Let slip the dogs of (urban) war

Sunday, January 5th, 2025

John Spencer shares some lessons from Oketz, the Israel Defense Forces’ Specialized Canine Unit:

The IDF’s military dog program was heavily shaped by the guiding influence of Professor Rudolphina Menzel, a pioneer in canine psychology. By the 1980s, the program became formally institutionalized as Oketz (“sting,” in Hebrew). Since then, the unit has played pivotal roles in every major conflict involving the IDF, from the 2006 Lebanon War to ongoing operations in Gaza.

Oketz sources nearly all of its military working dogs—99 percent—from breeders in Europe. The dogs are primarily Belgian Malinois, with some German Shepherds and Labradors. Each year, the IDF procures approximately seventy dogs, ensuring they are one year old to strike the right balance between developmental maturity and training flexibility. Their rigorous and multiphase training lasts up to two years and emphasizes bonding between handlers and dogs for operational cohesion.

Each Oketz dog is trained for a specialized role. Some are used tactically as attack dogs to neutralize threats in combat, while others work in explosive ordnance detection. Still others work to locate survivors or find the remains of fallen soldiers or civilians in disaster or combat scenarios. Among the most innovative ways Oketz employs its dogs is training some specifically for underground warfare to operating in tunnels, a frequent feature of combat in Gaza.

A part of me wants to see an underground warfare unit using dachshunds — which were of course bred for badger hunting.

During IDF operations in southern Lebanon in the 1990s, one of the primary threats was the widespread presence of improvised explosive devices planted along key routes by Hezbollah. In response, Oketz developed specialized training and equipment to address these challenges. Dogs were equipped with radio packs — essentially, small receivers and speakers that enabled handlers to transmit commands remotely via radio. This allowed the dogs to operate ahead of their handlers, covering long distances and clearing dangerous routes. This capability was essential in the era before the widespread use of cameras on dogs, and it became a hallmark of the IDF’s dog program.

During operations in Gaza over more than a year, small cameras mounted on dogs have provided real-time intelligence, allowing handlers to assess tunnel systems, detect booby traps, and identify combatants without exposing soldiers to direct risk.

This would take the visual of tactical dachshunds to the next level:

The IDF’s introduction of protective rubberized booties for dogs exemplifies the type of adaptation required by the unique challenges of urban environments. Dogs’ paws are tough — much better able to handle rough ground than the feet of humans, of course. So allowing dogs to work without any protective covering for their paws is often not a problem. But urban areas present unique dangers, with IDF dogs facing injuries from rubble, glass, and other hazards in Gaza’s war-torn streets. Equipping them with booties, along with ensuring teams carry essential training tools like bite sleeves, underscores the importance of anticipating and addressing operational challenges.

Posted in Animals, War | 4 Comments »

The Lancet operates in a hunter-killer team

Friday, January 3rd, 2025

Back in November, David Hambling noted that Russian Lancet strikes had fallen off:

The Lancet is a long-range killer, striking at distances of over 25 miles and with a shaped-charge warhead capable of knocking out tanks. It has been notably effective in damaging Ukrainian artillery, as the drone can pursue moving targets. But the number of strikes recorded by Russian OSINT site Lostarmour – which has a semi-official role providing data to Lancet makers ZALA – has been falling, from 180 in August to 81 in September, 100 in October and, with more than half the month gone, just 24 in November so far.

The interceptors are not bringing down many Lancets: instead they are taking out the reconnaissance and communication assets which enable them to find targets.

The Lancet operates in a hunter-killer team with ZALA reconnaissance drones. These with survey an area and identify and locate a target. Once this is confirmed, the Lancet is launched. The reconnaissance drone may also act as a flying radio relay, making the Lancet more resistant to jamming. It will observe the strike, and carry out post-strike damage assessment to determine whether to send a follow-up attack. In many cases the LostArmour videos include multiple strikes against the same target until it is destroyed.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

Taiwan’s presidential office runs first ‘tabletop’ simulation of Chinese military escalation

Sunday, December 29th, 2024

Taiwan’s presidential office Recently ran a war game, or tabletop simulation, of Chinese military escalation:

Unlike traditional war games by the military, the tabletop exercise was aimed at testing how different government agencies could “ensure the normal functioning of society” in times of crisis, according to Taiwan’s presidential office.

It simulated two scenarios: one where China imposes “high-intensity” grey-zone warfare tactics, and a second where Taiwan is “on the brink of conflict,” the office said. Grey-zone tactics refer to actions that fall just below what might be considered acts of war.

Government agencies were not allowed to prepare notes in advance and had to react immediately to different contingencies, the presidential office said, without elaborating on the exact circumstances featured in the simulation.

While Taiwan’s military regularly holds tabletop war games to test its defense readiness, Thursday’s exercise was the first time that the presidential office has held a simulation that focuses specifically on civil responses to the threat of a Chinese invasion.

[…]

Liu said that while Taiwan’s defense ministry was well positioned to respond to different situations, many government agencies struggled to clarify falsehoods during electricity or internet outages, highlighting the need for Taiwan to have a backup mechanism to ensure the flow of information.

She added that authorities have plans to recruit and train 50,000 volunteers across Taiwan to assist in disaster relief by the end of next year, which will include workers from the public sector.

Posted in Games, Policy, War | 3 Comments »

The Defense Reformation

Wednesday, December 18th, 2024

As a nation, Palantir’s CTO argues, we are in an undeclared state of emergency:

Around 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, China militarized the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and Iran was allowed to pursue the bomb. A decade later, we have had more than 300 attacks on U.S. bases by Iran, 1,200 people slaughtered in a pogrom in Israel, an estimated 1 million casualties in brutal combat in Ukraine, and an unprecedented tempo of CCP phase zero operations in the Taiwan Straits.

This is a hot Cold War II. The West has empirically lost deterrence. We must respond to this emergency to regain it.

We have a peer adversary: China. “Near-Peer” is a shibboleth, a euphemism to avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging we have peers when we were once peerless. In World War II, America was the best at mass production. Today that distinction belongs to our adversary. America’s national security requires a robust industrial base, or it will lose the next war and plunge the world into darkness under authoritarian regimes. In the current environment, American industries can’t produce a minimum line of ships, subs, munitions, aircraft, and more. It takes a decade or two to deliver new major weapon systems at scale. If we’re in a hot war, we would only have days worth of ammunition and weapons on hand. Even more alarming is our lack of capacity and capability to rapidly repair and regenerate our weapon systems.

Given the vast sums we have spent on defense in these decades of Pax Americana, it would be reasonable to wonder: what went wrong?

(Hat tip to VXXC.)

Posted in Policy, War | 8 Comments »

97.7% of perpetrators of mass shootings from 1966 to 2019 were male

Tuesday, December 17th, 2024

The suspect who opened fire at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin is a 15-year-old girl, but 97.7% of perpetrators of mass shootings from 1966 to 2019 were male:

In 2006, a former U.S. Postal Service employee fatally shot six people at a postal facility in Goleta, Calif., before taking her own life. Authorities said writings later found at the home of the woman, who had struggled with mental illness, indicated she believed she was threatened by a conspiracy involving postal employees.

In 2018, a woman with an apparent grudge against YouTube opened fire at the company’s San Bruno, Calif., headquarters, wounding several people before fatally shooting herself.

That same year, a temporary employee fatally shot three people — and then themself — at a Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen, Md. While authorities and some friends initially identified the perpetrator as female, some media outlets later reported they had started identifying as transgender in the years before the shooting.

Women were also part of pairs that carried out shootings, like the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., and the 2019 shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, N.J.

An infamous school shooting perpetrated by a woman happened in January 1979, when 16-year-old Brenda Spencer fired out of the window of her San Diego home at children arriving at the elementary school across the street.

Nine children and two adults — the principal and janitor — were killed in the attack.

Steve Wiegand, a reporter with the San Diego Evening Tribune, began randomly calling homes near Grover Cleveland Elementary School to talk to potential eyewitnesses. He connected first with Spencer, and after talking for a while, got the sense the shots had come from her house. Wiegand asked why she did it.

“She said ‘Because I just don’t like Mondays. Do you like Mondays? You know, it just livens up the day,’ ” he recalled.

On the other side of the country, Bob Geldof, the lead singer of the Irish new wave band Boomtown Rats, was being interviewed at a radio station in Atlanta when he saw a news story about the incident come across the wires.

Struck by Spencer’s phrasing, he went back to his hotel room and penned “I Don’t Like Mondays.” The song, released in July 1979, spent four weeks at the top of the singles chart in the United Kingdom.

Posted in Crime | 4 Comments »

While everything is stabilized, you go and arrest all the political leaders that could challenge you

Sunday, December 15th, 2024

Coup d’Etat by Edward N. LuttwakIn today’s world, with incredibly quick dissemination of information, Santi Ruiz of Statecraft asks Edward Luttwak, how have coups changed?

Well, I don’t think they have changed at all. If you look carefully at the structure of recent events, you see that they haven’t changed.

Every state has to have a security apparatus — military, non-military, police, security services. Those organizations are depicted in organizational charts as if they were machines. But they’re not machines, they’re run by people. Each of these organizations and sub-organizations has a chief. Now that chief may be a commanding figure, whose every word is implemented without question, or it could be simply the head who was appointed a week ago or something. Either way.

But it is evident that the coup d’état is a specific way of changing governance, and that is not to attack the state as a whole from the outside, not to attack the state from launching attacks on government ministries and palaces, as an enemy might do, but simply a process whereby these people who run the actual active elements of the state — which is, let’s say, that armored brigade, which is close to the capital city, the police, the gendarmerie if there’s a separate gendarmerie, everybody with guns in their hands — can intervene physically.

If you can coordinate them, then, mechanically speaking, you can take over the headquarters of the government: the presidential palace, the prime minister’s office, whatever it is. You can do that. You can shut down the mass media. And you can stop the internet because the internet operates from specific physical facilities. You can just open a door, enter there, and switch it off.

You are now free to call in your media, or the media generally, and make your statement: because of the intolerable abuses and misbehavior of the previous ruler, we, the committee of national salvation, have taken over, and so on.

Even if it is only one individual who runs everything, he never presents himself: “I took over.” It’s “The National Salvation Committee, of which I’m the humble secretary,” or chairman or whatever. Then you denounce the previous government and announce wonderful useful reform measures that people have been calling for.

You stop all flights, you control the airport. And then you say, “In order to ensure everybody’s safety, there are checkpoints: please don’t cross the checkpoints unless you’re willing to present yourself and say you have to take a child to hospital and things of that sort.”

And you stabilize the situation. While everything is stabilized, you go and arrest all the political leaders that could challenge you: all the ones that might stand up and speak in front of a group of people or a camera or microphone. You arrest them and you just physically detain them, perhaps to be liberated in a day or so with apologies, perhaps to be killed on the spot — anything in between. Those mechanics of the coup have not changed.

Posted in Policy, War | 7 Comments »

How to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem

Saturday, December 14th, 2024

The problem with sci-fi body armor, Bret Devereaux notes, is that how to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem, but most futuristic ‘hardsuits’ utilize little of the design language of those historical efforts:

Whereas fictional armors are often shaped through a kind of evolution whereby costume designers, artists and animators see each other’s costume ideas and iterate on them, armor development responds (within the limits of the physical materials available) not to other armor design, but to the demands of the human body (you need to be able to bend and move and armor needs to be of a weight a human can wear) and to the threats the armor is meant to defeat.

[…]

Armor works largely by converting various kinds of piercing or slashing attacks into blunt trauma distributed over the widest possible part of the body. And that in turn is part of the advantage of using rigid materials in armor construction.

[…]

A rigid material can spread out the energy of a weapon impact over a large surface; because assuming it remains rigid the entire armor component moves from the impact, contacting the body across a much larger area. The power of distributing impact energy in this way is pretty stark. A 50J impact concentrated into a very small, sharp impact zone (like the tip of a spear or an arrowhead) can easily produce lethal wounds. By contrast 200J applied across your entire chest is something you’ll certainly notice, but probably won’t cause any permanent injury. Indeed, as modern body armors show, impacts upwards of two-thousand joules (the energy delivery of many modern rifle rounds) is quite survivable if spread over enough of the body. So rigid elements (be that a breastplate or, as in modern armor, something like rigid plate inserts) can be of tremendous value precisely because they’re rigid and thus spread out the energy of impact.

[…]

Thicker armor means more weight, which adds up fairly rapidly, while more complete protection around joints means reductions in mobility. So an armorer has to think pretty hard about the tradeoffs between mobility, weight and protection. And one of the key questions here is, quite simply, “where is an opposing blow most likely to land or be most dangerous?”

[…]

By contrast, the threat profile of gunpowder warfare is slightly but importantly different. On the one hand it is a lot harder to armor against bullets because they arrive with much more energy. And I want to stress: much more energy. For a sword or spear swung by human arms, the upper limits6 are around 130J, though most blows will be much weaker than this. Arrows, as we’ve noted, top out around the same energy at launch but fall off somewhat in flight. By contrast, musket bullets can arrive with many hundreds of joules of energy and modern rifle rounds can deliver in the neighborhood of 2,000J of energy on impact. So armor that is trying to stop such a round has to be able to absorb a lot more energy and successfully spread it out over more of the defender’s surface.

The other factor is that, whereas melee strikes originate at the shoulders but can be rising strikes (‘uppercuts’) or falling strikes or horizontal strikes, bullets and other direct-fire weapons (this would be, for instance, equally true of directed energy weapons) fly very fast on relatively flat trajectories, which means the threat is mostly to the front of the body.

[…]

Consequently, whereas armor against contact weapons tends to want fairly complete coverage of the torso (including the sides and the tops of the shoulders), armor against bullets (and other missile weapons) is much more concerned with covering the vertical surfaces of the torso and is willing to compromise armor on the shoulders and even leave gaps in protection, if that means achieving a favorable balance of coverage and weight.

[…]

The first solution to the problem of how to use a rigid material to armor the body is of course to simply armor the parts of the body that don’t bend and then use some other material to protect the parts that do. Archaic Greek ‘bell’ cuirasses and later Greek and Roman muscle cuirasses take this approach, with the cuirass terminating at the hips and hanging leather strips, called pteryges, hanging down to cover the rest of the hips, groin and upper legs. But this is not exactly an ideal solution, as it sacrifices a lot of coverage.

[…]

The earliest of these articulation solutions is scale armor, by which we mean an armor composed of a lot of small rigid scales (metal or hardened leather, typically) which are fixed to backing material (textile or leather), so that they hang down. The scales overlap, which presents a solid metal face to the enemy, but since they move independently, little mobility is lost, allowing a scale coat to extend down past the waist and even cover the legs. The weakness of the approach, however, is that the scales are only anchored to the backing material at the top; there’s not much to stop a blade or spear-tip from sliding up one scale and beneath another, thus penetrating the armor. That’s less of a concern for something like an arrow-strike (which is going to be descending at least somewhat when it arrives) but against an opponent with a sword or dagger in close combat, that is a very real weakness.

A way to solve that weakness is to connect the scales to each other rather than to the backing, so that an opponent cannot slide a weapon underneath them or flip up a scale to render the opponent vulnerable. That solution — small metal plates connected to each other, rather than a backing — we call lamellar armor and it was very common in a wide range of cultures, but it has very little purchase in modern fantasy or science fiction armor designs, I think primarily because it was not included in the Dungeons and Dragons armor system. Nevertheless, lamellar armor was quite common in a wide range of cultures: we see it in the Near East, in Europe, in China and in Japan. The rigidity of the overall armor for lamellar varies based on how the plates are connected together (which you can see quite clearly in Japanese armor, in which a single set of armor often includes both rigid surfaces and articulation both using lamellar, connected more or less rigidly). In Europe, we see a variation on this concept, the brigandine (also underused in fantasy settings) where the metal plates are riveted through each other and a textile or leather backing.

But of course the solution we’re most interested in is plate armor, where a set of armor (a ‘harness’) is composed of a set of articulating plates which both provide a rigid protection to the wearer but also articulate where the wearer needs them to bend. Now going through all of the different methods late medieval plate armor uses to allow the armor to articulate would run beyond the scope of this post, but the relevant part here is the way that plate armor articulates over the torso, broadly speaking. The key components here are the cuirass, composed of a breastplate and a backplate, which covers the upper-half of the torso; this component is generally entirely rigid over that surface because the human body doesn’t bend there much either (on account of the rib-cage).

Below the cuirass, often directly attached to it, is a component called faulds. This consists of a set of articulating ‘lames’ (horizontal strips of armor) connected via leather straps or sometimes sliding rivets so that the lames can telescope into each other to enable the user to bend at the waist or raise their legs or even sit down. Faulds usually extend over the hips (sometimes only on the front) and a bit of the upper legs but occasionally run down as far as the knees. Then in many armors, an additional pair of metal plates hang down from the faulds to cover the upper legs called tassets.

Above the cuirass, we have pauldrons or spaulders (we needn’t here get into the differences), which protect the shoulders and upper arms. These are structured with a shoulder ‘cop’ — a dome-shaped metal piece — covering the shoulders, to which were attached a series of descending lames (articulated the same way the faulds would be) to apply coverage to the upper arms. Crucially, these pieces generally attach to the cuirass (though spaulders often also attach to the upper-arm armor called the rerebrace) rather than just to the upper arms, because as you will recall protecting the top of the shoulder is really quite important. Indeed, even a casual look through ancient and medieval armor will quickly reveal that this armor tends to be the thickest on the shoulder: Early mail armor often featured a second layer of mail to cover the shoulders, for instance; for some medieval armor, a mail coif or aventail also provided a layer of protection over the mail covering the shoulder.

The key advantage of this setup is that by terminating the solid form of the cuirass at the ‘natural waist’ (where the body is thinnest) the cuirass allows the wearer to bend and rotate at the waist, while the faulds, with their telescoping design, allow the wearer to bend down at the waist, raise their legs or sit. Likewise, the segmented, articulated construction of the pauldron both protects the shoulder, but also allows the arms to be raised.

Posted in Media, War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

In the majority of cases, not only was the FPV not downed, but even when it was damaged, the system kept flying as the shot was too weak

Thursday, December 12th, 2024

The Ukrainian Special Forces Command recently recommended placing a dedicated shooter at the back of every military vehicle near the frontline as a desperate defense against small drones:

According to Bradley, hobbyist quadcopter drones, like those made by Chinese maker DJI, tend to have a body made out of thin plastic as well as rigid but flimsy propellers in order to keep their weight down. That makes them “very easy” to damage with widely available 12g sporting rounds, he added.

In contrast, first-person view drones are generally built with thick carbon fiber frames and softer plastic propellers more resistant to impact, reflecting their heritage as machines designed for high-speed racing. Sporting ammunition typically cannot damage FPV sufficiently at almost any range, according to Bradley.

“Drones require more energy on target when they are in the air,” he explained. “When they are hit they simply move as they have very little inertia — the movement robs the pellets of kinetic energy, rather like punching something in zero gravity, less energy is transferred to target as it is used up moving it backward.”

The Ukrainian Third Assault Brigade demonstrated these challenges as part of an experimental shooting conducted earlier this month, simulating an FPV drone attack to test which kind of bullet is most effective. Soldiers compared shooting standard cartridges and specific anti-drone ammunition using different types of guns, including shotguns.

In the majority of cases, not only was the FPV not downed, but even when it was damaged, the system kept flying as the shot was too weak. In the one instance where the target was hit with an anti-drone charge, it crashed and caught fire near the shooter, barely missing him.

Sweden’s Norma has developed a specialized 12-gauge shotgun cartridge, the AD-LER (Anti-Drone Long Effective Range), to combat FPV drones:

The creators ultimately selected #6 shot with a 2.75 mm diameter, which provided an optimal balance between shot dispersion and kinetic impact.

[…]

Developed as a result, the AD-LER cartridge contains 350 tungsten pellets, weighing a total of 34 grams, and can deliver effective fire up to 60 meters. For testing, they chose the Benelli M4 Drone Guardian shotgun with a special barrel choke.

Of course, tungsten #6 birdshot is already on the market. Tungsten has the density of lead, without being toxic, which is why it’s now used to hunt waterfowl — and it’s harder than steel, which is why it’s now used to hunt drones, too.

Posted in War, Weapons | 11 Comments »

Long Range Maneuvering Projectile

Monday, December 9th, 2024

General Atomics’ Long Range Maneuvering Projectile is a 155-mm artillery round with wings — that the company claims can hit a moving target 120 kilometers away, in a GPS-denied environment:

To strike targets at ranges over double, and in some cases triple, of existing base bleed and rocket-assisted projectiles, LRMP will deploy wings. According to Forney, using existing propulsion methods would “make it too complex,” so the design examined General Atomics’ prior work designing the MQ-9 Reaper and MQ-1C Grey Eagle drones. LRMP’s sensors and electronics were also derived from the company’s hypersonics and railgun programs.

“Where we ended up was, let’s develop a projectile that will launch out of a barrel, a standard 155 mm, No separate gunpowder, whatever bag of gunpowder there is, we’ll use that as an explosive to launch the system,” said Forney. General Atomics’ experiences in designing electronics to withstand the forces sustained by hypersonics and railgun projectiles.

Long Range Maneuvering Projectile

Encased within a discarding sabot to protect LRMP’s wings and internals during firing, the round will reach its apogee of around 40,000 to 45,000 feet and deploy its wings. From there, the round will glide, and maneuver, to its target. From a 2023 interview, Naval News understands that this maneuvering capability could be used to conduct “endgame maneuvers” in its terminal engagement phase.

Regarding the unusual shape of LRMP, the company claimed that the design enhances the round’s precision and range. “Our projectile is not round. As you can see, it’s what’s called a rouleaux triangle, very close to a rule of triangle. So those triangular edges allow us to have more controllability and more lift to help us achieve that 120-kilometer range,” said Forney.

With recent lessons from the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in mind, Forney highlighted that LRMP does not rely on Global Positioning System guidance. Instead, the company is currently developing an “alternate guidance system” that relies on machine learning and camera systems within the projectile. The model of LRMP displayed at AUSA contains two lenses, one on the nose and another oriented downward. “We have multiple seekers, camera systems on the projectile so that we can see ahead, we can see down, and we’ll get to target,” said Forney. He also claimed that the seeker would draw on lessons from the company’s work on the Vintage Racer program, which supposedly looked to deploy a loitering system from a hypersonic missile over a target area.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

It left many in the SR-71 program confused

Sunday, December 8th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenThe CIA’s secret Oxcart program wrapped up, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), and the men moved on:

If you are career Air Force or CIA, you go where you are assigned. Ken Collins was recruited by the Air Force into the SR-71 program. Because the A-12 program was classified, no one in the SR-71 program had any idea Collins had already put in hundreds of hours flying in the Mach 3 airplane. “It left many in the SR-71 program confused. It surprised many people when it appeared I already knew how to fly the aircraft that was supposedly just built. They didn’t have a need-to-know what I had spent the last six years of my life doing. They didn’t learn for decades,” not until the Oxcart program was declassified, in 2007.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | 1 Comment »

Did Pearl Harbor Day catch you off guard?

Saturday, December 7th, 2024

Pearl Harbor Day is a good day to remember the war in the Pacific (and related topics):

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

They were all tan and looked healthy

Friday, December 6th, 2024

Chaos by Tom O’NeillSharon Tate was right to be wary of Polanski’s circle, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties):

Pic Dawson, who’d threatened Frykowski’s life and been thrown out of Polanski’s party, had been the subject of Interpol surveillance for drug smuggling as early as 1965. The young son of a diplomat, he’d gained entrée in the Polanski crowd through his friendship with Cass Elliot, one of the singers in the popular sixties group the Mamas and the Papas. Like most of the men in the troubled singer’s life, he’d used her for her money and connections. Elliot’s biographers would later write that her infamous 1966 London arrest — she’d been caught stealing hotel towels and keys — was actually a ruse to force her to share information about Dawson’s drug-smuggling operations. Dawson’s colleagues in the drug business, Billy Doyle and Tom Harrigan, also wormed their way into Polanski’s circle through Mama Cass.

According to police reports, Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan — all twenty-seven, and all romantically involved with Elliot — were joined by a fourth partner, “Uncle” Charles Tacot, a New Yorker who was more than a decade older. A former marine, the six-foot-six strongman was renowned for his prowess with knives; he was rumored to have maintained ties to military intelligence, and he’d been selling drugs in Los Angeles since his arrival in the mid-1950s. Curiously, despite their many years of drug peddling and several drug arrests among them, only Doyle had ever been convicted of any crime — and his conviction was later overturned and changed to an acquittal on his record.

[…]

As the story goes, at some point in the months before the murders, the residents of Cielo threw one of their endless parties, with Frykowski and Sebring leading the charge. Billy Doyle showed up and, in the spirit of the times, drank, smoked, and snorted himself to unconsciousness. Frykowski and Sebring, and maybe Witold Kaczanowski, too, wanted to get even with Doyle for something. Some say he’d sold them bad drugs. So, before a crowd of onlookers, they lowered Doyle’s pants, flogged him, and anally raped him.

[…]

Candice Bergen, in an interview with the LAPD a few weeks after the murders, said that it was a rape, most likely at Sebring’s place or at his friend John Phillips’s (also of the Mamas and the Papas); Dennis Hopper told the Los Angeles Free Press that it was at the Cielo house. He described it as “a mass whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope.” Ed Sanders, in The Family, reports that Doyle was “whipped and video-buggered,” and the location varies depending on which edition of the book you’re looking at.

[…]

In short, he told the LAPD’s Lieutenant Earl Deemer that he didn’t remember being raped, but he couldn’t be sure; it might’ve happened anyway. He recalled going over to see Frykowski at the Cielo house on the night in question, sometime in early July. Frykowski, thinking it would be a funny prank, slipped some mescaline in his champagne. Folger and Kaczanowski were there, too. “It was out at the swimming pool,” Doyle told Deemer, “and there was two cases of champagne by the pool… And apparently [Frykowski] put some in my drink, and I said, Jesus… I am high… I am really out of my bird.”

He wanted something to bring him down, and Frykowski was happy to oblige, producing some pills that he said belonged to Sharon Tate. Doyle swallowed “about eight of them,” and soon enough, as Frykowski started to laugh at him, he realized that the pills were something else entirely, and that he was dealing with some wild people:

They were crazier than hell. I didn’t realize they were so crazy. I am using the word ‘crazy,’ I mean drug-induced crazy… in California, everybody has a tan. Now, if people don’t have a tan, they look a little different. You can see things in their face[s] that a tan covers up… They were all tan and looked healthy. They looked very straight to me when I first got there. And, uh… I don’t remember much more than that.

[…]

In recent months he’d developed a coke habit, which only exacerbated the paranoia. Convinced that someone, somewhere, was out to get him, he started carrying a gun. It didn’t help that he often bragged about how much cocaine he had, especially when there were women around. “They all wanted to get laid,” he said to Deemer, “and the price of admission was a nose full of coke, and I learned that.” He would show up at parties with a silver coke spoon and tell everyone he had “pounds of it.” His good friend Charles Tacot said, “‘ For Chrissakes, Billy, what do you tell people that kind of stuff for?’ And I said, ‘I want to get laid, Charles.’”

That day, higher and higher on drugs that he couldn’t even name, Doyle became convinced that Frykowski meant to harm him. So he pulled out his gun and pointed it at the Pole, threatening to kill him. Frykowski, the bigger man — and the more sober, too, if only by a hair — wrested the gun from him.

Here Doyle’s memory got hazy; he apparently lapsed into unconsciousness, and Voytek called up Charlie Tacot, asking him to come collect his deranged friend. It was possible, Doyle conceded, that Frykowski or Kaczanowski had raped him after that. He admitted that he might’ve told his friend Mama Cass something to that effect. “I was unconscious,” he told Deemer. “I wasn’t sore the next day… not there. But I was sore everywhere else.”

In another LAPD officer’s account of that interview, Doyle puts it even more frankly: “I was so freaked out on drugs I wouldn’t know if they’d fucked me or not!”

[…]

In our first phone call, Tacot filled in some of the blanks from Doyle’s story. He remembered driving over to pick up Doyle, who was passed out somewhere on the Cielo Drive property. His belt had been split, apparently with a knife. A friend who’d come along for the errand said, “I think Voytek fucked him.”

They took Doyle, still unconscious, to Mama Cass’s place in the Hollywood Hills. Tacot remembered thinking, “If we don’t take care of him, he’s going to go back there and have a beef. I carried him out, laid him by a tree, went back to my car and got about twenty feet of welded link chain, which I had in there for somebody else, originally. I put it around his ankle and a tree with a good padlock and snapped it all together — so I know he’s not going anywhere. Cass was in the hospital at the time. She said, ‘Get the Polaroid! Get the Polaroid!’”

Doyle came to a few hours later, still very high, and simmering with rage. “‘ I’m going to shoot that motherfucker,’” Tacot remembered him saying. “And I said, ‘No, no, we’re leaving town. We’re going to Jamaica… but first you’re going to get sober and you’re going to be on this fucking tree until you are.’”

[…]

After that, Tacot told me, the pair headed off to Jamaica, where apparently they were making a movie about marijuana. (No footage from this film has ever surfaced. Others have said the two were involved in a large narcotics deal.) On August 9, while they were away, “Manson goes up and kills those people and everyone’s looking for [Doyle],” Tacot said. He and Doyle were suspects within days. “I picked up the phone one day and the Toronto Star informed me that me and Billy were in the headlines: two wanted for murder.” A couple of days later, back in the United States, “I took a lie-detector test,” Tacot told me. “They knew I had nothing to do with it. Billy, too. He was in Jamaica with me. We were cleared, out of the country. You can’t kill somebody long-distance.”

[…]

Seemingly everyone in town had partied with Tacot at some point. Corrine Calvet, a French actress who’d worked in Hollywood since the forties, had one of the most alarming stories of them all. Calvet was as famous for her turbulent life as her film roles. She’d starred opposite James Cagney in What Price Glory? In the fifties, she married Johnny Fontaine, a mobster-turned-actor who’d been a pallbearer at the gangster Mickey Cohen’s funeral. A purported Satanist, she’d been sued in 1967 by a longtime lover who accused her of “controlling” him with voodoo.

I met Calvet at her beach-facing apartment in Santa Monica. Solemn and unsmiling, in heavy makeup, her gray hair swept back, she got right to the point.

“The only thing that I can tell you about this Manson,” she said, her accent inflecting the words with glamour and gravity, “is that Charlie Tacot brought him and the girls to a party at our house. Two hours after they were there, I caught Charlie Manson taking a piss in my pool. I told Charlie Tacot to get them out of here and they left. After the tragedy happened, the FBI came by and told me I was next on their list to be killed.”

I explained that Tacot had denied ever having met Manson or anyone in the Family. “Maybe he has good reason to say that,” Calvet said, letting her words hang in the air. She was certain: “Charlie knew them.”

[…]

Tacot had lived in Los Angeles since the mid-1950s, when he moved there from Mexico with his wife. He had two daughters, one of whom, Margot, would later confirm a lot of her father’s story: he was a drug dealer, she said, who operated on the fringes of the music and acting world. Although he would often get arrested, she said, “nothing ever stuck. Someone always took care of it for him.”

[…]

As he grew more comfortable, Tacot made an unexpected revelation: at the time of the murders, he worked for an intelligence agency — he wouldn’t say which — and reported to Hank Fine, a veteran of the army’s Military Intelligence Service (MIS). This had been a World War II–era operation so secret that it wasn’t even acknowledged by the federal government until 1972. Fine, a Polish émigré whose true name was Hersh Matias Warzechahe, was “an assassin who shot people for the government,” Tacot claimed.

Thinking the old guy was fantasizing, I barely followed up on the revelation. But he, and later Billy Doyle, would often reference Fine, only to refuse to answer any questions about him. When I looked into him, I learned neither man had been lying. Tacot also described his friend Doyle — they were still close — as “a dangerous man. He’d kill you in a fucking minute. Both of us are second-generation intelligence.

[…]

Tacot reminded me that Bugliosi, when he wrote Helter Skelter, had given pseudonyms to him and his friends, and not just for the sake of politeness. “He was afraid American intelligence would kill him if he exposed us,” Tacot claimed.

[…]

Some people told me, with certainty, that Tacot had been an assassin for the CIA, that he was a “gun freak” and an incredible marksman. (In his 2006 autobiography, Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About it, the musician David Crosby identified Tacot as a “soldier of fortune” who taught him how to shoot a gun.) Others said that he was an ex-marine who’d served in Korea and used to show off his impressive knife-throwing skills. I heard that he grew pot in Arizona; that he was a child molester; that he was a coke smuggler; that he was an uncredited screenwriter; and that his intelligence ties were all fictitious.

[…]

Fine, who’d been a movie PR man from the 1940s until his death in 1975, had been in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the counterintelligence agency that oversaw the MIS and evolved into the CIA after World War II. His work often seemed to combine Hollywood and spycraft. Eddie Albert, the star of the sixties sitcom Green Acres, told me that Fine had sent him on undercover missions to Mexico during the war; from his sailboat, the actor had photographed German landing sites and military training grounds. Though I found no proof, the consensus among Fine’s associates was that he’d continued working in espionage operations through the sixties. His only child, Shayla, told me that his public-relations gig was a cover — and, yes, she said, Tacot had reported to her father. What kind of work were they doing? She never knew, except that it was classified.

[…]

I brought up his and Tacot’s alibi for the night of the murders: they’d been in Jamaica, you’ll recall, filming “a pot movie.” Doyle admitted that the movie was a ruse. He and Tacot had really been doing intelligence work there, he said, as part of some effort to keep Cuba out of Jamaica.

“Dead white men will pull your tongue out if you tell this shit,” he said. “You have to understand that the government doesn’t want to have any exposure on the Jamaican thing — there never was a Jamaican thing. They don’t want to know about it.” When I asked why, he said, “How the fuck do I know? I’m a Canadian citizen. I went with Charles on an adventure. I thought we were going to do a movie.”

[…]

Later, when I’d interviewed so many people that some of them had started to compare notes, he said something really impenetrable. “The community has looked at this as a settled thing until you started talking to us.”

“What community?” I asked. “Who?”

“The ties that bind.”

Posted in Crime | No Comments »

It was risky to break cover to fire the weapon when it might take five or even 10 shots to get the burst

Thursday, December 5th, 2024

Logan Nye was an Army journalist and paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, where he got to see the experimental XM-25 grenade-launcher in action:

I was a young public affairs sergeant assigned to an airborne brigade combat team, and we had one Stryker battalion attached to us that got the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement (CDTE) System, commonly known as the “Punisher.” It was similar to the SSRS, but it carried a smaller round at 25mm or .98-caliber, closer to the Bolter. When it worked, it really worked: Shooters used a laser to gauge distance to a target, told the weapon how much farther the target was behind the cover, then fired. The round flew past the cover, detonated at the specified distance and generally ruined people’s days.

But it was expensive; each round cost $1,000 and was expected to drop to $35 or so in full production. And the system frequently failed. I photographed a sergeant major firing it in a “familiarization shoot” and something like eight rounds failed in a row. A military police soldier and I slowly counted the shots as I took photos, marking each time that another two weeks of our pay had gone downrange and failed to explode.

It was worse on patrols, where troops couldn’t count on the weapon in tough fights. It was risky to break cover to fire the weapon when it might take five or even 10 shots to get the burst. They obviously tried, but the troops in contact reports would come across the brigade chat system, saying that they’d expended 10 or 20 rounds for zero enemy casualties. It’s no wonder the Army eventually abandoned the CDTE effort in 2018.

The new SSRS looks less complicated:

Key to the Barrett SSRS’s design is its user-friendly, assault-rifle-based structure. The weapon features a butt stock at the rear, an [sic] five rounds ammunition magazine in the center, and a barrel length of 305mm. The grenade launcher is compact and versatile with an overall length of 861mm and weighing just 6.3kg. It can fire various ammunition, including airburst rounds, giving soldiers a crucial advantage on the battlefield.

Barrett SSRS

A big, heavy, unreliable weapon has multiple strikes against it, but a small, light, reliable version might hit the sweet spot, where its small projectile can be launched at high enough velocity for accurate more-or-less direct fire, but the payload is big enough to kill nearby gunmen with a not-quite-direct hit.

Posted in War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

It cannot afford to be blockaded

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallHaving spent four thousand turbulent years consolidating its landmass, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), China is now building a blue-water navy:

A green-water navy patrols its maritime borders, a blue-water navy patrols the oceans. It will take another thirty years (assuming economic progression) for China to build naval capacity to seriously challenge the most powerful seaborne force the world has ever seen — the US Navy. But in the medium to short term, as it builds, and trains, and learns, the Chinese navy will bump up against its rivals in the seas; and how those bumps are managed — especially the Sino-American ones — will define great power politics in this century.

[…]

As some of the richer Arab nations came to realize, you cannot buy an efficient military off the shelf.

[…]

Gradually the Chinese will put more and more vessels into the seas off their coast and into the Pacific. Each time one is launched there will be less space for the Americans in the China seas. The Americans know this, and know the Chinese are working toward a land-based antiship missile system to double the reasons why the US Navy, or any of its allies, might one day want to think hard about sailing through the South China Sea. Or indeed, any other “China sea.” China’s increasing long distance-shore-to ship artillery firepower will free up its growing navy to venture farther from its coastline because the navy will be become less vital for defense. There was hint of this in September 2015 when the Chinese (lawfully) sailed five vessels through American territorial waters off the coast of Alaska. That this took place just before President Xi’s visit to the United States was not a coincidence. The Bering Strait is the quickest way for Chinese vessels to reach the Arctic Ocean. We will see more of them off the Alaskan coast in the coming years. And all the while, the developing Chinese space project will be watching every move the Americans make, and those of its allies.

[…]

Under the water China is playing catch-up in submarine warfare. It may be able to surface a sub next to a US carrier group, but its underwater fleet is too noisy to hunt enemy submarines. While it works on this problem it is deploying anti-submarine ships and is busy installing a network of underwater sensors in the East and South China Seas.

Between China and the Pacific is the archipelago that Beijing calls the “first island chain.” There is also the “nine-dash line,” more recently turned into ten dashes in 2013 to include Taiwan, which China says marks its territory. This dispute over ownership of more than two hundred tiny islands and reefs is poisoning China’s relations with its neighbors. National pride means China wants to control the passageways through the chain; geopolitics dictates it has to. It provides access to the world’s most important shipping lanes in the South China Sea. In peacetime the route is open in various places, but in wartime it could very easily be blocked, thus blockading China. All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.

Free access to the Pacific is first hindered by Japan. Chinese vessels emerging from the Yellow Sea and rounding the Korean Peninsula would have to go through the Sea of Japan and up through La Perouse Strait above Hokkaido and into the Pacific. Much of this is Japanese or Russian territorial waters, and at a time of great tension, or even hostilities, would be inaccessible to China. Even if they made it they would still have to navigate through the Kuril Islands northeast of Hokkaido, which are controlled by Russia but claimed by Japan.

Japan is also in dispute with China over the uninhabited island chain it calls Senkaku and the Chinese know as Diaoyu, northeast of Taiwan. This is the most contentious of all territorial claims between the two countries. If instead Chinese ships pass through, or indeed set off from, the East China Sea off Shanghai and go in a straight line toward the Pacific, they must pass the Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa—upon which there is not only a huge American military base, but also as many shore-to-ship missiles as the Japanese can pile at the tip of the island. The message from Tokyo is: “We know you’re going out there, but don’t mess with us on the way out.”

Another potential flare-up with Japan centers on the East China Sea’s gas deposits. Beijing has declared an “Air Defense Identification Zone” over most of the sea, requiring prior notice before anyone else flies through it. The Americans and Japanese are trying to ignore it, but it will become a hot issue at a time of their choosing or due to an accident that is mismanaged.

Below Okinawa is Taiwan, which sits off the Chinese coast and separates the East China Sea from the South China Sea. China claims Taiwan as its twenty-third province, but it is currently an American ally with a navy and air force armed to the teeth by Washington. It came under Chinese control in the seventeenth century but has only been ruled by China for five years in the last century (from 1945 to 1949).

Taiwan’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC) to differentiate it from the People’s Republic of China, although the ROC claims it should govern both territories. This is a name Beijing can live with, as it does not state that Taiwan is a separate state. America is committed to defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. However, if Taiwan declares full independence from China, which China would consider an act of war, the United States is not to come to its rescue, as the declaration would be considered provocative.

The two governments vie for recognition for themselves and nonrecognition of the other in every single country in the world, and in most cases Beijing wins. When you can offer a potential market of 1.4 billion people as opposed to 23 million, most countries don’t need long to consider. However, there are twenty-two countries (mostly developing states; for example, Swaziland, Burkina Faso, and the island nation of São Tomé and Principe) that do opt for Taiwan and that are usually handsomely rewarded.

The Chinese are determined to have Taiwan but are nowhere near being able to challenge for it militarily. Instead they are using soft power by increasing trade and tourism between the two states. China wants to woo Taiwan back into its arms. During the 2014 student protests in Hong Kong, one of the reasons the authorities did not quickly batter them off the streets — as they would have done in, for example, Ürümqi — was that the world’s cameras were there and would have captured the violence. In China much of this footage would be blocked, but in Taiwan people would see what the rest of the world saw and ask themselves how close a relationship they wanted with such a power. Beijing hesitated; it is playing the long game.

[…]

To go westward toward the energy-producing states of the Gulf they must pass Vietnam, which as we have noted has recently been making overtures to the Americans. They must go near the Philippines, a US ally, before trying to get through the Strait of Malacca between Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, all of which are diplomatically and militarily linked to the United States. The strait is approximately five hundred miles long and at its narrowest point is less than two miles wide. It has always been a choke point—and the Chinese remain vulnerable to being choked, which is why by the fall of 2016 the Chinese were nearing the completion of extending the capacity of the port in Gwadar, Pakistan, and linking it by highway to China. All of the states along the strait, and near its approaches, are anxious about Chinese dominance and most have territorial disputes with Beijing.

China claims almost the entire South China Sea, and the energy supplies believed to be beneath it, as its own. However, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Brunei also have territorial claims against China and one another. For example, the Philippines and China argue bitterly over the Mischief Islands, a large reef in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, which one day could live up to their name. Every one of the hundreds of disputed atolls, and sometimes just rocks poking out of the water, could be turned into a diplomatic crisis, as surrounding each rock is a potential dispute about fishing zones, exploration rights, and sovereignty.

To further these aims, China, using dredging and land reclamations methods, has embarked on turning a series of reefs and atolls in disputed territory into islands. For example, one, whose name, Fiery Cross Reef, described what it was, has been turned into an island complete with port and runway in the Spratly Islands. Another has had artillery units stationed on it. The runway could host fighter jets giving China far more control of the skies over the region than it currently has.

[…]

It cannot afford to be blockaded. Diplomacy is one solution; the ever-growing navy is another; but the best guarantees are pipelines, roads, and ports.

[…]

The geopolitical writer Robert D. Kaplan expounds the theory that the South China Sea is to the Chinese in the twenty-first century what the Caribbean was to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Americans, having consolidated their landmass, had become a two-ocean power (Atlantic and Pacific), and then moved to control the seas around them, pushing the Spanish out of Cuba.

[…]

Its lease on the new deep-water port at Gwadar in Pakistan will (if the Pakistan region of Baluchistan is stable enough) be key to creating an alternative land route up to China. From Burma’s west coastline, China has built natural gas and oil pipelines linking the Bay of Bengal up into southwest China — China’s way of reducing its nervous reliance on the Strait of Malacca, through which almost 80 percent of its energy supplies pass. This partially explains why, when the Burmese junta began to slowly open up to the outside world in 2010, it wasn’t just the Chinese who beat a path to their door. The Americans and Japanese were quick to establish better relations, with both President Obama and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan going to pay their respects in person.

[…]

The Chinese are also building ports in Kenya, railroad lines in Angola, and a hydroelectric dam in Ethiopia. They are scouring the length and breadth of the whole of Africa for minerals and precious metals.

[…]

China will not leave the sea-lanes in its neighborhood to be policed by the Americans.

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Napoleon didn’t believe any colonies could be held in perpetuity

Monday, December 2nd, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsWithin the space of a year, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon had made peace with Austria, Naples, Turkey, Russia, Britain and the émigrés — and now that the Atlantic Ocean was safe to cross, France was going to send an expedition of 12,000 men from Rochefort and Brest ‘to re-establish order on Saint-Domingue’ (present-day Haiti).

In the early 1790s the produce of this former slave colony of 8,000 plantations was greater than all of Europe’s other Caribbean and American colonies combined, providing 40 per cent of Europe’s consumption of sugar and 60 per cent of its coffee, and accounting for 40 per cent of all of France’s overseas trade. By 1801, however, because of the slave revolt led over the course of the previous six years by Toussaint l’Ouverture, sugar exports were a mere 13 per cent of their 1789 total and cotton 15 per cent.

[…]

The Jacobins who had abolished slavery and the slave trade in 1794 were either dead, in disgrace or in prison. Napoleon was keen to return to the days when Saint-Domingue produced 180 million francs per annum for the French treasury, gave employment to 1,640 ships and thousands of seamen, and kept the French Atlantic ports thriving. He hoped it might even provide a strategic springboard for a new French empire in the western hemisphere, especially now that France had exchanged Tuscany for Louisiana.

[…]

He ordered Leclerc to follow a three-stage plan: first, to promise the blacks anything and everything while he occupied the key strategic positions on the island, secondly, to arrest and deport all potential opponents, and only then to embark on the reintroduction of slavery.

The charismatic and ruthless Toussaint l’Ouverture, a black freeman who had himself owned slaves, had imposed a constitution on Saint-Domingue in May 1801 that made him dictator for life, ostensibly in the name of the French revolutionary principles of liberty and equality. He had also created an army of 20,000 former slaves and taken over the whole island, expelling the Spanish from the eastern half (the present-day Dominican Republic).

[…]

His plan to defeat the French was to destroy any resources they might find on the coast and then to retreat into the mountainous jungle interior to conduct guerrilla warfare.

Leclerc had failed to take into account the horrific ravages that malaria and yellow fever would wreak on his army. Once a shortage of supplies and the outbreak of those diseases struck he faced impossible odds.

[…]

‘If I were black,’ Napoleon said, ‘I would be for the blacks; being white, I am for the whites.’

[…]

The fighting on Saint-Domingue was brutal. Plantations were torched, massacres and torture were common, towns were razed; there were mass drownings; corkscrews were used to draw out the eyes of French prisoners, and the French even constructed a makeshift gas chamber (étouffier) on board a ship in which volcanic sulphur was used to asphyxiate four hundred prisoners, before the ship was scuttled.

Toussaint l’Ouverture finally surrendered on May 1 on terms whereby the freedom of Saint-Domingue’s blacks was officially guaranteed, black officers were accepted into the French army, and l’Ouverture himself and his staff were allowed to retire to one of his several plantations.

However, on June 7, on his own initiative, Leclerc suddenly reneged on the deal, kidnapped l’Ouverture and sent him to prison in France. The guerrilla war continued, and on October 7 Leclerc wrote to Napoleon: ‘We must destroy all the mountain negroes, men and women, only keep children under twelve years old, destroy half the ones of the plains, and so not leave in the colony one coloured man who wears the epaulette.’

[…]

Twenty generals, 30,000 Frenchmen and possibly as many as 350,000 Saint-Dominguans (of both races) had died. Toussaint l’Ouverture, ‘the Black Spartacus’, died of pneumonia on April 7, 1803 in a large cold cell that can be visited today in the Fort de Joux in the Jura mountains.

‘The Saint-Domingue business was a great piece of folly on my part,’ Napoleon later admitted. ‘It was the greatest error that in all my government I ever committed. I ought to have treated with the black leaders, as I would have done the authorities in a province.’ One lesson he did learn was that blacks could make excellent soldiers, and in November 1809 he set up a unit called the Black Pioneers, made up of men from Egypt and the Caribbean under a black battalion commander, Joseph ‘Hercules’ Domingue, to whom he gave a special award of 3,000 francs. By 1812 Napoleon didn’t believe any colonies could be held in perpetuity, predicting that they would all eventually ‘follow the example of the United States. You grow tired of waiting for orders from five thousand miles away; tired of obeying a government which seems foreign to you because it’s remote, and because of necessity it subordinates you to its own local interest, which it cannot sacrifice to yours.’

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

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