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.
I am pleasantly surprised that Obama made the right choice in standing up to Chinese provocations. Chinese provocations of new U.S. Presidents have become almost a ritual and I worried that Obama’s seemingly reflexive response of apologizing to aggressors would lead him to back off and apologize when the Chinese made their move.
He didn’t, at least so far, so he deserves credit from a critic like me for making the right choice.
Venturing out to sea on boats during the bad old days of Viking culture was tantamount to suicide.
Their longboats were marvels of engineering. Shallow draft so they could travel up rivers, yet also able to operate in the open ocean, they were the perfect craft for lightning commando raids. They were also fast enough that they could catch any ship the Vikings could see, using oars for propulsion while larger ships were at the mercy of the wind.
If a band of Vikings set their sights on taking a ship, there wasn’t anything the merchant skippers of the day could do to prevent a screaming group of northmen from swarming aboard.
But then some nameless genius, or more likely a group of geniuses, came up with a brilliant idea. If it was impossible to prevent the Vikings from boarding, why not build ships where the crew could fight them after the pirates were on deck?
This simple concept led to a ship known as the Cog, or cog-built ships.
Ironically, the general design was adapted from the Vikings own merchant vessels, but there were two changes that proved to make all the difference. The European ship builders constructed little wooden forts in the front and rear of the ship. They called these wooden castles the “stern castle” for the one in back, and the “forward castle”, or “fo’c’sle”. Quaint names that echo with past blood and terror.
The idea was to let the Vikings come aboard if they so chose, while the crew retreated to their forts. The pirates would be out in the open, vulnerable to any sort of attack, while the crew fought from relative safety.
A recent post at Strategypage.com tells a sordid tale of double dealing.
“Russian police caught a group of naval officers (including at least two admirals) trying to smuggle 30 anti-submarine missiles and 200 bombs to China.”
The idea was to mislabel currently used weapons as obsolete, and then sell them to China so Beijing could reverse-engineer the technology. This news article gives us some more details.
It would seem that the Russians have been uncovering various criminal plots in their military with astonishing regularity over the past few years. While they have always struggled with corruption and graft, it would appear that things have really taken off.
“Over 400 Russian military officers were convicted of criminal offenses in 2008, army prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky reports in an interview with the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper (Rus). The offending officers included 76 base commanders, and around 300 were senior staff, including 20 generals.”
The Russian military took it on the chin after the fall of the USSR in the early 1990’s. The economy was in turmoil, and funding for the troops was pretty much non-existent. Stories of how the armed forces were crumbling, such as how army bases would go dark because the electric bill wasn’t paid, were legion.
But that was supposed to be all in the past, as Russian oil and natural gas sales to an energy starved Europe revitalized the ruble and brought the good times back. Those who think that the recent US economic turmoil is forcing Russian generals to turn to crime as a desperate measure to stave off starvation should consider that the internal investigations to root out corruption started well before our own recession. And, as this op-ed from the UK Telegraph explains, Russia certainly had so much cash as late as October of 2008 that they offered a huge bailout loan to Iceland. A recent post at Strategypage.com reinforces the impression that the Russian government is going to keep spending money on the military, no matter how bad the global economic downturn.
This is probably the barely visible signs of a massive bureaucratic conflict that is raging between entrenched officers in the military, and the government at large. This essay mentions in passing that Putin has been trying to forcibly retire officers who are left over from an antiquated mobilization system, but the generals are refusing to go.
“The Army officer corps has stalemated the massive Defense Ministry reforms. This has delayed the forced retirement of thousands of senior officers. The officer corps wants to retain the 19th century “mobilization army” system. This requires conscription of most of the male population, and maintaining those men in reserve units (which are commanded by thousands of well paid senior officers). Russian leader Vladimir Putin sees this system as unworkable. Too many young men evade the draft and the country cannot afford to equip up to a hundred reserve divisions. Moreover, Russian nuclear weapons protect the country from invasion, and what the country needs is a smaller armed forces manned by professionals. But the officer corps is having none of it, and are digging in their heels, and calling in political favors.”
It seems to me that this is a case of “Use it or lose it”. The officers facing forced retirement, looking at their remaining decades spent as poor pensioners clipping coupons for dog food, realize that they only have a limited time to use their positions to cash in. Sell military technology to the Chinese and become a traitor to The Motherland? As long as a big pile of cash is on the table, then sign them up!
(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)
Chapter Four of Book V of On War is titled “Relationship between the Branches of the Service.” This chapter, however, doesn’t really seek to explain the relationship between the branches (infantry, artillery, and cavalry). Instead, it seeks to explain the relative strengths and weaknesses of the three branches. The specific relationships between the branches are left for us to intuit.
Clausewitz explains the strengths right off:
“The engagement consists of two essentially different components: the destructive power of firearms, and hand-to-hand, or individual, combat. The latter in turn can be used for either attack or defense (words here employed in an absolute sense, for we are speaking in the broadest of terms). Artillery is effective only through the destructive power of fire; cavalry only by way of individual combat; infantry by both these means.
In hand-to-hand fighting, the essence of defense is to stand fast, as it were, rooted to the ground; whereas movement is the essence of attack. Cavalry is totally incapable of the former, but preeminent in the latter, so is suited only to attack. Infantry is best at standing fast, but does not lack some capacity to move.” (p.285)
Clausewitz then enumerates his thoughts on the combat arms:
“1. Infantry is the most independent of the arms.
2. Artillery has no independence.
3. When one or more arms are combined, infantry is the most important of them.
4. Cavalry is the most easily dispensable arm.
5. A combination of all three confers the greatest strength.” (p.286)
And so Clausewitz starts beating around the Combined Arms bush.
Africa’s World War – Congo, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
By Gerard Prunier
I am not an expert on African military affairs but have a high degree of interest in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which many have called “Africa’s World War”. I wrote this post as I started researching this topic and will write additional posts as I learn more about the topic. I hope that this is as interesting to you as it has proven to be to me.