Tag: History

Weird Wargaming: Patton’s Division of the Future (of 1932)

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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)

Review: Sukhoi Su-15

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Sukhoi Su-15: The Boeing Killer

A Yefim Gordon book on the titular interceptor, Sukhoi Su-15 is exactly what it says it is and exactly what you’d expect. Which is to say, a book on an obscure Soviet plane that has a lot of details, but is questionably laid out and where you really, really want to double-check everything. In this case, some of the details are interesting.

These include things like the overlooked for-but-almost-always-not-with ground attack armament it had, and of course model kit reviews. (I do like the look of the Flagon). The issues besides the ones inherent to any Yefim Gordon book are that the Su-15 really didn’t have many variants or career highlights beyond the KAL shootdown. But you could do worse if you like obscure planes.

Rockwell Advanced Bomber Study

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With the B-1(A) cancelled, Rockwell took a look at a variety of bombers that ranged from “deliberately low technology for the sake of development time and risk” to “LASER GUNS” (seriously). The bomber needed to have a payload of 50,000 pounds, mostly in the form of sixteen nuclear-capable cruise missiles. It needed a strategic mission range of about 5,200 nautical miles with said payload.

The five main examples were:

  • Subsonic, low technology/cost
  • Subsonic, lowest weight
  • Supersonic
  • Stealth
  • LASER GUN

The resulting report makes for very interesting reading. One of the more interesting proposals that’s mentioned but not elaborated on there is the modular plane that could be a bomber, an AWACS, a transport, and more.

What implied stats emerge (I’m not an aviation engineer) show the cargo version of the bomber as having neither the raw payload capacity of a heavy airlifter (the payload charts only went up to about 40 tons/80,000 pounds) nor the ruggedness of a light one (the takeoff distance, though impressive for a heavy bomber, is less than a dedicated airlifter). And that’s even before considering the issues with a modular pod (there’s a reason why very few transporters like it have been built). Still fun to think about.

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: 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: Women At War

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Women At War

Edited by Elspeth Ritchie, Women at War is a collection of academic essays about the massive expansion of women in the US military through the years of war in the 21st century.

Now there’s a few things I’d like to say about the controversial topic of women in the military. The first is that in the “yes or no” arguments, my armchair opinion is “we don’t really have a choice”. As the current crunch shows, topping up a big volunteer military is tough already. There simply are not 200,000 ready gigachads who would join the military instead. The second is that I hate the term “combat roles” to refer to the controversy of infantry/armor/etc…, because it implies a false dichotomy between never intended to be in harms way and full inclusion in fields where you could raise legit objections. The third is that the worst thing that could happen to women in the military (or minorities in any field, basically) is the kind of identity-politics obsessed person who thinks that any disproportionately small amount of _____ in _____ must be due entirely to the Bias of the System.

Anyway, this actual book is a mixed bag. There are a lot of understandably dry but very thorough and cited articles on various effects that are done with proper hard-science rigor. Then there’s the fluffy pretentious ones that feel very out of place. Like I understand getting figures on how many women have been “naughty” on overseas deployments is going to be hard, but you could at least try instead of engaging in theorizing that ranges from the obvious to the silly. And that at least you can justify the theoretical with the difficulty in getting solid figures. There are other topics where instead of examining say, how the cultural differences in another country make the incorporation of women into the military better or worse, the writer just gives out marshmallow talc.

Stuff like this is why I just can’t recommend the book fully, even though it has many excellent articles and resources. Then again, that and its high price is just the nature of academic publishing. Of course, the other side of the coin is that you can get lots of relevant facts, figures, and stories about the topic, which is also the nature of academic publishing. So its your call.

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.

Tactical vs. Strategic Nukes

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So it’s worth noting that “Tactical” and “Strategic” nuclear weapons are a vague comparison. There’s a saying I’ve heard that what defined a nuclear weapon as “tactical” in the Cold War was if it detonated on German territory or not. Certainly a lot of “tactical” warheads had/have more power than the very strategic pair of WWII bombs.

Now you can just say “use” and that’s a fair definition. But I like to define it as range of the delivery system. So even if say, the legendary “Atomic Annie” cannon’s shell is in the same yield ballpark as the Little Boy, its short range qualifies it as a “tactical” system while a bomb carried by a long-range B-29 or similar plane counts as “strategic”.

It’s as good a distinction as any.