On this day in 1953, Joseph Stalin died.
(I love this movie)
Tag: History
Review: Military Strategy For Writers
Military Strategy for Writers
I’d love to see a book that can concisely explain strategic concepts to non-army nerds. But Stephen Kenneth Stein’s Military Strategy for Writers is not that book.
The biggest problem is the tone. It’s less “here’s what strategy is and why it’s often overlooked” and more “The generals are idiots, the writers are idiots, but I the great Historian shall tell you why all of them are wrong”, a tone that at absolute best is unhelpful.
It doesn’t help that I see typical pop-history cliche sneers that trigger alarm bells. WRT Vietnam and Iraq, for example it,s “hurr durr greeted as liberators” (during the actual invasion, that was largely accurate) and “Hurr durr us did big conventional war in Vietnam not smart coin like the British in Malaysia ” (they did that because the north was also doing it, with large northern armies being a complication that pure guerilla wars never had).
Ironically you could use Vietnam and Iraq to show the limits of strategy. Like the best case in Vietnam was going to be a Korea-style divided country, likely without South Korea’s economic boom. As a powder keg held together solely by a dictator’s lash and with a neighbor that had the ability to stir up trouble and the reasonable fear it could be next, Iraq was always going to pose a challenge.
Anyway, it fails to balance storytelling. Like yes, you get unrealistic amounts of decisive battles in fiction, but that’s because not every work needs or wants to be a hazy grey tale and because decisive conflict works for storytelling.
The Draft Bust That Changed History
It’s almost Super Bowl time, and it’s Black History Month. So I figure I’d post this tiny bit of gridiron history I was checking out. So if you were to list pioneering black quarterbacks overcoming the past stereotypes of the position to thrive in pro football, maybe you’d pick the first starter in the modern era, Marlin Briscoe. Or maybe Doug Williams, the first to win a Super Bowl. Or Warren Moon, the first superstar.
How about seemingly forgettable draft bust Andre Ware? Picked out of Houston college by the Detroit Lions no. 7 overall in 1990, he sputtered out in the pros. Now the “how” isn’t really the point of this article. From what I’ve read, it was a college scheme that didn’t really translate well to the pros, especially at the time. That white quarterback David Klinger followed a similar “went to Houston, was drafted high, and was a pro bust” seems to support that. But again, that’s not really the point.
The point is that Ware set a precedent for drafting black quarterbacks very high that has never stopped. Looking at later drafts:
- 1995: Steve McNair: 5th overall
- 1996: Tony Banks: 42nd overall, second round, however was first quarterback picked
- 1999: Donovan McNabb (2nd), Akili Smith (3rd), Daunte Culpepper (11th), this was the final nail in the coffin
Now obviously high draft picks are not total evidence of prejudice being eliminated. But it is interesting to note see the exact moment when, in practical terms, the tide turned.
Review: Atomic Steppe
Atomic Steppe
Togzhan Kassenova’s Atomic Steppe is the story of Kazakhstan and nuclear weapons. A Kazakh whose father was an advisor and think-tank head during the crucial early 1990s period, she’s well suited to write it. The bulk of the book is about the horrific environmental legacy of nuclear tests and infrastructure on the country, told excellently.
The problem with the main theoretical part of the book, the nuclear negotiations, is that despite her sincere efforts to show its complexity, the outcome was obvious and never actually in doubt. Kazakhstan had even less chance of preserving a nuclear arsenal than Ukraine or Belarus. That said, there’s plenty of finds from the almost video-game like saga of Americans retrieving super-enriched uranium for disposal to the Russian crews of the nuclear delivery systems flying bombers away and draining the fuel of ICBMs (SS-18s are liquid fueled) to skewer any chance of Kazakhstan being able to seize them.
It’s not a drama, but it’s a good look at atomic history.
Review: Seeking the Bomb
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.
The Amphibious Hook
The Amphibious Hook is a type of theoretical maneuver that allows for a naval support of a land offensive. It is either an operational or tactical offensive, with the Heavy OPFOR Operational noting that such ones would never be done outside of extensive air support. The document also argues that it generally would take the form of an amphibious regiment/brigade in the first wave and then normal mechanized troops unloading on the shore after the beach was cleared to continue the push. But of course, depending on shipping, it could easily be more.
(Brief note: Strategic amphibious operations are D-Day and even Inchon. Tactical ones are things like doing a boat raid. Operational ones are, fitting that level, more vague and mean things like ‘land a big enough force to divert their reserves so that the main land push can run more freely’).
The section on amphibious landings (Heavy OPFOR Operational sec. 2-13 to 2-15) also speaks of naval units being an easy way to reinforce airborne ones, assuming the geography works. There’s also, as happened in the Gulf War, the threat of an amphibious hook.
Ironically, one of the best ways for a defender to counter an amphibious hook is to ignore it. Or if not ignore it, recognize that it’s going to have trouble moving inland and can be contained with second-line forces and not divert too much to stop it, leaving the opponent with a small toehold always at risk of being cut off.
Motor Chariot Racing
From (where else) Australia, this motorcycle chariot racing was apparently a real sport at some point.
Review: Unclear Physics
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.
How the Fuldapocalypse Skewed Artillery
Fair warning: This is done by an armchair enthusiast with absolutely no practical experience and whose sole experience comes from reading things. I could be totally and completely wrong about many things. Now that that’s out of the way, a look at how a Fuldapocalypse-centric doctrine has skewed perceptions of artillery to the point where Ukraine came as a surprise to many.
To put a long story overly short, the current paradigm in Ukraine is:
- Largely static front
- Lots of drones flying around on both sides (which translates to deadlier air power, which in turn makes it a bigger threat)
- Limited resources
So you can see why smaller, easier to conceal towed guns are liked more.
Now compare this to the Fuldapocalypse:
- Mobile front
- Less threat from air but extremely good counterbattery fire
- Lavish (prewar) spending to afford SPGs.
See the difference?
Now the interesting thing is Caesar-style “truck SPGs”, ie artillery pieces on open wheeled chassis. They have shown the weaknesses of both-ie they’re soft like a towed gun and big like an SPG (and even less maneuverable). However, they’re not really designed for either kind of large-scale war.
Review: Super Mirage 4000
Super Mirage 4000
Finally translated into English, this is a look at what was to France what the Avro Arrow was to Canada, the TSR-2 was to Britain, the Lavi was to Israel, and the Osorio tank was to Brazil. (Or what the AMX-32 and AMX-40 tanks were to… France).
It’s what you’d expect from a small coffee table book whose sources came from inside the program: A combination of knowledge and bias, mixed with tidbits without being the deepest. This isn’t a bad thing if you know what you’re getting into, and the plane is certainly worthy of such a book.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 