The fall of Kabul will make the United States less willing to use military power to achieve national goals and, at the same time, make the use of decisive and overwhelming military force more necessary when the U.S. does decide to act. For years, America used her military scorecard in World War II as “credit” with our allies and adversaries. The positioning of a small American military force in some corner of the world provided deterrence at a fraction of the cost of placing a large enough force to actually win a decisive engagement or a campaign. We can all think of innumerable examples where America “held the fort” in a variety of strategically valuable locales while in reality planning to fight no more than two β I mean one and a half or maybe even just one β actual conflicts at any given time. America was and is securing key terrain “on margin”.
Kabul was a margin call. From now on, America may well be obliged to “pay cash”, viz., deploy combat capable formations of sufficient size to engage and win if we want anyone to take us seriously. A token “speedbump” force or a promise of “over the horizon” support β which is the majority of what the U.S. military now does β isn’t going to reassure any friends or deter any adversaries. At least not anyone who is paying attention.
Our adversaries will be emboldened. It is not so much that America’s military reputation has been irretrievably damaged, but the lessons that the Vietnamese, the Hmong, and now the Afghans have learned so painfully cannot fail to be appreciated by us or by the wider world. It appears that America (not the military, but America herself) has lost her stomach for a real fight. Americans taught the world the same lesson about the British Empire during the Revolutionary War (although Britain recovered enough to build her “second empire”), it would be foolish to fail to now see ourselves through that particular historical prism.
Garri Benjamin Hendell, “The Day After Kabul”, The Angry Staff Officer, 2021-11-02.
February 16, 2022
QotD: The fall of Kabul was “a margin call”
January 22, 2022
Belisarius: The General & The Eunuch
Epic History TV
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π Procopius, History of the Wars https://geni.us/L3Pgc
π The Wars of Justinian by Michael Whitby https://geni.us/Xxrd3
π Rome Resurgent by Peter Heather https://geni.us/ZFoU1
π The Armies of Ancient Persia: the Sassanians by Kaveh Farrokh https://geni.us/jMQo3z
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1842 Retreat From Kabul
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 22 Sep 2021On January 13, 1842, a single man on horseback approached the British garrison at Jalalabad, where soldiers were waiting for a retreating army of several thousand. Exhausted, the man had part of his skull shaved off by a sword and his horse was so exhausted that it would soon perish. As he was brought into the walls of the city the lone man was asked where the rest of the army was. “I am the army,” he replied. Thus ended a disastrous retreat from Kabul, where a British force of some 4,500 soldiers and thousands of civilians was almost entirely destroyed.
This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
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December 30, 2021
The Cursus Honorum of the late Roman Republic
At Founding Questions, Severian notes that the Cursus Honorum — the formal “career path” for ambitious men in the late Roman Republic was a remarkably effective process … that ended up being a victim of its own success:
Ahhh, God bless the autists at Wiki, theyβve got it down to a chart:
This is from Caesar’s time, and since one of this blog’s main themes is the confusion between process and outcome, let’s put it right up front: This system, the cursus honorum, was designed to produce men like Julius Caesar …
… and you can take that in either sense.
Caesar is one of the most mulled-over men in history, but nobody seriously doubts that he was at least competent at pretty much everything. Maybe he didn’t make the big list of “Greatest Pontifices Maximi” (or however the Latin goes), but he wasn’t a disgrace to the toga, either. If it was a public function in the Late Roman Republic, Caesar was at least decent at it.
And that’s what the cursus honorum was designed to do. It was a three-fer: It gave you competent public officials, but it also gave young ruling class men some seasoning. Most importantly, it was a way of nurturing talent that also hedged against the Peter Principle. If you want to argue that that makes it a four-fer, go nuts, but the point is, it was a pretty good system … up to a point, and if you’re a regular reader, you know what that point is: The Dunbar Number, at which point relationships become too complex to be managed personally, and bureaucratic structures replace them.
One wishes later governments had something like this β if a guy starts out as a quaestor and discovers he can’t handle it, he’ll bring that knowledge with him to the Senate. (Of course, if he can’t even manage to get elected to that, he’ll know full well his level of talent, and he’ll sit down and shut up on the Senate’s back benches). Note too that the bottom rung is military service β since at that time legionaries were all militia, the voters got a good look at you where it really matters, right from the beginning.
By the time a man reaches the top, then, he has intimate experience of ALL the public offices. Not only that, but he’s well known to everyone who matters, since in between the various offices he’s in the Senate, making connections (or out in the provinces, making other β but no less valuable β connections). A consul, then, is pretty much by definition omnicompetent. He did a good enough job in all the previous public offices that he didn’t disqualify himself for the top slot. Also, he’s been thoroughly vetted β everyone who matters, at pretty much every level of society, has had a good look at him (or, at worst, has a good friend who has had a good look at him).
Obviously it wasn’t a perfect system. Rome had her share of inept consuls, because people are people and sometimes “promotion to your level of incompetence” means “promotion to the very top job”. But for the most part it worked well, and even if a guy turned out to be a dud as consul, well, what can you do? Everyone had at least a reasonable expectation that he’d be able to handle it, which is pretty much the best one can consistently achieve in human affairs. Not only that, but because of the candidate’s long experience and careful vetting, you had a much better than average chance of getting a real winner …
… a man like Caesar, who is at minimum competent at everything, and outstanding at lots of things.
The Story Of Sir Arthur Currie: From Gunner To General | The Great War With Norm Christie | Timeline
Timeline – World History Documentaries
Published 28 Dec 2021Military historian Norm Christie presents a four-part series examining the First World War from a Canadian perspective. As he begins his journey through the historic battlefields of France and Belgium, Christie focuses on the career of General Sir Arthur Currie, a soldier who rose through the ranks from humble gunner in 1897 to lead the Canadian Corps to several victories during the conflict which began in 1914.
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Note: The original YouTube title said “from Gunman to General”. Perhaps in British usage, “gunman” is a variant of “gunner” (an artilleryman), but in Canadian usage the word “gunman” almost invariably means armed criminal or terrorist, and while Sir Arthur’s career had its difficulties, he was never a criminal.
December 13, 2021
The Battle of Cannae (216 B.C.E.)
Historia Civilis
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Website | http://historiacivilis.comMusic is Beethoven’s “Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111” – I. Maestoso – Allegro con brio ed appassionato, performed by Daniel Veesey
December 11, 2021
Belisarius: The Battle of Rome
Epic History TV
Published 10 Dec 2021Thank you to our sponsor Private Internet Access.
Get the Epic History TV special offer using this link: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com…Big thanks to Legendarian for Total War: Attila gameplay footage, check out his YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOI2…
Thanks also to our series consultant Professor David Parnell of Indiana University Northwest, who you can follow on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/byzantineprof
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π¨ Original artwork by MiΕek Jakubiec https://www.artstation.com/milek
πRecommended reading (as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases):
π Procopius, History of the Wars https://geni.us/L3Pgc
π The Wars of Justinian by Michael Whitby https://geni.us/Xxrd3
π Rome Resurgent by Peter Heather https://geni.us/ZFoU1
π The Armies of Ancient Persia: the Sassanians by Kaveh Farrokh https://geni.us/jMQo3z
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December 6, 2021
The Battle of Lake Trasimene (217 B.C.E.)
Historia Civilis
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Website | http://historiacivilis.comMusic is Beethoven’s “Sonata No. 07 in D Major, Op. 10 No. 3” – I. Presto, performed by Daniel Veesey.
December 3, 2021
The Battle of the Trebia River (218 B.C.E.)
Historia Civilis
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Website | http://historiacivilis.comMusic is Beethoven’s “Sonata No. 11 in B Flat Major Op. 22” – I. Allegro con brio. Performed by Daniel Veesey
November 12, 2021
More on the populist success of Hungary’s Victor OrbΓ‘n
Last week, Scott Alexander looked at a couple of recent biographies of Hungarian politician Victor Orban (linked here). He got some quite interesting responses from his readers, including a long Twitter thread from Lyman Stone, which he’s converted into plain text for ease of reading:
I won’t make you read it all in tweet format. He continues:
1) Dictatorship and democracy. The arguments about Orban cheating in elections might be totally true. I dunno. But that’s sort of irrelevant. Neutral opinion polls nobody disputes show he would have gotten 2/3 under almost any system.
His crude poll share was about 60% before the 2010 election, but given the threshold effects, he’d likely have ended up at a supermajority under almost any system. And as @slatestarcodex [says], a lot of the initiatives that the EU most despises under Orban are initiatives that *everyone agrees* have supermajority public support among Hungarian voters.
Moreover, I agree with @slatestarcodex that if public opinion turned in Hungary, Orban would probably turn on a dime too. The dude loves power. But that should inform our read of what’s going on in Hungary. *Hungarians wanted* a right-nationalist authoritarian leader, *and so they voted for one*, and the electorate has *wanted* recurrent intensifications of that regime. So is it a dictatorship? Or is it a democracy?
This gets at the problem with “democracy” as a concept. Hungary is undeniably Democratic: there is widespread public support for the regime, which is selected by elections, the results of which are a decent approximation of trustworthy and neutral opinion polls. But I think it’s still possibly reasonable to call Orban a dictator. He wields enormous *personal* power, there are few checks on his power, and he uses power to create a *personal* clique of supporters to perpetuate that power and enfeeble the competition.
But this is the point: Democracy and dictatorship aren’t opposites. In fact, they are natural companions! So much so that before the 20th century, “democracy” was often used *literally as a synonym* for “authoritarian and demagogic rule”! Orban is a great example of why the word “democracy” came into ill repute in the past: because it was widely understood that “the people” (often pejoratively “the mob”) will often vote for a strongman to stomp his boot on the face of disliked others. That’s not so much a disagreement with @slatestarcodex as just a comment where I think the modern western liberal mindset obscures understanding the phenomenon of populist leadership.
2) Why admire Orban? Here I think @slatestarcodex misses some important stuff, perhaps because his biographies miss it. Yes, Orban was incompetent in the 90s. So were MOST immediate post-Soviet leaders! And while Orban may have been corrupt, you can compare the personal wealth of the Fidesz clique to the cliques that looted Russia or Ukraine and realize that Hungary got a better class of corrupt leaders than much of eastern Europe. Moreover, Hungary actually had competitive elections with changes of power and leaders who *respected* those results! Maybe they were dirty but, like, it happened! This wasn’t universally true!
So why might Hungarians admire a dissident-cum-parliamentarian who competed for their votes and when defeated responded democratically by adapting to try to win the next election? Because … duh?
But it’s not just that. The big factor that’s absent in all these culturalist accounts of Hungarian politics is … the economy. Hungary went from below-average unemployment rate for its region under Orban 1 to way above-average under the socialists to again below-average under Orban 2.
This is extremely important. A part of Orban’s appeal is that, whether by coincidence or art, he has managed to preside over periods where Hungary’s economic performance was better than a lot of its neighbors, and often fairly obviously so. That is, supporting irredentist nationalism in the form of Orban hasn’t imposed costs on Hungarians: they aren’t like facing sanctions or something or enduring deep economic hardship to stand by their dictator. He’s delivered (comparatively) good times!
So when you have a leader who 1) seems marginally-less-corrupt than regional peers, 2) delivers marginally-better-results than regional peers, and 3) adopts policies that are widely popular … that leader will be popular! Duh!
Update: Fixed broken link.
November 11, 2021
H.G. Wells – The Outline of History – The Great War
Thersites the Historian
Published 5 Mar 2021In this video, we look at H.G. Wells’ coverage of World War I, from the war’s outbreak to the Armistice. Here, we see Wells at his most passionate and he makes a few controversial claims as well as sharing a couple of his personal experiences as a Londoner dealing with German air raids and celebrating the Armistice.
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QotD: War and human capital
The blame for this is always put on Hitler and that’s a good place to start, but the Germans had a brain power problem throughout the planning layer. This is obvious in how they went about making tanks. Instead of going for a tank that was cheap and easy to produce by a civilian workforce, they tried to build tanks that were complex and required specialists to produce. The effects of allied bombing raids were amplified by this strategic blunder in production planning. This is a very basic error in planning and execution.
One possible cause of this was that the middle-aged men who would have been sorting these production and design problems had died during the Great War. The German army tended to “use up” their units, rather than cycle them in and out of lines. That meant that a lot of experience with supply and logistics was lost in the trenches. The British and the Americans rotated units in and out of the lines, thus they came out of the war with a vast number of people with experience in the nuts and bolts of war fighting.
The current ruling class needs the Germans to be seen as the ultimate in super villains, but the truth is the Germans were dumb about a lot of important things. The Russians came up with sloped armor, for example, and the Germans never bothered to steal the idea, even after Kursk. The Germans got their hands on the Churchill tank, but never bothered to learn anything from it. They never learned from the Americans how to use communications to coordinate their artillery and their armor.
In many respects, the story of the tank in the war is a great proxy for the story of human capital and cultural intelligence. The Germans had the best trained military on earth, but they lacked human capital in the strategy and tactics layer. Either the culture was unable to produce it or there was simply not enough smart people to create the necessary smart fraction. That was ultimately why Germany was wiped from the map. It’s probably why no new culture has arisen from that place on the map either.
The Z Man, “Tanking It”, The Z Blog, 2019-03-01.
November 10, 2021
QotD: Pershing and Prohibition
There are two primary reasons for this. First, the Army had been living under various forms of prohibition long before the 18th Amendment’s ratification. In 1832, during the Black Hawk War, Illinois militiamen consumed their entire two-week issue of whiskey by the campaign’s second day. When Black Hawk attempted to surrender that day, the drunken militia instead attacked, and in the ensuing “Battle of Stillman’s Run” Black Hawk and his roughly fifty warriors routed the 275 militiamen. Consequently, Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of War Lewis Cass eliminated the whiskey ration.
As the temperance movement gained increasing influence, in 1890, Congress banned “intoxicating beverages” to enlisted men at military posts located in states, territories, or counties with local prohibition laws. The Army considered beer and light wines to be non-intoxicating, however, and allowed their sale and consumption at the post commander’s discretion. Congress subsequently expanded Army prohibition with the so-called Canteen Act of 1901, which forbade “the sale of, or dealing in, beer, wine or any intoxicating liquors by any person in any post exchange or canteen or army transport or upon any premises used for military purposes by the United States.” When America entered World War I, Congress extended alcoholic prohibition beyond the Army’s post boundaries. The Selective Service Act of May 1917 prohibited intoxicating beverages “in or near military camps” β which the War Department implemented by establishing a prohibition zone five miles wide around each post β and made it illegal to sell to any serviceman in uniform. (The Army once again skirted the bill’s intent by permitting beverages with less than 1.4 percent alcohol-by-volume). Thus, the 18th Amendment had little legal impact on the US. Army.
More importantly, perhaps, was the fact that like millions of their civilian counterparts, most officers and enlisted men simply chose to ignore the Volstead Act’s enforcement of Prohibition. When General Pershing became Army Chief of Staff, each day after leaving the War Department he enjoyed staying up late with his aides, drinking, talking about his youth, and joking. Once when he and George Marshall were traveling on a train together and enjoying a bottle of Scotch, Pershing suggested they offer some to Senator George Moses in the next car. Pouring a little into a glass, they proceeded to where Pershing thought Moses was sleeping in a Pullman. “Senator Moses,” whispered Pershing as he scratched a berth’s closed green curtain. When there was no answer, Pershing raised the curtain, only to discover not Senator Moses, but an angry woman who cried: “What do you want?” Pershing dropped the curtain and bolted down the aisle like a frightened schoolboy, pushing Marshall ahead of him and spilling the scotch. “I had a hard time keeping out of his way,” Marshall said, “because he was running up my back. But we got to the stateroom and got the door shut. Then he just sat down and laughed until he cried.” Finally, wiping his eyes, Pershing noticed a little Scotch remained in the glass and mischievously suggested Marshall return and try it again. Not on your life, Marshall replied. “Get another aide.”
Benjamin Runkle, “‘What a Magnificent Body of Men Never to Take Another Drink’: The U.S. Army and Prohibition”, Real Clear Defense, 2019-01-16.
November 6, 2021
Belisarius Part 2: The Empire Strikes Back
Epic History TV
Published 5 Nov 2021Play Epic War: Thrones and enjoy the real war game experience!
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Real War, Real EpicBig thanks to Legendarian for Total War: Attila gameplay footage, check out his YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOI2…
Thanks also to our Series Consultant Professor David Parnell of Indiana University Northwest, who you can follow on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/byzantineprof
Total War: Attila gameplay footage used with kind permission of Creative Assembly — buy the game here: https://geni.us/qDreR
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π¨ Original artwork by MiΕek Jakubiec https://www.artstation.com/milek
πRecommended reading (as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases):
π Procopius, History of the Wars https://geni.us/L3Pgc
π The Wars of Justinian by Michael Whitby https://geni.us/Xxrd3
π Rome Resurgent by Peter Heather https://geni.us/ZFoU1
π The Armies of Ancient Persia: the Sassanians by Kaveh Farrokh https://geni.us/jMQo3z
π Late Roman Cavalryman AD 236β565 (Osprey) by Simon MacDowall https://geni.us/XMGlSupport Epic History TV on Patreon from $1 per video, and get perks including ad-free early access & votes on future topics https://www.patreon.com/EpicHistoryTV
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November 2, 2021
Sandhurst 1975 – The Royal Military Academy
British Army Documentaries
Published 21 Feb 2021Filmed in 1975, this documentary is set at Sandhurst, the officer training academy. It follows a group of young men preparing for a life of leadership in the Army. These “managers of violence” will be expected to perform to the very highest of traditions of the British Army and be prepared to apply their professionalism on British soil should the need arise.
Β© 1975
This production is for viewing purposes only and should not be reproduced without prior consent.
This film is part of a comprehensive collection of contemporary Military Training programmes and supporting documentation including scripts, storyboards and cue sheets.
All material is stored and archived. World War II and post-war material along with all original film material are held by the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive.
