Category Archives: Military & War

STALINGRAD The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943

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I’ve only read a handful of history books (crime fiction is my passion) but they’ve all be great reads. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century; Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civ89l War Era; Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869; and Wires West: The Story of the Talking Wires. I’m currently reading STALINGRAD The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor.

(Wikipedia) “Stalingrad is a narrative history written by Antony Beevor of the battle fought in and around the city of Stalingrad during World War II, as well as the events leading up to it. The book starts with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the subsequent drive into the Soviet Union. Its main focus is the Battle of Stalingrad, in particular the period from the initial German attack to Operation Uranus and the Soviet victory.” Continue reading →

China Is a Paper Dragon

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In a recent article in The Atlantic (China Is a Paper Dragon) David Frum writes about a 2018 book by Tufts University professor Michael Beckley. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.

Following are some excerpts from Drum’s article and Beckley’s book:

American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”

Whereas public school is free through high school in the United States, China’s government only covers the costs of elementary and middle school. At many Chinese high schools, families have to pay tuition and other expenses, and these outlays are among the highest in the world. Consequently, 76 percent of China’s working-age population has not completed high school. (Beckley)

Many Chinese college students describe their universities as “diploma factories,” where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying “Mao Zedong thought,” and students and professors are denied access to basic sources of information, such as Google Scholar and certain academic journal repositories. (Beckley)

More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places. China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital. More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms.

“World War Wired”

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Following are a few of my favorites nuggets from an essay in the New York Times by Thomas Friedman:

“On the first day of the war, we saw invading Russian tank units unexpectedly being exposed by Google maps, because Google wanted to alert drivers that the Russian armor was causing traffic jams.”

A large-scale modern war will be livestreamed, minute by minute, battle by battle, death by death, to the world.

Russia, has an economy that is smaller than that of Texas.

The musician and actress Selena Gomez has twice as many followers on Instagram — over 298 million — as Russia has citizens.

Vladimir, the first day of this war was the best day of the rest of your life.

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.”

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I recently finished Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson, considered by many the best single-volume history of the American Civil War. I wouldn’t know where to begin to tell you how much I enjoyed this book. We all know how the story ends, right, but I was on the edge of my seat till the final page. The mark of a truly great story-teller.

We all know about Union general William T. Sherman’s burning of Atlanta and his “march to the sea.” My simplistic Hollywood understanding of that chapter in the war was changed by this book, especially by this excerpt from Sherman’s memoirs.

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman had told Atlanta’s mayor after ordering the civilian population expelled from the occupied city. But “when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker.” Until then, though, “we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” Union armies must destroy the capacity of the southern people to sustain the war. Their factories, railroads, farms—indeed their will to resist—must be devastated. “We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . [and] make them ‘so sick of war’ that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”

— Memoirs by William T. Sherman

The passage reminded me of a passage from a novel by Robert K. Tanenbaum:

“Peace is best. You should make every sacrifice to secure peace. When you absolutely must go to war, however, you must try to kill all the enemy you can as quickly as you can, holding nothing back, until they have surrendered or you have been defeated utterly. It is a great fraud to think otherwise and it prolongs the agony. It would be better if people said, if we fight, we are going to boil babies in their own fat and blast the skin off nice old ladies, so they die slowly in great pain, and we are happy to do this, because what we fight for is so important. And if they conclude that it is not as important as that, then they should fight no more.”

— Robert K. Tanenbaum, Act of Revenge

War as video game

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America’s Army is a video game “conceived by Colonel Casey Wardynski, the Army’s Chief Economist and a professor at West Point, the idea was to provide the public with a virtual soldier experience that was engaging, informative, and entertaining.” I got curious about this when I started seeing recruiting videos on some cable channels.

Not suggesting there is anything wrong with this approach, just that it got me thinking about what motivates a young man or woman to enlist in the military. Sebastian Junger alludes to this in his 2010 book, WAR.

“War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know.”

“War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”

So, is it “defending the homeland,” or the rush of surviving a firefight? Or something far more complicated?

Who would win a war between the Confederacy and the Taliban?

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In a chapter titled Amateurs Go To War, Battle Cry of Freedom author James M. McPherson describes the South’s strategy:

“Jefferson Davis […] early in the war he seems to have envisaged a strategy like that of George Washington in the Revolution. Washington traded space for time; he retreated when necessary in the face of a stronger enemy; he counterattacked against isolated British outposts or detachments when such an attack promised success; above all, he tried to avoid full-scale battles that would have risked annihilation of his army and defeat of his cause. This has been called a strategy of attrition — a strategy of winning by not losing, of wearing out a better equipped foe and compelling him to give up by prolonging the war and making it too costly.”

I shared this with my friend (and historian) Bob Priddy, suggesting parallels to the Taliban strategy in Afghanistan. Bob’s reply:

You have come to a realization that the American military has not come to grips with since time began. We still fight our wars as if it was Breed’s Hill (not Bunker Hill), with one side barricaded and visible and the other side marching resolutely forward, sacrificing enough bodies that eventually the marching force will overcome the barricaded force by surviving numbers or will fall back, weakened and puzzled at the lack of success. It’ why we “lost” Vietnam. It’s why our two-decade effort at nation building in Afghanistan ultimately failed. The parallels of Vietnam and Afghanistan are marked.

We can’t make good Republicans (no snide comments about that phrase) and good Democrats out of people who see no such things, never have, and have never wanted them.

Jefferson Davis ultimately failed because he never had the cunning or the tools the Taliban has — although the white supremacist philosophy never lost. The Confederacy did. But white supremacy lurks in the philosophical underground tunnels of our time. We can be grateful that its ride into Washington in January was not as successful as the Taliban’s ride into Kabul.

Poor planning and inept leadership saved us this time.

“Afghanistan Meant Nothing”

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That’s the conclusion of Laura Jedeed, a freelance journalist who deployed to Afghanistan twice — once in 2008, and again in 2009-2010.

I remember Afghanistan as a dusty beige nightmare of a place full of proud, brave people who did not fucking want us there. We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter. […] It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very instant we left.

And now, finally, we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening. The Taliban is surging in and taking it all back. They were always going to do this, because they have a thing you cannot buy or train, they have patience and a bloody-mindedness that warrants more respect than we ever gave them.

I am Team Get The Fuck Out Of Afghanistan which, as a friend pointed out to me today, has always been Team Taliban. It’s Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever. There is no third team.

Rambo III: Freedom Speech

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We knew how Afghanistan was going to end way back in 2008. In this scene from Rambo III Richard Crenna warns the Russian commander how stupid it is to start a holy war in the middle east in the name of freedom.

And this from 2009. Matthew Hoh, a former marine saying Afghanistan is not worth U.S. lives.

“I feel that our strategies in Afghanistan are not pursing goals that are worthy of sacrificing our young men and women or spending the billions we’re doing there,” Hoh said. “I believe that the people we are fighting there are fighting us because we are occupying them — not for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al Qaeda, not because of any fundamental hatred toward the West. The only reason they’re fighting us is because we are occupying them.”

JLTV: Humvee replacement

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From New York Times story: “The new truck, which began arriving at military bases in the spring, is faster, smarter and safer. It is powerful enough to bound through rough terrain, despite carrying armor so thick that the truck has to automatically level itself when parked, so that troops can swing open its 400-pound steel doors.”

“And unlike the stripped-down Humvee, the JLTV — which is far costlier than the latest Lamborghini Huracan — comes with a few conveniences, including a backup camera, phone-charging plugs, and not just one cup holder, but two.[…] It has seats designed to fit the bulky body armor and backpacks that soldiers now wear, and unlike the underpowered Humvee, it has air conditioning that actually worked.”

“The truck also comes packed with technology, including electronics that can communicate with fighter jets, drones and other military assets around the globe. In place of a sun visor mounted above the thick blast-resistant windshield, the JLTV has a fold-down night-vision driving system.[…] The JLTV also has a combat override switch that the driver can use to take all control away from the computer.”

Via Henry Domke