The most obvious example are the losers of World War 2, that is, Japan, Germany, and Italy. Japan and Germany suffered extreme damage to their infrastructure in the later stages of the war but were quickly able to recover.
[…]
Some of this research has been done using slaveholders in the former Confederacy, who lost the US civil war (1861-65). These were wealthy people who owned slaves, but lost this wealth. If they were wealthy because of human capital reasons, we would expect them to regain some fraction of this, and their children to markedly catch-up towards their long-term trend.
[…]
For people who had a lot of wealth from slave owning in 1960, their wealth was still reduced in 1870. However, their sons had actually caught back up by 1900. Likewise with the grandsons.
[…]
In his book The Son Also Rises economic historian Greg Clark tracked elite surnames to gauge social mobility across many countries. One of these was China, where the situation was dire.
[…]
However, when looking up modern data for the elite surnames, these are still over-represented among the current elite, despite the efforts of the communists to eradicate their advantages.
[…]
Here some will object that the recovery of the former Axis powers was due to US subsidies (Marshall plan in Europe). The problem with this idea is that wealthy countries have also tried doing the same kind of growth program in other regions of the world, and they have never worked very well.
The advice to attack an enemy’s weak points goes back at least to Sun Tzu in the fifth century B.C., Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), but it is extraordinarily difficult for human beings to follow:
Attacking Russia head-on was wrong to begin with, because it guaranteed the greatest resistance, not the least. A direct attack also forces an enemy back on his reserves and supplies, while it constantly lengthens the supply and reinforcement lines of the attacker. The better strategy is to separate the enemy from his supplies and reserves. That is why an attack on the flank is more likely to be successful.
Nevertheless Hitler could still have won if he had struck at the Soviet Union’s weakness, instead of its strength.
His most disastrous error was to go into the Soviet Union as a conqueror instead of a liberator. The Soviet people had suffered enormously at the hands of the Communist autocracy for two decades. Millions died when the Reds forced people off their land to create collective farms. Millions more were obliged to move great distances and work long hours under terrible conditions in factories and construction projects. The secret police punished any resistance with death or transportation to horrible prison gulags in Siberia. In the gruesome purges of the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had systematically killed all leaders and all military officers who, in his paranoid mind, posed the slightest threat to his dictatorship. Life for the ordinary Russian was drab, full of exhausting work, and dangerous. At the same time, the Soviet Union was an empire ruling over a collection of subjugated peoples who were violently opposed to rule from the Kremlin.
Vast numbers of these people would have risen in rebellion if Hitler’s legions had entered with the promise of freedom and elimination of Soviet oppression. Had Hitler done this, the Soviet Union would have collapsed.
Such a policy would not have given Hitler his Lebensraum immediately. But once the Soviet Union had been shattered, he could have put into effect anything he wanted to with the pieces that remained.
Hitler followed precisely the opposite course of action.
The first atomic bomb test site — selected in 1944 from a shortlist of eight possible test sites in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado — had been selected, in part, for its supposed isolation:
Yet in reality, nearly half-a-million people were living within a 150-mile radius of the explosion, with some as close as 12 miles away. Many, if not most, of these civilians were still asleep when the bomb detonated just before dawn.
Several civilians nearby — stunned by the blast — later reported that they thought they were experiencing the end of the world. A local press report stated that the flash had been so bright that a blind girl in Socorro, New Mexico — about 100 miles from the bombing range — was able to see it, and asked: “What’s that?” In Ruidoso, New Mexico, a group of teenage campers were jolted out of their bunk beds onto their cabin floor. They ran outside, worried that a water heater had exploded. Barbara Kent, one of the campers, recently recalled in an interview with National Geographic that “[A]ll of a sudden, there was a big cloud overheard, and lights in the sky. It hurt our eyes. It was as if the sun came out tremendous. The whole sky turned strange.”
A few hours later, white flakes began to fall from the sky. The campers began to play in the flurry.
“We were grabbing the white flakes, and putting it all over ourselves, pressing it on our faces,” Kent said. “But the strange thing, instead of being cold like snow, it was hot. And we all thought, ‘Well, the reason it’s hot is because it’s summer.’ We were only thirteen; we didn’t know any better.”
One family in Oscuro, about 45 miles away from the site, hung wet bed sheets in their windows to keep the flakes from floating into the house. The strange substance continued to fall from the sky for days, coating everything: orchards, gardens, herds of livestock, cisterns, ponds, and rivers.
In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.
[…]
The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.
By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.
The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.
[…]
After the early 1970s, employers responded by shifting from directly testing for ability to using the next best thing: a degree from a highly-selective university. By pushing the selection challenge to the college admissions offices, selective employers did two things: they reduced their risk of lawsuits and they turned the U.S. college application process into a high-stakes war of all against all.
In 1984, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies explained that catastrophic failures are unavoidable and cannot simply be designed around, when you have systems that are both complex and tightly coupled:
The biggest shortcoming of the theory is that it takes competency as a given. The idea that competent organizations can devolve to a level where the risk of normal accidents becomes unacceptably high is barely addressed. In other words, rather than being taken as absolutes, complexity and tightness should be understood to be relative to the functionality of the people and systems that are managing them. The U.S. has embraced a novel question: what happens when the men who built the complex systems our society relies on cease contributing and are replaced by people who were chosen for reasons other than competency?
The answer is clear: catastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity. While each failure is officially seen as a separate issue to be fixed with small patches, the reality is that the whole system is seeing failures at an accelerating rate, which will lead in turn to the failure of other systems. In the case of the Camp Fire that killed 85 people, PG&E fired its CEO, filed Chapter 11, and restructured. The system’s response has been to turn off the electricity and raise wildfire insurance premiums. This has resulted in very little reflection.
[…]
Americans living today are the inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic evaluation at all levels of American society. Given the damage already done to competence and morale combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades might simply be maintaining the systems we have today.
Eviation, a Washington State-based startup aiming to be one of the first companies to produce electric planes for commercial use, says its electric planes due in 2027 will make air travel less costly and cleaner:
The Alice is a nine-seater aircraft with a length of around 57 feet and a wingspan of 62 feet. These dimensions put it in the ballpark of a Cessna Citation Excel or a Piaggio P.180 Avanti. “I like to say that we found the sweet spot for electric aviation with this aircraft: we have a nine-passenger plane,” Aviation CEO Gregory Davis told InsideEVs. “You can fly with a single pilot in North America, so it means that it is more cost-effective to operate than a ten-passenger plane where you need two pilots.”
Keeping this plane flying in the air requires significant research and development — and that starts with the battery. Namely, the Alice stores a 900kWh battery pack in its underbelly. “In terms of the size of the battery, it is an 8,000-pound battery,” says Davis. “That 8,000-pound battery is fairly similar to what a full fuel load on a plane that size might weigh,” Davis told InsideEVs. “It actually works out well inside the existing rules for aircraft sizing.”
The 900kWh battery pack gives the Alice a range of around 250 nautical miles (with an additional 30 minutes for reserves), meaning it’s geared strictly for short-distance travels.
[…]
We need to have a good battery life, but it doesn’t need to be a 20-year battery. What we’re actually doing is designing our battery to be a 3,000-cycle or 3,000-hour battery, and they’ll get replaced during routine maintenance. We make sure that you’re also operating in the top 10% of battery utilization.”
Interestingly, aircraft turbine engines need to be rebuilt around every 3,000 cycles, and after several rebuilds, they’ll need to be replaced entirely.
[…]
“For the aircraft, electricity that is derived from the grid is between 30 and 70% cheaper than aviation fuel, and that’s in today’s environment,” Davis told InsideEVs. Besides the fuel cost savings, electric motors providing thrust will be less maintenance intensive than a turbine engine. “The electric motors are so much less costly to maintain than a traditional turbine engine,” Davis said.
But ditching the turbines comes with an unexpected benefit. Namely, the plane won’t have to reach 30,000+ feet to achieve maximum efficiency.
[…]
The ability to fly lower also means that Alice won’t have to spend more time climbing, which is a highly energy-intensive task. Along with cutting down carbon emissions, the Alice will also reduce noise pollution, an adversary of residential communities located near airports. “One of the advantages of an electric aircraft is that it’s very quiet. It’s incredibly quiet, especially compared to a turbine aircraft,” Davis said. With the quieter flight, these planes might be allowed to fly into airports with curfews during off-hours, like John Wayne Airport (SNA) in Irvine, California.
“The idea is that with an {electric} aircraft, you can access the airport infrastructure at 2:00 in the morning to do an overnight package delivery,” Davis told InsideEVs. “That rapid point-to-point package delivery for the freight provider is {highly beneficial}. Being able to knock twelve hours off your delivery time is very valuable to freight companies.”
The United States has aligned itself 100% with Ukraine. And as a result of that, I don’t see much movement or much interest even on the part of the U.S. government in Washington to be a third party, to actually be a negotiator, to find a peaceful resolution. So, really, no one is playing that role. The United Nations is not playing that role. Sweden is not playing that role anymore, now that it aspires to be a member of NATO. There is no neutral party that really is playing the role of trying to end the conflict between the two parties, who are essentially stalled right now in combat, where there’s not really much movement on either side, but the killing continues.
So, it was the case that in the minds of Russia, the expansion of NATO was provocative and may, in the theory of national security, been a strategic threat to Russia. And it is probably the case that when history is written, we will say that NATO was a little bit too greedy in its zeal to expand into Eastern Europe. But the reality is that that doesn’t excuse the Russian invasion, not in 2014 nor in 2022. And the reality for the CIA is that they need to understand what Putin’s intentions are, not only to understand the implications of Ukraine’s actions, particularly its increasing actions in Crimea and across the border in Russia, but also to understand what it is that Putin will settle for as part of a settlement and also what it is that Zelensky will settle for. So, it’s a tricky situation where I don’t really have a lot of confidence that the CIA is fully on top of what either of these two leaders think.
Oppenheimer opposed the H-bomb, which would be 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II, but not entirely for moral reasons:
At first, he thought it was infeasible. Then, when the math proved it feasible, he dropped his resistance, admitting that it was too “technically sweet” not to develop. (The film does not quote this rather famous line of his.) Still, he remained unenthusiastic, worrying that the H-bomb would divert money from Hiroshima-type A-bombs, which he thought the Army should continue building as weapons to be used on the battlefield if the Soviets invaded Western Europe. He argued that H-bombs were too powerful for battlefield targets—they could destroy only big cities—and, if the Russians built them, as they would if we did, a war would devastate American cities, too. He did eventually come to the view, as portrayed in the film, that this mutual vulnerability might deter both sides from using the weapons or even from going to war at all. But he was not opposed to nuclear weapons in general.
[…]
His hedged attitude toward the H-bomb threatened the project’s funding. And so its leading advocates set out to destroy him.
First and foremost, the producer. Anyone who makes money off of human misery.
Second and secondarily, the typical user. Sure, they rarely experience severe personal blowback. But they normalize deviant behavior. And they put money into the pockets of the vendors of sin, allowing them to flourish.
Last and least, the “abuser” or “addict.” Personally, they may disgust us. Yet the bipartisan position is that archetypal abusers are victims who deserve general sympathy and taxpayer assistance.
I say that these priorities are confused at best.
Visualize a world full of moderate users of every alleged vice. You might not approve, but what’s the big deal? The moderate users do their jobs, live in homes, take care of their families, and keep their friends. They’re not perfect, but who is?
The picture doesn’t change if you add thriving legal businesses supplying all these moderate users with their desired products.
[…]
The difference between me and normal observers: I don’t consider extreme abusers or “addicts” to be victims. I consider them victimizers. They aren’t a symptom of a greater social problem. They are the greater social problem. Abusers have and continue to make evil choices. Granted, it logically possible to end up on Fentanyl Row through tremendously bad luck. Empirically, however, everything I’ve read on poverty convinces me that the root cause of such residence is almost invariably extraordinarily irresponsible behavior.
[…]
Abusers don’t just mistreat their families, friends, neighbors, and passersby. Even worse, they give vice a bad name. Abusers inspire the indiscriminate, unjust “wars” on innocent users. They inspire prohibition, which takes production out of the hands of ordinary businesspeople and into the hands of criminals.
[…]
At minimum, you can impose the standard punishments for theft. Which is easy, because if you examine encampments, ill-gotten wares are in plain sight. Stealing shopping carts is a crime. Stealing bicycles is a crime. It’s crazy for cops to look the other way when shifty characters violate property rights in plain sight. And unless you oppose the very existence of public property, you can also consistently favor enforcement of laws against trespassing on, vandalizing, and defiling public property. Enforcing all of this doesn’t precisely make abuse illegal, but it comes close.
[…]
But in a strange sense, both gun control and prohibition grow out of softness. A system with the moral courage to harshly, swiftly, and surely punish violence would have little need of gun control. A system with the moral courage to harshly, swiftly, and surely punish abusers for stealing, trespassing, vandalizing, and defiling would have little need of prohibition. In both cases, we haphazardly punish millions of innocents because we refuse to decisively punish thousands of clear-cut criminals.
Rommel immediately grasped the essence of the war in Libya and Egypt, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II) — everything depended upon mobility:
“In the North African desert,” he wrote, “nonmotorized troops are of practically no value against a motorized enemy, since the enemy has the chance, in almost every position, of making the action fluid by a turning movement around the south.”
This was why the Italians had been beaten almost without a fight — they had moved largely on foot; the British were in vehicles. Nonmotorized forces could be used only in defensive positions, Rommel saw. Yet such positions were of little consequence, because enemy motorized units could surround them and force them to surrender, or bypass them. In other words, foot soldiers in the desert had no impact beyond the reach of their guns.
Rommel discerned that desert warfare was strangely similar to war at sea. Motorized equipment could move at will over it and usually in any direction, much as ships could move over oceans. Rommel described the similarity thus: “Whoever has the weapons with the greatest range has the longest arm, exactly as at sea. Whoever has the greater mobility…can by swift action compel his opponent to act according to his wishes.”
Two hundred years later, after free public education has extended beyond the three years endorsed by Jefferson to thirteen years, we are seeing more skepticism around the benefits of education than ever before. The spirit of the times is quite different than it was when Jefferson was manifesting the Enlightenment in the U.S.
Freddie DeBoer has an essay “School Doesn’t Work” summarizing the ineffectiveness of a wide range of educational interventions
[…]
Economist Bryan Caplan’s book The Case Against Education makes the case that schooling is mostly signaling rather than adding human capital.
[…]
Between the emphasis on genetics, on the one hand, and the ineffectiveness of most education, we have reached a point at which many people believe that most K12 spending is a waste of money; Scott Alexander somewhat facetiously suggests that we give everyone the $150K (now more like $200K) we currently spend on each child so they can buy a cabin rather than waste time in school.
[…]
But clearly human performance can be improved. Anders Ericksson, the researcher most responsible for researching “deliberate practice” as a technique for improving performance, one of the world’s leading researchers of expert performance, has been arguing against the genetic determinists for decades.
[…]
From a young age, your child is biologically programmed to be a status optimizer within a given cultural milieu seeking niches for optimizing social status (including love and attention as good things!). In order to do so, they will reflexively imitate the behaviors of those who are regarded as prestigious, successful, and skillful in their social group, and whose sex/gender and ethnicity cues are something that she can emulate successfully.
[…]
These people (including Montaigne, Pascal, Mill, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, etc.) were raised by parents who were keen to immerse their children in environments in which interesting people were constantly around thinking and talking about ideas.
Today, teens with access to the internet who choose to devote themselves to achieving excellence for the sake of optimizing status among a chosen community of peers can learn extraordinary amounts without any classroom environment at all.
[…]
In the best circumstances, a school is a place where your child is exposed to a peer culture that supports learning. In the worst circumstances, the peer culture so undermines learning that all of the academic instruction becomes largely irrelevant.
[…]
Harvard’s David Perkins makes the case that much of what we regard as “intelligence” is a matter of dispositions towards thinking. Thus while it may or may not be the case that we can increase “g,” the underlying factor that is believed to result in high IQ scores, we can improve the ways in which minds think.
[…]
But as Carol Black, the screenwriter for The Wonder Years TV show notes, studying children in school is like studying orcas at Sea World. I regard almost all educational research as inconclusive garbage insofar as it is premised on schooling.
For instance, many people are excited by Bloom’s “2 sigma” finding, that students tutored one-on-one using mastery techniques performed two standard deviations better than students in a classroom environment. One reading of this is, “Wow, tutoring is powerful.” Another is, “Wow, classroom instruction is garbage.”
[…]
Schooling is a cultural monoculture that is far more damaging to human cultures than is agricultural monoculture on natural ecosystems. To shift from the Sea World metaphor, imagine studying Monsanto treated industrial wheat farms in Kansas and suffering from the illusion that one understood plant life.
“Russian constructions follow traditional military plans for entrenchment, largely unchanged since the Second World War,” British military intelligence said in a December statement about Russian activity in Luhansk.
The problem for Ukraine is that since late last year, Russian forces have been building up their defensive positions in eastern Ukraine and along the northern approaches to Crimea. These engineering works include concrete-lined trenches, barbed wire, dragon’s teeth, anti-tank ditches, and plenty of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, and they “pose a major tactical challenge to Ukrainian offensive operations,” the RUSI report said.
Each Russian brigade has two engineer companies, which is roughly comparable to the engineer battalion attached to a US brigade combat team. One company focuses on building fortifications, while the other lays and clears mines.
There is an initial line of infantry foxholes. Behind this is a second line of trenches and concrete firing posts, screened by multiple obstacle belts — each a little over a half mile wide — and comprising barbed wire, dragon’s teeth, and anti-tank ditches about 20 feet wide and 13 feet deep.
The second line isn’t continuously manned but rather consists of company-size positions in wooded areas and on ridgelines, placed so that the defenses are entirely covered by fire.
The third line, about 3 miles back from the initial outpost line, consists of fallback positions and concealed areas for reserves. And these fortified zones may have several echelons of Russian units.
“The overall depth of defensive fortifications exceeds 30 kilometers (19 miles) on some axes,” the RUSI report, which was based on interviews with Ukrainian military officers, said.
[…]
Perhaps the most formidable part of Russian defenses is mines, which the Russians “have no shortage of,” the report said.
[…]
Clearing minefields is difficult because Russian mines have multiple triggers and anti-tampering devices. The RUSI report said it’s common for Russian antipersonnel mines “to be initiated by a seismic sensor and to have an immediately adjacent mine initiated by wires, which are laid out in a cross from the device.”
Russia has also laid “instant” fields of magnetically activated anti-tank mines that are deployed using multiple rocket launchers.
The war between Russian and Ukraine has become a magnet for foreign fighters:
In a recent interview with the Nepal Express, two young Nepalis described their service. One was a student at a Russian university, while the other was a former Nepalese Army soldier who worked as a security guard in Dubai before visiting Russia as a tourist and then enlisting.
[…]
“We were thinking of joining the French army,” said the ex-Nepali soldier. “There was a long process and it was difficult to enter Europe. Russia became easy.”
Ironically, Russia is also recruiting former Afghan commandos who were trained by the US military to fight the Taliban (and whose families probably fought the Soviet soldiers who occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s).
Like the Nepalis, the Afghans aren’t joining out of love of Russia or hatred of Ukraine. They are being hunted by the Taliban who now rule Afghanistan and need sanctuary and money to support their families, so the prospect fighting for Moscow — for $1,500 a month — is likely the least bad alternative.
At sea, the heavily armored, big-gun capital ships have vacated the scene, and warfare is waged offensively by electronic guided missiles and defensively by electronic disruption and interception systems. Similarly, air warfare, once based on the kinetic capabilities of planes and their armament, now relies primarily on electronically guided weapons and electronic defensive systems. Both at sea and in the air, victory now depends on who is one step ahead of its rivals in these crucial techno-tactical spheres.
The medium in which land warfare takes place is immeasurably more complex than those of sea and air warfare, because of both the numbers of combatants involved and land’s complex topographical features. But at least since the early 1980s the direction has been clear to those who grasped the broader context. The revolution that land warfare is undergoing is no less profound and far reaching than that generated by the mechanization revolution and the introduction of the tank and other AFVs. It was J. F. C. Fuller, the leading pioneering theorist of mechanized warfare, who firmly placed the mechanization revolution in war within the context of the second industrial revolution and thereby helped people understand its full significance and scope. Incredibly, as early as 1928, he looked further ahead, predicting that the third revolutionary wave of the future — which would shape war, as well as all other fields of life — would be “electric and robotic” (the word electronic did not yet exist).
Let us focus on the tank, a product of the second mechanization revolution and the backbone of land warfare for about a hundred years. Ever since World War II, tanks have been optimized, primarily to fight other tanks, and second, to withstand hollow charges. Their main armament is a high velocity gun firing kinetic projectiles. Half of their 60-70-ton weight in most armies consists of heavy armor, which in turn requires a 1500 horsepower engine.
However, tanks will no longer come within kinetic firing range of each other, and will be discovered and attacked at much longer ranges. This is no different than with the mighty battleships of WWII’s Pacific theater, which never came within firing range of each other.
[…]
The wholesale destruction of the hapless Armenian army in the 2020 war against Azerbaijan, like the stranded and harassed Russian convoy en route to Kiev and the image of the Russian armored battalion massacred during its attempted river crossing in the Donbas, with the shattered bridge in the middle, starkly demonstrates the current reality. The same can be said of the rash retreat from the Saluki wadi by the Israeli army’s 401st Brigade Merkava Mark 4 tanks during the Second Lebanon War (2006) when faced with second-generation Russian Kornet anti-tank missiles fired by Hezbollah.
[…]
This does not mean that the tank and other fighting vehicles are history. But the answer is not to be found in further reinforcing the heavy armor or in improved tactical practices, clumsy as Russian tactics proved to be. Rather, the answer lies in a full-scale adjustment of land fighting vehicles to the ongoing electronic revolution — above all, in adopting active defense systems, such as the Israeli Trophy and Iron Fist, now purchased and installed by the US, German, and British armies. Active defense means electronic detection, disruption, and interception of incoming projectiles, launched from land or from the air — the same revolution that sea and air warfare have already undergone.
[…]
The current reality, in which being detected on the modern battlefield means almost assured destruction, will no longer hold. A two-sided game reopens. Thus, battlefield survival and success will depend on the question of which side possesses the last word in terms of offensive and defensive electronic systems and counter-systems for detection, attack, and disruption. As in air and sea warfare during the electronic age, it can also be expected that when one side holds a decisive advantage in these systems, we shall see crushing, almost one-sided victories in regular conventional land warfare.
[…]
While electronically guided projectiles are already widely and effectively used in the Ukraine War, electronic interception and disruption system are largely absent. The trench warfare stalemate that has attracted so much attention — as if we were back one hundred years to World War I — may be a function of this imbalance, as armored fighting vehicles are paralyzed by the lack of effective active defense.
[…]
Indeed, relying on electronic detection and interception systems enables a drastic reduction in the armor of fighting vehicles for what is necessary against small arms, shrapnel, and blasts. Thus there is an expected reduction in their weight to about 10 to 25 tons; a parallel reduction in engine size and weight; and design re-orientation to electronically guided defensive and offensive systems. This, I believe, is the direction in which land warfare and land weapon systems is heading in the electronic-computerized age.
I have seen the number one movie of 1977, Star Wars, multiple times, but I somehow never caught the number two movie of 1977, Smokey and the Bandit, until recently.
The film stars Burt Reynolds, as Bo “Bandit” Darville, and four 1976-model cars, as his 1977 Pontiac Trans Am:
Hal Needham saw an advertisement for the soon-to-be-released 1977 Pontiac Trans Am and knew right away that it would be the Bandit’s car, or, as Needham referred to it, a character in the movie. He contacted Pontiac and an agreement was made that four 1977 Trans Ams and two Pontiac LeMans four-door sedans would be provided for the movie. The Trans Ams were actually 1976-model cars with 1977 front ends (from 1970 to 1976, both the Firebird/Trans Am and Chevrolet Camaro have two round headlights and in 1977, the Firebird/Trans Am was changed to four rectangular headlights, and the Camaro remained unchanged). The decals were changed to 1977-style units, as evidenced by the engine size callouts on the hood scoop being in liters rather than cubic inches, as had been the case in 1976. The hood scoop on these cars says “6.6 LITRE”, which, in 1977, would have denoted an Oldsmobile 403-equipped car or a non-W-72, 180 hp version of the 400 Pontiac engine.
The cars were 1976 models, the engines fitted to them were 455ci power plants, the last year these engines were offered for sale before withdrawal. All four of the cars were badly damaged during production, one of which was all but destroyed during the jump over the dismantled Mulberry bridge. The Trans Am used for said jump was equipped with a booster rocket, the same type that was used by Evel Knievel during his failed Snake River Canyon jump. Needham served as the driver for the stunt (in place of Reynolds), while Lada St. Edmund was in the same car (in place of Field). By the film’s ending, the final surviving Trans Am and LeMans were both barely running and the other cars had become parts donors to keep them running. This gives rise to various continuity errors with Justice’s patrol car, which during some chase sequences is shown with a black rear fender, which then reverts to the car’s bronze color again in later scenes. When it is finally torn off along with the car’s roof in the impact with the girder, the missing fender still reappears later on in the film.
[…]
After the debut of the film, the Pontiac Trans Am became wildly popular, with sales almost doubling within two years of the film’s release. It outsold its Chevrolet Camaro counterpart for the first time.
The premise of the film is that wealthy Texan Big Enos Burdette and his son Little Enos have sponsored a racer in Atlanta’s Southern Classic and want to celebrate in style when they win, so they bet Bandit and his truck-driving partner Snowman $80,000 that they can’t bootleg 400 cases of Coors from Texarkana to Atlanta in 28 hours.
Wait, why do they have to bootleg Coors? Beer’s not illegal in Atlanta:
In 1977, Coors was unavailable for sale east of Oklahoma. Its lack of additives and preservatives meant that Coors could spoil in one week without refrigeration, explaining the film’s 28-hour deadline. A 1974 Time magazine article explains that Coors was so coveted for its lack of stabilizers and preservatives, and Coors Banquet Beer had a brief renaissance. Future President Gerald Ford, after a trip to Colorado, hid it in his luggage to take it back to Washington, D.C. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a steady supply airlifted by the Air Force to Washington. Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox would bring several cases after playing on the West Coast, by stashing them in the equipment trunks on the team’s plane. Frederick Amon smuggled it from Colorado to North Carolina and sold it for four times the retail price.
Coors is still brewed just outside Denver, Colorado. It is now sold in all states as Coors ships it in refrigerated train cars and bottled locally and sold in different parts of the country including the eastern US states.
During their run, Bandit annd Snowman are pursued by Texas county sheriff Buford T. Justice, played by Jackie Gleason:
“Buford T. Justice” was the name of a real Florida Highway Patrolman known to Reynolds’ father, who was once Police Chief of Riviera Beach, Florida. His father was also the inspiration for the word “sumbitch” used in the film, a variation of the phrase “son-of-a-bitch” that, according to Reynolds, he uttered quite often. Gleason was given free rein to ad-lib dialogue and make suggestions. It was his idea to have Junior alongside him throughout the film. In particular, the scene where Sheriff Justice unknowingly encounters the Bandit in a roadside diner (a “choke and puke” in CB lingo) was not in the original story but was rather Gleason’s idea.
Gleason’s Buford T. Justice follows quite clearly in the footsteps of Clifton James’ Sheriff J.W. Pepper, from Live and Let Die (1973):
When asked about the Blaxploitation element of the film, screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz said he invented Sheriff J.W. Pepper as a racist small-town southern sheriff, setting him up for mockery as a foolish pompous figure that the audience is meant to side against.
This reminds me that Bandit and Snowman are conspicuously non-racist, in contrast to Justice.
Anyway, Clifton James’ sheriff also falls in the footsteps of another:
Actor Joe Higgins, who was born in Louisiana in 1925, landed the role of Sheriff J.W. (and added his real name Higgins) for a series of Dodge commercials starting in 1969. He was prolific on American television for guest roles in many series including ‘Gunsmoke,’ ‘Hill Street Blues,’ ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and ‘The Twilight Zone.’
Over the course of the TV campaign for the new Dodge Challenger, Sheriff J.W. evolves from pulling over drivers for having a “racing vee-hickle” in the city limits, learning of how affordable the new car is, to later schooling his younger deputies in slapstick fashion. The last spot from 1972 ends in his humiliation when flying chickens escape the trunk of a car and would have been a comedic moment right at home in the Roger Moore era.
Seeing success with the spots, Dodge anointed Higgins as the “Safety Sheriff” and Higgins would tour the country at motor shows and conventions, as well as speaking to high-school kids about driving and promoting the use of seat belts.
At the peak of his popularity, Higgins filmed a PSA for the Office of Traffic Safety with then-Governor Ronald Reagan.
When I was a kid, Starbuck was the name of a cocky fighter pilot in the original Battlestar Galactica. It was a fanciful, sci-if name, like Skywalker. Somewhere along the way I picked up that it was a real name, but it was still surprising to see a coffee-shop chain of the same name (but with a non-apostrophe s):
In 1971, our founders got together with artist Terry Heckler to define their new brand. They wanted the company’s name to suggest a sense of adventure, a connection to the Northwest and a link to the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders. Co-founder Gordon Bowker, a writer, initially proposed calling the company “Pequod,” after the ship in Herman Melville‘s classic novel “Moby-Dick.” But Terry objected – would a cup of “Pee-kwod” appeal to anyone?
The brainstorming continued. While researching names of mining camps on Mt. Rainier, one of the best known landmarks near Seattle, Terry came across “Starbo,” which eventually led the team back to where they’d started. In “Moby-Dick,” the name of the first mate on the Pequod was, you guessed it, Starbuck. A brand was born.
Bruce: Ludendorf’s WWI ‘War Communism’ and Marxist-Leninism rhyme.
Bob Sykes: There is no question that National Socialism is s form of socialism. Just ask G. B. Shaw or Time. One of the differences among socialisms is how they treat the national issue. Marxists are doctrine internationalists, and they used to maintain that the only distinguishing characteristic among people that really counts is economic class. That position seems to have been abandoned during WW I, because the proletariat turned out to be nationalists. Fascism and Naziism valorate the nation (or more...
Isegoria: It doesn’t appear to come from either Dracula or The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
Isegoria: I suppose I should have linked to my fourth Critical Chain post, which addresses multi-tasking.
Gaikokumaniakku: “The trail I walked lacked the geometric and artificial precision of the grand boulevards of the Städte I would later come to know so well. Here Nature did not bend to Man with such frequency or slavishness, but rather the two seemed to bend around one another at regular intervals, a grant of mutual dignity prevailing between the two. Here the paths wound around and through the hills, according to how the land pulled a man’s steps hither or thither. It was by this road, made by Man but...
Gaikokumaniakku: I’m a simple man. I see Goldratt, I feel compelled to wade into the comments section, even if I have little to add that the author has not already said. Overproductive workers who produce subassemblies are an example of physical constraints of part storage. Real-world factories don’t have infinite buffer space to store subassemblies. Overproduction is a problem for many reasons, but if we had some kind of Star-Trek-tier space warp for infinite storage, overproduction would be...
W2: Do two people looking at the same place see the same sprite?
Bob Sykes: This is US/UK/EU propaganda. Prior to the coup of 2014 that removed Ukraine’s democratically elected and legitmate president, Yanukovich, and that replaced him with the current paleo-Nazi junta, over 90 of Crrimeans were ethnic Russians, and they voted to join Russia. The vote was unauthorized, but there is no doubt it was accurate. The Russian military did not invade Crimea. They were already there by treaty. And Crimea (and all of Ukraine) had been sovereign Russian territory for over 300...
McChuck: Predators seek out dark, secluded spaces. Normal people avoid dark, secluded spaces. It really is that simple. There’s a reason parking garage stairwells are now built with top to bottom windows. Public spaces are designed with clear sight lines, no obstructions above two feet or below six feet. Remove the places predators can wait in ambush, and crime drops substantially.
Phileas Frogg: Makes sense, ease of access and utilization is improved for everyone by lots of those changes, not just the young, old and disabled. Reminds me of this excerpt: “The trail I walked lacked the geometric and artificial precision of the grand boulevards of the Städte I would later come to know so well. Here Nature did not bend to Man with such frequency or slavishness, but rather the two seemed to bend around one another at regular intervals, a grant of mutual dignity prevailing between...
Isegoria: This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History, by T. R. Fehrenbach, makes the short list.
Gaikokumaniakku: Marginally relevant, but likely to be of interest to readers who may actually have seen it already: The Marine Corps Commandant’s 2026 Reading List.
Isegoria: I think The Dracula Tape is moving up in the queue.
Bruce: “Medicine in the 19th century was in a Hell of a state.” — Dracula in Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, where Dracula says Lucy was killed by van Helsing’s bungled blood transfusions.
Isegoria: I felt the same way about Dumas: Reading The Count of Monte Cristo in 11th grade clarified just how derivative most of the entertainment we consume really is — everything has been done better by Dumas, and he did it over a century ago — and it got me wondering why we don’t regularly enjoy the pop classics.
Isegoria: Apparently Saberhagen’s Dracula Series goes on for nine books!
Bruce: The Dracula Tape and The Holmes-Dracula File by Fred Saberhagen are extremely good, and Saberhagen knew the source material very well.
Benjamin I. Espen: Dracula is like the still center around which a whole constellation of pop culture orbits. You can see a lot of things that were clearly derived from it, yet returning to the original is a shocking and even a refreshing experience. None of the derivatives have its power and gravity.
Isegoria: When I read Frankenstein years ago, I immediately realized how little resemblance it bore to the version of the story I’d osmotically absorbed through the culture.
Phileas Frogg: I’ve returned to Dracula many times throughout the years, and I’m always amazed that each time I pick it up I become more and more aware of the genuine horror of the story. My most recent re-read a few months ago elicited the willies on several occasions, a phenomenon that I really only experienced a handful of times while reading. Excellent novel, and far superior to, Frankenstein, despite the fact that they are paired together so often, and the latter seems to be preferred...
