Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Thursday, July 31, 2014

A Timely Lesson from the Great War?

Adam Hochschild, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, argues that one of the reasons why the First World War was as bloody as it turned out to be was because the British, French, and German senior officers cut their military teeth on colonial wars. The British, at the Battle of Omduran, had machine guns and artillery to use on a force armed with swords, spears and blackpowder muskets.

They were all used to having massive fire superiority against underarmed and often poorly disciplined native forces. They went into the war convinced that things would be no different.

But they weren't. The Reichsheer wasn't a bunch of "Fuzzy-Wuzzies" or Boers. They had Maxim guns and heavy artillery. The British Army, still, maintained three cavalry divisions, when cavalry had been shown to be worse than useless against troops with machine guns and that the only useful purpose for horse flesh in France was as draft animals. And even though it had long since been shown that German soldiers weren't going to panic and flee, the British insisted on mass charges.[1]

But has the lesson of the First World War been learned? It was been nearly seventy years since our nation has faced, on the battlefield, a foe as equally capable. One of the lesser-known historical points from the Second World War was that, until later in the war, the Japanese pretty much kicked our asses in surface ship actions. They had better gunnery, better powder for night gunnery and their Long-Lance torpedoes cut through American destroyers like sabers through a wheel of cheese.[2] The mass daylight bombing raids, until the arrival of large numbers of long-range escorts, were turkey shoots for the Germans.

What doomed the Axis, ultimately, was that the Allies had the resources of most of the globe available to them. Germany and Japan only had what its soldiers could see. When the Enola Gay opened its bomb-bay doors over Hiroshima, there was probably about as much aviation gasoline in Japan as there was at the Army Air Force bases in the Marianas.[3]

So what happens, come the day, when our soldiers have to face a foe which is not wearing homespun robes and carrying old AKs? What happens when the enemy has drones and satellite reconnaissance? Will our own generals, then, having cut their teeth beating on Iraqi insurgents and Afghani Taliban, be mentally prepared to take on an equally-matched enemy? Or will they, like the European generals a century ago, think that their technology will be enough?
______________________________
[1] It is an enduring mystery as to why Kitchener and Haig weren't court-martialed and shot.
[2] If the Japanese had used their submarines in the way that we and the Germans did, it would have been a much different sort of war.
[3] And much better gasoline, to boot.

8 comments:

S O said...

Cavalry of WWI wasn't worse than useless. It was still the premier scouting and security force in mobile warfare, on the Eastern Front and in the Levante.
Its scouting-trained peronnel was even preferred for recce in infantry divisions.

The massed employment of battle cavalry fighting on horseback had been given up decades earlier already.

Mark Rossmore said...

Aye, "pick on someone your own size," as they say. The next biggest possible foe would be China. I can't say anything about their ground forces, but their surface ships, fighter aircraft, and missile technology is improving rapidly. One on one, their J-20 may not be quite as advanced as an F-35, but give it enough numbers and you'll have a fight. Budget and management ridiculousness aside, I think the F-35's a decent airplane, but it sure isn't some kind of superweapon.

If there's one thing the Chinese have on their side, it's numbers. Watching the Chinese Olympics opening ceremony back in 2008, one thing that struck me was the sheer amount of people they could field for a specific task. Obviously, fighter pilots are not dancers or drummers, but in a game of numbers, it's always good to have a bigger population from which to pull your talent and build your tools.

The New York Crank said...

"[1] It is an enduring mystery as to why Kitchener and Haig weren't court-martialed and shot."

No mystery at all to that. They were "our kind of people." Had they but been cockney conscripts from the gutters of London, why, of course one would have tied them to posts and blown their heads off with a hail of firing squad bullets.

But one simply can't go about shooting gentlemen, can one? Let that happen and next thing you know, they'll be imprisoning investment bankers, Supreme Court justices, and corporate thieves. It would all be too horrible to contemplate.

Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank

montag said...

Kitchener had the decency to be lost at sea before everybody realized what an ass he was. Haig was on the winning side, would have been very bad form to give him what he needed so he got a cash bonus and a fancy title, kind of like today's CEO's.

Andrew S. said...

The European powers all had advisors watching the carnage in the Russo-Japanese war, where massed charges of Japanese infantry into the machine guns of Port Arthur's defenders. All parties involved chose to disregard that stark warning and commence merrily marching an entire generation of men (check your privilege!) into hopeless advances.

We've forgotten what taking casualties is like. One generation of Americans saw the hell of the Civil War, the next saw the hell of WW1, and the next saw the hell of WW2. We take 10 casualties in a single day in the sandbox and it's front-page news with wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Our tactics rely completely on total air superiority. Absent unopposed skies, we're going to learn very quickly what it feels like to lose entire companies at a go.

blackhorse said...

To compare the Boers to the Zulus, Fuzzies, or even the wild tribes on the northwest frontier is a great disservice to the Boers, who were excellent irregular warriors and taught the Royal Army many lessons that were applied between 1914-18. While the days of the great cavalry battles were over as S O points out they were still the best arm for scouting and patrol.

The condemnation of Lord Kitchener and Genl Haig sound like the error of seeing the past through contemporary eyes. The political and military leadership on both sides of the '14-18 acted within the limits of the knowledge, corporate and learned, that they had access to. A better question is why didn't MacArthur face a court-martial for his actions against the bonus marchers and his failures to follow War Plan Orange and protect the Philippines?

Oh well, live and learn.

Richard said...

Deconstructing a NYT article is like shooting fish in a barrel. This article is a target rich environment. I will note several things. Only the British and French had significant colonial wars. The Germans and Russians had only small scale wars and the Austrians none at all. The prevalence of British officers with colonial war experience was related to the small size of the British Army. Less so the French but any ambitious officer would have wanted combat experience and colonial wars were the only game in town. The use of the Gatling gun in the Civil war was so insignificant as to provide no lessons, though the Russo-Japanese war should have. Cavalry has been doing stupid things since before the invention of firearms like charging longbows and pike walls. Just aristocrats being aristocrats.

And if we are going back in history to shoot Haig, can we please shoot Westmoreland and Hodges too.

A.B. Prosper said...

Who would we, we meaning the US fight? Europe isn't going to be fighting anyone. Heck the US faces internal stressors enough for a civil war on ethnic lines, Since its essentially becoming Brazil two, in not that many years it will have the same military wherewithal

Russia? The Neo-Cons would love that till either the Russian winter eats our forces or the button gets pushed.

A Russian invasion of Poland is I guess a plausible Causus Belli but it seems remote.

China is not a likely target for ton or reasons and I suspect that if they ever build enough sea lift to take Taiwan it will be too late fr us to afford the risk

A Sino-Russian war over Siberia or water is possible but both powers are prepared for regular war it doesn't meet the criteria.

My hunch is that the 21st century will end up bloody but more in a regression to the old world of raiding and feuding with few real wars.

That said if the West manages Procto- Cranial inversion they certainly will need to be prepared for large scale warfare.