Australian Chief of Army’s Reading List

Monday, April 28th, 2014

Thomas E. Ricks highly recommends the Australian Chief of Army’s reading list, because it doesn’t just list books; it tells you why you might want to read each one. Also, he says, USMC General Paul Van Riper’s essay on his own professional education is worth an evening all by itself.

Comments

  1. That was indeed excellent. Though I find myself in agreement with the thrust of Van Riper’s piece, I can’t help but wonder how it squares with his unprofessional, almost adolescent misconduct during the Millennium Challenge wargames.

    Col. Keogh’s otherwise excellent essay on ‘The Study of Military History’ is marred by his “Western Front-itus” statements about WWI. “You can learn all about the strategy and the tactics of the Western Front in half a dozen printed pages, for their was precious little of either to write about.” This is debatable at best. Also, it is difficult to uphold, on the evidence, his proposition that the military leadership of the First World War was significantly and consistently worse than that of the Second.

  2. L. C. Rees says:

    Whose conduct was ultimately more unprofessional or even infantile during the Millennium Challenge kriegsspiel? Those who disrupted the decreed and preset MIC rentier friendly outcome or those who initiated an expensive tax-payer funded wargame to arrive at an outcome they were hellbent on before hand? Especially as the highly artificial outcome was the sort of contrived script that tends to be fatally undermined by unprofessional, almost adolescent misconduct by friend and foe alike when re-enacted in the wild with undomesticated humans.

  3. There was no single outcome, much less a preset one. Millennium Challenge 2002 was a series of tactical simulations performed with the goal of determining the parameters of various engagement scenarios that pitted conventional naval assets against the sort of unconventional mosquito fleet that a nation like Iran might try to spring on such. It was also quite generous to the red team, allowing combinations of heavy ASMs and light boats that would probably prove unworkable in real life.

    Riper completely disregarded the scenario rules, making up forces for himself, resurrecting those lost to enemy action, and teleporting them about the map to their optimum positions as necessary. That was not valiantly fighting back against excessively unbalanced scenarios nor was it the sort of unconventional and creative tactics that could have uncovered weaknesses and blind spots to be remedied. It was churlishness, and it completely invalidated a series of simulations that were both expensive and time consuming to prepare. It may end up costing sailors their lives some day.

    Gen. Van Riper is a decorated wartime leader and (apparently) a fine writer, but that doesn’t mean he is without flaws or that he made the right decisions when it came to MC2002.

  4. Sconzey says:

    Scipio Americanus: You sound like you’ve read a lot deeper into this than I have, yet your account of MC2002 is the exact opposite of what I had previously believed — I thought it was Blue Team “refloating” sunk ships and teleporting forces around.

    With this said, the entire extent of my reading on the subject is the Wikipedia page and the War Nerd’s analysis. Do you have a better account you could link me to?

  5. T. Greer says:

    Seconded. I would like to see a longer account.

  6. Zhai2Nan2 says:

    I’m late to the comment-party here.

    1. I really enjoyed the first half of the posted document. I’m still reading it.

    2. The MC2002 war game is widely believed to have been a case of neocons lying the USA into war. Any attempt to disrupt such lying would not be misconduct; it would be obedience to the laws of war.

    3. If there is any evidence that MC2002 was not a case of neocons starting a war with lies, then I would also like to peruse said evidence with great care.

  7. Toddy Cat says:

    “The MC2002 war game is widely believed to have been a case of neocons lying the USA into war”

    I don’t know a whole lot about this. Do you have evidence for this? If so, I’d really like to see it. I’m no fan of neocons, but I’ve heard so much about who did what with regard to MC 2002, I have no idea what to believe. Is there an even remotely dispassionate account of what happened here? Is Van Riper the new Billy Mitchell or a posturing adolescent (the two are not, of course, mutually exclusive…)

  8. So, I went back and tried to dig up the sources that had formed my opinions on the MC2002 debacle and haven’t had much luck. Most of the sites I used no longer exist, and my other sources were persons and so cannot be posted. With that in mind, anyone here would be completely justified in disregarding my commentary on the topic.

    For those of you still reading, I would like to make a couple of points about MC2002 and reporting thereon from a more general perspective, hopefully also answering some of the questions that popped up in the discussion above. First, the wiki article on the simulations was subtly misleading. It talks about the Navy resurrecting their units rather than Van Riper, but what it leaves out is that the Navy units were resurrected between the separate simulations. Reports of the Navy teleporting their units refer to them starting in different locations at the beginning of each separate scenario. It was, as I’ve said, not a campaign simulation but a series of tactical problems. In Van Riper’s case, on the other hand, when Navy strikes destroyed some of his land-based missiles he simply used the destroyed missile batteries as though they were untouched during the same simulation. Obviously, the Navy was taken by surprise and suffered heavily.

    There were, as far as I can tell, no dispassionate accounts of what happened during the exercises. As best as I have been able to determine, the Navy was surprised and dismayed by the effectiveness of Van Riper’s unconventional tactics, especially those regarding his inter-unit communications. They were, however, even more surprised and dismayed when he began inventing fleets of teleporting whaleboats carrying missiles larger than the boats. Van Riper’s outrage was partly justified in that the Navy disregarded all the lessons of the exercises, including the pertinent ones.

    The Billy Mitchell analogy is actually very, very good. Billy Mitchell was rather fanatical, and mostly wrong in his predictions (which were supported by unrepresentative publicity stunt “exercises” like sinking the fmr. SMS Ostfriesland). He was a disciple of the rather batty Giulio Douhet, founder of the theory that heavy bombers were impossible to intercept and that bombing enemy cities with them would be the totality of future wars. The US attempted to put these theories of airpower into effect through the unescorted daylight precision bombing raids, and suffered bloodily for disputed gain. Mitchell advocated that, among other things, aircraft carriers were a folly because land-based bombers had longer range than their aircraft, could strategically concentrate more easily, and would therefore always sink them. Of course, in real life it doesn’t work out that way.

    Mitchell’s untiring advocacy, though, helped move the USN towards an airpower-centric strategy that paved the way for US naval dominance in the Pacific and beyond. I suppose you could view Van Riper’s performance in MC2002 as similar to the sinking of the Ostfriesland, of course with the caveat that until the next major war we won’t know which set of theorists currently pulling us in a dozen directions were the right ones.

  9. Sam says:

    “…Riper completely disregarded the scenario rules, making up forces for himself, resurrecting those lost to enemy action, and teleporting them about the map to their optimum positions as necessary…”

    “…In Van Riper’s case, on the other hand, when Navy strikes destroyed some of his land-based missiles he simply used the destroyed missile batteries as though they were untouched during the same simulation…”

    It occurs to me that someone scored his attacks as successful. Why did they do that if what he attacked with was destroyed? Could it be he convinced the judges that which the Navy “destroyed” was not? That he camouflaged or some how maneuvered the assets out of harm. Could it be those same judges, under pressure, changed their minds? I have no inside information on the matter it just seems odd that the attacks attributed to Riper could have been scored at all unless by some logical means they could have been made. As for resurrecting the ships, this seems perfectly logical. The exercise cost a great deal, and running it again could cause no harm.

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