Tag: 2020s

Review: The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook

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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.

Review: N’Oubilons Jamais

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N’Oubilons Jamais and Other Great Wars

Sea Lion Press published an anthology featuring alternate World War Is called N’Oubilons Jamais. Full of short stories, there is one that makes the anthology worth it all by itself. That is “The Modern Knight” by Jeff Provine, and it is amazing. The divergence is that instead of tanks, they go for people in Ned Kelly style body armor. The result is something that looks like a World War I version of GTA V’s “The Paleto Score”

Anyway, the rest of the anthology doesn’t quite come up to that masterpiece, but it’s still well worth your while.

A Thousand Words: Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2

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Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2

Have you ever wished that you could just throw two armies against each other? Have your playthroughs of Command: Modern Operations or other wargames largely just consisted of setting up artificial jousts in the level editor? Don’t want any of that pesky “tactics” or “detail”? Then Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2 is the game for you!

There’s a campaign mode and the ability to play it as a makeshift real-time-strategy game, but the true meat of UEBS is to just line up a pair of armies on a map, like a literal million ancient soldiers against an artillery brigade with a contemporary infantry company screen, and watch as they charge at it. It’s not exactly deep but it is very fun.

In fact, it’s weirdly informative about actual battlefield dynamics, because taking away any kind of tactical management means you can see the other factors at play. I was pleasantly surprised to see a small number of melee units I put in making an outsize difference as they fixed the opposition and let the ranged units fire on them more freely. You can see terrain effects as your giant hordes struggle to make it through bottlenecks.

So there are a lot worse things to get than UEBS2, especially since mods mean you make even more fantastical clashes.

Review: American Military Helicopters

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American Military Helicopters

E.R. Johnson’s American Military Helicopters is one of those giant encyclopedias of aircraft that appeal only really to a certain group of people, but which appeals a LOT to said group. This is a huge catalog of everything that has either had a rotary wing or a vertical takeoff feature that either entered or was considered for American military service.

So you get stuff like the UH-1 and F-35B. But you also get obscure projects from the 1950s and 60s that ranged from gargantuan lifters that challenged the Soviet monsters in size to literal flying jeeps. The history nerd in me complains that it didn’t go as far into the VTOL weeds as it could have, but as an expanded “coffee table book”, it’s excellent for what it is.

Review: Falling

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Falling

TJ Newman’s Falling is a thriller about an airliner pilot faced with an ultimatum on a previously routine flight: Crash on purpose or your family gets killed. Reading it gave me a weird feeling. Not a bad feeling, but a weird one.

I’ve seen reviews that have said “this book was clearly trying to be a movie”. And this is a very, very blatant example of this. It’s not a bad example, and neither is it a bad book. I was reminded a lot of the movie Speed, which is not exactly a horrible thing for a thriller to remind you of. But at the same time, people remember Speed a lot more than they remember the novelization of Speed, because it’s the kind of thing that’s far better told in visual format.

Not surprisingly, this book is being made into a movie. I’ll have to see how that turns out, but I’ll just say that if being too much like an action movie is the worst thing in a thriller, it’s a good thriller. Especially if it’s written by a veteran flight attendant who thus knows a thing or two about airplanes.

Review: 25 Days To Aden

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25 Days To Aden

Michael Knights’ 25 Days to Aden is one of the best nonfiction military histories I’ve read recently. As of this post it’s also very timely. Diving deep into the crucial but obscure in the outside world battle for the city of Aden in the early stages of the latest Yemeni civil war, it tells of how a coalition of the UAE, putting its petrodollars to effective use, and local Yemenis ousted the Houthis from the vital port city.

The biggest problem with this book is very obvious from the first page. Knights clearly relied completely on UAE sources, and thus the book is about as biased towards them as Arrian was towards Alexander. It’s not so much the exact facts (Kenneth Pollack, no fan of the Arab militaries, has praised the smaller, well-resourced Emirati army as a big exception), so much the tone that, along with the usual issues in war reporting, leaves one feeling inherently suspicious.

However, this insiders look also has great advantages. It shows a skillful campaign conducted with limited resources and the quirks and compromises that had to be made when dealing with a low-education local army. The two things that accurately jumped out at me were A: It was calculated that 20% of all ammunition would be wasted with random ‘celebratory’ gunfire, and B: Chewing khat was so vital and important that one simply did not fight battles in Yemen during chew time. It also shows that tanks still are very important even in an age of drones and smart weapons, but that kind of goes without saying.

Finally and most importantly, Knights is unbiased in a crucial way in that he has no illusions about treating the temporary victory as more than what it was. The political context of Yemen in its entire history can be summed up by me saying “latest civil war”, and Knights mentions the effectively unsolvable political context.

So keeping its biases and flaws in mind, this is a highly recommended read.

Review: Selling the 90s

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Selling the 90s

A pop culture history, Selling the 90s is a book about one man’s life in a comic store in the bubble era. This goes through 90s crazes such as the Death of Superman and Magic The Gathering. For someone like me who was a child in the 1990s, it was a fun nostalgia hit.

Unfortunately, it could have been more. The book is very much a set of lists and events. It’s just “here’s this. Now here’s this. Now here’s this. Oh, and this happened too. So did this!” It still has enough to be interesting, but its setup does it no favors.

Still, there are worse books to look back at retro fun.

Carver College

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In the chaotic time of late 2020, Carver College stepped up to the basketball court to… lose. A lot. A tiny religious college, it was perhaps the most blatant of the tomato cans that appear in all kinds of sports. With no illusions, it stepped up to play multiple Division 1 schools as a kind of fill-in, getting badly needed money and experience.

Plenty of other colleges have done the “face a much stronger opponent for prestige and cash” before, but it’s interesting to see it going to this level. It’s one of those 2020 sports footnotes alongside things like Eastern European table tennis, the Belarusian Premier League being the most engaged one in the world, and the Denver Broncos running out of quarterbacks.

Review: Stealing the Atom Bomb

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Stealing The Atom Bomb: How Deception and Denial Armed Israel:

I want to say that Roger Mattson’s Stealing the Atom Bomb does the story of a critical and underreported part of nuclear history justice. In the mid-1960s, Israeli agents swiped enough highly enriched uranium to make multiple first-generation warheads from an enrichment plant in Pennsylvania. As the subject matter is incredibly secret, Mattson had to wade through a massive jungle to find out more. To his credit, the book is well-researched and detailed.

The problem is that so much of the book is about how the investigations went. That could be interesting in and of itself, but it’s told in such a stilted, dry way. So I regretfully have to say that what could have been a great resource has become a niche topic for nuclear weapons historians.

Review: Black Seas

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Black Seas

TK Blackwood’s 199X Fuldapocalypse (or should I say Yugoslavpocalypse) continues in Black Seas. Not surprisingly given the title, it centers around the biggest missile age naval battle ever. The centerpiece is an alternate history classic: The nuclear Ulyanovsk-class carrier (I’m still debating whether to have them be in All Union or not, btw…)

That alone makes it a guilty pleasure for me (I’m definitely including the slightly similar Kherson-class “Ivan Tarawa” large landing ships in that universe, btw…). It’s certainly able to juggle a ton of plot elements as well as any other successful technothriller. Plus it has an Iowa-Kirov showdown! (A sadly realistic Iowa-Kirov showdown, which is all I’ll say about it, but still)

So yeah, this is a worthy successor to the past entries in the series and a fun WW3 naval showdown in its own right. I highly recommend this.