The 4th of July Defined

Many countries have holidays which celebrate the end of an old regime, and the time when their country was officially created. But I like to think that the American version is a bit different from most of them.

The history taught in schools would have us all think that the Continental Congress was pretty much a bunch of foppish, wig wearing dandies who liked nothing better than to strike dramatic poses and spout off long winded speeches laden with allusions to ancient Greek and Roman culture. This isn’t exactly accurate.

It was on this day 231 years ago that those same dandies told the greatest military power on the planet to go get bent. Any reasonable and accurate assessment of their chances to prevail would have been right down there at zero. Everyone who signed the Declaration of Independence, if they were being honest with themselves, could only expect to end their lives at the end of a noose. Most of their friends would swing with them. Their property and fortunes would certainly have been confiscated, bringing ruin and poverty to their families. But they did it anyway.

Those guys were real men. Balls as big as church bells. Anyone who wants to understand the United States has to start at that basic historical fact.

This day is the quintessential American holiday, and I am going to celebrate it in a way to honor the spirit and memory of the real men who put it all on the line for some impossible dream. I’m going to eat a lot of red meat, I’m going to pal around with my real men buddies, and I’m going to blow some stuff up real good.

Boo-yah!

Independence Day

One of the great sorrows of British life at present is the widespread anti-Americanism both on the left and the right. One can understand why the left should feel so – the United States is the pre-eminent liberal (mostly) democratic capitalist society, all of which they hate.

Why the right should seethe with anti-Americanism is a little more complicated and one that I hope to discuss in greater detail in a future posting. For the moment I simply want to wish all the best to all our American friends for July 4.

A Very Good Immigration Post

Opponents of the wall genuinely think that sealing the border is impossible–at least those in the mainstream do. Furthermore, if they refuse to even entertain the notion that sealing the border is possible a) they will never be proven wrong; and b) their adversaries will never be proven right. And it doesn’t hurt that their stance will make them the favored choice at the polls for the very vocal hardcore believers who think that any attempt to close the borders is a betrayal of their ideals.
 
The argument that X is an intractable problem so we shouldn’t even try to fix it is kind of an odd argument for the left to be making, considering their faith in social engineering. Yet it’s become their fallback position in recent years.

Read the whole thing.

I was wrong about immigration, at least the politics of it. I thought the political divisions would force the competing constituencies into some kind of messy but reasonable compromise that would be an improvement over the current situation. Instead, one side used dishonest arguments and raw political leverage to try to impose its preferred outcome on everyone else, which further radicalized opponents and alienated many citizens who might otherwise have been sympathetic to Bush’s approach.

Whether a real compromise, the status quo or some kind of smaller and more incremental reform is now more likely is anyone’s guess.

Book Review: The Changing Face of War

Eminent Dutch-Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has the rare distinction among historians of having been more right about the future than he has been about the past. His earlier 1990’s works, The Transformation of War and The Rise and Decline of The State were radical interpretations for military history and clashed somewhat with the views of Europeanist and late Medieval specialists but they pointed to the current state of global affairs with great prescience and scholarly authority.

Van Creveld’s latest book, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq is not an example of a historian resting on his laurels but of expanding and extrapolating upon previous ideas. In this book, Dr. van Creveld analyzes the evolution of twentieth century warfare up to it’s WWII apex and subsequent decline to a 21st century nadir of shrunken conventional armies, overloaded with goldplated technology but unable to beat shadowy terrorist groups and ragtag insurgencies armed with homemade bombs.

The perspective here is theoretical ( “trinitarian” vs. “non-trinitarian”), systemic and Germanocentric. Van Creveld clearly admires the technical and cognitive martial prowess of the Wehrmacht and the old Imperial German Army that stamped itself so heavily on the bloody history of the twentieth century. He clearly relates the connection between effective logistical coordination between a mass production, capitialist, industrial economy and the armies in the field, unlike most historians, accurately crediting the Kaiser’s Quartermaster-General, Erich Ludendorff ,for having had the breakthrough insights into the political economy of Total War.

The most interesting chapters are the last ( here I agree with William Lind) where Van Creveld takes premier military historian John Keegan to task and critiques the performance of American arms in Iraq. Van Creveld is returning the warm embrace that the Fourth Generation Warfare school has given his body of work in disputing Keegan’s contention that a Nazi-occupied Europe could not have been liberated by indigenous partisan forces. In my view, van Creveld is correct that the Manhattan Project would have rendered the whole question moot but is wrong in overestimating the ability of partisans to have overthrown Nazi domination.

Assuming the defeat of the USSR, Hitler would have simply liquidated the Serbian people as an example, incorporated the Scandinavian countries into a racial confederation system with Greater Germany, and been satisfied with a National Socialist “Findlandization” of the rest of Europe. Except for Russia, which Albert Speer indicated in his final book had been slated for depopulation and Slavic enslavement with no fewer than 30 million eliminated or worked to death building massive transnational autobahns. Preponderant force would have been used by the Nazis to quell open resistance to the ” New Order” but most European countries would have resembled Denmark or Vichy France, not Poland’s rump state “General Gouvernment”.

Van Creveld’s assessment of American performance in Iraq is bitterly harsh, bordering on vicious, but it is accompanied at the very end by a wise set of ” rules” for counterinsurgency warfare ( van Creveld advises throwing out the bulk of COIN literature as having been written by ” losers”) that merit widespread dissemination. One case study of successful counterinsurgency he points to favorably is the British experience in Northern Ireland where the use of military force was highly economized ( a case he omits, curiously, was El Salvador, where it was not), a general consideration for winning at the “moral level of warfare” when powerful state forces seek to defeat a “weak” opponent.

While The Changing Face of War is not the pathbreaking text that The Transformation of War represented, it is highly accessible to the layman, clearly written and coherently argued. It fits well on the shelf of any serious student of military history.

Links:
Cutting Edge Military Theory: A Primer (Part III.) – UPDATED
William Lind review at DNI
Fabius Maximus review at DNI