Hidden Powers & Mastery

Tuesday, October 9th, 2012

After writing the 48 Laws of Power and its sequels, Robert Greene had an ephiphany about hidden powers & mastery:

For the previous eleven years I had immersed myself in a study of the most powerful people in history. I had read one biography after another about great political figures, strategists, scientists, artists, and inventors. And on that particular day, as I was reviewing some old material, it finally struck me: all of these people — no matter their field, culture, or moment in history — followed more or less the same pattern or pathway to power. At first, I could see only the broad outlines of this, but as I thought about it more, in the days to come this pattern came into focus.

It goes like this: in childhood these high–achieving types experience a powerful attraction towards a particular subject or activity — math, music, games and sports. As they get older, this interest gets stronger, to the point of becoming an obsession. They end up following a career path that corresponds to this primal interest. Because the subject or activity stimulates their natural curiosity, they learn at a faster rate than others. They pay deeper attention and absorb lessons more thoroughly. While often still quite young they acquire a high skill level in this field, which makes them find more pleasure in the practice or training period, which leads them to practice harder. They tend to gain attention early on for their proficiency, which leads them to be given responsibilities or chances to practice what they have learned on a public stage. At this point, they enter a cycle of accelerated returns — more practice and experience leads to higher skill levels and more chances to prove themselves, more valuable feedback, and so on.

Inevitably a point is reached where they begin to experiment with what they have learned and become creative with their knowledge. Since they are often still young, they retain a freshness, and a somewhat rebellious attitude towards authority. They are not afraid to go against conventions. In the process of experimenting, they hit upon new ways of doing things or seeing the world. They become the ones who rewrite the rules they had learned so diligently in their apprenticeships.

At the endpoint of this process, these types reveal signs of a qualitatively higher intelligence. I call this intelligence high-level intuition. As opposed to mere hunches or anything mystical, this intuition is based on years of intense experience. They have internalized so much knowledge that they have a feel for their field. It has become hardwired into their nervous system. They can spot solutions or trends with great speed and fluidity, and this brings them tremendous practical power.

An excellent example of this would be Napoleon Bonaparte:

As a child he found himself drawn to games of strategy, and to books that presented examples of leadership in action. Entering a military academy, he was not focused on a military career and fitting into the system. Instead, he had an obsessive need to learn as much as he could about all aspects of the military arts. He read voraciously. The extent of his knowledge impressed his superiors. At a very early age he was give an unusual amount of responsibility. He learned quickly how to keep his cool, derive the right lessons from his experiences, and recover from mistakes. By the time he was given greater responsibilities on the battlefield, he had gone through an apprenticeship that was double or triple the intensity of his peers. Being so young, ambitious and disdainful of authority, when he was given leadership positions, he proceeded to effect the greatest revolution in military history, changing the size and shape of armies, singlehandedly introducing maneuver into battle, and so on.

At the endpoint of his development, he came to possess a remarkable feel for battle and the overall shape of a campaign. In his case, this became known as his infamous coup d’oeil, his ability to assess a situation with a glance of his eye. This made his lieutenants and rivals imagine that he possessed mystical powers.

Posted in Education, War | No Comments »

Arithmetic on the Frontier by Rudyard Kipling

Monday, October 8th, 2012

As we continue to send highly trained troops overseas, we should remember Rudyard Kipling’s Arithmetic on the Frontier:

A great and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe —
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: “All flesh is grass.”

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in “villanous saltpetre!”
And after — ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our ‘ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station —
A canter down some dark defile —
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail —
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow
Strike hard who cares — shoot straight who can —
The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troop-ships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The “captives of our bow and spear”
Are cheap — alas! as we are dear.

Posted in War | 2 Comments »

What’s So Special About Special Ops?

Monday, October 8th, 2012

What’s so special about special ops?, William S. Lind asks — as his way of saying, no, they can’t solve all our problems:

The first reason is that the strategic objectives the foreign-policy establishment sets are unattainable by any military. Not even an army of elves and ents could remake Third World hellholes into Switzerland. And as Russell Kirk wrote, there is no surer way to make a man your enemy than to tell him you are going to remake him in your image for his own good.

Second, while there is wide variance within the Special Operations community, most SOF units share the same problems that afflict our conventional forces. They, too, are stuck in the Second Generation of modern war, with an inward-focused culture of order that reduces the complex art of war to putting firepower on targets.

SOF are more skilled at techniques than their conventional counterparts, but techniques are not a typical American weakness. Our armed forces are technically capable across the board.

Techniques and tactics are not only different but opposite in nature — the first is formulistic and the second should be situational — and like our conventional forces, SOF are mostly not tactically competent, at least from what I have seen of them. Few American Special Operations units know light-infantry (“Jaeger”) tactics, without which they depend tactically on massive fire support (usually air strikes) that in Fourth Generation war works to the enemy’s advantage. They do not even know the basic Third Generation maneuver-warfare tactics the German army evolved late in World War I. They use their superior techniques merely to put more fire more accurately on more targets in wars of attrition against enemies who are not sensitive to losses.

SOF’s tactical obsolescence is doubly harmful in that they are often employed to train the forces of the weak states we are attempting to support. By teaching them Second Generation firepower/attrition war, we undermine their effectiveness while making them dependent on firepower they are unlikely to have once we depart. Beyond the level of techniques, we are too frequently the Typhoid Mary of military advice.

The picture at higher levels of war is also grim. SOF understand operational art no better than the rest of the American military, which is to say they can spell it. (This is now evident in the increasingly desperate attempts of the American command in Afghanistan to respond to green-on-blue attacks. They are trying to counter an operational move by the Taliban at the tactical level, which is doomed to failure.) This is an especially serious failing for Special Operations Forces because what makes an operation “special” is that it is operational, not just tactical. The result is that most American “special operations” are merely tactical actions with fancy techniques, the equivalent of raids by police SWAT teams. Our Special Operations Forces get dribbled away in minor events that, again, add up to a war of attrition. Night raids to kill or capture Taliban squad leaders are a long way from Otto Skorzeny’s rescue of Mussolini, which was the model special operation.

SOF fare no better at the strategic level. There, attrition has been and remains the American way of war, and Special Operations Forces are employed accordingly.

In Fourth Generation war, Special Operations Forces share yet another weakness with our conventional forces: they are American. With the important exception of Special Forces (the Green Berets), they take America with them wherever they go to war. After an action, they go back to a base that is “little America,” with air conditioning, steak, and the Internet. The locals, whether enemies or allies, look on with envy that soon shades into hatred.

This feeds a central problem in Fourth Generation war, what Martin van Creveld calls the power of weakness. With our overwhelming technical and equipment advantages, luxurious (by local standards) way of life, and nice country to go home to after we have wrecked someone else’s, we are Goliath. Our opponents, however repulsive, become David. How many people identify with Goliath?

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

The Conservative Mind

Sunday, October 7th, 2012

When David Brooks joined the National Review in 1984, it was a fusion of economic conservatives and another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now:

This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government.

Because they were conservative, they tended to believe that power should be devolved down to the lower levels of this chain. They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, finish school and postpone childbearing until marriage.

Recently the blogger Rod Dreher linked to Kirk’s essay, “Ten Conservative Principles,” which gives the flavor of this brand of traditional conservatism. This kind of conservative cherishes custom, believing that the individual is foolish but the species is wise. It is usually best to be guided by precedent.

This conservative believes in prudence on the grounds that society is complicated and it’s generally best to reform it steadily but cautiously. Providence moves slowly but the devil hurries.

The two conservative tendencies lived in tension. But together they embodied a truth that was put into words by the child psychologist John Bowlby, that life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.

The economic conservatives were in charge of the daring ventures that produced economic growth. The traditionalists were in charge of establishing the secure base — a society in which families are intact, self-discipline is the rule, children are secure and government provides a subtle hand.

Ronald Reagan embodied both sides of this fusion, and George W. Bush tried to recreate it with his compassionate conservatism. But that effort was doomed because in the ensuing years, conservatism changed.

In the polarized political conflict with liberalism, shrinking government has become the organizing conservative principle. Economic conservatives have the money and the institutions. They have taken control. Traditional conservatism has gone into eclipse. These days, speakers at Republican gatherings almost always use the language of market conservatism — getting government off our backs, enhancing economic freedom. Even Mitt Romney, who subscribes to a faith that knows a lot about social capital, relies exclusively on the language of market conservatism.

It’s not so much that today’s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don’t even know it exists.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Forget About Helmets

Saturday, October 6th, 2012

If you fall off a bike, a helmet can reduce your risk of serious head injury — but ordinary cyclists rarely fall, which is why cyclists rarely wear helmets unless forced:

On the other hand, many researchers say, if you force or pressure people to wear helmets, you discourage them from riding bicycles. That means more obesity, heart disease and diabetes. And — Catch-22 — a result is fewer ordinary cyclists on the road, which makes it harder to develop a safe bicycling network. The safest biking cities are places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where middle-aged commuters are mainstay riders and the fraction of adults in helmets is minuscule.

“Pushing helmets really kills cycling and bike-sharing in particular because it promotes a sense of danger that just isn’t justified — in fact, cycling has many health benefits,” says Piet de Jong, a professor in the department of applied finance and actuarial studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. He studied the issue with mathematical modeling, and concludes that the benefits may outweigh the risks by 20 to 1.

He adds: “Statistically, if we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities.” The European Cyclists’ Federation says that bicyclists in its domain have the same risk of serious injury as pedestrians per mile traveled.

Obviously wearing a helmet to get into the bath is counterproductive, but wearing a helmet while climbing isn’t crazy.

Posted in Economics, Fitness, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

Silent Spring’s 50-Year History of Selective Data

Friday, October 5th, 2012

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring just turned 50, and Ronald Bailey holds it accountable for politicizing science:

Through Silent Spring, Carson provided those who are alienated by modern technological progress with a model of how to wield ostensibly scientific arguments on behalf of policies and results that they prefer for other reasons. It is this legacy of public policy confirmation bias that Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his research colleagues are probing at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project.

In a recent study on how Americans perceive climate change risk published in Nature Climate Change, Kahan and his colleagues find that people listen to information that reinforces their values and ignore that which does not. They observe that people who are broadly identified as being on the political left “tend to be morally suspicious of commerce and industry, to which they attribute social inequity. They therefore find it congenial to believe those forms of behavior are dangerous and worthy of restriction.” On the other hand, those broadly considered as being on the political right are proponents of technological progress who worry about “collective interference with the decisions of individuals” and “tend to be skeptical of environmental risks. Such people intuitively perceive that widespread acceptance of such risks would license restrictions on commerce and industry.”

As trust in other sources of authority – politicians, preachers, business leaders – has withered over the past 50 years, policy partisans are increasingly seeking to cloak their arguments in the mantle of objective science. However, the Yale researchers find that greater scientific literacy actually produces greater political polarization. As Kahan and his fellow researchers report, “For ordinary citizens, the reward for acquiring greater scientific knowledge and more reliable technical-reasoning capacities is a greater facility to discover and use—or explain away—evidence relating to their groups’ positions.” In other words, in policy debates scientific claims are used to vindicate partisan values, not to reach to an agreement about what is actually the case. This sort of motivated reasoning applies to partisans of the political left and right, who both learned it from Rachel Carson.

Posted in Policy, Science | No Comments »

The Dictator’s Dilemma

Friday, October 5th, 2012

Mao Zedong warned Ho Chi Minh of the dictator’s dilemma
in June 1966:

I advise you, not all of your subjects are loyal to you. Perhaps most of them are loyal but maybe a small number only verbally wish you “long live,” while in reality they wish you a premature death. When they shout “long live,” you should beware and analyze [the situation]. The more they praise you, the less you can trust them. This is a very natural rule.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Vasili Blokhin

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

Soviet war hero Vasili Blokhin was hand-picked by Stalin — to serve as chief executioner of the NKVD:

Blokhin is recorded as having personally executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand, including the notorious Katyn Massacre of 7,000 Polish officers (each night 250 men were shot one by one, over a month’s time)[2][3]—making him the most prolific official executioner in recorded world history. He was awarded both the Order of the Badge of Honor (1937) and the Order of the Red Banner (1941).

[...]

Blokhin was forcibly retired following Stalin’s death, although his “irreproachable service” was publicly noted by Lavrenty Beria at the time of his departure. After Beria’s fall from power (June 1953), Blokhin’s rank was eventually stripped from him in the de-Stalinization campaigns of Nikita Khrushchev. He reportedly sank into alcoholism, went insane, and died February 3, 1955 with the official cause of death listed as “suicide”.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

Edward Luttwak explains why Fascism is the wave of the future — writing in 1994:

[Among males age 45-54 with four years of higher education], the combined total income of the top 1 per cent of all earners increased sensationally, and the combined total of the bottom 80 per cent declined sharply. Again, that implies in one way or another a more than-proportionate quantum of dislocation. Needless to say, individual working lives cannot be dislocated without damaging families, elective affiliations and communities — the entire moss of human relations which can only grow over the stones of economic stability. Finally, it is entirely certain that what has already happened in the United States is happening or will happen in every other advanced economy, because all of them are exposed to the same forces.

In this situation, what does the moderate Right — mainstream US Republicans, British Tories and all their counterparts elsewhere — have to offer? Only more free trade and globalisation, more deregulation and structural change, thus more dislocation of lives and social relations. It is only mildly amusing that nowadays the standard Republican/Tory after-dinner speech is a two-part affair, in which part one celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while part two mourns the decline of the family and community ‘values’ that were eroded precisely by the forces commended in part one. Thus at the present time the core of Republican/Tory beliefs is a perfect non-sequitur. And what does the moderate Left have to offer? Only more redistribution, more public assistance, and particularist concern for particular groups that can claim victim status, from the sublime peak of elderly, handicapped, black lesbians down to the merely poor.

Thus neither the moderate Right nor the moderate Left even recognises, let alone offers any solution for, the central problem of our days: the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people, from industrial workers and white-collar clerks to medium-high managers. None of them are poor and they therefore cannot benefit from the more generous welfare payments that the moderate Left is inclined to offer. Nor are they particularly envious of the rich, and they therefore tend to be uninterested in redistribution. Few of them are actually unemployed, and they are therefore unmoved by Republican/Tory promises of more growth and more jobs through the magic of the unfettered market: what they want is security in the jobs they already have — i.e. precisely what unfettered markets threaten.

A vast political space is thus left vacant by the Republican/Tory non-sequitur, on the one hand, and moderate Left particularism and assistentialism, on the other. That was the space briefly occupied in the USA by the 1992 election-year caprices of Ross Perot, and which Zhirinovsky’s bizarre excesses are now occupying in the peculiar conditions of Russia, where personal economic insecurity is the only problem that counts for most people (formers professors of Marxism-Leninism residing in Latvia who have simultaneously lost their jobs, professions and nationalities may he rare, but most Russians still working now face at least the imminent loss of their jobs). And that is the space that remains wide open for a product-improved Fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people. Such a party could even be as free of racism as Mussolini’s original was until the alliance with Hitler, because its real stock in trade would be corporativist restraints on corporate Darwinism, and delaying if not blocking barriers against globalisation. It is not necessary to know how to spell Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to recognise the Fascist predisposition engendered by today’s turbocharged capitalism.

Posted in Economics, Edward Luttwak, Policy | 1 Comment »

Otto Skorzeny

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012

If the real Otto Skorzeny hadn’t lived, pulp-fiction writers would have had to make him up:

Otto Skorzeny was born in Vienna into a middle-class Austrian family with Polish roots which had a long history of military service. In addition to his native German, he spoke excellent French.

In his teens, Otto once complained to his father of the austere lifestyle that his family was suffering from, by mentioning he had never tasted real butter in his life, because of the depression that plagued Austria after its defeat in World War I. His father prophetically replied, “There is no harm in doing without things. It might even be good for you not to get used to a soft life.”

He was a noted fencer as a university student in Vienna. He engaged in thirteen personal combats. The tenth resulted in a wound that left a dramatic dueling scar—known in academic fencing as a Schmiss (German for “smite” or “hit”)—on his cheek.

In 1931 Skorzeny joined the Austrian Nazi Party and soon became a member of the Nazi SA. A charismatic figure, Skorzeny played a minor role in the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, when he saved the Austrian President Wilhelm Miklas from being shot by Austrian Nazis.

[...]

Skorzeny went to war in the USSR with the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich and subsequently fought in several battles on the Eastern Front. In October 1941, he was in charge of a “technical section” of the German forces during the Battle of Moscow. His mission was to seize important buildings of the Communist Party, including the NKVD headquarters at Lubyanka, and the Central Telegraph and other high priority facilities, before they could be destroyed. He was also ordered to capture the sluices of the Moscow-Volga Canal because Hitler wanted them used to turn Moscow into a huge artificial lake by opening them. The missions were canceled as the German forces failed to capture the Soviet capital.

In December 1942, Skorzeny was hit in the back of the head by shrapnel from Soviet Katyusha artillery rockets. He refused all first aid except for a few aspirin, a bandage, and a glass of schnaps. A few hours later Skorzeny rejoined his unit but his health deteriorated, and continuous headaches and stomach pains forced him to evacuate for proper medical treatment. He was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery under fire and was hospitalized in Vienna. While recuperating from his injuries he was given a staff role in Berlin, where he read all the published literature he could find on commando warfare, and forwarded to higher command his ideas on unconventional commando warfare.

[...]

Sonderverband z.b.V. Friedenthal’s first mission was in summer 1943. Operation François saw Skorzeny send a group by parachute into Iran to make contact with the dissident mountain tribes to encourage them to sabotage Allied supplies of material being sent to the Soviet Union via the Trans-Iranian Railway. However, commitment among the rebel tribes was suspect, and Operation François was deemed a failure.

[...]

In July 1943, he was personally selected by Hitler from among six German Air Force (Luftwaffe) and German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) special agents to lead the operation to rescue Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who had been overthrown and imprisoned by the Italian government.

Almost two months of cat-and-mouse followed as the Italians moved Mussolini from place to place to frustrate any rescuers. There was a failed attempt to rescue Mussolini on 27 July 1943. The Ju 52 that the crew was aboard was shot down in the area of Pratica di Mare. Otto Skorzeny and all but one of his crew bailed out safely.

Mussolini was first held in a villa on La Maddalena, near Sardinia. Skorzeny was able to smuggle an Italian-speaking commando onto the island, and a few days later he confirmed Mussolini was in the villa. Skorzeny then flew over in a Heinkel He 111 to take aerial photos of the location. The bomber was shot down by Allied fighters and crash-landed at sea, but Skorzeny and the crew were rescued by an Italian destroyer. Mussolini was moved soon after.

Information on Mussolini’s new location and its topographical features were finally secured by Herbert Kappler. Kappler reported Mussolini was held in the Campo Imperatore Hotel at the top of the Gran Sasso mountain, and only accessible by cable car from the valley below. Skorzeny flew again over Gran Sasso and took pictures of the location with a handheld camera. An attack plan was formulated by General Kurt Student, Harald Mors (a paratrooper battalion commander), and Skorzeny.[contradictory]

On September 12, Gran Sasso raid (a.k.a. Operation Oak and Unternehmen Eiche), was carried out perfectly according to plan. Mussolini was rescued without firing a single shot. Flying out in a Storch airplane, Skorzeny escorted Mussolini to Rome and later to Berlin. The exploit earned Skorzeny fame, promotion to Sturmbannführer and the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

Keep reading. I mean, the guy goes on to lead the Werwölfe.

Posted in War | 12 Comments »

Silos

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012

The notion of a missile silo seems self-evident now, but the US military got the idea from the British Blue Streak missile project:

The missiles used liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants. Whilst the vehicle could be left fully laden with 20+ tonnes of kerosene, the 60 tonnes of liquid oxygen had to be loaded immediately before launch or icing became a problem. Due to this, fuelling the rocket took 4.5 minutes, which would have made it useless as a rapid response to an attack. The missile was vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike, launched without warning or in the absence of any heightening of tension sufficient to warrant readying the missile. To negate this problem DeHavilland created a stand-by feature. A missile could be held at 30 seconds’ notice to launch for ten hours. As the missiles were to be deployed in pairs and it took ten hours for one missile to be prepared for stand-by, one of the two missiles could always be ready for rapid launch.

To protect the missiles against a pre-emptive strike while being fuelled, the idea of siting the missiles in underground silos was developed. These would have been designed to withstand a one megaton blast at a distance of half a mile (800 m) and were a British innovation, subsequently exported to the US.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Aston Martin on the outside, Apple on the inside

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

The New York Times reviewer really, really likes the new Tesla Model S sedan:

Throughout the week, I found myself sneaking away to Berkeley’s winding hilltop roads to experience the smoothness of the electric drivetrain. The half-ton battery pack is under the floor, providing a low center of gravity that helps to give the 4,700-pound Model S its ninjalike handling.

At high speeds and low, the car goes where you put it. Detecting noise intrusion in the cabin requires a stethoscope, although the optional 21-inch wheels add a decibel or two.

The salient details:

Now, the $83,270 question. My Model S test car, equipped with an 85-kilowatt-hour battery pack, started at $77,400. The final price included the $3,750 Tech package; premium sound system ($950); and personal delivery to your home or office. Nappa leather seats add $1,500.

Budget-conscious shoppers can save money by dialing back from the roughly 230 miles of consistent real-world range delivered by the 85-kilowatt-hour pack. The 60 kilowatt-hour model, providing about 175 miles, saves $10,000. A drop to a 40-kilowatt-hour pack, with about 130 miles of real-world range, takes off another $10,000. In the other direction, the fully loaded Signature Performance model is $104,400. The car qualifies for a $7,500 federal tax credit.

Hmm…

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

The Enemy of My Enemy Is…

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

Wedemeyer’s comparison of World War II to the Peloponnesian War is instructive:

Sparta fought Athens but Persia was the real beneficiary, or a few years later Macedonia, or a little later Rome. To see this as a failure of Sparta is to misunderstand its motives. Sparta wanted to get rid of Athens, and they did. Sparta itself wanted to maintain unquestioned control of the Peloponnese, the southern part of Greece, but their failure to do so is mostly unrelated.

Paleoconservatives gripe endlessly about the neoconservative, and now Obama, policy of promoting democracy in the Moslem world, as if this was a new and idiotic idea. But reformers in Britain were promoting democracy various places in the 19th century, Greece and Italy among them I believe. Not in India, mind you, or any of their colonies. But if demanding democracy, or national or ethnic self-determination undermines potential adversaries, the sting of being accused of hypocrisy will harm you little.

Britain, or the Anglospheric elite, controlled a lot of the globe — all the oceans, North America, India, much of Africa, and had strong influence in Western Europe. It had commercial presence in China and South America, but little to no control. It could not hope to control Russia, which if it was able to extend its power south would make it a fearsome competitor.

[...]

Communism never seriously threatened any English-speaking country, any Protestant country if you exclude East Germany, or any British colony. Like a plague or a forest fire, it wiped out cultures uncontrollable, unamenable or uncooperative to the English and the classes and castes that supported them. The hellish industrialism of 19th century Manchester has been established in China. Russia is a broken shell of a nation being looted by “Russian” billionaires and their KGB friends. Catholic and Orthodox Western Europe is being destroyed under a financial system established just after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Taking the long view, World War II and its aftermath worked out great for the people running Britain and America.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Illuminate!

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

Borepatch just introduced me to Hijinks Ensue, and I particularly liked this one about the little Dalek who wouldn’t go to sleep:

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Wedemeyer Reports

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

In his memoir, Albert C. Wedemeyer wonders “how and why the United States became involved in a war which was to result in the extension of totalitarian tyranny over vaster regions of the world than Hitler ever dreamed of conquering.”

Our friend Foseti considers this a good question, too:

Wedemeyer views the European war as analogous to the Peloponnesian War. In both wars, a sea power (Athens/Britain) fought a land power (Sparta/Germany) with the ultimate result being the victory of an outsider (Macedon/Russia). The outsider ended up as “the sole beneficiary of the suicidal internecine quarrel of the West.” This, of course, doesn’t explain why the US jumped into the war that only Russia won.

Joseph McCarthy concluded that America’s leaders were influenced by Communist agents. Wedemeyer concluded that “we were just that naive.”

At any rate, the American strategy in Europe was exactly wrong:

In Europe, Wedemeyer’s preferred approach was a all out assault on Northern France as soon as possible. He believed this would strike a decisive blow against the Germans and allow the Allies to gain as much territory as possible in Europe (even in ’41 his plans involved minimizing Russian gains in Europe). This plan was premised on the (widely held) belief in 1942 that Russia would not be able to hold out against the Germans much long. According to Wedemeyer, it was also Marshall’s plan.

Wedemeyer was very frustrated by Churchill’s desire to attack the Germans around the periphery. Ultimately he viewed the invasion of North Africa, Sicily and Italy as unnecessary. It was not (logistically) possible to invade Germany from those point. The effect of the Churchill strategy was to delay victory for several years.

Wedemeyer blames the British for some American strategy screw-ups. On this point, I think Wedemeyer is wrong. He devotes many words to condemning Churchill’s strategy in Germany — specifically he thought Churchill should have let the German’s and the Russian’s fight each other until they were exhausted. At that point, the British should have intervened to essentially restore the pre-war status quo.

Unless I’m missing something, Churchill’s plan to attack Germany on the periphery would have the result Wedemeyer outlined. He seems to simultaneously want to condemn the Allied strategy for being overly aggressive and not aggressive enough.

Churchill’s plan was not too tentative — as Wedemeyer says, a tentative plan would have been fine (let the Germans and the Russians fight until one is about to collapse). The strategic error was seeking a middle ground between the Wedemeyer/Marshall-invade-France-now plan the the Churchill plan. The worse error would come later though.

Nevertheless — from a overall strategic standpoint — I have lots of sympathy for Wedemeyer’s position. Oddly, and perhaps coincidentally, no one seems to have planned what to do after North Africa, Sicily and Italy were taken. The result was that the Allies pursued the worst possible strategy. These Mediterranean invasions delayed decisive action in France and they didn’t lead to any decisive actions themselves. In the meantime, the Russians did not fold under German advances.

Wedemeyer wanted to see a balance of power in Europe, with a still-standing Germany able to hold off the Russians:

Nevertheless, the US and the British chose to demand unconditional surrender. Wedemeyer hints, a couple times, that such demands may be the consequences of democracies going to war (he avoids saying so explicitly, so I’m left wondering his thoughts might have been on this subject).

Toward the end of the war in both theaters, Allied officials knew that both countries were willing to give up long before the fighting actually ended, as long as the Allies didn’t demand unconditional surrender.

The Allies would stop at nothing other than unconditional surrender, even though doing so got more troops killed, made the enemies fight harder (“instead of encouraging the anti-Hitler Germans, we forced all Germans to fight to the last under a regime most of them hated”) and only could benefit the Russians.

The Soviet empire was largely the result of our own creation, Wedemeyer concluded.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »