SubUrban Warfare

Counterinsurgency through violence

2009-09-20T11:19:00.002-04:00

Tom Ricks writes on his blog recently about Mark Kramer's explanation about how the Russians have been effective at COIN through the past 60 years.

The basic idea is that by using brutal violence the Russian were able to suppress any will to resist, and while they didn't get a friendly government out of the process, they did get a suppressed populace. And I don't think this should be too surprising. There is that famous adage, about making a desert and calling it peace. This article makes me think of Roman and Mongol pacification efforts. They would just raze town, sell entire populations into slavery, and worse. You could write books on Roman atrocities in the name of pacification.

But to get back to the article, I don't think anyone should be surprised in an autocratic country with tight control of the media, that that same autocratic government can and will use sufficiently extreme violence to pacify the situation at least temporarily.

We in the U.S. should be glad this option is foreclosed to us. Certainly the U.S. military kills far more innocent civilians than it should, but it is nevertheless a good thing that our official policy isn't 100 of them killed for every one of our own.

How far does Rep. Hoekstra have his head up his ass?

2009-08-26T10:30:00.003-04:00

Here's a fun challenge for today: See how many things wrong you can find with Pete Hoekstra's explanation for why we shouldn't hold people accountable for torturing in our name. Bonus points if you can find things wrong with the NPR interviewers questions or lack thereof. Please put your answers in the comments and show your work. I will give my answers in an edit of the post tonight or tomorrow.

There is no such thing as the Dreadnought Era

2009-04-09T16:31:00.002-04:00

I meant to post awhile ago, after Jon Stewart creamed MSNBC, in the guise of Jim Cramer, on The Daily Show, but I fell behind and never got to it, but luckily The Daily Show proved, once again, that they don't take themselves too seriously, and made it topical again.

What I though originally, was that perhaps the Stewart/Cramer moment marked a watershed moment when people would really start to think differently about the world of finance and the economy. But on further reflection I remembered that marked edges don't tend to really occur except retrospectively, to help us mark off and remember portions of the past, for those who actually lived those events they tend not to be demarcations of temporal barriers, but instead defining events.

Thus I remembered that at some point, Prof. Sumida, who was an expert on the British and German navies before and during WWI, once said, and I forget whether it was to me or to someone else that there was, "No such thing as the Dreadnought Era." I think he didn't elaborate, or I just caught a snippet. But I think the idea was that in the naval popular history of the period there tends to be a view that the HMS Dreadnought inaugurated a new period in naval warfare that was closed by naval aviation and aircraft carriers during WWII, but that in fact that these discrete ends are in fact less clear to the point of not being substantial enough to note for the serious historian.

That said, it is hard for someone who think seriously not to wonder about how history will record the moments we live every day.

How fucked are we?

2009-03-24T22:58:00.002-04:00

Matt Taibbi is the rising Hunter S. Thompson of our generation and like his forbear he is here to tell us just how fucked we are. Short answer: totally.

(Hat tip to Tim)

The Emperor protects.

2009-03-14T10:18:00.003-04:00

The new game, Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2 is out and there are some badass videos to go with it. The new intro features Eldar fighting Space Marines, and it is really something. I have two problems though. First, the space marines win, like always, and second, there were no striking scorpion, my favorite of the aspect warriors. Anyway, pretty awesome.

Here is a video of a real life Rhino tank from the game:

And here is the trailer from the first game:

When I was a kid I played this game with my childhood friends. I spent so much time and money building, painting, and playing with these miniature figures. Not too mention all the time spent thinking about the game. Anyway, I am happy that the game is being reincarnated in various electronic media. I only hope one day that they make a really good 40K movie.

WWII in cartoon form

2009-03-12T16:28:00.002-04:00

Kirill sent me this one, and I love it. Artistically, I think it a good example of how someone who is a talented artist can do what looks cursorily to be simple but in fact is quite complex. In this instance making stick men of countries is a simple premise, but the way that he draws quite detailed country borders and intricate facial expressions shows artistic ability, but more important really makes the comic work. For more examples of simple done well, check out XKCD and Kate Beaton, two comics that I incidentally love. Also, here is a Peanuts meets Frank Miller comic Attackerman found.

Dying to Learn

2009-03-12T15:16:00.002-04:00

This is an old article from '06 by Thomas Barnett about how U.S. generals are trying to learn and synthesize from the ongoing wars today. It focuses on Army generals David Petreus and William Wallace, and Marine general James Mattis, who was the division commander of the troops depicted in the Generation Kill mini-series.

Anyway, old article, but I hadn't seen it until recently, so it's new to me, much like bacon explosions.

ENGLAND EXPECTS EVERY MAN TO DO HIS D-U-T-Y

2009-03-11T21:09:00.001-04:00

Kiss me Hardy...

(Kate Beaton rocks my socks)

Afghanistan Today (Part I)

2009-03-10T15:18:00.008-04:00

This post is meant to explicate my understanding of the current situation in Afghanistan. Also, it is meant as a pair of posts. My former co-worker, Jess Guiney, who actually studies the situation in Afghanistan as part of her Masters work has been generous enough to agree to correct my many and glaring errors in this post as well as providing her own analysis.

My understanding is that the U.S. (or NATO if you are being charitable) mission in Afghanistan is a terrible mess. The resurgent Taliban is gaining ground throughout the country and has strongholds in Pakistan, which are much more difficult for the U.S. to attack or negate in some fashion. This is for two reasons, first that Pakistan is a sovereign state, where the U.S. can't just do whatever it wants. Second, public opinion in Pakistan is at best shaky in its support for the U.S. attacking the Taliban or Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan. Further, one of our allies in the 'stans North of us (Uzbekistan?) has withdrawn its support for the U.S. and so they and their NATO allies can't get supplies into the country by a convenient route. I understand that something like 80% of supplies coming into Afghanistan comes through the Khyber Pass. Yes, that Khyber Pass, the one from the Great Game. Not great news. There was some report that something like 100 trucks were destroyed in a Taliban attack recently, in that area. More bad news comes from the fact that at this point the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is widely viewed as an impotent leader, who does not unify the country and who is derisively called, "The Mayor of Kabul."

All of this is bad, bad news, and there is not particularly good reason to hope, even with a 'hope' president. First, we haven't created a stable, democratic Iraq, even if we are now planning on leaving, as Tom Ricks (whose son I went to high school with) reminds us. Second, all the lessons we have learned in Iraq are at best of some use in Afghanistan, and at worst actually misleading or a wrong guide to action. Worse still, the occupation of Iraq is not over yet, and we don't know what the long term consequences of actions taken in Iraq will be, so even if the U.S. takes actions in Iraq that are correct based on current information and appropriate for transplantation to Afghanistan, they may turn out badly in Iraq, and also, later, Afghanistan. Of course, that is ultimately just saying that all knowledge is in doubt, but I nevertheless wanted to reinforce that idea in light of these circumstance which feature such high costs for mistakes, and so little certain knowledge.

My knowledge of the history and circumstances of Afghanistan is rather weak, and I haven't even read the Wiki page, so bear with me. Hopefully, Ms. Guiney will correct any gross errors on my part in her post. Afghanistan is a cold, rocky and inhospitable country that is home to a variety of ethnicities that are further divided into a multitude of tribes. This means that central government is, and I think pretty much always has been, a largely notional concept. Mountainous tribal areas are historically not as amenable to central control as flatter areas. This effects both national control and foreign dominance. For a quick and dirty analogy compare the subjugation of Wales and the subjugation of Scotland by England. So the upshot of this is that while it was difficult for Afghanistan to explode in the paroxysms of violence we saw in Iraq a few years ago, it is also harder for the U.S. (NATO) to get central government going. It is worth remembering that Afghanistan has been something of a graveyard of empires with Britain and Russia (twice!) having significant problems there for little to no gain.

The big idea at this point is that if the U.S. can wrap up in Iraq, and put more troops and resources into Afghanistan and get the kind of success there that the U.S. has now in Iraq. First, of course, as noted above, there is no assurance that things actually are on track in Iraq. More importantly a lot of big thinkers on COIN are not sure that more soldiers and Marines will salve the situation in Afghanistan, and are not at sure at all what will. This is quite dangerous, because I think a lot of smart people who haven't followed the military situation in Iraq and Afghanistan closely, view the narrative of the wars as something like this: U.S. (NATO) invades Afghanistan, kicks ass with Northern Alliances and sets up a new government, U.S. invades Iraq, distracting attention from Afghanistan, in '05 and '06 violence reaches catastrophic levels in Iraq, the troop surge brings violence down and lets the Iraqi government assert itself, allowing the U.S. to begin withdrawal, finally, as the U.S. withdraws from Iraq it relocates troops and resources to Afghanistan. This narrative, however, is basically wrong, except for the idea that the diversion of troops and resources (hundreds of billions of dollars) for the Iraq war greatly damaged the effort in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the transition from Iraq to Afghanistan is real, and the consequences remain yet to be seen.

Update: Attackerman through Abu Muqawama gives the low-down on a likely Obama approach to Afghanistan.

Update 2: Stephen Walt lays it out more clearly than I can.

I'm naming the next cat 'Iraq'

2009-03-04T11:55:00.005-05:00

Recently, I gave up my efforts to housebreak a local stray cat that Lisa and I had been feeding. These efforts have come to naught and we have released the cat, Lil' Bit, back into the wilderness of suburban Hyde Park. My reflections on this failed effort and the hubristic assumptions underlying the effort have led me to some loose parallels with the hubristic invasion of Iraq.

To start at the beginning I began this cat-taming venture on faulty intelligence. My neighbor told me about Lil' Bit, and how he was a stray cat that she and the previous neighbors on her other side had been taking care of and intimated that Lisa and I could take up primary care for the cat and maybe even adopt it. After feeding the cat for awhile we got our neighbor, who had sufficient rapport with Lil' Bit, to pick him up and bring him into our house. The first two times when our neighbor tried to do this with Lisa in the house Lil' Bit squirmed away, so the third time Lisa and I left the house while our neighbor went in. The intelligence would prove to be faulty because regardless of whether or not our neighbor regarded Lil' Bit as her cat, Lil' Bit regarded himself as belonging to her.

Our neighbor succeeded in capturing Lil' Bit within our house. This 'success' was one which drew my attention to the Iraq analogy. I had advocated for the idea to Lisa and our neighbor that if we just brought Lil' Bit into the house that we would be able to tame him. I turned out to be very wrong and it reminded me of the Iraq war plans, which seemed to be that if Saddam was removed from power the rest would follow. There is wonderful military adage that "The enemy gets a vote." I neglected the possibility that Lil' Bit might become the enemy in much the way that the Bush Administration ignored the idea that the Iraqi population, or at least a substantial proportion, would become the enemy.

As to the cat-based insurgency, it turned out that Lil' Bit had little interest in being social, and would mostly hide under the bed or sofa or other corners of the house. He only came out when he thought Lisa and I were asleep or not paying attention to try to escape through closed windows, or cry about it. Also, he sometimes would come out to eat and this provided some delicate, narrow windows to pet him and be physically closer to him, and thus an avenue for socialization.

In my cat insurgency I learned certain lessons through painful experience. The most excruciating one is don't try to pick up a cat just because you can get close enough to do it because it is fast and has many sharp claws. The cuts on my hand will probably attest to this truth for awhile. Possibly even more lasting will be the smells and stains of cat pee, because Lil' Bit decided that our two sofas were the most appropriate places to relieve himself. I have already gone through one bottle of stain and odor remover and another is likely.

I won't compare my tribulations to the casualties and other trials suffered by U.S. forces in Iraq, but nevertheless, like the U.S. I found myself confronted by a variety of unexpected challenges and setbacks, but which had I thought more, and done more research I could have found out about these potential problems. Instead, I went ahead unprepared.

The U.S. has had to adapt in Iraq, altering its tactics and responses to try to gain better success. I also changed my methods for dealing with Lil' Bit, doing things like lifting the bed where he hid to flush him from the bedroom and then closing it to him so that he would have fewer places to hide and be forced to deal with me. Also, I started feeding him smaller amounts, more often, so that I would have more opportunity to deal closely with him.

Regardless, the venture still ended in defeat last night. One of the responses I instituted to deal with the cat peeing on the sofas was that I flipped them on their long end so that the cat couldn't get on them. I invited my neighbor to come over and visit Lil' Bit, which she did alone in the office, since he wouldn't come out if I was in there. While she did that I thought about the Iraq-Lil' Bit analogy while looking at my upended living room. I reached the conclusion that whether or not it was possible to housebreak Lil' Bit, it seemed that the cost was rising too high. Luckily for me my neighbor decided that Lil' Bit was very stressed out and that the arrangement was not working out, to which I of course agreed, and she took Lil' Bit back to her house.

I could make some facile comparison with Lil' Bit's departure and the Iraqi government asking the U.S. to leave by 2011, but I think instead that this is a point of divergence between the two. I could just throw the cat out, but the U.S. can't just leave, whether or when it does in fact leave, it has to deal with the mess it made, one way or another.

A Critique of a "Critique of Pure Success"

2009-02-25T15:08:00.001-05:00

I recently read A Critique of Pure Success: Inchon Revisited, Revised,
and Contrasted, by Russel H. S. Stolfi from the April 04 issue of the Journal of Military History. This article makes a fairly well-supported and argued narrow argument but goes too far with some broader assertions and comparisons. Specifically, the article compares the U.S. Inchon landings with the opening attacks of Army Group North in the initial stages of Operation Barbarossa. He essentially says that both attacks are more similar than might be facially assumed because of the apparent disparity between an armored thrust and an amphibious assault. He says that both involved secretly transporting large quantities of men and material over long distances by rail or sea. He then describes how both achieved total surprise in their initial attacks and thus achieve great success at the beginning. The comparison diverges from there, focusing in on the contrasting courses of the 1st Marine Div. and Inchon and the 8th Panzer Div. in their drive towards Leningrad. Basically, he then contrasts how it took the 1st Mar. over two weeks to make it 20 miles from Inchon, to the real objective Seoul. This is as compared with the 8th Pz. who travelled hundreds of miles. Stolfi accounts for this difference for two primary reasons. First, he asserts that the Marines had a "fortress assault mentality," which focused on a successful amphibious landing without much planning beyond that, which was appropriate for attacking small islands, heavily defended by Japanese forces, but that wasn't appropriate to the relatively wider spaces of Korea. Further, though, he shows how the 8th Pz. was energetically led by the officers of 8th Pz.; the commander of whom stayed near the front and urged his men to almost continuous effort in their offensive. The 1st Mar. on the other hand stayed in Inchon and set up a provisional government and received Gen. MacArthur there, rather than staying near the front and urging his men on to Seoul. All of this is well-argued and convincing and consonant with what I know of Barbarossa (something) and the Korean War (very little).

I have two problems with the article, neither of which is critical, but both of which are of some substance. First, after making the comparisons above, Stolfi goes on to talk about the German and American ways of war, and asserts the above circumstances as evidence of the difference between the two. I think that there is a lot of truth to the comparison, but I think one example is not compelling. Further, making that assertion at the tail of a much more limited article is insufficiently supported and extraneous, at least without citing a few more examples, even if only in passing.

My second criticism is that the title is misleading, if not inaccurate. I may be missing a joke or a reference, but excepting that, I don't think the title is a good one. I read the article because I thought the title was going to discuss how perhaps the U.S. had been too successful in its Inchon landings, which seemed like an interesting idea. Instead, what the article turned out to be was more of a critique of partial success. The "Pure Success" seems to have been the Inchon Landing itself, which the author lauds as being flawlessly done.

Crossposted to Facebook.

Election Update

2008-10-30T15:10:00.004-04:00

With the election just days away, rhetoric is heating up between would-be Hierarchs Tassadar and Aldaris. Executor Tassadar is running on his wartime experience as Fleet Executor, citing the fulfillment of his promise to bring in the terrorist Overmind, "dead or alive." By contrast, Judicator Aldaris has been running on long experience as Judicator of the Conclave. Of Ex. Tassadar, Ju. Aldaris has said, "What do we really know about Tassadar? He has only served two hundred years in the Conclave and suddenly the Aiur media is making him out to be a latter day Khas."

One of Ju. Aldaris's most incediary claims has been that Ex. Tassadar "associates with known terrorists," referring to Ex. Tassadar's association with Arcturus Mengsk, the former leader of the Sons of Korhal, which was designated a terrorist group by the United Aiur Provinces Terror Watch List. Ex. Tassadar has called such assertions, "A gross misrepresentation of the facts," pointing out that he only worked briefly with the Sons of Korhal, and only as part of the larger Galactic War on Zerg (GWOZ). Ju. Aldaris has been tenacious in his accusations however, pointing out that rather than razing the Human planet of Mar Sara to the ground as soon as he discovered Zerg on the planet, Ex. Tassadar instead helped the Human colonists evacuate first, about which Ju. Aldaris said at a recent campaign rally, "Any Protoss who would put the lives of humans above destroying the Zerg menace is a traitor to Aiur," prompting chants of "Aiur first!" from the crowd.

Ex. Tassadar has responded to such criticisms by citing his successful prosecution of the GWOZ, the purification of Chau Sara from Zerg infestation, and the destruction of the Overmind, saying that "I have been the most vociferous advocate in fighting the Zerg terrorists, and I have brought change to the past failed strategies of the Conclave." On campaign, the Executor has repeatedly hit Ju. Aldaris on that point, reminding voters that the election of Ju. Aldaris would mean a continuation of the past policies of the Conclave.

The selection of Vice-Hierarch has added depth to the candidates but some analysts say it has only muddied the waters. Ex. Tassadar has selected his old associate, the templar Fenix. Fenix, a veteran greivously injured in the GWOZ who now gets around with the help of a Dragoon, is thought to be crucial in helping to shore up Ex. Tassadar's against charges that Tassadar is insufficiently patriotic. Fenix himself, however, has been dogged by allegations of improper soft money contributions in violation of Aiur's election rules, though no charges have yet been proven.

Ju. Aldaris was initially thought to have scored a big coup by convincing long-time Tassadar-loyalist Praetor Artanis to join the ticket. Because of Ju. Aldaris's advanced age, it was believed that Pr. Artanis's youth would help to balance the ticket, but recently analysts and pundits have been criticizing the Aldaris camp for picking such a green politician, with little foreign policy experience. These criticisms have become increasingly common following an interview in which Pr. Artanis cited his piloting a scout space craft past Tarsonis as evidence of foreign policy experience. Pr. Artanis himself has been particularly strident in questioning his former mentor's patriotism, noting that Ex. Tassadar often appears in public settings without wearing a Symbol of the Khala on his nerve cords. Nevertheless, many who have questioned the choice of Pr. Artanis worry that he is only a psionic rupture away from the Hierarchy if Ju. Aldaris is elected

As the campaign hits the home stretch, some pundits on both sides have asserted that a vote for the other camp is a vote for Kerrigan, the current, shadowy leader of the Zerg. Ex. Tassadar's campaign has issued a statement that "An Aldaris administration would undercut our efforts in the GWOZ by refusing to work with reconcilable human allies who can help us to eliminate the Zerg menace." The Aldaris camp has by contrast said, "Ex. Tassadar's leadership would critically weaken our struggle against the terrorist threats to Aiur, Human or Zerg, and in this time of crisis we need a leader with the proven experience to see us through."

The campaign of perenniel third-party candidate Zeratul has released a statement: "Both candidates offer what is essentially a continuation of the Khala politics that have divided the protoss for so long. Only the election of Zeratul to Hierarch would fundamentally change the situation by uniting the Uraj and Khalis.

2008-09-13T12:34:00.002-04:00

An article, about the rise of promiscuous youth culture in Chile. The takeaway is to remember that this is not because of Pinochet but in spite of, and that Sex Ed was destroyed under Pinochet, so if there are problems from promiscuity it comes from the sad state of education, not a lack of moral virtue. Also, the anniversary of Pinochet's coup came and went a few days ago. Don't forget it, and don't forget the U.S.'s disgraceful role in it.

I can move things with my mind

2008-08-06T17:05:00.002-04:00

This blog vacillates between mammoth polemics of turgid prose and short links to various interesting things. This post is the latter. It seems that Emotiv Systems has designed a helmet that allows you to control action in a game with thoughts. Think hard that you want to lift a rock and you do it, concentrate your anger and evil spirits are banished. All very cool and with ramifications for all sorts of things; guiding missiles for instance. The technology still sounds fairly primitive and some amount of calibration is required, for example telling the game what your version of a push looks like from a neuron perspective. Nevertheless, this is something I have been excited about for as long as I can remember and its very exciting that it might finally be coming to fruition.

Link

Vive la France! Vive l'Empereur!

2008-08-05T10:29:00.004-04:00

A week or so ago I was researching Google-bombing, the practice of taking measures to Google produce a desired result when a certain work or phrase is entered. There are two very famous examples. First, 'miserable failure' would bring up George W. Bush's official biography. And second, when you type in 'French military victories' it brings up a fake Google page saying there are no results and suggests searching for 'French military defeats.' The first Bush search has since been rectified to bring up articles about the Google-bombing but the French one hasn't and most of the results for 'French military victories' bring up results hating on French military prowess, with the first result still being the 'French military defeats' parody page.

This is all ridiculous and would be laughable if not for the widespread American belief in the myth. And believing lies about history can have real world repercussions because it affects how you think you and your country should act in the world. The psuedonymous Gary Brecher, aka the War Nerd, wrote up an excellent polemic against this anti-French myth describing both the critical role of the French in the American Revolution, as well as a selection of critical French victories. So to add onto that I will describe and analyze some of the threads that run through this anti-French myth. One thing I also want to add, though, is that when you type in 'French military victories,' there is one useful site describing briefly the outcome of French military battles through history. Also here is the site I am largely criticizing.

The first thing to realize is that the unifying idea behind this myth is the systematic undercutting of French manliness through various means, with their supposed lack of military prowess being the chief method. In this regard proponents of the myth trump up French military defeats, often totally failing to explain the circumstances surrounding them, and then second try to undercut French victories. The way that the myth proponents talk up French defeats is rather uninteresting, here is one example: "[In regards to WWII] Lost. Conquered French liberated by the United States and Britain just as they finish learning the Horst Wessel Song." Basically just a lot of ignorant vitriol.

The way that victories are undermined is far more interesting because it is much harder to explain away a victory than it is to play up a defeat. The two basic techniques are to say that the French people weren't actually French or that their war leader fails to qualify. The first instance basically relies on the assertion that the Gauls, Normans, Franks, etc. aren't actually French because, as far as I can tell, they weren't calling themselves French, who according to the myth makers materialized out of thin air in order to be the punching bags of Europe. This is clearly fatuous and the Gauls are the foundation of modern France and were for a long time a thorn in Rome's side, even sacking the city at one point. Also during the Punic Wars they were a critical component in Hannibal's successful campaign in Italy. Though Hannibal was ultimately defeated at Zama he controlled the Italian peninsula for a decade with the help of his Gallic troops. Ultimately the Gauls were subdued by the Romans, but the Romans were one of the most successful civilizations in history and the only reason the Britons and Germans weren't crushed are reasons of terrain, an they were both partially taken over by Rome for a time. Also, it should be noted that the Britons and Germans of this period bore as much relation to modern Britons and Germans as the Gauls do to the French except that the Romans called them Brittania and Germania rather than Gallia, and it's not like the French cigarette isn't called Gaulois after a certain group of ancestors. One more note before we leave the Roman period; one of the myth proponents had the temerity to make this comment on the Gauls losing to the Romans, "In a war whose ending foreshadows the next 2000 years of French history, France is conquered by of all things, an Italian. [Or at ths time in history, a Roman -ed.]" This is particularly atrocious because it attempts to compare Rome with Italy which was barely a state until recently and has performed with marked ineptitude in recent wars, particularly WWI and II. Later we get the Normans, who did in fact come from somewhere else, but are treated as bad-ass non-French in their victories, but when Normandy becomes just another part of France are now part of the losing race. Much later we get some assertions about how much of Napoleon's Grand Armee was not French, which is true, but less than that of many of those who opposed him, and still mostly French and commanded by Frenchmen.

Napoleon is a good transition, though, because he comes in for two criticisms of the myth proponents, first that he was not French, but Corsican. This is true, but the men and generals who fought under him were mostly French by blood, and Napoleon was certainly French by education and culture. Perhaps even more galling is counting Napoleon's campaigns in the loss side. The wars of French Revolution and Empire shattered the old order of Europe and made France the dominant power in Europe from about 1789 to 1815, which is a very long time when compared to say, the Third Reich, who did not even need to fight a revolution to secure their power. The myth proponents also like to use the success of Joan of Arc, who was definitively French as a dig against French masculinity.

Ultimately, the biggest problem other than the implicit and sometime explicit racism and sexism inherent in the argument is that it is done with totally dissimilar comparisons with the most obvious nations for comparison, the British and the Germans. In the first the British had the advantages of being an island, which has protected them from invasion since Britain has been Britain and second they generally performed similarly to the French in the more modern wars where they were allied with the French. So for some reason the French are terrible fighters for needing US help in WWI, but the same is not said about the British. The Germans meanwhile weren't even a country for most of France's existence, and while their immediate predecessor, Prussia (sort of...), managed to achieve great victories under Frederick the Great it was utterly crushed by Napoleon at Jena, with the majority of the victory actually being achieved by the definitively French Davout at Auerstedt. And while the German army from the mid-19th century to the final defeat of the Nazis was the terror of the European continent it was the terror to all of the other combatant nations, who were either beaten by it at least initially or subordinate allies. Also it must be remember that Germany lost both world wars and is remembered respectfully for its prowess, while the myth proponents treat France totally differently for winning for much longer during the revolution and empire, than the length of the two world wars put together.

The Fall of France deserves special mention because it is the primary reason that Americans have their disdain for French prowess. No one really knows why France fell, but I will give a brief outline of the reasons typically cited, none of which include moral cowardice. First, the French did not cower behind the Maginot Line, which was successful system of fortifications and successfully held only surrendering after being shown French newspapers describing the surrender of the French government. Instead the French deployed forward into Belgium to meet the Germans. This would have worked quite well for them but when a German plane with war plans crashed in France the Germans radically altered the plans at the last minute and decided on a risky maneuver through the Ardennes forest in the hinge between the main French troops and the Maginot line. Defending that point were the three worst divisions in the French Army and the Germans blew right through them, using the speed of their armor divisions to cut the French Army off from its base of supply. How did this happen? Contrary to popular belief the French had very good armor for the time and even armor divisions. However the doctrine was very much based on the lessons of WWI rather than adopting a more modern doctrine. Neither Britain nor the US had a better doctrine, though, and even after witnessing the events of 1939-1941 the US still entered the war with bad armor doctrine and mediocre tanks. Also, the German Army was better trained than the French, who had relatively short terms of service. Also significant is the idea that history is no experiment and the idea that the French in WWII were unlucky in that in the game of rock-paper-scissors with Germany they picked poorly and the Germans funneled through a narrow gap that if they done things only moderately differently could have been resolved. One other note is that the culture at the time was divided, with some French even preferring a Fascist government imposed by Germany to the Left coalition in power at the time of the invasion.

Ultimately, the whole myth of French military weakness is ludicrous. To cast a culture that was composed of many different peoples and governments through history is both factually inaccurate and intellectually vacuous. France was and is one of the major powers of Europe and anyone who studies European history for even very superficially will realize states don't survive there on military ineptitude and moral cowardice.

2 weeks too long

2008-08-01T15:33:00.002-04:00

Since it's been a whole two weeks since I last posted and all the posts are much more ambitious than I have had time for I will at least put something up about the future of warfare: Jetpacks!

Update: Fair and convincing critique of the new "jetpack"

They're watching you

2008-07-18T07:20:00.002-04:00

So, turns out the Maryland State Police (MSP) has been spying on anti-death penalty groups, such as the Campaign to the End the Death Penalty, a group I often worked with in my younger days. This news is shocking, because I and my friends, while not actually in the spied on have been close to organizations spied on and it shows that we are not far from being the victims of state surveillance. Particularly galling is the fact that the MSP agents consistently found that the anti-death penalty groups were non-violent and law-abiding, yet recommended that the spying continue and kept all of the records they made of these groups. This is a good depiction of the way the state will try to spy on people not as far as necessity, but instead will try to spy as much as they can get away with. This story has more than just a passing familiarity with COINTEL-PRO. 288 hours were spent spying on good people trying to end state imposed barbarism when instead they could have been spying on real potential threats, or fighting crime. Here is one good article about it.

Save Darfur! Alright, what do you propose?

2008-07-17T16:06:00.004-04:00

David Axe, local D.C. adventuring journalist has recently returned from Chad and has been writing about what he saw and learned, and a recent article proves what I long suspected: "Saving Darfur" is more complicated and likely more futile than the endless green signs in Takoma Park would have you believe. Specifically the article says that the refugee camps in Chad defended under Western auspices have protected the rebels themselves as well providing a population from which to draw recruits.

Obviously, I didn't predict this scenario. But I have been dubious about this thing in Darfur for a long time. It always sounded like a big complicated mess in Africa that simple solutions wouldn't solve, and no surprise, they didn't. Specifically, the story got reduced to poor innocent Southern Sudanians being victimized by the marauding Janjaweed. You shouldn't believe that story with the Serb vs. pretty much anyone and you shouldn't believe it in Darfur. I'm not trying to equivocate to the point of saying that every conflict has equally bad sides, but in my experience both in history and contemporaneously, these horrible ethnic conflicts in failing/failed states tend to be chock full of bastards on both sides.

That said, even if the Manichean version of Darfur is accepted what the Hell do people expect the US to do about it? Again, I'm not trying to say we can't do anything to halt the world's problems, but the current situation is that the US military is stretched to the limit in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Russia and China have been playing a hardcore game of realpolitik for the past ten years and are more interested in playing a long smart game with there national interests than political grandstanding. Spielberg shitfits or the Olympics notwithstanding, as Dave Chappelle once put it, "We're tryin' to get that oil!" The point is that China and Russia will veto any UN legislation that would sanction Sudan unless they can get something in return no matter how much Condi Rice wags her finger at them.

So what do we have thanks to our reductionist assessment? Now we are spending millions giving aid and comfort to the bastards on the other side. Great.

An Awesome Library of Awesome Things

2008-07-10T12:29:00.002-04:00

I have recently discovered that the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth hosts a variety of documents on their website. These documents include original research, after-action reports, analysis, old field manuals and other military miscellany. It all suggests that in the future the ability of an individual with an interest in military history (and likely other historical disciplines) will be able to do more meaningful work on contributing towards the body of knowledge outside of an institutional academic framework. I don't know whether there are any independent peer review-type organizations online, but I am sure there are tons of military history discussion sites online wherein people will challenge and discuss any papers one might care to post.

Here are a couple more specifically interesting parts of the CGSC to check out:
CSI/CGSC Press
House on the history of Combined Arms Warfare

Problems of equivocation

2008-07-09T12:04:00.004-04:00

The term blitzkrieg which literally means lighting war suffers from equivocation of definition. Part of the problem is the blitzkrieg isn't a term originally used to describe the military tactics and strategies developed in the interwar period, and was instead tacked on later as a sexy description of the great successes in Poland and France. In rough terms, tactical blitzkrieg is using armor combined air power functioning as mobile artillery to bring high levels of lethality to relatively small spaces very quickly, with a goal of breaking through enemy lines to unguarded rear areas. The strategic component is to take these breakthroughs and create encirclements of enemy forces or at least wreak havoc in the rear areas.

I bring all of this up because I was surprised reading the incredible historian of war in the East, David Glantz, describe the German Kursk operation as blitzkrieg in a 1986 paper on the Soviet defenses at Kursk. I say I was surprised because Kursk is always the red herring of blitzkrieg, the operation which looks like blitzkrieg of the highest order but is in fact the opposite. This is because blitzkrieg is not made up just of tanks and planes acting in coordination but that they are also being in directed in such a way that the goal of their attacks is finding the weak points in enemy lines and breaking through. Further, these operations should be fluid and able to rapidly respond to conditions on the ground. At Kursk the Germans attacked a Soviet salient around the town of Kursk with massive quantities of tanks, artillery, men and air power. But the Soviets knew of German preparations and were ready, and not only that had prepared the way for a counter-offensive as soon as the German offensive had run its course. This was not blitzkrieg but the opposite: a grinding assault on a prepared enemy. The waste of German armor in this operation was massive, and even though the Germans gave as good as they got, the Soviets who both held the field at the end of the day and had massive production available to them, were much more able to redress their losses. After the defeat at Kursk the Germans were never able to mount a strategic offensive, an inglorious death for the vaunted blitzkrieg.

Apparently some people have more torsos than me

2008-07-09T10:33:00.003-04:00

So many people know me as a connoisseur of fine t-shirts. However, I have recently discovered that there is a whole rich world of t-shirt blogs. It's pretty nuts to my mind, because there are only so many t-shirts one man can own in good conscience. I also want to give a shout-out to Amorphia Apparel though, because the guy who makes them comes up with cool designs, but then you can do a lot more with them, like manipulate the pictures, in terms of color, size and orientation, as well as also adding text.

Here are a few t-shirt blogs:
http://www.thedailytee.com
http://www.shirtsonsale.info/
http://www.cottonable.com/
http://www.taddict.com/blog/

History tastes better in Black and White

2008-07-02T16:27:00.006-04:00

The amazing Alli Katz of Great Moments in History is doing the thankless work of bringing history to the world through a wondrous magic device. Check through her stuff, there is a bunch of strange and interesting stuff; it's not just history's greatest hits. Here is Paris in '68, truly a great moment, in both major senses of the word.

Set your decoder rings to "Clausewitz"

2008-07-02T12:01:00.003-04:00

Our long wait is almost over. Prof. Sumida's great work is nearly available to the public from the fine people at University of Kansas Press, the publishers of most of the best works on military history. I took Sumida's class on the topic and his essential point is that people tend to view Clausewitz as a doctrinaire thinker along the lines of his contemporary Jomini, who sat around and thought up elaborate strategies for battlefield success. Instead, Sumida argues convincingly that Clausewitz was a hardened soldier concerned with the best way of teaching war in the absence of war. Specifically, Clausewitz vigorously rejected hard and fast rules and was chiefly concerned with developing the mindset and mental agility of commanders in preparation for the rigors and uncertainties of the battlefield. I don't want to go much further and get out of my depth. The book will be available September 5, 2008.

Panzer Tactics DS Review

2008-06-12T14:36:00.002-04:00

I am trying to put this review on GameFAQs:
Elliott Becker

Panzer Tactics DS

This is a good game made all the more so by its relatively unique status on the Nintendo DS system. It is unique because it is a turn based tactical combat game carried out on a hex map with three campaigns encompassing the major combatant sides of the European Theatre of World War II. This has been of course done to death in games like its immediate ancestor Panzer General, but the DS has been consigned to games like Advance Wars, which differs in important ways from Panzer Tactics.

This review/FAQ is going to turn largely into a description of its numerous peculiarities and flaws, but I want to explain now that it is a good game that occupied a couple months of my time with fairly regular though not generally intensive play. The game would have been shorter if various aspects which I will elaborate below on, had been properly explained in the outset, either in the rulebook or the tutorial.

Historically, this game generally covers the major battles of the European Theatre but suffers from two major flaws. First, there is no conception of the size of units you are commanding. Is it a division, a corps, an army? It’s totally unclear and your objectives from one mission to the next can very widely in geographical area. Second, you are always attacking, even in defensive missions. The missions are all more or less of the same format: Your units begin clustered in one to three starting areas and you need to capture some objective cities and points on the other side of the map, with various secondary cities, usually with some sort of garrison in it between you and your objective, though there is often one or two cities of little consequence on a map. Before moving from historical inaccuracies there are bizarre unit choices. For example as the Soviets your beginning tank is a KV-2, a very rare modification of a KV-1, which was not particularly widespread to begin with Then you upgrade to the upgraded 85mm version of the T-34 followed by the JS-3, a tank which was not introduced until after the war. Much more sensible would have been to start with original version of the T-34, then go to the upgunned version, and then go to the JS-2 which did see limited wartime use. What is particularly boggling about the situation is that the KV-2 is rare enough that most people don’t know about it and if you know about it you probably also know it was extremely uncommon.

In terms of game play there is some important information for the player. First, ground units have zones of control that effect ground units and air units have ZOCs that effect air units. Each unit exerts a ZOC on the 6 spaces surrounding it. Any unit moving into a ZOC has to stop its movement there. If a unit began its turn in an enemy ZOC it can only move one space through it. Thus if you have friendly units on opposite sides of a unit it will only be able to move one space. Next commandos have a variety of special rules, not all of which are clearly explained. In addition to normal attacks, they can sabotage units draining them of all fuel and ammunition, rendering them at least temporarily harmless, as well as giving you 500 fame points. This is the primary commando ability. They can also, though, assassinate enemy officers and demoralize enemy units. Commandos are also invisible except to enemy commandos or if an enemy units tries to move through them. While invisible, commandos can move through enemy ZOCs. If they successfully carry out a commando action they get a second move away, but they will no longer be invisible and so not immune to ZOCs. In order to become invisible again as well as be able to carry out further commando attacks, commandos must end their turn in any friendly flag space, including spaces that the commandos convert to friendly flag spaces by moving to. One exception to this is if they are made visible by an enemy commando; in this case only killing the enemy commando or moving out of its site range will make you invisible again.

Another very important point is that units that have their health number against a black background are core units, while those with white units are not core. Core units remain from mission to mission and gain experience and special abilities as well as costing fame to replace. Non-core are specific to that mission. Thus non-core units should be ruthlessly sacrificed, even to the point of taking measures contrary to the good husbanding of your army if the distinction between core and non-core was eliminated. Thus is you have a half-dead non-core tank unit, it may be better to leave it exposed to enemy fire rather than pull it back and let your core you units take the enemy fire instead. Also in every mission depending on how quickly you finish the mission you get a number stars, with 3 the best and 1 the worst. 3 starts gets you 3500 fame points, 2 stars 1500, 1 star 500. Fame is the currency by which you buy new core units, and therefore it is imperative that when playing through the campaigns that at least in the early mission you do well because early success will give you the fame to buy the units and officers you will need in later missions. Remember at the end every mission you are given the option to redo that mission. Also every mission has a secondary mission where you have to accomplish some sort of task, often somewhat at odds with your primary mission. Secondary missions give rewards, but in most instances they are quite inadequate compensation for the time and effort required to deviate from the original mission and therefore are not recommended under any circumstance that would prevent the player from getting a 3 star rating. Also worth noting here is that each of the three campaigns, German, Soviet, Allied, has a secret mission that is unlocked by beating Tunis, Seelow Heights and Battle of the Bulge, respectively, with a 3 star rating.
There are two units you will need. First a recon unit. The Germans are the only ones who get a decent one but they all basically suck in combat. However they have two unique attributes, first an excellent site range and second the ability to see units hidden in forests, which usually require a friendly unit to be adjacent to in order to uncover. On top of this recon units have a high movement meaning over roads at least, they can get to places quickly. In consequence your army should always include one and possibly two recon units if your battle breaks into multiple fronts. The other kind of unit you will need is anti-air which can either be ground based or fighters. There are advantages to each which I won’t go into because the more important point is that a knowledge of the history of WWII will be a disadvantage because rather than Luftwaffe being ground into oblivion through the course of the war, quite ahistorically, they are instead given good planes in large numbers, even ultimately being given large numbers of jet fighter units, even though historically small numbers were made and they played an insignificant role. The point of this diatribe, besides historical pique, is to emphasize the importance of securing air superiority early. You should have such control that the enemies fighters are annihilated in one turn and his bombers in the second. The best way to do this is to early on keep your planes from getting killed by sacrificing your non-core air units liberally and as soon as you can getting an air general.

There are three levels of officers you can buy. They enhance the abilities of themselves and those up to 2 space away depending on rank. Try to buy mostly the top ranked officers, specifically the air general and the offensive general. Once you have both those officer the rest of the campaign is a fairly straightforward affair. The air general will allow at least American Mustangs to outright destroy German jets in a single attack and the offensive general makes all of your ground assets much more powerful, most conspicuously artillery, which on its own is relatively ineffective against armor but with the offensive general it only takes a couple shots to destroy Tiger tanks. While on artillery I should say that in my opinion artillery should make up much of your total of 20 core units because of its ability increase firepower density and also to strike without riposte. In the first, you are often confronted with opposed river crossings where your ability to move through the obstacle is constrained to a path as narrow as a single hex. Artillery however does not have be adjacent to the enemy and can sit on the friendly side of a river and devastate the opponent. Secondly, also because it attacks from afar, even if it does little damage it doesn’t have to worry about a punishing counterattack. Also about artillery, it does more damage if it fires from a hill or mountain space. One last comment on officers, you can only have three, but the third is far less important. Nevertheless I recommend the second-level recon major to make your recon unit that much more effective.

This review and guide has hopefully served to help you avoid many of the pitfalls that caused me to restart the various campaigns at different points. While much of the information was gleaned through extensive experience much was also learned from posts on the GameFAQ forums, and I appreciate both their direct answers to my questions and the forum community as a whole.

Don't lick your ice cream, you dumb animal.

2008-06-10T14:55:00.002-04:00

I first heard about this story on this weekend's Wait, Wait, which incidentally has an interview with keeping-our-fingers-crossed veep-to-be Jim Webb, about how Bush's bioethics adviser has it out for people eating ice cream. Here is a rant from him on the topic:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating,
like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable
in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is
offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is
between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of
self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for
cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing
off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one
must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no
shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

Obviously this guy is crazy, but what is even more disturbing is that this is not an insignificant post. Bioethics is an important issue, and once again Bush has me wishing he would just burn my tax money rather than spend it on insanity like this. The quote above and a much larger article about Kass and his fellows is from a recent article by Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor of psychology tearing up Kass and the other psuedo-bioethicists in the The New Republic. It is available here.

Yes, it is possible!

2008-05-19T11:29:00.003-04:00

I finally played Mario Kart Wii this past weekend. The Wii Wheel is excellent and works very well. I didn't even try the controller the whole time. The controller is probably a little better and certainly less strenuous but the wheel is a ton of fun. The game is great, but I found from experiences with novice racers you shouldn't take them out on courses where you can fall of the racetrack because they will and then they will curse and give up (lame). There are a variety of innovations in this game over past iterations. First, you can do tricks going off jumps, second you can ride a bike rather than a kart and third you can choose different karts and bikes with different attributes. Also there are now half-pipe boosts as pictured above (courtesy of GameSpot) that give you a boost on the way back down. This is required in a number of tracks to avoid deep snow or worse, lava. The first time I encountered the lava I had a little trouble figuring out the jump and my friend was watching with me and when I successfully made it what sprung to mind was !Si se puede! which made me think of a great picture if I could figure out how to take a screenshot would be me making the jump with !Si se puede! under it.

I also have been playing Mario Galaxies, which is awesome. A friend once described it as, "Just, really fun." And I think that is very accurate. After digressions with Luigi's Mansion and Mario Sunshine, Galaxies brings things back to classic Mario form in impressive quality. Think Mario 64 with the intervening years put to judicious use. Most everything Mario could do 64 is back. Mario himself doesn't have many new tricks, though there are a few, like Bee Mario, but that is because the focus in Galaxies has been on the environments Mario exists. Everything is played with, gravity, perspective, physics, sound, and all to good effect with little that is jarring or difficult. If anything the game is too easy and likely too short though I haven't finished it. Nevertheless, for me as my time and patience with games gets more limited.

Also, I got the other recent big hit: Super Smash Bros. Brawl. This one is not for the Wiimote. Get out your old Gamecube controllers because this is classic platform jumping/fighting, but it is great and very attractive. The game is mostly more of the same from previous titles but introduced is now a very robust and somewhat immersive single player, which is great for me because the days of four-player throw downs are an unfortunately distant memory for me. However, to combat that problem there is now online play, though beating up random assholes is nowhere near as fun as hitting your friend sitting next to you out of the park with the Homerun Bat.

The underlying point of all these games, all of which have come out within the past few months at the most, is that the Wii has finally arrived as a system for Nintendo fans. So far the Wii has been attracting audiences to it that never played video games before or only a long time ago, and this trend is likely to pick up again with the game/something else Wii Fit coming out this Wednesday, but for people who have playing games continuously since they were kids and see nothing wrong with that, the Wii now has the games to make it the system it promised to be.

Appeasement is a conservative idea, assholes!

2008-05-16T10:29:00.005-04:00

The image is from Prof. Mark Grimsley's blog, where he give a good discussion on why the recent assertion by Bush yesterday that Obama would 'appease' terrorists is a totally inappropriate use of a historical example. Also, Ackerman has a great clip of a rightwing talk show host who parrots the appeasement line over and over again with no idea what it means, and Chris Matthews destroys him for it.

My take on the whole thing is my continued frustration that the main people who call other people appeasers are conservatives even though Chamberlain and his government were conservatives. The Left in Europe knew what the Nazis were about and wanted to see them harshly dealt with. It was the conservative leaders who thought that Hitler would be a useful bulwark against the Soviet Union and communism. This was a mistake and they should have backed the KPD from the word go and backed the anarchists and communists in Spain in 1936. But just like conservative governments throughout history they proved worse than useless and profoundly fucked things up.

Oh, and after Chamberlain resigned following the invasion of France he was still retained in the Churchill cabinet.

Update A good article on appeasement by Isaac Chotiner is available here from NYT.

Why the Chinese don't mind the censorship

2008-05-14T10:36:00.002-04:00

Good article from Pew explaining why Internet censorship in China has excited less outrage. The most compelling idea in my mind is that for the Chinese people they are getting more unfettered information than at any time in the past. Also, the Chinese government has done a very good job with the censorship by making it unpredictable but also using a fairly light touch in all but the most hot button areas.

Any idea what this means?

2008-05-14T09:50:00.003-04:00

A couple of my friends/coworkers at CDI are writing a pretty damning report on the Army's Future Combat Systems and in the process of researching it found this wonderfully incomprehensible chart. I'm soliciting ideas on what it means in the comments section.

Communism in the 1920s

2008-05-12T23:18:00.003-04:00

I read a great book not too long ago called The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans. I'll post a review soon, but I want to just put up one great quotation from a German communist:

I was call-conscious because class-consciousness had been a family tradition. I was proud to be a worker and I despised the bourgeois. My attitude to conventional respectability was a derisive one. I had a keen one-sided sense of justice which carried away into an insane hatred of those I thought responsible for mass suffering and oppression. Policemen were enemies. God was a lie, invented by the rich to make the poor be content with their yoke, and only cowards resorted to prayer. Every employer was a hyena in human form, malevolent, eternally gluttonous, disloyal and pitiless. I believed that a man who fought alone could never win; men must stand together and fight together and make life better for all engaged in useful work. They must struggle with every means at their disposal, shying at no lawless deed as long as it would further the cause, giving no quarter until the revolution had triumphed. (pp. 239-240)

The only way I could say it better is say it in present tense. I actually have one more great quotation from Otto Wels, the chairman of the German Social Democrats, on the eve of the Nazi takeover ended his speech thusly:

In this historic hour, we German Social Democrats solemnly profess our allegiance to the basic principles of humanity and justice, freedom and socialism. No Enabling Law gives you the right to annihilate ideas that are eternal and indestructible. The Anti-Socialist Law did no annihilate the Social Democrats. Social Democracy can also draw new strength from fresh persecutions. We greet the persecuted and the hard-pressed. Their steadfastness and loyalty deserve admiration. The courage of their convictions, their unbroken confidence, vouch for a brighter future. (pp. 353-354)

Solidarity

You OrthoTrot, you!

2008-05-12T13:55:00.004-04:00

Kirill turned on to a great archive of Trotsky writing. Terrorism and Communism can be found here, and complete archive found here.

Newsflash: Racism still exists in America

2008-05-12T12:58:00.002-04:00

This post comes second generation from Attackerman, but there is an article at the New Republic about the continued presence of racism in the American electorate and what that could mean for Obama. The article mostly focuses on studies of the influence of race in elections particularly Tali Mendelberg's The Race Card which summarized a number of studies. Apparently the book's most controversial point, at least for social scientists, was that race based attacks are most effective when they are implicit because then people can agree with them without violating social norms. Some social scientists disagree because they have found that explicit racial attacks are still plenty effective. That is super depressing. I like to imagine that we had reached the point where people at least had to pretend they aren't racists.

The Hulk vs. Omar

2008-05-09T17:37:00.002-04:00

The actor who played Omar, Michael K. Williams, is going to have a cameo in the new Hulk movie thanks to the intervention of Edward Norton. More here.

Arc reactor: not as cool as a Flux Capacitor, but more useful

2008-05-09T14:58:00.005-04:00

I saw Iron Man yesterday (I saw Harold and Kumar last week; post coming), and it didn't live up to the hype, though I blame the hype more than the movie. When I initially saw previews for the movie I thought it was going to be complete crap and I had to convince Kai that we should continue our practice of seeing horrible movies together which began with the Doom movie and has continued with such gems as the Marine and Unbreakable. However, when the movie came out it started getting great reviews both from worthwile critics like the Onion and NYT and directly from friends who had seen it.

In the event the movie failed to live up to my hopes. I hoped as I always do for a movie that acts as if it is based on reality except in points where it neccesarily must not. For example the "arc reactor" which powers Iron Man's suit is a necessary conceit for the movie because it is essential to there being an Iron Man. However creating drama by having the Taliban-look alikes ethnically cleanse a village is a frustrating inaccuracy. It's not to say there has never been ethnic cleansing in Afghanistan, but it's not really the way you build a base of support among the people. It would have been much more plausible in Iraq. Other nits to pick are the rifles that the faux-Talibs use against which are manufactured by Stark Industries and A) just look like HKs covered in bells and whistles and B) these future guns don't seem to affect at all the original crude armor that Tony Stark makes for himself to escape. Also, for some reason, the faux-Talibs also don't seem to have a single RPG-7v or Stinger or any other shoulder launched missile to hit the proto-Iron Man with even though the Taliban precursors, the Mujahideen were fighting the the Soviets they eventually got Stingers. Further, in this battle sequence they are surrounded by boxes and boxes of weapons, none of which apparently hold any weapons that might be useful to the faux-Talibs at that point.

The bigger issue is that the plot just doesn't make sense broadly and relies on circular assumptions. At the outset Tony Stark's convoy is attacked and he is taken prisoner in order to be executed in a set-up arranged by Obadiah Stane. Stane was the business partner of Stark's father. Why he wants him dead is left completely unclear, also Stane, despite having a thriving business in Stark Industries, an obvious Lockheed Martin analogue, some how thinks its good idea to sell arms to the faux-Talibs. Now its not like arms companies don't sell arms to bastards, they just don't usually do it to people that the US is actively fighting. Imagine if the Lockheed sold arms to Iran; you can't because they wouldn't fucking do it, not because they are nice guys but because it would bring bad press, and be illegal. The circular logic comes in because Stane seems to have it in for Stark because Stark gets all soft on selling weapons after he escapes captivity, which he wouldn't have been in if Stane hadn't sold him out. Then things just get totally nuts when Stane gets into his own ironman suit for rather unclear reasons. When he was getting in it he didn't know SHIELD or Iron Man were after him. Then after Iron Man shows up we are treated to a rather short fight between the two of them which makes for a somewhat dissapointing climax.

Other problems include Terrence Howard's character, Col. Rhodes, who at one point is commenting on something on the destruction of an F-22 in an incident with Iron Man as a training accident also comments on the ethnic cleansing I referred to earlier. Rhodes is a colonel in charge of testing equipment, and reporters would know that and would not have asked him, and Rhodes, having gone through years of Air Force training would have known not to comment on matters outside his perview. At other times Rhodes takes on more authority than he should based on his rank and role, which I find irritating.

In another particularly silly scene Stane meets with the faux-Talibs and his men surround and disarm them. As soon as Stane steps off camera gunfire is heard, strongly implying that they were all executed. This is problematic, because the gunmen were standing in a circle around their captives, an obviously poor way of gunning people down.

So what did I like, did I even like it? Well, it was certainly not terrible. Robert Downey was good, though not great, more due to the formulaic nature of the role than anything else. I liked best the future technology interfaces that Stark used to do his work. It always excites me to see things like that and gets me excited about the future. The bottom line for me is that it was an enjoyable if you could turn off your brain, but I can't.

I look forward to the new Hulk movie since it stars one of my favorite actors, Edward Norton, but I want to see the old one since the Onion keeps making comments about how it was underated and since its directed by Ang Lee it probably isn't terrible.

For extra fun, read about comic book characters on Wikipedia. It summarizes the trials and trevailles of these various characters and the stupidity is glorious.

An article you can't refuse

2008-05-08T16:35:00.002-04:00

Sorry for the cheap joke but there is a great article comparing various foreign policy options of the US to the Godfather. I'm not going to say too much beyond recommending you read it except that at the end of it leaves me a little wondering where I stand. The three options presented are liberal democrat, neocon, and realist and it comes down very pro-realist. And I always hate the label realist because it implies that by contrast that the goals of the other philosophies are unreal or unattainable. And I don't think that is very fair because first realism has goals that aren't "real," by their very nature as goals they are not real since they have not yet been attained. Similarly there is no reason that some sort of ideology can't be tempered by realism, and I think in the event most of them are, since reality projects such a powerful influence. Further, I think, and I don't think this is just limited to this article, that many people are taking all the presidential candidates at the word far too much, since people say a lot of shit on the campaign trail that they either don't mean in first place, or will be find a different situation on their taking the presidential mantle. So while I would place myself more in the realism camp than the other two, especially with the liberal side presented so darkly, I think I'm just out of the whole thing. National agrandizement is a mistake.

The Drug War and Piracy War: Long Lost brothers

2008-05-08T15:08:00.002-04:00

So you know how properties can be shut down and have other punitive penalties applied to them if they become dens lawlessness by way drug use/dealing, prostitution, gambling, etc.? Well guess what else now qualifies, at least in LA and NYC: downloading and sharing copyrighted music and video. Apparently nothing brings down property values and public safety like someone downloading Braveheart. This is truly rediculous and the only saving grace is that it has not yet reached the level of the Drug War where police can actually sieze the properties permanently and sell them. Regardless, this move is another step in the wrong direction at a time when we need a new more flexible approach to intellectual property. Article here.

Also a lawyer for RIAA, the Recording Industry Assholes of America, who recently won a $222,000 judgement against a woman for illegal downloading, has been made a judge on the Colorado Court of Appeals. And who says crime doesn't pay? Obviously lots of lawyers with worse pedigrees than this guy have been appointed judges, but this is still far from a good thing. Article here.

To go to the larger issue of the war on Piracy, it seems that the prosecutors of it are hell-bent on repeating the mistakes of the drug war. First they shut down Napster, and then they shut down other media distribution networks and now they are going after individual users. But the systems are evolving, and things are getting more distributed and harder to pin down. Hopefully one of my friends who knows more about this can post in the comments about the evolution of media downloads, but it looks to me remarkably like the drug war. In the drug war the US has many many times shut down large, complex drug networks only to have someone take their place, and even sometimes increase supply. Similarly the shut down of some download sites has led to a proliferation of others with no end in site. In the drug war the US prosecutes drug users, often very harshly, but this has little effect on demand. Likewise, we are starting to see the RIAA crack down on illegal downloading, but though there may be some initial scare it is unlikely to significantly reduce use, if it even affects it at all. Its really sad because like the drug war the powers that prosecutes this crusade fails to accomplish its goals but manages to ruin and damage the lives of many in the quixotic quest.

Ayn Rand: 101 years old and still worthless

2008-05-07T13:52:00.002-04:00

Bruce McCall over at the Washington Independent muses on what a course about Ayn Rand would look like in light of the fact that the CEO of BB&T has given millions of dollars to 25 colleges to teach pro-Rand pro-capitalist courses:

I: Course overview: Introduction to reality in metaphysics, reason in epistemology, rational egoism in ethics.

Assignment: If professor cannot satisfactorily explain this to your liking, punch him/her in the face. If he/she appeals to reason, punch him/her again.

New weapons made of magic

2008-05-06T22:36:00.002-04:00

Wired (not the Danger Room) has an article up about something called reactive materials (RM). The basic idea is with these seemingly magical materials you have something with the typical properties of metal, e.g. hard, durable, but which also explodes. So bombs in which not only is the bomb full of explosive, but the metal covering the explosive also explodes. Or take artillery shells and fragmentation grenades, they do much of their damage through high speed metal shell fragments which are created by the initial explosion. With RM you can also have those fragments themselves explode. Further, RM may also promise other magical effects like the ability to burn-out after a set amount of time to prevent collateral damage. With all this magic going around there's a lot promised, so we'll have to see what happens but it clearly has revolutionary potential.

I could live forever as an idiot

2008-05-06T16:57:00.002-04:00

There is an article in the NYT today about animal intelligence and its origins. The basic idea is that learning and being intelligent extract significant material costs on animals that quite often outweigh the benefits of becoming intelligent. Below I have posted a few choice quotations:
One clue comes from another experiment, in which he and his colleagues found that the very act of learning takes a toll. The scientists trained some fast-learning flies to associate an odor with powerful vibrations. “These flies died about 20 percent faster than flies with the same genes, but which were not forced to learn,” he said.

Dr. Kawecki suspects that each species evolves until it reaches an equilibrium between the costs and benefits of learning. His experiments demonstrate that flies have the genetic potential to become significantly smarter in the wild. But only under his lab conditions does evolution actually move in that direction. In nature, any improvement in learning would cost too much.

Humans’ oversize brains require 20 percent of all the calories burned at rest. A newborn’s brain is so big that it can create serious risks for mother and child at birth. Yet newborns know so little that they are entirely helpless. It takes many years for humans to learn enough to live on their own.

Somewhere out there there is someone boasting they are so smart they'll die at 30. Not me though.

Genesis

2008-05-06T14:24:00.002-04:00

So I'm already two posts in and I'm already behind. This was meant to be the first post but has since fallen behind thanks to events seemingly more pressing than a banal introduction. But, nevertheless, I am going to render some explanation of what I am trying to do and why I am trying to do it.

In the first, I don't have a great answer except that I want to write a blog about military history/affair and world security as well as radical leftwing politics. This will be primarily done through sources such as other blogs and online news outlets. Therefore the value I will bring to this endeavor is however much my "insights" are worth, and bringing issues to the attention of my minuscule readership. However, I will try to spice things up with reviews of movies/concerts/restaurants and other DC/Bmore events. My prototype for this blog is probably Attackerman, an excellent blog that combines informality and irreverence with penetrating insight and analysis. Ooh, that sounded like I ripped that line off the back of a book or something. Anyway, Attackerman is written by Spencer Ackerman a relatively young journalist in DC who is into punk music and is somehow connected with a woman new to the Charm City Rollergirls. So basically I can relate to him better than I can to the professors and/or veterans that I generally also rely on. Also, of note two other defense writers I like are local to DC, David Axe and Lt. Col. Bob Bateman. But enough about other blogs.

The reason I am writing this blog is mostly to try to force myself to write more regularly and in greater quantity in order to hopefully enhance my skills. The other purpose is to create a corpus of work that may be valuable in securing jobs or positions in the future. I am under no illusion that my voice will somehow be superior or even noteworthy amongst the blogs by professional journalists, academics and professors. Nevertheless, I was heartened today when I saw on Wired's Danger Room an article about new light fast attack vehicles to fill roll that used to be filled by jeeps and the increasingly heavy humvee. Essentially what they did was recap an article from DefenseNews. Interestingly, I had seen this article and was planning to do something similar but gave it to a coworker for an FCS article because she is doing research on the topic. Regardless, I am heartened that I might be able to do something similar, though when I leave my current job in two weeks I will no longer have the free access to all of these nice defense periodicals I do now.

That's it.

Spread This Around!

2008-05-02T14:37:00.003-04:00

Once upon a time a little media company made a hand-shake deal with a not-so-little, but not-yet-globe-begirdling retailer to film their corporate events. The first company you probably haven't heard of, Flagler Productions, but you certainly have the second: Wal-Mart. The interesting turn, though, is that in 2006 Wal-Mart decided to submit their media production contracting to a competitive bidding process that ended with Flagler as a loser. Flagler had spent most of its life more or less exclusively filming Wal-mart for about 30 years and were totally unprepared to do any other business. They had to sell a big loss the huge 20,000 square foot building they had bought to store their current and future collection of Wal-Mart media and fire all their employees.

Any guesses where this is going?

Let's go back to that hand shake deal. Turns out that Flagler owns the footage of Wal-Mart, all 30 years of it. And some people are willing to pay good money for it. Like unions. Have you seen the video's of embarassing moments from Wal-Mart conventions and wondered where they were from? Well now you know. Some UFCW interns are going to spend a lot of time over the next few years looking through a lot of tape.

Link to the story.

Sanchez spills the beans

2008-05-02T12:15:00.003-04:00

I'm going to debut this blog a bit early and write the introductory post later, but I just saw a link to this story on Danger Room: Retired Gen. Ricardo Sanchez yesterday told Time magazine that Rumsfeld tried to get Sanchez to sign off on a memo essentially absolving Rumsfeld of culpability for the disastrous post-war operations in Iraq:

"This left General Sanchez in charge of operations in Iraq with a staff that had been focused at the operational and tactical level, but was not trained to operate at the strategic/operational level." He went on to write that neither he nor anyone higher in the administration knew these orders had been issued, and that he was dumbfounded when he learned that Gen McKiernan was out of the country and in Kuwait, and that the forces would be drawn down to a level of about 30,000 by September. "I did not know that Sanchez was in charge," he wrote.
I stopped reading after I read that last statement, because I knew it was total BS

Eventually, Sanchez figured out what was going on due to past dealings with the esteemed SecDef:

So it was clearly a pattern on the Secretary's part, and now I recognized it. Bring in the top-level leaders. Profess total ignorance. Ask why he had not been informed. Try to establish that others were screwing things up. Have witnesses in the room to verify his denials. Put it in writing. In essence, Rumsfeld was covering his rear. He was setting up his chain of denials should his actions ever be questioned. And worse yet, in my mind, he was attempting to level all the blame on his generals.

And there's more, it's a good article and Sanchez goes into other things, like how the Rumsfeld buried a report criticizing post-war planning. The fact that this kind of negligence and incompetence doesn't qualify as a crime is appalling. Sanchez says it best:

...hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty.