Economics of a POW Camp

R. A. Radford, writing in Economica in 1945, explains the economics of a POW camp, including the cigarette currency, which arose spontaneously:

Although cigarettes as currency exhibited certain peculiarities, they performed all the functions of a metallic currency as a unit of account, as a measure of value and as a store of value, and shared most of its characteristics. They were homogeneous, reasonably durable, and of convenient size for the smallest or, in packets, for the largest transactions. Incidentally, they could be clipped or sweated by rolling them between the fingers so that tobacco fell out.

Cigarettes were also subject to the working of Gresham's Law. Certain brands were more popular than others as smokes, but for currency purposes a cigarette was a cigarette. Consequently buyers used the poorer qualities and the Shop rarely saw the more popular brands: cigarettes such as Churchman's No. 1 were rarely used for trading. At one time cigarettes hand-rolled from pipe tobacco began to circulate. Pipe tobacco was issued in lieu of cigarettes by the Red Cross at a rate of 25 cigarettes to the ounce and this rate was standard in exchanges, but an ounce would produce 30 home-made cigarettes. Naturally, people with machine-made cigarettes broke them down and rerolled the tobacco, and the real cigarette virtually disappeared from the market. Hand-rolled cigarettes were not homogeneous and prices could no longer be quoted in them with safety: each cigarette was examined before it was accepted and thin ones were rejected, or extra demanded as a make-weight. For a time we suffered all the inconveniences of a debased currency.

Machine-made cigarettes were always universally acceptable, both for what they would buy and for themselves. It was this intrinsic value which gave rise to their principal disadvantage as currency, a disadvantage which exists, but to a far smaller extent in the case of metallic currency; – that is, a strong demand for non-monetary purposes. Consequently our economy was repeatedly subject to deflation and to periods of monetary stringency. While the Red Cross issue of 50 or 25 cigarettes per man per week came in regularly, and while there were fair stocks held, the cigarette currency suited its purpose admirably. But when the issue was interrupted, stocks soon ran out, prices fell, trading declined in volume and became increasingly a matter of barter. This deflationary tendency was periodically offset by the sudden injection of new currency. Private cigarette parcels arrived in a trickle throughout the year, but the big numbers came in quarterly when the Red Cross received its allocation of transport. Several hundred thousand cigarettes might arrive in the space of a fortnight. Prices soared, and then began to fall, slowly at first but with increasing rapidity as stocks ran out, until the next big delivery. Most of our economic troubles could be attributed to this fundamental instability.

Supremacy by Stealth

Robert Kaplan offers his rules for Supremacy by Stealth:

1. Produce More Joppolos
2. Stay on the Move
3. Emulate Second-Century Rome
4. Use the Military to Promote Democracy
5. Be Light and Lethal
6. Bring Back the Old Rules
7. Remember the Philippines
8. The Mission Is Everything
9. Fight on Every Front
10. Speak Victorian, Think Pagan

The last of those rules became one of the sub-titles of the Coming Anarchy blog:

Imperialism in antiquity was in many respects a strain of isolationism: the demand for absolute security at home led powers to try to dominate the world around them. That pagan-Roman model of imperialism contrasts sharply with the altruistic Victorian one, exemplified by Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone in his comment about protecting “the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan.” Americans are truly idealistic by nature, but even if we weren’t, our historical and geographical circumstances would necessitate that U.S. foreign policy be robed in idealism, so as to garner public support and ultimately be effective. And yet security concerns necessarily make our foreign policy more pagan. The idealistic shorthand of “democracy,” “economic development,” and “human rights,” by means of which the media make sense of events in distant parts of the world, conceals many harsh and complicated ground-level truths. Remember that even Gladstone’s vision was more effectively implemented by the realpolitik of statesmen such as Lord Palmerston and Benjamin Disraeli, who kept illiberal empires like Germany and Russia at bay and retook Sudan from Islamic extremists.

By sustaining ourselves first, we will be able to do the world the most good. Some 200 countries, plus thousands of NGOs represent a chaos of interests. Without the organizing force of a great and self-interested liberal power, they are unable to advance the interests of humanity as a whole…

Brilliant or a sham? Questions asked over Ingrid Betancourt rescue

Kidnapping is big business and has been for some time, but no one wants to admit that they pay off — and thus encourage — kidnappers.

It didn't take long for some to wonder, Was the Ingrid Betancourt rescue brilliant or a sham?

Swiss public radio cited an unidentified source “close to the events, reliable and tested many times in recent years" as saying the operation had in fact been staged to cover up the fact that the US and Colombians had paid $20 million for their freedom. [...]
French media have also raised questions about Ms Betancourt’s relatively healthy appearance after her release, compared with the gaunt and haggard look of her last video from captivity. French state radio suggested the hostages may have been given food and medicine to return them to health before their release. There was no suggestion that the hostages knew they were to be released.

Dominique Moisi, one of France's leading foreign policy experts, said that it was “probable” that the Farc had been paid money as part of the "infiltration" of their command. “They were bought in order to turn them around, like Mafia chiefs," he said on French state television, as Ms Betancourt's plane was taxiing up to the terminal in Paris.

This wouldn't be the first time a Latin American regime faked a rescue operation.

On the Waterboard

When you read that Christopher Hitchens has volunteered to undergo waterboarding, you expect something far more terrifying than a few portly guys in khakis pouring a few ounces of water — from an ordinary water bottle, no less — onto a hand towel over his face. And you certainly don't expect an adult-contemporary soundtrack.

The black hoods are scary though, I'll admit, and evidently the whole process is so unbearable that Hitchens had to stop almost immediately:

"It doesn't simulate the feeling of drowning. You are being drowned — slowly."

Quartermaster to the Barbarians

John Jay considers the recent arrest of Viktor Bout (pronounced “boot”), the Quartermaster to the Barbarians, big news, because the international arms dealer has a long history of working as a convenient contractor for the Russians, with built-in plausible deniability for his Kremlin financiers:

So who is Viktor Bout? My blog partner CW can answer that better than I can, since he had a whole series of posts regarding the missing 727 and the networks of Bout on his old blog. In the absence of that archive, or purchasing Braun and Farah’s book The Merchant of Death, the best places to start are here and here. Other treasure troves of information include TheYorkshire Ranter and Ruud Leeuw.
[...]
So how did Viktor get bagged?

There is some speculation that one reason Bout has evaded capture is the complicit help of certain highly placed parties in the US and EU who would be embarrassed by revelations from Bout concerning their dealings with him.

This may be true. It is certainly curious that Bout was not arrested on money laundering, arms smuggling, or tax evasion charges that are outstanding against him, despite the fact that Bout’s company pulled a fast one on its American employers and made off with over 200,000 Kalashnikov’s that had been paid for by the US in Bosnia for shipment to Iraqi militias.

In fact, the sting that brought him down was an entirely de novo operation of the DEA:

In the end it was an agency of one of those states suspected of turning a blind eye to Bout’s activities that was the engine behind his capture. According to a source with close ties to the DEA, the operation was so sensitive it was kept secret from other members of the US intelligence community, including high-ranking members of the Justice Department, precisely because of the fear that Bout might be tipped off by elements that the DEA agents feared had protected him in the past. A special unit was set up to run the operation due to ‘war on drugs’ legislation and guidelines, allowed to operate outside the normal protocols that require US government-wide notification.

This is probably the first positive dividend I’ve seen coming out of the War on Drugs.

For those people who supported a unified intelligence command in the wake of 9/11, there is some further food for thought in this sordid tale:

Few people, even in the closed world of US intelligence, knew the DEA was tracking Bout, let alone setting him up for an arrest. ‘[The DEA] was laughing at the CIA in their offices,’ because they had arrested someone that was perceived to be working for the agency, said one witness.

The question remains — why did this sting succeed where so many others failed? Why did Viktor wind up in Thailand? Bout allegedly has a penchant for signing deals face to face, which may have led to his downfall. Only a few countries are safe for the fugitive, and a previous meeting in Bulgaria was scratched due to international pressure. Thailand apparently remained a safe haven.

According to the Mother Jones report, Bout agreed to meet the DEA agents despite the fact that their photographs did not appear in his intelligence report on FARC commanders. This appears to be a bit sloppy on the part of the usually ultra-paranoid Bout, but may indicate that the financial pressure brought on by asset seizure is beginning to strain Bout’s finances.

Despite his the evident conspiracy-mongering in some of the articles of former Polish Intelligence officer Daytsh, I tend to agree with his assessment that Viktor has been betrayed in a power struggle in Moscow, in the FSB in particular, and his arrest would have been accomplished even in the absence of doubts surrounding his loyalty to the Russian state. Medvedev wants to clear the slate of Putin’s cronies, and if he can simultaneously win a few PR points in the West, so much the better.

The major piece of evidence supporting Daytsh’s claims that Bout was betrayed is the back and forth in the press concerning Russia’s intent to extradite. In the first days after his arrest, the Russian Foreign Ministry. intimated that Russia would extradite Bout. As of today, it seems the Russians are not willing to extradite him despite his direct plea for help. This, to me, indicates that the early overtures in that direction were the remnants of Putin’s network acting in a knee-jerk fashion, and that Medvedev’s new cronies are gradually cutting ties to Bout. More evidence in that regard is the recent arrest of Bout crony and Arbat Prestige Mafia Godfather Semyon Mogilevich in Moscow.

Bout may also have traveled to Thailand under the assumption that his patrons in Moscow would help extricate him from any problems he might encounter. In this he appears to have been mistaken. For now. But I highly doubt that the Russians have begun to put the long term interests of civilization ahead of the short term interests of the kleptocracy in Moscow.

I hope that the US manages to extradite and prosecute Bout, but the real question for me is what becomes of his empire? His older brother Sergei is nowhere near the logistics expert that Viktor has shown himself to be. Hopefully Bout’s network will fall into far less competent hands and slowly rust away. However, I can not help but suspect that Medvedev has someone else in mind to take the title of World’s Greatest Merchant of Death. If so, the threat to civilization from fourth generation warfare will continue to grow.

Where is Nomonhan in the list of vital battles?

Where is Nomonhan in the list of vital battles we teach our high school and college students about WWII? Pretty much nowhere. And yet it decided the course of the war:

“I remember well how, in the spring and summer of 1939, my curiosity was gripped by short newspaper accounts of an undeclared war that was raging between the Japanese and Soviet armies on a desolate stretch of disputed frontier lying between the client states of Manchukuo and Outer Mongolia.”

– Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan

That battle, Nomonhan or Khalkhin Gol, depending on your perspective, was a watershed in the global conflict that rivaled its contemporary event, the invasion of Poland, in its significance:

“It is generally agreed that, despite IJA silence on the subject, the Japanese decision in 1941 to transfer strategic emphasis to the south, involving war with the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands, stemmed in part from the Kwantung Army’s failure against the Russians in 1939.”

– Ibid

In large part. Had the Japanese succeeded agaisnt Zhukov and joined the Nazis in a two front war against the Russians, the Second Front would have been a disaster for Stalin. Had the Japanese not moved against Pearl Harbor in 1941, war with the US would have been at least delayed, and Roosevelt would have needed some other pretext to come to beleaguered Britain’s aid in its darkest and finest hour.

Failure to understand that conflict and the lessons it taught about the IJA by people who should have taken a much more professional interest led to much needless bloodshed on the part of the British and American military in the Pacific War. The defeat of the Kwantung army by Zhukov (a name that should have been well noted by Americans and Germans alike in 1939), was the primary event that turned the Japanese on a collision course with the US.

Yet where is Nomonhan in the list of vital battles we teach our high school and college students about WWII? Pretty much nowhere. Apropos another conversation on this blog, it seems that the professional military historians outside academia take the study of this battle a little more seriously.

(I've mentioned Khalkhin Gol before.)

The assassination, the Bay of Pigs, and Camelot were useless drivel and a distraction

John Jay says that the assassination, the Bay of Pigs, and Camelot were useless drivel and a distraction to the serious study of history:

In fact, the most likely (and I do not presume to have the final world on this) candidate for the seminal event of 1960–1964 is Kennedy’s commitment of troops to Vietnam. From this flowed a tremendous amount of history, and not just the further commitments of LBJ and the subsequent social upheaval in the US. If the officers I talked to in the late Soviet period are correct, the Vietnam War bankrupted the Soviet Union. The Soviets spent approximately $1 billion per year in a war it truly could not afford:

“The Soviet Union poured billions of rubles into Vietnam... During 1965-1975 military aid was central, and economic aid was geared entirely to the war effort. By the 1970s Soviet aid amounted to $1 billion or more annually, without which the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) could not have continued the war.”

The adventure in Vietnam and the attendant arms race crippled the economy of the USSR. It severely curtailed their foreign policy adventures. And when Reagan came along and proposed Star Wars, Gorbachev threw in the towel. Not because he thought that the American missile shield would achieve 100% coverage against missile attacks. The Russians were not stupid. And not because they thought we’d even get 75% coverage. It was because even 30% coverage was considerably better than the 0% the Soviets could muster in the near term. And because it would have sapped a couple of percent of our GDP, while even attempting to match it would have cost a significantly grater fraction of their GDP (some officers I talked to estimated as much as 50%). And the US technology would have gotten better with time and experience, which would have sapped even more Russian resources. In this respect, the events of 1989 and 1991 were a direct result of Kennedy’s decision to commit to Vietnam and Reagan’s willingness to capitalize on the advantage gained by bankrupting the USSR and sending it into the period the Russians call “The Stagnation”.

How to Survive A Disaster

Amanda Ripley has written an entire book — The Unthinkable — on how to survive a disaster, and John Robb (Brave New War) has written a review:

I’m living, breathing proof that you can survive a disaster. I’ve lived through two airplane crashes (“catastrophic mishaps” in Air Force jargon), one at the start and one near the end of my Air Force piloting career, as well as a countless number of close calls in between. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to understand fully why I was so successful at navigating disaster and others in similar circumstances weren’t. There hasn’t been a source of solid thinking on the subject until now. Amanda Ripley’s new book, The Unthinkable, is a riveting exploration of the factors that dictate whether you will live through or perish in a disaster — if you’re ever unlucky enough to confront one.

Based on my experience, the top objective in all catastrophes is to move to a safe zone and take as many people with you as you can. While this goal may seem simple, achieving it during the onrush of chaos isn’t. Thinking clearly during a crisis is tough, for reasons more complex than we realize. Ripley shows us what stands in our way as we navigate what she calls the “survival arc,” which consists of two phases: denial and deliberation.

Denial keeps you from realizing that you are in danger. It’s rooted in bad risk assessment, overconfidence, and a lack of relevant experience. Bouts with denial can delay your response, as Ripley illustrates through the testimony of Elia Zedeno, who relates her painfully slow escape from the 73rd floor of Tower One on September 11. Once you realize the extent of the peril, though, fear might take over. Deliberation requires overcoming fear to regain the ability to think clearly. [...] Contrary to popular understanding, group behavior during disasters is rarely panic-driven, but more often extremely docile and overly polite. Getting a group to respond and act effectively often requires aggressive behavior, like barking orders.

Our bodily reaction to fear — regulated by the amygdala and catalyzed by cortisol and adrenaline — deprives us of our higher mental functions and can induce everything from tunnel vision to time compression to extreme dissociation:

We can counter fear, however. The best method, FBI trainers say, is to get control of your breathing. “Combat breathing” is a simple variant on Lamaze or yoga training — breathe in four counts, hold four counts, exhale four counts, and repeat. It works because breathing is a combination of the somatic (which we control) and the autonomic (which we can’t easily control) nervous systems. Regulation of the autonomic system deescalates the biological-fear response and returns our higher-level brain functions to full capacity.

Some people are naturally suited to dealing with chaos:

What makes them different? Some have a natural psychological buffer that allows them to bounce back from extreme stress. Examination of people who always perform well in extreme circumstances has shown high levels in the blood of “neuropeptide Y” — a compound that allows one to stay mentally focused under stress. It’s so closely correlated with success in pressure situations that it is almost a biological marker for selection into elite groups for military special operations.

One of the disaster tales Ripley tells is of the M.V. Estonia, which went down in the Baltic Sea after suddenly listing starboard 30° at 1 AM:

In the bar, almost everyone fell violently against the side of the boat. Härstedt managed to grab on to the iron bar railing and hold on, hanging above everyone else.

"In just one second, everything went from a loud, happy, wonderful moment to total silence. Every brain, I guess, was working like a computer trying to realize what had happened," he says. Then came the screaming and crying. People had been badly hurt in the fall, and the tilt of the ship made it extremely difficult to move.

Härstedt began to strategize, tapping into some of the survival skills he had learned in the military. "I started to react very differently from normal. I started to say, 'O.K., there is option one, option two. Decide. Act.' I didn't say, 'Oh, the boat is sinking.' I didn't even think about the wider perspective." Like many survivors, Härstedt experienced the illusion of centrality, a coping mechanism in which the brain fixates on the individual experience. "I just saw my very small world."

But as Härstedt made his way into the corridor, he noticed something strange about some of the other passengers. They weren't doing what he was doing. "Some people didn't seem to realize what had happened. They were just sitting there," he says. Not just one or two people, but entire groups seemed to be immobilized. They were conscious, but they were not reacting.

Contrary to popular expectations, this is what happens in many disasters. Crowds generally become quiet and docile. Panic is rare. The bigger problem is that people do too little, too slowly. They sometimes shut down completely, falling into a stupor.

On the Estonia, Härstedt climbed up the stairwell, fighting against gravity. Out on the deck, the ship's lights were on, and the moon was shining. The full range of human capacities was on display. Incredibly, one man stood to the side, smoking a cigarette, Härstedt remembers. Most people strained to hold on to the rolling ship and, at the same time, to look for life jackets and lifeboats. British passenger Paul Barney remembers groups of people standing still like statues. "I kept saying to myself, 'Why don't they try to get out of here?'" he later told the Observer.

Ripley tells another disaster tale, this one about the Beverly Hills Supper Club south of Cincinnati, in which a small electrical fire spread, killing 167:

The disaster delivered many brutal lessons. Some were obvious — and tragic: the club had no sprinkler or audible fire-alarm systems. But the fire also complicated official expectations for crowd behavior: in the middle of a crisis, the basic tenets of civilization actually hold. People move in groups whenever possible. They tend to look out for one another, and they maintain hierarchies. "People die the same way they live," says disaster sociologist Lee Clarke, "with friends, loved ones and colleagues, in communities."

At the Beverly Hills, servers warned their tables to leave. Hostesses evacuated people that they had seated but bypassed other sections (that weren't "theirs"). Cooks and busboys, perhaps accustomed to physical work, rushed to fight the fire. In general, male employees were slightly more likely to help than female employees, maybe because society expects women to be saved and men to do the saving.

And what of the guests? Most remained guests to the end. Some even continued celebrating, in defiance of the smoke seeping into the rooms. One man ordered a rum and Coke to go. When the first reporter arrived at the fire, he saw guests sipping their cocktails in the driveway, laughing about whether they would get to leave without paying their bills.

As the smoke intensified, Wayne Dammert, a banquet captain at the club, stumbled into a hallway jammed with a hundred guests. The lights flickered off and on, and the smoke started to get heavy. But what he remembers most about that crowded hallway is the silence. "Man, there wasn't a sound in there. Not a scream, nothing," he says. Standing there in the dark, the crowd was waiting to be led.
[...]
People were remarkably loyal to their identities. An estimated 60% of the employees tried to help in some way — either by directing guests to safety or fighting the fire. By comparison, only 17% of the guests helped. But even among the guests, identity shaped behavior. The doctors who had been dining at the club acted as doctors, administering CPR and dressing wounds like battlefield medics. Nurses did the same thing. There was even one hospital administrator there who — naturally — began to organize the doctors and nurses.

Read the original article for the whole story of Rick Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter at the World Trade Center.

What got cut from the article was Ripley's list of 5 Ways to Refine Your Disaster Personality:

1. Attitude
   People who perform well in crises and recover well afterwards tend to have three underlying advantages:
   1. They believe they can influence what happens to them.
   2. They find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil.
   3. They are convinced they can learn from both good and bad experiences.


2. Knowledge
   If you learn more about your actual risks — or the risks that scare you most — you will probably be calmer should something go wrong someday. For example, did you know that most serious plane accidents are survivable? Yes, it’s true. Of all passengers involved in serious accidents between 1983 and 2000, 56% survived. (Serious, for those of you who still don’t believe me, is defined by the National Transportation Safety Board as accidents involving fire, severe injury, AND substantial aircraft damage.)


3. Anxiety Level
   People with higher everyday anxiety levels may have a greater tendency to freeze or totally shut down in an emergency. As in regular life, if you can learn tricks to control your anxiety, you will probably perform better. For example, some police officers are now trained to do rhythmic breathing (in for four, hold for four, out for four) whenever their guns are drawn.


4. Body Weight
   The harsh truth is that overweight people move more slowly, are more vulnerable to secondary injuries like heart attacks and have a harder time physically recovering from any injuries they do sustain. On 9/11, people with low physical ability were three times as likely to be hurt while evacuating the Towers.


5. Training
   It is much better, for example, to stop, drop and roll than to talk about stopping, dropping and rolling. [...] Make surprise drills an annual tradition in your office or home. Take the stairs down to the ground — don’t just stare at the stairwell door.

Laptop Jihadi

Lexington Green points to Adam Shatz's London Review piece, Laptop Jihadi, on the recent book, Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus'ab Al-Suri by Brynjar Lia:

Abu Musab al-Suri never received an advance for his magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, written in safe houses after the fall of the Taliban and published in December 2004 by a clandestine press. But a few weeks before his book appeared, the Bush administration bestowed an honour on him more valuable than anything the jihadi market had to offer: the announcement of a $5 million reward for his capture.

Abu Musab al-Suri is the nom de guerre of the Syrian jihadi Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam Nasar, al-Qaida’s most formidable and far-sighted military strategist. Al-Suri played a key role in the 1990s in establishing al-Qaida’s presence in Europe and forging its links to radical jihadis in North Africa and the Middle East, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, South and East Asia. He was a spokesman for the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé, a press attaché for Osama bin Laden in London and an adviser to Mullah Omar in Kabul, and he appears under a variety of aliases in books by foreign correspondents he escorted to meet the man in Tora Bora. Until he was captured in Quetta by Pakistani intelligence agents in October 2005 and handed over to the CIA, he went wherever the jihad travelled. Indeed, it was al-Suri who first argued that in order to survive, al-Qaida had to become a kind of travelling army based on mobile, nomadic, flexible cells operating independently of one another, unified by little more than a common ideology – and by the sense of shared grievances that the West’s ‘war on terror’ was likely to foster among Muslims. The concept of ‘leaderless jihad’, now much in vogue among so-called terrorism experts, is to a great extent al-Suri’s invention.

Some of the details of al-Suri's life are not what you might expect:

Madrid, where al-Suri made a living selling second-hand furniture at a flea market, proved a comfortable base. With his red hair, green eyes and pale complexion, al-Suri passed easily for a European and soon enough he was one: in 1987 he married Elena Moreno Cruz, a left-wing student of philology who converted to Islam and helped him become a Spanish citizen. They moved to Granada and began to raise a family. Al-Suri opened a giftshop but found his true vocation as a jihadi author.

It guess it comes as no surprise that we should have been paying more attention to what Islamic terrorists were up to in the 1990s:

The GIA, however, thought al-Suri would be more useful in London, so in 1995 he moved there with his family and settled in Neasden. He became a staff writer for the GIA newsletter, al-Ansar, and travelled throughout Europe promoting the cause. The GIA was taking the war to France. It hijacked an Airbus in Algiers on Christmas Eve 1994 with the intention of flying it into the Eiffel Tower (the plane was stormed by gendarmes while refuelling in Marseille), and planted bombs in the Paris Metro the following year. Al-Suri praised these operations as efforts to punish France for supporting the military regime and to ‘expose the hidden hand of the West’. What neither al-Suri nor Qutadah knew at the time was that Algeria’s Sécurité Militaire had agents inside the GIA, and that they were probably encouraging the attacks on French soil in order to expose the barbarous face of the Islamist opposition and thereby persuade France that defending the military was in its national interest. Eventually, however, the GIA went too far even for al-Suri, when it began to execute many of its own leaders and to kill wavering supporters in order to ‘purify’ Algeria. Al-Suri resigned from the party and began looking for other work.

We also probably should have been paying more attention to the situation in London:

He didn’t have to look for long. London, as he later wrote, was ‘the centre for communications between Islamist groups and groups opposed to the governments of their own countries’, and there was no lack of opportunity for a ‘media jihadi’ like al-Suri. Still reeling from the Rushdie affair, the British government looked the other way, and showed particular indulgence towards jihadis who shared a common enemy with the Foreign Office, notably the Libyan jihadis conspiring against Gaddafi. British hospitality led al-Suri to assume, not unreasonably, that he and other jihadis had a tacit agreement with John Major that they ‘would never target Britain as long as the security forces left us alone’, and he abided by the ‘truce’. He spoke regularly to al-Zawahiri from a telephone box in the London suburbs, and came to serve as a liaison between British journalists and the jihadi movement. He was remarkably industrious – and successful – in his efforts to attract British attention.
[...]
He felt betrayed: ‘When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he tore up the unwritten understanding and stabbed the mujahedin in the back by changing the laws and harassing us.’ Britain had lost its ‘democratic virginity’ to ‘the American cowboy’.

The Shield

Lloyd explains a few things about the shield that wouldn't be obvious until you started re-enacting ancient combat:

What Rumsfeld Got Right

Robert Kaplan lists what Rumsfeld got right:

de-emphasizing nuclear weapons by giving Strategic Command a conventional-strike capacity, and by sharply reducing the nuclear stockpile; creating an undersecretary of intelligence to make relations with the civilian intelligence community more seamless; developing the littoral combat ship, however overpriced, as the first phase of a counterguerrilla force at sea; killing the Crusader artillery program and using the funds to research precision-guided rockets and mortars for the Army; encouraging the Marines to stand up several battalions to Special Operations Command; helping expand NATO eastward; and forcing change upon NATO by appointing Marine General James Jones to run the Army-centric organization, by trying to establish a NATO rapid-reaction force, and by replacing the supreme allied command for the Atlantic, located in Norfolk, with an allied command for transformation.

Better known is the list of what Rumsfeld got wrong:

To wit, his decision to more or less go it alone in Afghanistan in 2001 made strict military but not political sense. The failure to allow NATO a large role in the beginning gave alliance members little stake in the outcome — a dynamic that continues to hamper the war’s conduct. His use of private contractors in Iraq made sense in order to create efficiencies in the rear, but because Iraq constituted an irregular war, there was often no rear there, so contractors found themselves in the midst of the fighting. The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an abject failure in the chain of command going all the way up to the defense secretary, who must be held accountable.

The Spear

Lloyd notes that the spear may be the only weapon used by every culture in warfare — and used in roughly the same form. An eight-foot spear is about as long as a man can wield with one hand, and almost all soldiers wanted to keep their other hand free to hold a shield:

If the enemy is showering you with arrows or sling-stones, you want a shield. A formation of spearmen without shields is very vulnerable. If a formation of spearmen without shields came up against another, the slaughter would be terrible, as each man would have easy target, and be an easy target.

The more interesting question involves how exactly they used the spear — overhand or underhand?

With the over-arm hold, the spear is held in the centre. This means that half the length of the spear is wasted, and serves merely as a counter-weight to the front half. No man would be strong enough to hold a spear horizontally over-arm by one end. This goes dead against the whole idea of a spear. A spear is a device for keeping your enemy at a distance. He cannot come close to hit you with a club or sword, because as he advances to his fighting distance, he gets skewered. An eight-foot spear is turned into a four-foot spear if it is held over-arm. If two formations of spearmen clashed, one using spears underarm, the other over-arm, then the fools using their spears over-arm would face their enemies’ spears before they themselves were in striking range.

With the over-arm hold, the rear end of the spear acts as a counterweight to the front end. If a foe were to strike the spearhead sideways with a sword, then the counterweight would act against the spear-user. The front end of the spear would act as a lever, twisting the wrist of the spearman, and the swinging rear counter-weight end would act to exaggerate this effect. To close with a spearman, a sword user has to knock the spearhead aside and rush in at his foe. The over-arm grip would make this enormously more easy. With an under-arm grip, the spearman has his spear braced along his forearm, and has much more control of the spearhead. The spearhead may be knocked aside, but it will resume position a great deal more quickly. If a high thrust over a shield is wanted, this can be achieved by bringing the right elbow up to shoulder height. Also, if the swordsman advances, then the under-arm spear user can retreat a great deal faster, to bring his spearhead between them, as he has the ability denied to the over-arm user, of pulling back his spear, and sliding his right hand up the shaft, to shorten the weapon for close use.

With the under-arm grip, a spearman can thrust with his spear downwards at the feet of his foe, or upward at his face. The strongest thrust he can do it at waist height, and he can disguise his intentions easily. He can hold his shield in position during all of this. Using an over-arm grip, the feet of the foe are out of reach. Greaves, protection for the lower leg, were very common in the ancient world, being part of the standard hoplite panoply. This suggests that the lower leg was a common target. Not only are the feet out of reach, but the thighs are difficult targets. A thrust at waist height is difficult, and the spear point will be travelling downwards, and will glance of a shield more easily. The only really strong thrust will be at the face and neck of the enemy. The neck was seldom armoured in ancient times. Greeks and Romans usually had no armour there at all. This thrust will be easy to see coming. Worse still, the spearman thrusting over-arm will of necessity expose himself as he does this, leaning forwards out of formation, and turning his shield to the left to give himself room for the thrust. If an enemy spearman to the right of the over-arm user saw the thrust coming, he would have an easy victim: a man who has stepped with his weight onto his front foot (thus preventing any evasion by footwork) with an exposed shieldless side.

As I mentioned, most ancient spears had butt-spikes, and spears were used in large formations. An under-arm grip allows the butt-spike to be controlled, tucked away where it will do no one any harm. Anyone standing behind an over-arm spearman will be faced with a butt-spike going in and out at every thrust, and unpredictably sideways whenever an enemy knocks the spearhead. If spears were use over-arm, then a lot of people would have had somebody’s eye out by mistake.

Spears can be used for parrying, but only if used under-arm. The under-arm spear can be used very effectively to rake the enemy’s spears aside. Each man in a formation can act to protect not just himself, but his neighbours this way. Such group strength will win the day against men who cannot act to help their neighbours. Under-arm use of spears also means effectively longer spears, so parries can start further out from the user, which is a big help, and one spear can guard a larger volume of space.

The armour that soldiers wore seems to have been designed for under-arm spear use. Hoplite and legionary armour involves stiff broad pieces which come over the shoulders. These make holding an arm up very awkward, uncomfortable, weak, and limited. Armpits were generally not armoured. If a man were using a spear over-arm, his right armpit would be exposed all the time during a fight. Many shields had cut-aways in the side which allow a spearman to keep his shield nicely in front of him, and his spear in fighting position — as long as it is underarm. Shields were either round or taller than they were wide. If thrusting over a shield all the time, why make life awkward with a tall shield, and why not protect yourself better with a wide shield? Hoplite shields were very unusual, in that they had the handle for the left hand at the edge of the shield rather than in the middle (see shield essay). This makes sense if the spear is being used under-arm, since it means that the shield does not get in the way of the spear so much, but is bafflingly daft if the spear is used over-arm, because it would serve simply to further expose the wielder.

A spear used under-arm is easy to set in the ground against a cavalry charge or the like. It is also easy to ditch in favour of a sword when the melee gets frantic and mixed. A spear is easy to deploy underarm. When on the march or standing at rest, a spear would be held vertically, and the spearman simply has to lower the spear into position, and thrust it out in front of him. Greek texts refer to orders given to the men to “lower” spears and advance. To deploy a spear over-arm, a man has to throw the spear upwards, quickly get his arm underneath it, and catch it again (unless he was holding it upside down, with the butt spike in the air, but this is never pictured, and would mean that the main spearhead would get blunted on hard ground).

Another snag with the over-arm grip is that it is very tiring. Just holding your arm up and out to the side can get tiring, without the weight of a spear on it. With the under-arm grip, the spear is held close in to the body, is much easier to hold, and it is much easier to take a rest. During the slightest of lulls in the fray, the spearhead can be lowered to the ground, and from there, it can rapidly be redeployed.

To appreciate the weight of the above arguments, it is necessary to imagine large numbers of spearmen clashing in formation. The front row of each formation would try to present the enemy with spearpoints, and a wall of shields. From re-enactment experience, I can say with confidence that the person most likely to kill you is not the man opposite you. If you are half-competent with your shield, then you will always be able to move it to block your opponent’s thrusts (with the possible exception of thrusts aimed at the feet, and these are only possible with under-arm use). As you fight, you will be watching for an opportunity to make a kill — to thrust through a gap in the enemy’s shieldwall. Your enemies are doing the same. When you see a chance to thrust into a gap and take it, then you are for that instant exposed to some extent (utterly exposed if using over-arm). If an enemy has predicted your thrust, then he will spear you as you make it. You defend yourself against the man in front of you, and defend your neighbours from him, while watching for a chance to spear one of his neighbours. With underarm use, his neighbours are in easy reach, and his neighbours’ neighbours are in possible reach. With over-arm use, his neighbours are possibly within reach.

Sometimes, the furious charge of one side in a battle would sweep away the enemy. It takes nerve and confidence in one’s fellows to stand fast as the enemy rushes on screaming out war-cries. Where both sides keep their nerve, however, then two other possibilities arose. One was that both sides would get to spear-using distance, and then halt and fight it out. In such circumstances, under-arm users would have the advantages spelled out above, and more. Spears are sharp. A hard thrust into a shield would cause it to blunt, or worse, to stick. Once your spear is stuck in an opposing shield, you cannot thrust, or parry. You could yank the spear out, perhaps killing the man behind you with your butt-spike, or ditch it. You would want to avoid this. With under-arm spear use, spearmen can prod. Over-arm spearmen cannot. Prods are very useful. By prodding an opposing shield off-centre, you can turn it, creating an opening for one of your neighbours to thrust through. By prodding at an enemy’s shield, you can force him to pay attention to parrying you. You may not kill him this way, but you occupy his attention, and that has many uses. You can poke and prod about to work your spear into position, and then make a quick thrust. An over-arm spearman has to wait for his moment and then commit himself. If he hits a shield, which he often will, then he will very likely get his spear stuck.

Another possibility, often referred to in ancient literature, is that a “pushing match” develops. This sometimes involved not just the men of the front row, but of the whole formation, favouring the deeper one. It is reasonably easy to understand how such a pushing match might develop if spears were being used under-arm. It is next to impossible to imagine how it could happen, if men used spears over-arm. With under-arm spear-use, the spears themselves might be a way to push at the enemy. Spears of the first rank or two could be pushed into enemies and enemy shields, and used to shove the enemy back. If the spearmen got very close, such that they were pushing with their shields against the shields of the enemy, then their spears would be impotent, and perhaps ditched in favour of swords. Conversely, if spears were used over-arm, then they could not be used for shoving the enemy back. Furthermore, I don’t see how the two sides could close to shield-pushing range, without horrendous slaughter (and seeing this slaughter coming both sides would hang back). Once to shield-pushing distance, each side would have its spears above shield height, where they would be in the perfect position to thrust into the faces of the men opposite, and those men probably wouldn’t be able to parry. The bloodshed would be very rapid indeed, which contrasts not just with common sense, but also with the literary records which talk of these contests lasting some considerable while.

There is one instance in which an over-arm use is better than an under-arm use. This is when the spearman throws his spear. A spearman would only carry one spear, and this was a melee weapon, not a missile weapon. However, if he had the time and the space, and was going to ditch his spear anyway, in favour of a sword or axe or knife, then he might very well throw his spear, and this would be far more effective over-arm.

As a re-enactor, he notes that he has "encountered very strong opposition" to his case from "academics who have never wielded anything heavier than a pen."

The Francisca

Lloyd learned something interesting about the famous Frankish throwing axe, the francisca, when he and his re-enactor friends actually threw some replicas:

Javelins are lighter and easier to carry than franciscas. A man might carry a bundle of javelins, whereas he is unlikely to carry more than one francisca. Javelins can be thrown from horseback, can be thrown quickly, can be thrown well even with no run-up, have decent range, good accuracy, good penetration and will always land point-first. By contrast, a francisca can't be thrown very quickly, gains a lot from a run-up, and spins around in flight, making the whole process rather approximate, and will seldom hit the target point-first.

My view of the francisca changed rapidly when I went on a dark-age re-enactment weekend in the Lake District. A few of us had made franciscas, and were trying them out for the first time. The first thing we learned is that the head is so heavy (being chunkier than a battle-axe) that the thing is pretty useless in melee — it is just too unwieldy. The next was to confirm near enough everything I said in the last paragraph. The big revelation came when we started throwing them into an empty space of ground. Franciscas bounce.

If a javelin is parried with a shield, and does not come through, the danger to the target is over. Similarly, if a javelin is seen in flight, it can easily be side-stepped by anyone with enough room to do so, and it will hit the ground and stop. Not so, the francisca. When a francisca hits the ground, it bounces randomly like a rugby ball. The heavy head and long curving haft combine to make this weapon hurl about unpredictably for a few seconds, sometimes leaping over a man's height into the air. If ever one did hit a shield point-first, then it might behave as a javelin, but a more likely strike would bounce off the shield alarmingly. The weight of the whole weapon would ensure that it made a frightening noise against the shield first.

Imagine, then, a large group of Franks attacking a formed-up group of foes. If they all threw at once, shortly before contact, then charged in with swords, then they might well find themselves charging into a formation which has be broken up by many whirling unbalanced sharp implements. Few of the enemy would be badly injured by the volley, but whereas a disciplined soldier could well stand in firm formation against a volley of javelins, I strongly suspect that it would take much more nerve to stand steady with half a dozen bouncing franciscas crashing into him and his neighbours.

The Sling

Lloyd explains what made the sling — which bears little resemblance to the modern sling-shot — in many ways better than the bow:

The sling is very easy and cheap to make. Most in the past were made of leather, some being rush or twisted cord. The amount of material needed is minimal, and anyone who knows what a sling should look like could make one in a few minutes. Bows take far more materials, and rarer materials too. Bows take more maintenance, can break when you fall over, take far more time and skill to make, and are more cumbersome. A slinger could carry half a dozen spare slings easily, while an archer would worry about damage to his one bow.

A sling might be carried without ammunition, with the thought that some could be found when needed. Bows take very specialist ammunition which needs to be well-made in advance, and maintained. An archer would want to recover as many of his arrows as possible after use. Arrows are expensive, and can warp in damp weather. Arrows are long things need to be carried in an awkward quiver which flops about as the carrier runs. A pouch of sling stones can be a neat bundle, a more manageable load.

It is well known how bows are affected by weather. Battles have hinged on whether one side, with superior archers, has been able to make use of its bows effectively. Even quite light wind will blow arrows off course badly, and rain will spoil bow strings, and drag arrows down from the air. Slings, while still adversely affected by wind and rain, suffer not nearly so much from bad weather. This may explain why armies with archers often valued having slingers as well.

Slingers are generally more mobile than archers. They find it easier to shoot on the move and have the great advantage of needing only one hand to shoot, which allows them to use a shield in their free hand to protect themselves. It is possible to load a sling one handed, and I find that the best way to do this is to kneel down quickly and use the ground as a third hand: put the sling down letting go of one string, get a stone, put the stone in the sling, then pick up the sling again by the loose string and stand up again. While doing this, you would want to have a shield for protection, since you have to take your eye off the enemy. One can sling while kneeling, but the shot will not be as powerful or accurate. Archers in ancient armies often wore armour; they needed it more. While some archers did sometimes carry shields, these could not be used for parrying while shooting. All this may explain while slingers were often deployed as skirmishers on the field rather than in huge formations.

Arrows can be seen raining down upon an enemy, and even when they are flying on a fairly flat trajectory, are visible to an enemy expecting them. Sling stones are much more difficult to see in flight, especially from a distance. It is also more difficult to judge which way they are going, as they are seen as a dot rather than a line. Sling bullets, which are cast lead shot, are especially difficult to see. It has been speculated that this difficulty of seeing the stones in flight might be both advantageous and disadvantageous. A cavalry formation charging into a shower of arrows, might be broken up or slowed down when the riders look up to see the arrows and try and avoid them. Slings would not break up formations this way so readily, but might gain from allowing less evasion.

One advantage that the bow has over the sling is that bows can be used more easily in deep formations of troops. Archers could angle their bows to shoot safely over the heads of their fellows in front of them. While slinging over the heads of friendly troops is possible, it is much more dangerous and was seldom attempted. In later periods, when fortifications had slits for shooting from, bows and crossbows were better suited to this than slings.

One further comparison with the bow which should definitely be made is that of the skill needed to operate the weapon well. A man might be taught how to use a bow to a useful standard quite quickly. Judging the range of an oncoming line of troops might be difficult, but at least the archer could shoot an arrow well enough to make it look threatening. Slings are different. To get good range with a sling takes practice. With one of my slings, I might sling a stone a bit bigger than a golf ball only seventy yards or so. Ancient slingers with much more skill than me could get a stone over twice this distance. There are peasant boys in Africa who use slings to herd sheep and goats. They sit in the shade of a tree, and if they see an animal straying, they sling a stone in front of it to scare it back into the flock. To gain this sort of skill, I am told it is necessary to start young. Good slingers in antiquity were in demand. Particularly famed for their skill with slings were the men of the Balearic Isles (islands in the Mediterranean including Majorca, Ibiza and Minorca). These slingers practised their skill from a very early age, their original purpose being to hunt and to scare pests. Their skill brought them employment from the Romans.
[...]
Both Roman and Greek writers say that the sling could out-range the bow. The advantage of range is repeatedly stressed. This could, it seems to me, be because the sling had a greater effective range, arrows losing their power to air-resistance after a while, and falling out of control onto their target, whereas a sling stone might build up a more dangerous speed just from falling. The effective range of slings seems to be in excess of 360 yards. Assyrian reliefs show slingers attacking cities from further away than the archers. Perhaps this is because the archers were used to shoot straight at defenders on the walls, while slingers dropped stones into the city, or perhaps it is just another clue to the greater range of slings.

Writers tell of the terrible wounds that slings would inflict, especially bullets. The Romans developed a special pair of tongs designed for getting bullets out of people. Arrows, unless barbed and deep in the victim, are easier to extract. There was also a belief, presumably false, that sling bullets got white hot as they flew through the air. Julius Caesar writes about clay shot being heated before slinging, so that it might set light to thatch.
[...]
The power of slings is famous. When iron plate-armoured Spaniards went into South America against the Aztecs, only the slings of the Aztecs were feared. The stone-tipped arrows would glance off or shatter against the armour, but the sling stones would damage the Spaniards by sheer smashing force. I have demonstrated the power of a sling by slinging a lump of chalk rock against a large tree. The stone does not bounce [off] the trunk. Instead, where the stone impacts, a cloud of dust appears, and wafts away, being all that remains of the rock.

Slings are, of course, still popular in the Middle East.

Drawing a Sword

Lloyd explains a few myths about drawing a sword:

The Sabre

Lloyd shares what he has learned about the sabre after wielding his Moghul Indian tulwar — namely that curved one-handed swords are not equivalent to straight ones:

Sabres are next to useless for fencing. The curve of the blade makes the whole thing amazingly unwieldy. To hack, and then get the blade back into position for parrying is very difficult and slow. The curve does not make thrusts impossible, but thrusting with a straight sword is much easier.

Remember that these curved weapons were used by cavalrymen. If a cavalryman rides up to an infantryman and stops, and then fences with him, he loses almost all his advantage. Horses are very large and very scary, and the momentum which a moving horse adds to a blow makes a slash from a passing horseman terrible indeed. But if a horseman were to sit and fence, then his horse's head would be in his way, and his horse would offer a huge fleshy target which he could not protect with his parries, and which might buck or bolt at any moment. The rider would only have one angle of attack: downwards. He would find it difficult to fight opponents behind him or to his left, and would find it difficult to attack the lower halves of his foes. The infantrymen could get round him, and attack his immobile legs, his horse's legs, and (especially if he had no shield and used reins, as Napoleonic cavalrymen did) his left arm. He would be in big trouble.

Cavalrymen would ride at infantry, take a hack at them as they passed, and then use their speed to get past and away. Cavalry were good at attacking disordered and routing footmen, but much less good at attacking well-ordered troops, especially if those troops had long weapons such as spears or muskets with long bayonets on them. Against a formed body of infantry, they would rush at them and attack the ends of lines, gaps and weak points, hoping to get round a flank. If the infantry held, the cavalry would ride away and regroup and try again. Often the infantry would break formation, and then the cavalry had a good chance. A mass of cavalry thundering across the battlefield takes a lot of nerve to face. What cavalry did not do, was ride up to the infantry head-on, halt, then try to whittle away the numbers of the enemy by fencing on the spot.

Paul Van Riper's Recommended Reading

Monitor Talent presents a profile for retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper — famous for his role as red team commanders in war games — in which he lists his recommended reading:

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S, Kuhn
• Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life, Jeremy Campbell
• The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert A. Simon
• Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
• System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life, Robert Jervis
• Managing as Designing, Richard J. Boland, Jr. and Fred Collopy
• Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson
• Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, Peter Checkland
• Intuition At Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better At What You Do, Gary Klein
• Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture, Jamshid Gharajedaghi
• The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, John Gaddis
• Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and The Evidence of History, Colin S. Gray

He also lists web-sites:

• ISAAC-EINSTein, An Artificial-Life Approach to Land Combat
• Artificial Life Links
• Systems Dynamics Home Page
• KLI Theory Lab
• Clausewitz Home Page
• The Visual Thesaurus
• The Works of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press

Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency

Roger Trinquier wrote Modern Warfare after the French defeat in Vietnam and just before the final French defeat in Algeria, when terrorism was a new tactic:

The terrorist has become a soldier, like the aviator or the infantryman.

But the aviator flying over a city knows that antiaircraft shells can kill or maim him. The infantryman wounded on the battlefield accepts physical suffering, often for long hours, when he falls between the lines and it is impossible to rescue him. It never occurs to him to complain and to ask, for example, that his enemy renounce the use of the rifle, the shell, or the bomb. If he can, he goes back to a hospital knowing this to be his lot. The soldier, therefore, admits the possibility of physical suffering as part of the job. The risks he runs on the battlefield and the suffering he endures are the price of the glory he receives.

The terrorist claims the same honors while rejecting the same obligations. His kind of organization permits him to escape from the police, his victims cannot defend themselves, and the army cannot use the power of its weapons against him because he hides himself permanently within the midst of a population going about its peaceful pursuits.

But he must be made to realize that, when he is captured, he cannot be treated as an ordinary criminal, nor like a prisoner taken on the battlefield. What the forces of order who have arrested him are seeking is not to punish a crime, for which he is otherwise not personally responsible, but, as in any war, the destruction of the enemy army or its surrender. Therefore he is not asked details about himself or about attacks that he may or may not have committed and that are not of immediate interest, but rather for precise information about his organization. In particular, each man has a superior whom he knows; he will first have to give the name of this person, along with his address, so that it will be possible to proceed with the arrest without delay.

* In France during the Nazi occupation, members of the Resistance violated the rules of warfare. They knew they could not hide behind them, and they were perfectly aware of the risks to which they were exposing themselves. Their glory is to have calmly faced those risks with full knowledge of the consequences.

Needful Provision, Inc.

David A. Nuttle is a former "GS-14 CIA Special Operations Officer" — which sounds impressive — who has gone on to perform humanitarian aid in dangerous places around the world.

He wrote the Volunteer Safety & Survival Reference as "a single, quick reference to the essential information needed to help volunteers survive natural and man-made disasters of all types":

In the decades following initial publication, the earlier 1979 handbook was used by police and military personnel, Boy Scouts, Peace Corps volunteers, and volunteers for charities and NGOs (non-governmental organizations). From the many testimonials of these users, the safety and survival information herein provided helps to save lives. At the same time, this safety and survival guide acted to sustain volunteer operations in high threat areas.

Materials added to this handbook were designed to provide known safety and survival techniques for volunteers working in overseas areas with extensive armed conflict and related hazards. The need for a such information has been emphasized by increased numbers of volunteers being kidnapped and killed in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and other nations with high rates of conflict. Moreover, most charities and NGOs seldom effectively train their volunteers in safety and/or survival techniques.

There has never been a successful right-wing insurgency

There has never been a successful right-wing insurgency, Mencius points out:

That is, there has never been any successful movement employing the tactics of guerrilla or "urban guerrilla" (or "terrorist") war, in which the guerrilla forces were to the political right of the government forces. To some extent you can classify Franco in Spain as a successful right-wing rebel, but his forces were more organized and disciplined than the government's — Franquismo was a coup that turned into a rebellion, and it succeeded in the end only because, for unusual reasons, England and the US declined to intervene against it.

For example, if oppression and injustice really are the cause of insurgent movements, why was there never anything even close to an insurgency in any of the Soviet-bloc states? Excepting, of course, Afghanistan — a rather suspicious exception. You may be a progressive, but you can't be such a progressive that you believe there was no such thing as Communist oppression. Yet it never spawned any kind of violent reaction. What up with that, dog?

The obvious answer is just Defoe's. "When they had the Power in their hands, those Graces were strangers in their gates." The cause of revolutionary violence is not oppression. The cause of revolutionary violence is weak government. If people avoid revolting against strong governments, it is because they are not stupid, and they know they will lose. There is one and only one way to defeat an insurgency, which is the same way to defeat any movement — make it clear that it has no chance of winning, and no one involved in it will gain by continuing to fight.

I mean, think about it. You hear that in country X, the government is fighting against an insurgency. You know nothing else. Which side would you bet on? The government, of course. Because it is stronger by definition — it has more men and more guns. If it didn't, it wouldn't be the government.

So insurgency in the modern age is not what it appears to be. It is an illusion constructed for a political audience. If Fisher is right, it was not the Continental Army that prevailed in 1783, but the alliance of the Continental Army and the British Whigs. Together they produced a new Whig republic to replace the old one that had collapsed with Cromwell's death. Neither could conceivably have achieved this mission alone.

Insurgency, including what we now call "terrorism," is thus a kind of theater. Guerrilla theater, you might say. It exists as an adjunct to democratic politics, and could not exist without it. (I exclude partisan campaigns of the Peninsular War type, in which the guerrillas are an adjunct to a war proper.)

The goal of an insurgency is simply to demonstrate that the violence will continue until the political demands of its supporters are met. The military arm produces the violence. The political arm explains, generally while deploring the violence, that the violence can be stopped by meeting the demands — and only by meeting the demands.

What's so beautiful about this design, at least from the Devil's perspective, is that it requires no coordination at all. It is completely distributed. There is no "command and control." It often arouses suspicion when politicians and terrorists are good friends. With the insurgency design, both can benefit from each others' actions, without any incriminating connections. They do not even need to think of the effort as a cooperation.

Insurgents and politicians need not even share a value system. There is no reason at all, for example, to think that Ayman al-Zawahiri shares any values with American progressives. I have a fair idea of the kind of government that Sheikh al-Zawahiri would create if he had his druthers. I can certainly say the same for progressives. They have nothing at all to do with each other — regardless of anyone's middle name.

Yet when Sheikh al-Zawahiri attributed the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections to the mujahedeen, he was objectively right. The Democrats won because their prediction that Iraq would become a quagmire for the US military (which everyone and his dog knows is a Republican outfit) turned out to be true. Without the mujahedeen, who would have turned Iraq into a quagmire? Space aliens?

To make a proper feedback loop, the efforts of the politicians must assist the insurgents, and the efforts of the insurgents must assist the politicians. The al-Zawahiri effect — which is not exactly a unique case — is a good example of the latter. The former is provided by a tendency in Whig politics that we can call antimilitarism.

Antimilitarism assists the "armed struggle" in the most obvious way: by opposing its opponents. All things being equal, any professional military force will defeat its nonprofessional opponent, just as an NBA team will defeat the women's junior varsity. The effect of antimilitarism is to adjust the political and military playing field until the insurgents have an equal, or even greater, chance of victory.

Wars in which antimilitarism plays an important role are often described as "asymmetric." The term is a misnomer. A real "asymmetric" war would be a conflict in which one side was much stronger than the other. For obvious reasons, this is a rara avis. A modern asymmetric war is one in which one side's strength is primarily military, and the other's is primarily political. Of course this does not work unless the political and military sides are at least nominally parts of the same government, which means that all asymmetric wars are civil — although they may be fought by foreign soldiers on foreign territory.

How does antimilitarism do its thing? As always in war, in any way it can. In the case of Lord Howe we see what looks very much like deliberate military incompetence. Military mismanagement may occur at the level of military leadership, as in the case of Lord Howe, or in civil-military relations, as with McNamara. The military may win the war and its civilian masters may then simply surrender, as in the case of French Algeria.

The most popular approach today, however, is to alter the rules of war. War is brutal. If you were a space alien, you might expect a person opposed to this brutality to ameliorate it, or at least attempt to, by: (a) deciding to support whichever side is the least brutal; (b) promoting rules of war which minimize the incentive for brutal conduct; and (c) encouraging the war to end as quickly as possible with a decisive and final result.

Modern progressivism does not resemble any of these actions. In fact, it resembles their polar opposite. It is certainly motivated by opposition to brutality, but the actions are not calculated to achieve the effects. In a word, it is antimilitarism.

For example, the modern US military has by far the highest lawyer-to-soldier ratio in any military force in history. It requests legal opinions as a routine aspect of even minor attacks. It is by no means averse to trying its own soldiers for judgment calls made in the heat of battle, a practice that would strike Lord Howe as completely insane. (Here is a personal narrative of the consequences.) Meanwhile, its enemies relish the most barbaric tortures. And which side does the progressive prefer? Or rather, which side do his objective actions favor?

Adjusting the rules of war in this way is an excellent strategy for the 21st-century antimilitarist. He does not have to actually express support for the insurgents, as his crude predecessors of the 1960s did. (As Tom Hayden put it, "We are all Viet Cong now.") Today anyone who can click a mouse can learn that the NLF was the NVA and the NVA were cold-blooded killers, but this knowledge was controversial and hard-to-obtain at the time. The people who knew it were not, in general, the smart ones. "We are all al-Qaeda now" simply does not compute, and you don't hear it. But nor do you need to.

An arbitrary level of antimilitarism can be achieved simply by converging military tactics with judicial and police procedure. Suppose, for example, Britain was invaded by the Bolivian army, in a stunning seaborne coup. Who would win? Probably not the Bolivians, which is why they don't try it.

But suppose that the Bolivian soldiers have the full protection of British law. The only way to detain them is to arrest them, and they must be charged with an actual crime on reasonable suspicion of having committed it. Being a Bolivian in Britain is not a crime. You cannot, of course, shoot them, at least not without a trial and a full appeal process. Any sort of indiscriminate massacre, as via artillery, airstrikes, etc, is of course out of the question. Etc.

So Britain becomes a province of Bolivia. War is always uncertain, but the Bolivians certainly ought to give it a shot. What do they have to lose? A few soldiers, who might have to spend a little time in a British jail. Not exactly the Black Hole of Calcutta. So why not?

And this is how antimilitarism produces war. War is horrible, and no one is willing to fight in it unless they have a chance of winning. Antimilitarism gives the insurgents that chance. And this is the other half of the feedback loop.

Be-bop Galula

In Be-bop Galula, Wretchard cites an article by Caroline Glick at the Jerusalem Post, which explains how Hezbollah prefers to work through a form of control without governance where it is possible to remain both in power and in opposition:

It only took Hizbullah a week to bring the government of Lebanon to its knees. The Saniora government's decision Wednesday to cancel its decisions to ban Hizbullah's independent communications system and sack Hizbullah's agent from his position as chief of security at Beirut Airport constituted its effective acceptance of Hizbullah's preeminent role in Lebanon.

What is interesting about Hizbullah's successful overthrow of the elected government in Lebanon is that after his forces defeated their foes, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah ordered his men to retreat to their customary shadows. Why didn't Hizbullah just overthrow the government? Understanding why Hizbullah refused to take over Lebanon is key not only for understanding Hizbullah but also for understanding Hamas, Fatah and the insurgency in Iraq.

A compelling answer to this question is found in David Galula's classic work, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice.... As Galula explained, one of the main advantages that insurgents have over the governments they seek to overthrow is their lack of responsibility for governance. Far from seeking to govern the local population, the goal of insurgents is simply to demonstrate through sabotage, terror and guerrilla operations that the government is incapable of keeping order. And it is far easier and cheaper to sow disorder and chaos than to maintain order and secure public safety.

In Hizbullah's case, Nasrallah and his Iranian bosses have no interest in taking on responsibility for Lebanon. They don't want to collect taxes. They don't want to pick up the garbage or build schools and universities.

Wretchard explains that "the goal of seeking power without responsibility isn't confined to insurgents and Galula's theory might just as well have been a critique of the modern media as much as Hezbollah":

A generation of public intellectuals found it was possible to have both a decisive influence over policy yet remain exempt from accountability for its effects. The next time someone asks how it is possible to simultaneously be a rebel and celebrity, a critic of Global Warming and owner of an executive jet, or become a successful hate-America pastor living in a multimillion dollar mansion, refer him to Galula.

But Glick asks whether there is any way to to spoil this game; to keep the puppet master from retreating into the shadows after he has pulled his strings. One obvious method is the shockingly simple expedient of making information warfare a part of operations. To patiently label every roadside bomb; every massacre as the work of the hidden hand. The success of the Surge is in large measure due not only to kinetic action but information action. It is not enough to arrest terrorists, it is equally important to connect them to their acts. AQI failed in the Sunni Triangle where Hezbollah continues to succeed in Lebanon partly because MNF-I, like a waiter who refuses to let a patron walk out without paying his bill, simply refused to let them escape with a free lunch.

But the task wasn't easy because at every step of the way AQI's cheering squad yelled "foul". Power without responsibility has been a time honored tradition of the professional critic for so long it's almost a constitutional right.

Commenter Tamquam Leo Rugiens references a Robert Kaplan piece from a few years back, The Media and Medievalism, which makes a similar point:

[Late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power (1960)] discerned six ingredients necessary for oppression: secrecy, physical brutality, swift reaction, the right to question and to demand answers, the right to judge and condemn, and the right to pardon and show mercy.
[...]
As this is an age in which we are bombarded by messages that tell us what to buy and what to think, when one dissects the real elements of power — who has it and, more important during a time of rapid change, who increasingly has it — one is left to conclude bleakly: Ours is not an age of democracy, or an age of terrorism, but an age of mass media, without which the current strain of terrorism would be toothless in any case.

Like the priests of ancient Egypt, the rhetoricians of ancient Greece and Rome, and the theologians of medieval Europe, the media represent a class of bright and ambitious people whose social and economic stature gives them the influence to undermine political authority. Like those prior groups, the media have authentic political power — terrifically magnified by technology — without the bureaucratic accountability that often accompanies it, so that they are never culpable for what they advocate. If, for example, what a particular commentator has recommended turns out badly, the permanent megaphone he wields over the crowd allows him to explain away his position — if not in one article or television appearance, then over several — before changing the subject amid the roaring onrush of new events. Presidents, even if voters ignore their blunders, are at least responsible to history; journalists rarely are. This freedom is key to their irresponsible power.
[...]
The medieval age was tyrannized by a demand for spiritual perfectionism, making it hard to accomplish anything practical. Truth, Erasmus cautioned, had to be concealed under a cloak of piety; Machiavelli wondered whether any government could remain useful if it actually practiced the morality it preached. Today the global media make demands on generals and civilian policymakers that require a category of perfectionism with which medieval authorities would have been familiar. Investigative journalists may often perform laudatory service, but they have also become the grand inquisitors of the age, shattering reputations built up over a lifetime with the exposure of just a few sordid details.

Read Kaplan's whole piece.

True History of the American Revolution

Mencius Moldbug slowly works his way toward explaining the shortest way to world peace. Along the way, he shares some revisionist thoughts from Sydney George Fisher's True History of the American Revolution, written 100 years ago:

Here are some questions about the American Revolution for which you may find you have no good answer:

One: why do the American loyalists share a nickname with a British political party? Is this just a coincidence, or does it imply some kind of weird alliance? And what is on the other side of said alliance? If the loyalists are called Tories, why does no one call the Patriots Whigs?

Two: what on earth is the British strategy? Why do the redcoats seem to be spending so much time just hanging around in New York or Philadelphia? Valley Forge is literally twenty miles from Philly. Okay, I realize, it's winter. But come on, it's twenty miles. General Washington is starving in the snow out there. His troops are deserting by the score. And Lord Howe can't send a couple of guys with muskets to go bring him in? Heck, it sounds like a well-phrased dinner invitation would probably have done the trick.

Three: if the Stamp Act was such an intolerable abuse, how did the British Empire have all these other colonies — Canada, Australia, yadda yadda — where everyone was so meek? Surely we can understand the idea that taxation without representation was the first step toward tyranny. So where is the tyranny? Where are Her Majesty's concentration camps? Okay, there was the Boer War, I guess. But more generally, why is the history of America so different from that of the other colonies?

Four: why does no one outside America seem to resent these unfortunate events at all? I mean, the Revolution was a war. People got pretty violent on both sides. In some parts of the world, when people lose a war, they don't feel that it was just God's will. They feel that God would be much more satisfied if there was some payback. And they tend to transmit this belief to their offspring. In the American unpleasantness, a lot of people — loyalists — got kicked out of their homes. They had to leave with only a small travel bag. When this sort of thing happens in the Middle East, it's remembered for the life of the known universe.

Those are some good questions. "One of the many neat things about Fisher's history is that it was written when the British Empire was actually a going concern, not a shadowy boogeyman from the past," Mencius notes, as he cites this passage:

The British government, only too glad to be rid of rebellious Puritans, Quakers, and Roman Catholics, willingly gave them liberal charters. This explains that freedom in many of the old charters which has surprised so many students of our colonial history. Some of these liberal instruments were granted by the Stuart kings, with the approval of their officials and courtiers, all of whom showed by almost every other act of their lives that they were the determined enemies of free parliaments and free representation of the people.

Connecticut, for example, obtained in 1662 from Charles II a charter which made the colony almost independent; and to-day there is no colony of the British empire that has so much freedom as Connecticut and Rhode Island always had, or as Massachusetts had down to 1685. Connecticut and Rhode Island elected their own legislatures and governors, and did not even have to send their laws to England for approval. No modern British colony elects its own governor; and, if it has a legislature elected by its people, the acts of that legislature can be vetoed by the home government. A community electing its own governor and enacting whatever laws it pleases is not a colony in the modern English meaning of the word. Connecticut and Rhode Island could not make treaties with foreign nations, but in other respects they were, as we would now say, semi-independent commonwealths under the protectorate or suzerainty of England.

England and America happily ignored this odd situation as long as France loomed as a major threat, but once France was kicked out of North America, the English sought to "remodel" the American colonies, and the American colonies sought to wriggle free entirely.

But the heart of the problem is that not all Americans are Whigs, and not all Englishmen are Tories. From Fisher:

The ablest men of the country were pitted against each other in continual debates, and colonial taxation was the leading topic of conversation among all classes. There were two main questions: Was the Stamp Act constitutional? and, If constitutional, was it expedient? It was the innings of a radical section of the Whigs, and, being favorable to liberalism and the colonies, they decided that the Stamp Act was not expedient. They accordingly repealed it within a year after its passage. But they felt quite sure, as did also the vast majority of Englishmen, that Parliament had a constitutional right to tax the colonies as it pleased, and so they passed what became known as the Declaratory Act, asserting the constitutional right of Parliament to bind the colonies "in all cases whatsoever;" and this is still the law of England.

The rejoicing over the repeal of the Stamp Act was displayed, we are told, in a most extraordinary manner, even in England. The ships in the Thames hoisted their colors and houses were illuminated. The colonists had apparently been able to hit a hard blow by the stoppage of trade. The rejoicing, however, as subsequent events showed, was not universal. It was the rejoicing of Whigs or of the particular ship-owners, merchants, and workingmen who expected relief from the restoration of the American trade. It was noisy and conspicuous. There must have been some exaggeration in the account of the sufferings from loss of trade. It is not improbable that Parliament had been stampeded by a worked-up excitement in its lobbies; for very soon it appeared that the great mass of Englishmen were unchanged in their opinion of proper colonial policy; and, as was discovered in later years, the stoppage of the American trade did not seriously injure the business or commercial interests of England.

But in America the rejoicing was, of course, universal. There were letters and addresses, thanksgivings in churches, the boycotting associations were instantly dissolved, trade resumed, homespun given to the poor, and the people felt proud of themselves and more independent than ever because they could compel England to repeal laws.

The colonists were certainly lucky in having chanced upon a Whig administration for their great appeal against taxation. It has often been said that both the Declaratory Act and the repeal of the Stamp Act were a combination of sound constitutional law and sound policy, and that if this same Whig line of conduct had been afterwards consistently followed, England would not have lost her American colonies. No doubt if such a Whig policy had been continued the colonies would have been retained in nominal dependence a few years longer. But such a policy would have left the colonies in their semi-independent condition without further remodelling or reform, with British sovereignty unestablished in them, and with a powerful party of the colonists elated by their victory over England. They would have gone on demanding more independence until they snapped the last string.

In fact, the Whig repeal of the Stamp Act advanced the colonies far on their road to independence. They had learned their power, learned what they could do by united action, and had beaten the British government in its chosen game. It was an impressive lesson. Consciously or unconsciously the rebel party among them was moved a step forward in that feeling for a distinct nationality which a naturally separated people can scarcely avoid.

Such a repeal, such a going backward and yielding to the rioting, threats, and compulsion of the colonists, was certainly not that "firm and consistent policy" which both then and now has been recommended as the true course in dealing with dependencies. The Tories condem