War and Peace

Book Review: The Changing Face of War

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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

The Vietnam War (eventually) resulted in an American victory

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There is a pretty heated discussion about the war in Vietnam, among other things, in the comments of this post by Ginny, so these observations by Jerry Pournelle should contribute some useful context:

Viet Nam was a US success because a great part of Soviet transport production including trucks and such was built in the USSR, transported at great expense to Viet Nam and destroyed by USAF. When North Viet Nam invaded the South in 1975 they had more armor than the Wehrmacht had at Kursk, and more trucks than Patton ever had in the Red Ball Express. This was all replacements for similar amounts of materiel destroyed in 1973 when the US at a cost of 663 US casualties aided ARVN in repulsing a 150,000 troop invasion — fewer than 40,000 ever got back home — bringing with it more tanks than the Wehrmacht had at Kursk and more trucks than Patton ever had — none of which ever got home.
 
Viet Nam helped convert the USSR into Bulgaria with missiles. They neglected their own infrastructure to send materiel to Viet Nam for us to destroy.

As Pournelle also writes in his post, Afghanistan was yet another war of attrition that finished them off. One important reason why the Soviets didn’t realize all that in time was that they lied to each other. If displeasing your superiors with reports about problems is risky, you simply report successes all the time. The West in turn didn’t notice what happened because our spies didn’t get to hear anything but the misinformation Soviet officials were feeding each other. That’s also why the victory in Vietnam didn’t feel like one for decades. While Iraq isn’t Vietnam (it can’t be repeated frequently enough), the example of the long-term success that the Vietnam turned out to be should serve to demonstrate the virtue of patience. Iraq will only turn into a defeat (in the long as well as the short run) in case of a premature troop withdrawal (but that is an issue for another post).

Duty Calls

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My mother was sharp-tongued and, perhaps I am as well; we were not particularly close. But reading Ann Althouse’s post today, I recognize and salute an attitude. It is true that my mother wanted to leave the village in which she grew up; it is true that she worked her way, first through high school and then college. The Waves, as the service is for so many, was a way out and up. But she joined the Waves in the first months of the war because she embraced duty as she embraced rights. As her mother had “demonstrated” because she thought women deserved the vote, my mother enlisted because she wanted to ensure that right. I was shocked when a woman in my Sunday School class described her work as a nurse during WWII in terms of oppression we weren’t given the same money as the men, we weren’t. . . and I thought how such an idea would never have occurred to my mother. She felt lucky to serve.

She remembered those years fondly because she traveled the country; she met and worked with politicians and a variety of women, all of whom wanted to give. She spoke with pride of the women she recruited. One had parents who invited my mother to dinner and fervently said that their daughter didn’t want and they didn’t want for her a “feather dusting” job. She wanted to serve. She spoke of African-American girls with all the qualifications for officers who wouldn’t, yet, be enlisted into that route (she held back for a couple of weeks one such application, hearing that officer training would be soon integrated; her African-American enlistees were then put early on that fast track.) In Oklahoma, in the forties, she worked late in old office buildings, following communication paths.   Fifty years later, when she died, a group of Waves, now, too, in their late seventies, drove the hundred miles and paid their respects at her funeral.

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Memorial Day

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Lexington & Concord, Saratoga, Valley Forge, Yorktown, the burning of Washington, Battle of New Orleans, Chapultepec, Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, Appomatox, Little Big Horn, San Juan Hill, Belleau Wood, Meuse-Argonne, Pearl Harbor, Bataan Death March, Midway, Kasserine Pass, Normandy, Bastogne, Okinowa, Inchon, Chosin Reservoir, Ia Drang Valley, Hue, Linebacker II, evacuation of Saigon, Desert Storm, 9/11, fall of Baghdad, Falujah — victories and defeats, a hundred battles, a thousand skirmishes, countless deeds unknown to history.

Gratitude and respect for America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and all who have gone in harm’s way to defend America and destroy America’s enemies. God rest the souls of those who died, God give strength to those who were harmed or maimed in the course of their service, God sustain the families of all who serve. God bless America.

(Wretchard discusses the evil of our current and future enemies. If you smirk at the word “evil” you are going to have a rude awakening in the years ahead.)

UPDATE: Neptunus Lex gives us an honor roll for Memorial Day. (Via Photon Courier.)