Merry Christmas from Fulapocalypse!
A Thousand Words: The Sting
The Sting
The Robert Redford classic The Sting is a movie about Great Depression-era con artists pulling a dangerous game against a powerful mobster. A well-regarded movie, I would reckon it’s one of the best films to center around sports betting. Why?
Well, the plot that the protagonists are (supposedly) pulling involved horse racing, and the central scheme of outrunning the official updates to place advantageous bets is something I knew very well. Combined with excellent cinematography and performances, this is a 70s masterpiece.
Just beat Rogue Trader
I’ve just beaten Rogue Trader. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that it was the best fun I’ve had in an RPG since Fallout New Vegas. A great game. Maybe now I’ll have more time for other things like this blog.
Review: The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook
Say there’s a crusty football coach who ran teams back in the days of Jim Thorpe and leather helmets. You’re at a coaches analytics and strategy meeting. There’s Bill Walsh and there’s Paul Zimmerman, talking about the evolution of the NFL. Then in comes this ninety-something coach who says “You know, you can throw the ball if you have to”, because in his time and mind, the forward pass was a novelty. But even by the start of the Super Bowl era, even in run-dominant periods postwar, it simply wasn’t.
This is how I felt when reading the New Maneuver Warfare Handbook by the infamous William Lind.
It starts with a pompous retelling of the generations of war and has a paragraph where he says “4GW” is not insurgency or guerilla war, but rather war against non-state actors. In other words, it’s not COIN/guerilla war, just war against insurgents and guerillas. Ok.
One running theme in histories of this Pentagon Reformer is that Lind, regardless of merits, was a terrible salesman. And it comes across here, where he keeps referring back to some German general or another he met in 197X and generally coming across as loving the sound of his own voice. His dismissal of every small unit encounter in Iraq/Afghanistan as “bumping into the enemy and then calling for fire” with the implication that only the equivalent of a 100% perfect never spotted run in a stealth game would be good enough for him.
Only about eighty pages of the 200 page book are the “main event”, and the amount of actual substance there is less. Lind recommends the fellow Special Tactics press books in the style of an internet video maker getting the sponsorships out of the way. Which is ironic because those, with their small and clear focuses, are the antithesis of his work. Which here involves a lot of blathering and told-you-so with a huge dose of selection bias.
The many appendices, some of which are not written by Lind, are somewhat better. It’s important to note that the themes of realistic effective training, mission type command, and even maneuvering are not necessarily bad ones (even if I disagree with the particulars). The only problem is that this is about 3% useful stuff that can and has been said elsewhere and 97% self-important back-patting. There’s a reason why other maneuver war advocates considered Lind a liability.
December Update
So I’ve slowed down blogging. The biggest reason is me playing the new Rogue Trader video game. I’ll admit it’s a little raw and a combination of just being released and having a ton of moving parts has led to a giant case of Bethesdaitis, and thus to me maniacally saving and being prepared to redo entire arcs if not the whole game (not that I mind). But in spite of that it’s an awesome experience and is a side of Warhammer 40k that I hadn’t seen as much of before. The second biggest reason is me working on A Period of Cheating, which has gone great in a time of year that normally isn’t the best for writing.
Between those and my other responsibilities/pastimes, there just hasn’t been much time for reading and reviewing. But rest assured I’m well.
In Memoriam David Drake
Science Fiction author David Drake, known for the Hammers Slammers tank novels among many, has reportedly passed away. RIP.
Review: The Soul Drinkers Omnibus
The Soul Drinkers Omnibus
Since I’ve just gotten (and am enjoying) the new Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader game, I figured I’d review a book (series) from that setting. An old set of Space Marine novels, the Soul Drinkers Omnibus covers the titular chapter. Is it good? Uh… not really.
The biggest problem is the characterization. It’s not that they’re one-dimensional bolter shooters. No, it’s that they’re worse. Namely, that these ancient super-warriors come across as ridiculously dumb and naive for people in their position. The plot involving the Soul Drinkers and their fall from grace involves a lot of contrivances and bad judgement to the point where I frankly felt they deserved to get wiped out.
There’s better 40k books around, so I don’t recommend these.
Weird Wargaming: Patton’s Division of the Future (of 1932)
Then-major George Patton in 1932 made a long essay about the ideal army for the “war of the future”. Most importantly, it had order of battle charts. The whole thing is well worth a read, but some thoughts/highlights:
- Underestimated motorization, saying you can have agility (professional army) or mass (conscript army) but not both. This was true in WWII (even for the Americans to an extent), but postwar motorization rendered that largely (if not entirely) moot. He proposed nationalizing civilian trucks for motorization in wartime.
- Proposed a standing army of about 315,000 people. Which uh, isn’t actually that much less than the post-Vietnam volunteer army. Especially adjusted for national population size.
- Patton is extremely Pattonesque. Believing his higher-trained army can always beat a numerically superior qualitative one (uh, not always the case), and being a grandfather of manueverism (not surprising). To his credit he does acknowledge the problem of keeping an elite army elite after attrition (and showing knowledge of how pre-gunpowder, almost all casualties were in the rout, whereas firearms made large losses inevitable against peer opponents)
- The most unusual part is at the smallest level, which consists of a “section” built around a tripod-mounted belt-fed machine gun and has 19-20 men at paper strength. It’s divided into a rifle squad (fairly plain ten rifles) and an LMG squad (one LMG gunner, several assistants for it with pistols, and four riflemen) . Two such sections form a platoon.
- Above that it’s a now-familiar triangular division. Three line platoons in a company, three line companies in a battalion, three line battalions in a brigade, three brigades in a division, a divisional tank battalion. Aka, by and large the standard post-WWII division.
- Brigades would have a company of heavy machine guns (at the time an anti-tank weapon) and a battalion of three 75mm batteries (two field guns and one howitzer). Of note is no apparent organic division artillery, with it either being the brigade artillery or handed down by corps (the WWII Soviet prioritization taken to even greater extremes)
- The 39-strong divisional tank battalion is mentioned as having tanks of the “Vickers-Armstrong or modified Christie type”. Tank platoons are a fairly unusual “vanilla and Firefly” type of having three “normal” tanks and one tank chassis with a larger-caliber cannon. At the time, this wasn’t unusual. Everything above platoon for tanks is conventional.
- An infantry division has an organic paper strength of around 8,000 people.
All in all a very fascinating document. Patton may have been prescient in making a modern army, but I still wouldn’t want him commanding it (he would have been a good armored division commander, but deserved nothing higher). And of course, this army is easy to make and wargame in the underappreciated interwar period.
(Special thanks to the Tactical Notebook for its own analysis of Patton’s proposal which brought it to my attention)
A Thousand Words: Warriors of Fate
Warriors of Fate
Capcom’s Warriors of Fate is a Final Fight-type beat em up set in ancient China. Err.. except the American translation set it in a fictional place that just happened to resemble ancient China. And the simple and easy Chinese names got turned into complex Mongolian-inspired names. Yeah, it was a little weird.
That being said, it’s a Final Fight successor that plays like a Final Fight successor and has the fun of a Final Fight successor. Unlike Captain Commando, mounts (horses in this case, not mechs) actually are useful and usable. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Battle Circuit in terms of pure technical ability, but there is a lot more depth than many other games of its ilk and it makes up for it in terms of spectacle.
Not a bad slightly forgotten arcade game.
The SI AI Scandal
Many people don’t know that sports reporting was one of the first big ways that “modern AI” as we know it came into public view. Basically, if you had a box score for a game where you couldn’t or decided it wasn’t worth it to send an actual reporter, an AI could (and still can) extrapolate a game story based on it. Sure, you don’t get the “yes they sportsed but we sportsed harder” quotes from the participants, but is that really a big deal?
Of course, that assumes one admits to using it. In the case of once-great Sports Illustrated magazine, they tried to sneak AI in. With presumably machine-generated (and if not machine-assisted) articles and “reporters” who were the sportswriter equivalent of Aimi Eguchi , the institution that once gave us Rick Riley’s reports was reduced to the algorithm gaming self-publisher.
Now I have no problems with AI in creative endeavors, but if you want to make something completely with it, it should be labeled as such. (I’ll leave other legal concerns aside for now). I can think of ways to make an openly fake (for lack of a better word) recapper. But any technology can be used for bottom feeding, and this is no exception.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 