Tag: 2020s

Review: Seeking the Bomb

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Seeking the Bomb

Vipin Narang’s Seeking the Bomb is another nuclear proliferation study, this one focusing on how the bomb was sought, not why. This is an incredibly frustrating to read (but very fun to review) book because of how it wobbles across both extremes of political scientist writing.

Right off the bat a gargantuan flaw comes into being: Having a central thesis heavily committed to theories and charts that simply don’t really translate well into an incredibly complex set of situations with a very small sample size. This is disturbingly common in works by political scientists, of which the author is one. It’s also adversarial in its nature and cites multiple kinds of “conventional wisdom” as wrong, including both other scholarly studies and pop-history claims. This feels like a college work in that it’s written to defend a thesis argument rather than simply study the subject.

Fortunately, this book has a lot of strengths as well. It is very well researched and has an effective categorization of nuclear seekers as either hedgers (building up the known capacity but holding back for political reasons), sprinters (just openly moving ahead at all costs), and hiders (trying to keep it concealed until too late). Its story of how India moved from hedging to blatant hedging (doing an unweaponized explosion in 1974 with obvious hints) to just open use is well done as a case study.

Yet I still feel it lacks somewhat in terms of applying technical capacity. This is not to say the book never acknowledges it-it recognizes that South Africa’s ability to make a domestic enrichment plant and other technologies contributed to it being the one successful hider, praises the scholarship of Unclear Physics even as it disagrees with its conclusions, and mentions that Libya’s program was doomed. But I think more detail, more appreciation for both technical challenges and opportunities, and a couple fictional “Nth Country” hypotheticals would have done better. Almost any reasonably advanced country could sprint to a bomb in the kilotons, even if cruder and more dangerous than established ones, if they really wanted to, and I don’t think Seeking the Bomb comes across as appreciating that in its text.

Still, if this is an uneven book it’s an interesting and well-done kind of uneven, and I don’t regret reading it.

Review: Battledrills for Chinese Mobile Warfare

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Battledrills for Chinese Mobile Warfare

Against my better judgement, I got another H. John Poole book. The title made me naively think “oh, this could be a set of practical drills approached from a different perspective.” So like any H. John Poole book, this is about 5% reasonable well-thought out arguments (in this case: Formations should be simpler and grenade skill should be focused and emphasized) mixed with 95% incoherent rambling about how artillery is useless.

The “logic” is a classic all or nothing where if the artillery fails to destroy everything in its path and close combat is still necessary, therefore artillery is useless and only suitable for clunky western armies and not cunning subtle ‘eastern’ ones. He even argues that artillery and aid of artillery has not been useful in the contemporary war in Ukraine, which is… something. But not something good.

By this point Poole has lost most of what teaching value his books had, and I recommend avoiding them.

Review: Quantifying Counterfactual Military History

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Readers of Fuldapocalypse should not be surprised to learn that when I saw a book called “Quantifying Counterfactual Military History“, I instantly bought and read it. The premise is simple: The authors use the Approximate Bayesian Computation method to get a large sample size in their various simulations-much, much larger than conventional wargames.

Starting off with one of the easiest and most popular ones, Jutland, that chapter made me go “a-ha! They got it.” My favorite quote is “but unlike in a wargame, our goal is to simply understand what is plausible and what is not.” This “War of the Spreadsheets” has its roles provided one knows its limitations, which the authors do. Then comes the Battle of Britain (where the goal is temporary German air superiority, along with a controversial conclusion. There’s Vietnam where the authors actually remember the large northern conventional forces that were always there. It concludes with Cold War game theory.

There’s some technical topics that are beyond me, but this is overall an excellent book whose authors know their own limitations. As someone who loves these kinds of simulations, I was delighted to read this.

Review: Blood Trails

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Blood Trails

A novella of Texans hunting terrorists, Nicholas Orr’s Blood Trails is not very substantive. On one hand, it’s short and its plot is nothing that hasn’t been done many times before. That’s not an obstacle to a good book, and neither is the “Herman Melville’s Guide To Patrolling” exposition.

What is an obstacle is the fact that the final climactic battle also reads just as dryly as those infodumps. This is the one thing a thriller cannot be, and it’s what turns it from a possible 51% snack into a rejection in my eyes. Which is a shame, but oh well.

Review: Unclear Physics

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Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons

In Unclear Physics, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer takes a look at the ultimately unsuccessful nuclear weapons programs of Saddam’s Iraq and Libya. Instead of a technical perspective, she looks at them from a political/organizational one, showing how poor state structures (in the case of Iraq) and nonexistent ones (in the case of Libya) hampered them. From the outside, there aren’t any shocking revelations: Iraq could have had a bomb by the mid-late 1990s without the Gulf War or a similar catastrophe, while Libya’s was going nowhere by 2003.

But from the inside, it’s a detailed look at human failure,in terms of dealing with low technology, dictator paranoia, dictators not understanding, and disorganized factionalism. Some of it comes across as legitimately fun to read.

Unclear Physics has two big apparent weaknesses. The first is its academese tone. The second and worse one along the similar nature is that she writes in a kind of inside baseball tone as if this an argument among nonproliferation academics, saying “the conventional wisdom says ______” when she means the previous conventional wisdom among people in that very small niche. It’s arguments that I’ve never even heard, for better or worse, as someone who’s for an amateur read up a lot about nuclear proliferation.

But this is still a great book at showing the soft human side of an otherwise hard technical issue.

Review: Hooves, Tracks, and Sabers

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Hooves, Tracks, and Sabers

Raconteur Press’s Hooves, Tracks, and Sabers is an anthology of alternate history cavalry stories. You get helicopters in Southeast Asia (but not the way you might think), airships (of course) in the American Civil War, and plenty of good old horsies. While none of the stories are bad, a lot just feel like historical fiction with different names, which is a problem a lot of alternate history unavoidably has (I think that World War IIIs actually avoid this by being something so completely different from say, the Vietnam War, but that’s another story).

Thankfully, there are ones that go above and beyond that. My favorite is a World War I divergence where the Tsar Tank actually works. How can you not love a giant armored tricycle? Anyway, while the execution may not be the best in every case, the concept is so great that I still recommend this collection (and lament that I couldn’t write a story about armored recon units in the Soviet-Romanian War for it).

Review: Tank Warfare

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Jeremy Black’s Tank Warfare is a history of the century-plus history of the metal tracked armored vehicle known as the tank. Published in 2020, it wasn’t able to cover the wars in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, but that’s not its fault. There are however a significant amount of things that are its fault.

The book is a popular history broad-brush overview. Perhaps its biggest weakness is that it’s too broad for its own good. Tangets towards every tank developed and exported by everyone in the time period happen at the expense of actually exploring the topic. Which would be more tolerable if it hadn’t actually focused on World War I in depth simply because there were few types of tanks to cover. The balanced look at the earliest AFVs there give a picture of what might have been.

This is basically just a generic coffee table tank book, but it had the potential to be more.

Review: Blood of the Ancients

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Blood of the Ancients

Like Jerry Ahern, John Schettler decided to take the Kirov series into outright science fiction. Gone are the purely terrestrial squabbles, replaced with sci-fi spaceship battles against aliens and, in this case, an attempt at a John Carter of Mars Homage in Blood of the Ancients. Although much of the book takes place on Earth as the ancient “Sons of Ares” change the past in secret alternate history, this is obviously John Carter through and through.

The issue is that Schettler is not the most inherently suited to write this kind of flowery planetary romance. It would be like a fluffy romance author writing a technothriller. Despite this, it’s a sincere and well-appreciated effort. Who knows, maybe Kirov will turn to nonviolent romantic drama next…

Review: Midnight Ops

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Midnight Ops

Midnight Ops is the latest Duncan Hunter book by Mark Hewitt . It is also not just the worst in the series but the worst “thriller” novel that I’ve read. Ever. At least as of this post. And I do not mean this lightly. Having read literally hundreds of these books, I’ve reached the point.

So the Amazon blurb mentions a defecting F-22 that flew to North Korea as the MacGuffin. Well you will be “glad” to hear that it takes two thirds of the book to even reach that point at all. And then it goes back to what it was previously doing. What was it doing?

Political rants. I’d say it’s like reading the Facebook page of your boomer uncle from rural Oklahoma, but that would be an insult to boomer uncles from rural Oklahoma. If you trained an AI model on nothing but conspiracy talk radio transcripts and then let it rip for five hundred pages, you’d have this book. But I’m still pretty sure the AI could do better.

The worst part is that I used to like this series! It had the same ridiculously right-wing politics and unstoppable Mary Sue, but could be fun in a Mack Maloney manner. This isn’t. The actual ‘action’ is the same repetitive easy victories that feels like an afterthought. It’s easy to tell the real emotion is in the rants.

So yes, I’ve found the new worst (thriller) novel ever. Welp.

Review: The Nordkapp Affair

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Northern Fury: The Nordkapp Affair

(note: I got permission to read this book pre-release for the sake of a review).

This fairly short novella to the Northern Fury epic is a side story about a Norwegian ferry at the beginning of the war. It has to try and evacuate people from what could become a warzone (spoiler alert: It does). While a simple plot, it’s a very suitable one.

One thing I particularly liked was keeping the “camera” focused entirely on the ship itself and a running tally of its status. Whereas a lot of “Big War Thrillers” understandably show the big war, something as focused as this is a lot different.

Which is a good thing, as there’s something to be said for an HMS Ulysses type story. Which I mean both in terms of tone/structure and in terms of location-an excellent place for a war novel.