Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Everything old is new again. Via Richard North comes this interesting discussion of innovative mine-detection and -clearing techniques used by the white Rhodesians against Mugabe’s insurgents.
See also this post and this post for an insightful and much broader discussion of British military capabilities and political/military errors in the Iraq war. (These posts are not recent but remain highly relevant.)
It all started today.
At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, on April 19, 1775, a company of minutemen from Acton responded to the call to arms initiated by Paul Revere (who rode with other riders, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, with Prescott the only one of the three who was able reach Acton itself) and fought at the North Bridge in Concord as part of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The Acton minutemen were led by Captain Isaac Davis. When a company was needed to lead the advance on the bridge which was defended by the British regulars, Captain Davis was heard to reply, “I haven’t a man who is afraid to go.”
The colonists advanced on the bridge; in the exchange of musket fire that followed, Captain Isaac Davis and Private James Hayward were killed and Abner Hosmer, also of Acton, was mortally wounded. Davis was the first officer to die in the American Revolutionary War. In Acton they refer to “the battle of Lexington, fought in Concord, by men of Acton.”
Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW)
Of the military theories developed in the last quarter century, none have stirred the heated feelings in the defense community quite like Fourth Generation Warfare has done. In part, this is due to the unsparingly harsh criticism that leading 4GW advocates have directed at both the mainstream Pentagon establishment and the rival school of Network-centric Warfare; mostly though, it is because 4GW questions the validity of the current defense establishment itself. If 4GW theory is correct, then much of the American defense budget amounts to so much waste. As 4GW theorists would have it, money ill-spent for exquisitely high tech weaponry that will not work as promised, purchased for the kinds of wars that are never again going to be fought. The 4GW school is riding high right now; not simply because the GWOT lends fertile field for study and examples but because the outcome of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War was far more accurately predicted by 4GW theorists than by the conventional military experts. This was despite the fact that Hezbollah is not quite a “true” 4GW military force, but a state sponsored hybrid whose vulnerabilities the IDF failed to exploit.
What we currently call the poverty line is so high that only the top 6 percent or 7 percent of the people who were alive in 1900 would be above it.
Robert Fogel (Via Arnold Kling). RTWT.
This post is the first in a series that is not intended for those bloggers or readers who already follow military affairs closely; for them it contains nothing new. Nor is this intended to be an exhaustive investigation of any specific military theory. Instead, it is written for those who would like to know more about buzzwords like ” Core-Gap”, “4GW”, “Open-Source Warfare” and “COIN” that have begun seeping into the MSM and the mainstream blogosphere and who would enjoy a set of links for further investigation.