’ depot division and charged with supplying those missing men was itself 4,500 men short. By early October 1918, AEF combat units needed 80,000 replacements but only 45,000 were expected before 1 November. At the end of October, the total shortfall had reached 119,690, including 95,303 infantrymen and 8,210 machine gunners. Only 66,490 replacement infantrymen and machine gunners would be available any time soon. For most of the war, AEF combat divisions were typically short by 4,000 men. After August 1918, even divisions fresh from the United States usually needed men. Too many divisions had been organized too quickly.

Of course, the root cause of the manpower problem was even more basic. Men were being used up faster than they could be replaced. The AEF suffered most of its battle casualties between 25 April and 11 November 1918, a period of less than seven months. These combat losses amounted to between 260,000 and 290,000 officers and men, of whom some 53,000 were killed in action or died of their wounds. The rest were wounded or gassed but 85% of these subsequently returned to duty. About 4,500 AEF prisoners of war were repatriated after the Armistice. Five thousand others became victims of “shell shock.” Accidental casualties, including those known to have been caused by “friendly fire” (total friendly fire losses must have been considerable, given the poor state of infantry-artillery coordination), or disease or self-inflicted wounds, far exceeded those sustained in battle.

Two thirds of the more than 125,000 Army and Marine Corps deaths between April 1917 and May 1919 occurred overseas and nearly half (57,000) were from disease. Pneumonia and influenza-pneumonia, which produced the infamous “swine flu” epidemic of 1918, were the chief killers but many victims who became ill before the Armistice did not actually die until after it. Between 14 September and 8 November 1918 some 370,000 cases were reported in the United States alone. Within less than two years between one quarter and one third of the men serving in the US Army had died or became temporarily or permanently disabled by battle, disease, accident, or misconduct. Had such losses continued, the United States might soon have begun to experience the same war weariness and manpower “burnout” that had been plaguing the British, French, and Germans.

With regard to the infantry, the woes of the AEF replacement and training system were much increased by the prevailing belief that because an infantryman needed few technical skills he had little to learn and could be quickly and easily trained from very average human material. Technical arms such as the engineers, signal corps, artillery, and, more significantly, the air corps got the pick of the AEF’s manpower.

The infantry soon became the repository for those deemed unfit for anything better. Many infantrymen saw themselves, and were seen, as cannon fodder. Morale and cohesion were further undermined by the practice of stripping new divisions of men (often before they had even left the United States) to fill older ones. The better men and officers avoided infantry duty to seek less demanding “technical” jobs. Of course, training suffered grievously.

As demands for replacements became more insistent, men who supposedly had received several months’ training were appearing in the front lines not knowing how to load their rifles. Others proved to be recent immigrants who could not speak English. Infantrymen of small physique who might have rendered useful service in non-infantry roles, soon collapsed under the physical burdens placed on them and became liabilities rather than assets. Losses among even good infantry were heavy enough but mediocre infantry melted away at an astonishing rate. Indiscipline, disorganization, and ignorance inevitably increased losses by what must have seemed like a couple of orders of magnitude. These losses were likely to be replaced, if at all, by men of even lower caliber.

Straggling was an especially pernicious problem, which the military police had only limited success in controlling. Even more than actual casualties, it caused some units to simply evaporate. During the Meuse-Argonne offensive, for example, one division reported that it was down to only 1,600 effective men. However, soon after it arrived at a rest area, it reported 8,400 men in its infantry regiments alone.

April 6, 2023

QotD: The general’s pre-battle speech to the army

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

The modern pre-battle general’s speech is quite old. We can actually be very specific: it originates in a specific work: Thucydides’ Histories [of the Peloponnesian War] (written c. 400 B.C.). Prior to this, looking at Homer or Herodotus, commanders give very brief remarks to their troops before a fight, but the fully developed form of the speech, often presented in pairs (one for each army) contrasting the two sides, is all Thucydides. It’s fairly clear that a few of Thucydides’ speeches seem to have gone on to define the standard form and ancient authors after Thucydides functionally mix and match their components (we’ll talk about them in a moment). This is not a particularly creative genre.

Now, there is tremendous debate as to if these speeches were ever delivered and if so, how they were delivered (see the bibliography note below; none of this is really original to me). For my part, while I think we need to be alive to the fact that what we see in our textual sources are dressed up literary compressions of the tradition of the pre-battle speech, I suspect that, particularly by the Roman period, yes, such speeches were a part of the standard practice of generalship. Onasander, writing about the duties of a general in the first century CE, tells us as much, writing, “For if a general is drawing up his men before battle, the encouragement of his words makes them despise the danger and covet the honour; and a trumpet-call resounding in the ears does not so effectively awaken the soul to the conflict of battle as a speech that urges to strenuous valour rouses the martial spirit to confront danger.” Onasander is a philosopher, not a military man, but his work became a standard handbook for military leaders in Antiquity; one assumes he is not entirely baseless.

And of course, we have the body of literature that records these speeches. They must be, in many cases, invented or polished versions; in many cases the author would have no way of knowing the real worlds actually said. And many of them are quite obviously too long and complex for the situations into which they are placed. And yet I think they probably do represent some of what was often said; in many cases there are good indications that they may reflect the general sentiments expressed at a given point. Crucially, pre-battle speeches, alone among the standard kinds of rhetoric, refuse to follow the standard formulas of Greek and Roman rhetoric. There is generally no exordium (meaning introduction; except if there is an apology for the lack of one, in the form of, “I have no need to tell you …”) or narratio (the narrated account), no clear divisio (the division of the argument, an outline in speech form) and so on. Greek and Roman oratory was, by the first century or so, quite well developed and relatively formulaic, even rigid, in structure. The temptation to adapt these speeches, when committing them to a written history, to the forms of every other kind of oratory must have been intense, and yet they remain clearly distinct. It is certainly not because the genre of the battle speech was more interesting in a literary sense than other forms of rhetoric, because oh my it wasn’t. The most logical explanation to me has always been that they continue to remain distinct because however artificial the versions of battle speeches we get in literature are, they are tethered to the “real thing” in fundamental ways.

Finally, the mere existence of the genre. As I’ve noted elsewhere, we want to keep in mind that Greek and Roman literature were produced in extremely militarized societies, especially during the Roman Republic. And unlike many modern societies, where military service is more common among poorer citizens, in these societies military service was the pride of the elite, meaning that the literate were more likely both to know what a battle actually looked like and to have their expectations shaped by war literature than the commons. And that second point is forceful; even if battle speeches were not standard before Thucydides, it is hard to see how generals in the centuries after him could resist giving them once they became a standard trope of “what good generals do.”

So did generals give speeches? Yes, probably. Among other reasons we can be sure is that our sources criticize generals who fail to give speeches. Did they give these speeches? No, probably not; Plutarch says as much (Mor. 803b) though I will caution that Plutarch is not always the best when it comes to the reality of the battlefield (unlike many other ancient authors, Plutarch was a life-long civilian in a decidedly demilitarized province – Achaea – who also often wrote at great chronological distance from his subjects; his sense of military matters is generally weak compared to Thucydides, Polybius or Caesar, for instance). Probably the actual speeches were a bit more roughly cut and more compartmentalized; a set of quick remarks that might be delivered to one unit after another as the general rode along the line before a battle (e.g. Thuc. 4.96.1). There are also all sorts of technical considerations: how do you give a speech to so many people, and so on (and before you all rush to the comments to give me an explanation of how you think it was done, please read the works cited below, I promise you someone has thought of it, noted every time it is mentioned or implied in the sources and tested its feasibility already; exhaustive does not begin to describe the scholarship on oratory and crowd size), which we’ll never have perfect answers for. But they did give them and they did seem to think they were important.

Why does that matter for us? Because those very same classical texts formed the foundation for officer training and culture in much of Europe until relatively recently. Learning to read Greek and Latin by marinating in these specific texts was a standard part of schooling and intellectual development for elite men in early modern and modern Europe (and the United States) through the Second World War. Napoleon famously advised his officers to study Caesar, Hannibal and Alexander the Great (along with Frederick II and the best general you’ve never heard of, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden). Reading the classical accounts of these battles (or, in some cases, modern adaptations of them) was a standard part of elite schooling as well as officer training. Any student that did so was bound to run into these speeches, their formulas quite different from other forms of rhetoric but no less rigid (borrowing from a handful of exemplars in Thucydides) and imbibe the view of generalship they contained. Consequently, later European commanders tended for quite some time to replicate these tropes.

(Bibliography notes: There is a ton written on ancient battle speeches, nearly all of it in journal articles that are difficult to acquire for the general public, and much of it not in English. I think the best possible place to begin (in English) is J.E. Lendon, “Battle Description in the Ancient Historians Part II: Speeches, Results and Sea Battles” Greece & Rome 64.1 (2017). The other standard article on the topic is E. Anson “The General’s Pre-Battle Exohortation in Graeco-Roman Warfare” Greece & Rome 57.2 (2010). In terms of structure, note J.C. Iglesias Zoida, “The Battle Exhortation in Ancient Rhetoric” Rhetorica 25 (2007). For those with wider language skills, those articles can point you to the non-English scholarship. They can also serve as compendia of nearly all of the ancient battle speeches; there is little substitute for simply reading a bunch of them on your own.)

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VII: Hanging by a Thread”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-12.

April 2, 2023

QotD: The (in-)effectiveness of chemical weapons against “Modern System” armies

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it is far easier to protect against chemical munitions than against an equivalent amount of high explosives, a point made by Matthew Meselson. Let’s unpack that, because I think folks generally have an unrealistic assessment of the power of a chemical weapon attack, imagining tiny amounts to be capable of producing mass casualties. Now chemical munition agents have a wide range of lethalities and concentrations, but let’s use Sarin – one of the more lethal common agents, as an example. Sarin gas is an extremely lethal agent, evaporating rapidly into the air from a liquid form. It has an LD50 (the dose at which half of humans in contact will be killed) of less than 40mg per cubic meter (over 2 minutes of exposure) for a human. Dangerous stuff – as a nerve agent, one of the more lethal chemical munitions; for comparison it is something like 30 times more lethal than mustard gas.

But let’s put that in a real-world context. Five Japanese doomsday cultists used about five liters of sarin in a terror attack on a Tokyo Subway in 1995, deployed, in this case, in a contained area, packed full to the brim with people – a potential worst-case (from our point of view; “best” case from the attackers point of view) situation. But the attack killed only 12 people and injured about a thousand. Those are tragic, horrible numbers to be sure – but statistically insignificant in a battlefield situation. And no army could count on ever being given the kind of high-vulnerability environment like a subway station in an actual war.

In order to produce mass casualties in battlefield conditions, a chemical attacker has to deploy tons – and I mean that word literally – of this stuff. Chemical weapons barrages in the First World War involved thousands and tens of thousands of shells – and still didn’t produce a high fatality rate (though the deaths that did occur were terrible). But once you are talking about producing tens of thousands of tons of this stuff and distributing it to front-line combat units in the event of a war, you have introduced all sorts of other problems. One of the biggest is shelf-life: most nerve gasses (which tend to have very high lethality) are not only very expensive to produce in quantity, they have very short shelf-lives. The other option is mustard gas – cheaper, with a long shelf-life, but required in vast quantities (during WWII, when just about every power stockpiled the stuff, the stockpiles were typically in the many tens of thousands of tons range, to give a sense of how much it was thought would be required – and then think about delivering those munitions).

[…]

But that’s not the only problem – the other problem is doctrine. Remember that the modern system is all about fast movement. I don’t want to get too deep into maneuver-warfare doctrine (one of these days!) but in most of its modern forms (e.g. AirLand Battle, Deep Battle, etc) it aims to avoid the stalemate of static warfare by accelerating the tempo of the battle beyond the defender’s ability to cope with, eventually (it is hoped) leading the front to decompose as command and control breaks down.

And chemical weapons are just not great for this. Active use of chemical weapons – even by your own side – poses all sorts of issues to an army that is trying to move fast and break things. This problem actually emerged back in WWI: even if your chemical attack breaks the enemy front lines, the residue of the attack is now an obstruction for you. […] A modern system army, even if it is on the defensive operationally, is going to want to make a lot of tactical offensives (counterattacks, spoiling attacks). Turning the battle into a slow-moving mush of long-lasting chemical munitions (like mustard gas!) is counterproductive.

But that leaves the fast-dispersing nerve agents, like sarin. Which are very expensive, hard to store, hard to provision in quantity and – oh yes – still less effective than high explosives when facing another expensive, modern system army, which is likely to be very well protected against such munitions (for instance, most modern armored vehicles are designed to be functionally immune to chemical munitions assuming they are buttoned up).

This impression is borne out by the history of chemical weapons; for top-tier armies, just over a century of being a solution in search of a problem. The stalemate of WWI produced a frantic search for solutions – far from being stupidly complacent (as is often the pop-history version of WWI), many commanders were desperately searching for something, anything to break the bloody stalemate and restore mobility. We tend to remember the successful innovations – armor, infiltration tactics, airpower – because they shape subsequent warfare. But at the time, there were a host of efforts: highly planned bite-and-hold assaults, drawn out brutal et continu efforts, dirigibles, mining and sapping, ultra-massive artillery barrages (trying a wide variety of shell-types and weights). And, of course, gas. Gas sits in the second category: one more innovation which failed to break the trench stalemate. In the end, even in WWI, it wasn’t any more effective than an equivalent amount of high explosives (as the relative casualty figures attest). Tanks and infiltration tactics – that is to say, the modern system – succeeded where gas failed, in breaking the trench stalemate, with its superiority at the role demonstrated vividly in WWII.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-20.

March 24, 2023

Only a paper dragon?

Filed under: China, Government, India, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak suggests that China’s military may be much more apparent than real:

The day after Li Keqiang, China’s departing Prime Minister and the last of Beijing’s moderates, called for more market liberalisation to reach this year’s 5% growth target, Xi Jinping responded by announcing a muscle-flexing 7.2% increase in China’s defence spending. That is certainly consistent with Xi’s truculent stance (he replied to Nancy Pelosi’s recent Taiwan visit with a series of ballistic missile launches), and with his official promise to the Communist Party that China will become the world’s dominant power by 2049. But what do those percentages actually mean?

The declared total of China’s newly increased defence budget at 1.56 trillion yuan amounts to $230 billion, according to the current exchange rate. If that were the case, it would mean that China is falling further behind the United States, whose own fiscal 2023 defence spending is increasing to $797 billion (and actually more, since that figure does not include its funding for military construction or the added help to Ukraine).

China’s own figure is also generally assumed by experts to be greatly understated — not by fiddling the numbers one by one, but rather by wholesale exclusions, such as the attribution of research-and-development spending to civilian budgets. Even if a commando team of elite forensic accountants were sent into action to uncover China’s actual defence spending, with another team dispatched to determine what’s missing from the US budget, we would still only have a very loose indication of how much actual military strength China and the United States hope to add.

But one thing can be said with absolute certainty: each side is adding less than the rising numbers imply.
In China’s case, a manpower shortage undercuts military spending in the PLA’s ground forces and naval forces, and soon it will affect manned air units as well. The PLA ground forces now stand at some 975,000, a very small number for a country that has 13,743 miles of borders with 14 countries — including extreme high-mountain borders where internal combustion engines lose power, jungle-covered borders where remote observation is spoiled by foliage, Russian-river borders with endemic smuggling, and the border with India’s Ladakh where an accumulation of unresolved Chinese intrusions have forced each side to deploy substantial ground forces, with at least 80,000 on the Chinese side.

Except for Ladakh, which now resembles a war-front, borders are not supposed to be guarded by army troops but by border police. And China did in fact have a substantial dedicated border force, but it was abolished for the same reason that the PLA ground army is so small: a crippling shortage of physically fit Chinese men willing to serve in these regions. Cities and towns, by contrast, do not seem afflicted by such severe manpower shortages, leading to the weird phenomenon on Nepal’s main border crossing to Tibet where, according to an acquaintance, a group of freezing Cantonese city policemen were checking travellers and “guarding the border”. (They said they had been “volunteered” for two months.)

March 22, 2023

What happened to Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne after Rorke’s Drift?

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Chap
Published 20 Jul 2022

Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne was the senior NCO at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift during the Zulu War of 1879. Superbly played by actor Nigel Green in the 1964 film Zulu, many have wondered why he was never awarded a Victoria Cross when 11 others were. This is the story of what happened to Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne after Rorke’s Drift.

He was actually awarded Britain’s second highest military medal (at the time), the Distinguished Conduct Medal, and ultimately rose from the ranks to become an officer. His military career continued all the way to the First World War, where he was promoted to the rank of Lt. Colonel. Frank Bourne, the last surviving defender of Rorke’s Drift, died in 1945, one day after the Germans surrendered.
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March 15, 2023

An Aircraft Carrier Without A Deck? | The Remarkable Brodie Landing System

Filed under: History, Military, Pacific, Technology, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Rex’s Hangar
Published 21 Sept 2022

Today we’re taking a look at the remarkable Brodie Launch System. This device could be used on land or aboard ships, and it was designed to provide accessibility for light aircraft in extremely remote locations during WW2.
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March 13, 2023

Good “peacetime” generals versus good “wartime” generals

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

“Shady Maples“, a serving Canadian Army officer, explains why the skills and talents that allow an officer to rise to general rank in peacetime have no direct relationship with how that officer will perform in a shooting war:

Field Marshal Sir William Slim (1891-1970), during his time as GOC XIVth Army in Burma.
Portrait by No. 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit via Wikimedia Commons.

I am not the first person to make these kinds of observations. Jim Storr has written about peacetime promotion culture in the British Army and Thomas E. Ricks did the same with U.S. Army. Here is an excerpt from Storr:

    It appears that many of those whom the British Army promoted in peacetime during the twentieth century were found wanting on the outbreak of war. Promotion to high command in peacetime very much reflects the values of existing senior commanders, themselves largely the products of a peacetime promotion system. To that extent it reflects deeply held values, and has an obvious impact on operational effectiveness in war.

    Roughly two-thirds of those who commanded formations in the BEF [British Expeditionary Force] of 1940 were either sacked, retired immediately, or were never given another formation to command in the field.

Ricks describes a similar phenomenon occurring in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. Many senior leaders who had risen during peacetime couldn’t perform under real-world conditions. Under the stern hand of George C. Marshall, then Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, generals were removed from command at a rate that is unheard of today. Many of those who were fired had glowing records and some went on to redeem their reputations in later commands, which suggests that they had been promoted too soon or too high above their level of competence.

More recently, Russia has been churning through general officers in Ukraine, seemingly desperate to find someone who can achieve Putin’s war aims. If an army systematically promotes its officers above their level of competence in peacetime, then clearly their selection and assessment criteria are not aligned with the actual job requirements.

To illustrate the point, Storr compares careers of Second World War British Field Marshals. The first, Field Marshal John Verreker a.k.a. Lord Gort, was Commander-in-Chief (C.-in-C.) of the BEF during its disastrous efforts in France in 1940.

    [Gort] was the epitome of the system: young, highly decorated, charismatic, promoted through and entirely within the system. He was only 51 when appointed CIGS [Chief of Imperial General Staff] … As C.-in-C. of the BEF, he “fussed over details and things of comparatively little consequence” and had a “constant preoccupation with things of small detail”.

After he oversaw the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, Gort was removed from command and served out the rest of the war in non-combatant posts. It should be noted that Gort was not a bad soldier. During the First World War, he rose from the rank of captain to acting lieutenant-colonel and in the process earned the Distinguished Service Order (with bar) and the Victoria Cross. It was during the interwar years that Gort ascended from the substantive rank of Major to Field Marshal. Battles may be won with good-enough tactics and a lot of chutzpah, but Gort was unprepared for the complexities of wartime command at the strategic level. He did, however, excel at playing politics.

For contrast, here is Storr’s description of Field Marshal William “Bill” Slim:

    [The] 47-year-old Bill Slim was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1938, perhaps at the last possible opportunity. Slim had not been to Sandhurst; he had gained his commission “through the back door” and had come from a modest background. The outbreak of the Second World War saw him commanding a brigade in East Africa. Within four years he was commanding the Fourteenth Army in Burma … Slim was obviously not the product of a stable heirarchy in peacetime. His rise to fame came entirely during wartime. He was arguably one of the greatest British generals of the twentieth century. The contrast with Gort could not be more marked.

For his part, Ricks has a takes a wider view of how the post-war U.S. Army made some officers too big to fail:

    Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq were all small, ambiguous, increasingly unpopular wars, and in each, success was harder to define than it was in World War II. Firing generals seemed to send a signal to the public that the war was going poorly.

    But that is only a partial explanation. Changes in our broader society are also to blame. During the 1950s, the military, like much of the nation, became more “corporate” — less tolerant of the maverick and more likely to favor conformist “organization men”. As a large, bureaucratized national-security establishment developed to wage the Cold War, the nation’s generals also began acting less like stewards of a profession, responsible to the public at large, and more like members of a guild, looking out primarily for their own interests.

It seems like loyalty up became more important than loyalty out.

March 11, 2023

M240 Bravo: America Replaces the M60

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Nov 2022

In 1977, the US military adopted the FN MAG as the M240 in vehicular configuration to replace the less-than-successful M73/M219 machine guns. The USMC would get an early start adapting the 240 to ground configuration (the M240G), but it wasn’t until 1995 that the Army formally replaced the M60 with the MAG in M240B layout. The M240B has a number of differences from the standard MAG:

– Single-position gas regulator, giving about 600 RPM
– Picatinny rail on the top cover for mounting optics
– Front heat shield over the barrel to prevent heat mirage
– Top cover can be closed with the bolt either forward or back

The M240B has since been adopted by the Marines as well, and served extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a quite heavy gun (24+ pounds) but very well liked by its users for being exceptionally rugged, dependable, and accurate. The one we have today is in pristine condition, and one of just 11 transferrable examples registered in the US.
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February 25, 2023

Rise of Franco – The Spanish Rif War 1921-1926

Filed under: Africa, Europe, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 24 Feb 2023

The Rif War between Spain and the Rif Republic gave rise to a young Spanish officer named Francisco Franco — who later would become Spanish dictator. After Spain had almost lost the war against the Rifi people, they got help from France and WW1 hero Philippe Pétain.
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February 24, 2023

QotD: Relearning lessons as old as warfare

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

DURING THE FIRST MONTHS of American intervention in Korea, reports from the front burst upon an America and world stunned beyond belief. Day after day, the forces of the admitted first power of the earth reeled backward under the blows of the army of a nation of nine million largely illiterate peasants, the product of the kind of culture advanced nations once overawed with gunboats. Then, after fleeting victory, Americans fell back once more before an army of equally illiterate, lightly armed Chinese.

The people of Asia had changed, true. The day of the gunboat and a few Marines would never return. But that was not the whole story. The people of the West had changed, too. They forgot that the West had dominated not only by arms, but by superior force of will.

During the summer of 1950, and later, Asians would watch. Some, friends of the West, would even smile. And none of them would ever forget.

News reports in 1950 talked of vast numbers, overwhelming hordes of fanatic North Koreans, hundreds of monstrous tanks, against which the thin United States forces could not stand. In these reports there was truth, but not the whole truth.

The American units were outnumbered. They were outgunned. They were given an impossible task at the outset.

But they were also outfought.

In July, 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What had happened to the widely heralded pushbutton warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who had never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen?

In this unconsciously plaintive cry lies buried a great deal of the truth why the United States was almost defeated.

Nothing had happened to pushbutton warfare; its emergence was at hand. Horrible weapons that could destroy every city on earth were at hand — at too many hands. But pushbutton warfare meant Armageddon, and Armageddon, hopefully, will never be an end of national policy.

Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life — but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.

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

February 22, 2023

Toward a taxonomy of military bullshit

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Bruce Gudmundsson linked to this essay from “Shady Maples“, a serving officer in the Canadian Army, on the general topic of bullshit in the military:

Armies, as a rule, are quagmires of bullshit. The Canadian Army is no exception. We accept that bullshit is an occupational hazard in the Army, but it’s a hazard that we struggle to manage and it’s one that threatens our effectiveness as a force.

In order to understand bullshit we need a taxonomy, that is, a map of bullshit and the common varieties found in the wild. Using our taxonomy, we can develop diagnostic tools to detect bullshit and expose its corrosive effects on our integrity and professional culture. I assume that bullshit is also a hazard in other environments and government departments, but since my experience is in the land force I will be focusing my attention on that.

The subject of bullshit entered the mainstream in 2005 when Princeton University Press issued a hardcover edition of Harry G. Frankfurt’s 1988 essay “On Bullshit“. Frankfurt doesn’t mince words: “[one] of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.” He argues that even though we treat bullshit as a lesser moral offence than lying, it’s actually more harmful to a culture of truth. I believe this wholeheartedly, for reasons which will become clear.

In Frankfurt’s view, even though a liar and a bullshitter both aim to deceive their targets, bullshitting and lying require different mental states. In order to lie, someone must believe that they know the truth and intentionally make a false account of it. For example, if you believe that today is Monday but today is in fact Tuesday, and somebody asks you what day it is, you’re not a liar if you say “today is Monday”. You’re not lying because you really do believe that today is Monday, even though this belief is incorrect. In order to lie, you have to intentionally make a statement that is contrary to the truth as you understand it. In this example, you would be lying if you said “today is Tuesday” while believing that today is actually Monday. You would be accidentally correct, but you would still be lying because you are providing a false account of what you believe is true.

This means that lying actually requires a tacit respect for the truth on the part of the liar. The liar has to at least acknowledge the existence of truth in order to avoid it. To provide a false account of the truth, the liar must first believe in the truth.

The bullshitter, by contrast, does not operate under this constraint. Bullshit according to Frankfurt is speech without any regard for the truth whatsoever. To Frankfurt, “[the bullshitter] does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” Bullshit, Frankfurt argues, is speech that is disconnected from a concern for truth. The bullshitter will say anything if it helps them achieve their desired ends.

[…]

Let’s move on to the topic of “bull”, which is discussed at length by British psychologist Norman F. Dixon, author of On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. Dixon beat Frankfurt to the punch by publishing his own theory of bullshit in 1976, twelve years before “On Bullshit”. Dixon is a Freudian psychologist writing in the 1970s, so I am skeptical of the scientific merit of his book. Nonetheless, he provides an interesting outsider’s perspective of British military culture from the Crimean War up to the Second World War and how that culture enabled terrible officers while punishing competent ones (spoiler: aristocrats and nepotism are bad for meritocracy).

There is an entire chapter of the book about bullshit as a contributing factor to military incompetence. Dixon attributes the origin of the word “bullshit” to Australian soldiers, who in 1916 “were evidently so struck by the excessive spit and polish of the British Army that they felt moved to give it a label”. His theory of the Australian origin of bullshit is supported by Australian philosopher David Stove, who believed that it’s a signature national expression.

[…]

Canadian political philosopher G. A. Cohen added some depth to the discourse when he responded to Frankfurt in “Deeper into Bullshit“. Cohen wasn’t satisfied that Frankfurt had explored full range of bullshit as a social phenomenon. Frankfurt anchors his definition of bullshit in the intention or mental state of the speaker (the bullshitter) whose lack of concern for truth is what makes their statements bullshit. Cohen responds to this by pointing out that there are many people who honestly profess their bullshit beliefs. Reading this brought me back to my undergrad days. I had a TA in a 300-level philosophy course who claimed that he doubted his own existence. Personally, I wondered whether he would still doubt his own existence if I punched him in the balls for spewing such performative bullshit in class. So I think that Cohen makes a good point: there are bullshitters who honestly believe their own bullshit.

Cohen’s argument is squarely aimed at a certain style of academic writing, which he calls “unclarifiable unclarity.” These are intentionally vague statements which cannot be clarified without distorting their apparent meaning or dropping the veil of profundity altogether. If you want an example, you can try reading Hegel or a postmodernist philosopher, or just save yourself the effort and click on this postmodern bullshit generator (trust me, it’s indistinguishable from the real thing). Pennycook et al. label statements of this type as “pseudo-profound bullshit“. Hilariously, they ran a series of experiments to see if test subjects would find the appearance of profound truth in both real and algorithmically-generated Deepak Chopra tweets. The result, disappointingly, was yes.

Cohen adds a fourth type of bullshit to our taxonomy: “irretrievably speculative comment”. Basically, when someone is arguing for a proposition which they have no way of knowing is true or false, or they put forward an argument that’s completely unsupported by readily available evidence, then that argument is bullshit.

[…]

Still with me? So far we’ve identified and defined four types of bullshit (BS):

BS1 (Frankfurt): propositions made without concern for truth.

BS2 (Dixon): ritualistic activity which doesn’t serve its stated aim or justification.

BS3 (Cohen/Pennycook): unclarifiable unclarity aka pseudo-profound bullshit.

BS4 (Cohen): speculation beyond what’s reasonably permitted by the evidence.

The common denominator of all four types of bullshit is their disconnection from reality. Bullshit statements don’t enhance our understanding and bullshit activity doesn’t get us any closer to achieving our goals in the real world. Bullshit doesn’t necessarily move us further away from truth, like lies do, but it certainly doesn’t get us any closer to it either. Essentially, bullshit lowers the signal-to-noise ratio of discourse.

The endless carousel of bullshit.

True Size of a Roman Legion

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

Invicta
Published 29 Oct 2022

The True Size of a Roman Legion.

A history documentary on the True Size of a Roman Legion. This is our first episode in the new True Size series which seeks to bring history to life in 3D using Unreal Engine 5. In this episode we cover the organization of a Roman Legion from the soldier to the Contubernium, the Century, the Cohort, and the Legion. Along the way we not only include the troops and their officers but all the slaves, mules, support, staff, and gear which accompanied them. This makes for a much better understanding of the Roman army structure.

We then put these into context by looking at a Roman army camp, a Roman army on the march, and a Roman army in battle order. This gives the viewer a full 3D history of a legion like never before.
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February 14, 2023

China’s awkward actions on the world stage do not charm the neighbours

Filed under: Asia, China, India, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander explains why the BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) “coalition” is as unlikely to occur in the real world as any other opium pipe-dream:

Yes, the USA and Canada had our Balloons of February, but in the last year or so, what has China been doing to seem like a pleasant alternative to the United States to the rest of the world?

Her largest neighbor? They get sticks:

    The root cause is an ill-defined, 3,440km (2,100-mile)-long disputed border.

    Rivers, lakes and snowcaps along the frontier mean the line can shift, bringing soldiers face to face at many points, sparking a confrontation.

    The two nations are also competing to build infrastructure along the border, which is also known as the Line of Actual Control. India’s construction of a new road to a high-altitude air base is seen as one of the main triggers for a deadly 2020 clash with Chinese troops.

    How bad is the situation?

    Despite military-level talks, tensions continue. In December 2022 troops clashed for the first time in more than a year.

    It happened near the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh state, the eastern tip of India. Some soldiers suffered minor injuries.

    De-escalation work has taken place since a major clash in June 2020. The Galwan Valley battle — fought with sticks and clubs, not guns — was the first fatal confrontation between the two sides since 1975.

    At least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers died.

    Another face-off in January 2021 left troops on both sides injured. It took place near India’s Sikkim state, between Bhutan and Nepal.

The “I” and “C” in the B.R.I.C. are not going to be close friends, ever — one of the reasons I roll my eyes at those who propose the BRIC nations as some kind of power block — something only slightly sillier than the Cold War “Non Aligned Movement.”

With the “B” being the basket case Brazil (always the nation of the future, and always will be), and the “R” being Russia, I mean, child please.

Another nation that if the PRC was just slightly more subtle and less arrogant they might have a chance to make things more difficult for the USA-Japan-Australia defense concerns is The Philippines. They had a window in the last couple of decades, but … if they’re doing this;

The PRC Wolf Warrior Lack of Charm Campaign perhaps may play well internally — and that may be all they care about — but there was a window not long ago that the PRC was playing smart on the world stage — making significant impact in Australia and having the USA happy to let them set up Confucius Institutes at our major universities, etc … but the last decade or so they somehow decided to play a different game.

February 10, 2023

Water-Cooled .50s: The US Navy Mk22 Pedestal Mount

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Oct 2022

In 1942, the US Navy adopted the Mk22 Pedestal mount, which fitted a pair of water-cooled Browning M2 machine guns (one left-hand feed and one right-hand). It was used for antiaircraft use primarily, and was also adopted by the Army as the M46 in 1943. The mount was an update to the previous single-gun MK21.

The gunner was protected by a 3/8″ (9.5mm) hardened steel shield, and the mount could rotate a full 360 degrees, with elevation from -10 degrees to 80 degrees. They were produced by the Heintz Manufacturing company (no relation to the Heinz company that makes ketchup) of Pittsburgh from 1942 until 1945.
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January 27, 2023

QotD: What is Strategy?

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

We should start by returning to our three levels of military analysis: tactics, operations and strategy. We’ve dealt with tactics (how you fight) and operations (where you fight, and how you get there). Strategy is an often misunderstood term: most “strategy” games (especially real-time strategy) are actually focused almost entirely on tactics and operations; as a rule, if “don’t have a war” isn’t an option, you are not actually doing strategy. Likewise, a lot of basic planning in business is termed “strategy” when it really is tactics; not a question of goals, but of means to achieve those goals. Because strategy is the level of analysis that concerns why we fight – and thus also why we might not fight. Let’s unpack that.

(Attentive readers who know their Clausewitz (drink!) will recognize that I am being both broader and narrower than he in how I use the term strategy. Clausewitz terms strategy as “the employment of battles to gain the end of war” which is more nearly what we today mean as operations. In contrast, strategy as it is used today in a technical sense corresponds more nearly to what Clausewitz terms policy, the third element of his “marvelous trinity”. A full exegesis of Clausewitz’ trinity is beyond the scope of this essay, but I wanted to note the differing usages, because I’m going to quote Clausewitz below. And as always, every time Clausewitz gets quoted you must take a drink; it’s the eternal military history drinking game).

At the strategic level of analysis, the first question is “what are your policy objectives?” (although I should note that grand strategy is sometimes conceived as an analytical level above strategy, in which case policy objectives may go there). There’s a compelling argument common in realist international relations theory that the basic policy of nearly all states is to survive, with the goal of survival then suggesting a policy of maximizing security, which in turn suggests a policy of maximizing the military power of the state (which ironically leads to lower the security of other states who then must further increase their military power, a reaction known as the “security dilemma” or, more colorfully, the “Red Queen effect”). I think it is also possible for states to have policy goals beyond this: ideological projects, good and bad. But survival comes first.

From there, strategy concerns itself with the best way to achieve those policy objectives. Is peace and alliances the best way to achieve security (for a small state, the answer is often “yes”)? Would security be enhanced by, say, gaining a key chunk of territory that could be fortified to forestall invasion? Those, of course, are ends, but strategy also concerns itself with means: how do you acquire that defensible land? Buy it? Take it by force? And then – and only then, finally – do you come to the question of “what sort of war – and what sort of conduct in war – will achieve that objective?”

You may note that this is not the same kind of thinking that animates tactics or operations. Military theorists have noticed that for quite some time, often suggesting a sharp separation between the fellows who do operations and tactics (generals) and those who do strategy (typically kings or politicians). As Clausewitz says (drink!), “The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose … war should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy [emphasis mine].” In short, Clausewitz stresses – and leaders have long ignored to their peril – that of all of the factors in war, policy ought to guide action (although no part of the trinity may be neglected).

This creates subordination between the three levels of analysis (to get technical, this is because operations and tactics are part of a side of the Clausewitzian trinity which ought to be subordinate to policy). Operations is subordinate to strategy; an operation which achieves something that isn’t a strategic goal accomplishes nothing. And tactics is likewise subordinate to operations. Thus the thinking pattern should always proceed from the highest questions of strategy down to the prioritization of ends (still strategy), to the means to accomplish those ends (still strategy); only then to the execution of those means (operations) and then to the on-the-ground details of that execution (tactics). Of course what this tripartite division is mean in part to signal is that all three of these stages are tremendously complex; just because tactics is the subordinate element does not mean it is simple!

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VIII: The Mind of Saruman”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-19.

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