Welcome to 2023 – There’s Obviously Lots Going On

 

I’ve always said that it is not my intention to burden the followers of this blog (or anyone else!) with an endless stream of new postings just to show I’m busy, I’ve tried to only post when I believe there’s something useful to say.  I have also been spending a lot of time on The Military Philosopher Facebook page with shorter postings and a lot of sharing articles of interest (as well as on my other FB pages).  But the bright and shiny of FB is fading beneath the tarnish and scratches so I’m thinking that this year I will try to share more of my interests here and cut back on my FB time.

Obviously, the Russian invasion of Ukraine remains the biggest ongoing matter of interest.  Pretty much everyone was surprised at the scale of Russian ineptitude and practically awestruck by Ukrainian resistance.  I think the most important point I can offer right now is what I said elsewhere at the very beginning – either Putin has to change his mind about this war, or the Russians will have to change Putin for another leader who can admit failure and cut Russia’s losses.  What happens to Russia after that is anybody’s guess, including the majority of Russians at home and abroad.  I do know that a postwar Ukraine will require major amounts of help and investment, and I fully support integrating them into the EU and NATO if that’s what they want to do.

Otherwise, I will be posting about several of my ongoing projects and some things that in another year might have become lectures, so the content here may roam and range widely.  That said, I’m trying principally to research the American War of Independence in support of the ongoing design of the American Revolution game at the National Security Decision Making Game (found on Facebook).  I am also doing some miniatures painting, currently focusing on Medieval to early Renaissance figures for use with the Fog of War Rules, and may sure some reports on that and related games here.  I have also been working on some solitaire replays of classic Avalon Hill War games to mark the 50^th anniversary year of beginning of my career as a war gamer with the purchase of AH’s hex version of Gettysburg (thanks for the gift, Grandma!).  I will probably also return to my series of articles on classic/vintage miniatures war gaming rule sets in an attempt to capture what these rules brought to the general conversation of war game design and play features.     

For today, I’ll just share some observations on my latest reading – the original novel “The Enemy Below” upon which the film of the  same name was based.  The 1957 film has long been a favorite so when I spotted an early paperback copy in a used book sale, I grabbed it and then chose it to be my first book finished in 2023.

The author was Denys Arthur (D. A.) Rayner, DSC + Bar, VRD, RNVR, an actual veteran of the Battle of the Atlantic.  He published the original novel in 1957, as he explains in an Author’s Note, in order to explore a combat situation he had never actually experienced – a one on one contest between one surface escort ship and one enemy submarine.  He presents a tautly told tale in 146 pages in the 1966 reprint paperback I found.  The movie version officially runs at 97 minutes (per my DVD copy). 

The screenplay was written by veteran screenwriter Wendell Mayes, a US Navy veteran though without combat sea service.  Technical advisors for the movie were identified on IMDB.com and the DVD package as Albert Beck, a U-boat veteran, and Commander C. E. Dunston, USNR.

As is often the case when translating a book into a movie, a number of changes were made and some elements and events in the novel were dropped from the screenplay, the most significant being the change from a Royal Navy to a US Navy destroyer thus making the U-Boat commander’s adversary an American instead of a British Captain.  Also Dropped from the film were the chess games played by the destroyer’s captain and the ship’s doctor, though the screenplay also added more byplay and involvement on the part of crewmembers.

The scenario behind this confrontation remains the same – the U-boat is hurrying to rendezvous with a German raider that has in obtained a set of important Royal Navy code books that would enable Germany to easily locate and attack the Allied convoys essential to Britain’s survival in the war.  The requirement to reach the specified time and location for this rendezvous is what keeps the U-boat on a course and heading that allows the destroyer to find it again whenever the two ships lose contact.

There are also some nice dialogue scenes in the movie in which anti-submarine warfare tactics are discussed and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two ships are noted, which I’m sure was helpful to the audiences of the late 1950s (and even today).  But if you want to have some very interesting reading, head over to the comments section of the IMDB.com entry for The Enemy Below where a number of knowledgeable individuals have offered their evaluations and additions to the discussion featured in the movie!

Bottom line, for me at least, both the book and the movie deliver a taut naval thriller though with much of the feel of the war at sea’s long days and nights waiting for something to happen.  The differences between the movie version and the original book, though, really make me want to see a British studio for a change remake the movie and stay closer to the book!  I’d buy a ticket and a copy of the movie on DVD/Blu-ray! 

 

 

 

Legacy Knowledge versus New Data

 

I am reminded of a quote from Winston Churchill during debate, “I admire the martial and commanding air with which the right honorable gentleman treats the facts.  He stands no nonsense from them.” 

For some time, I have been thinking through a blog post on the unreliability of human perceptions, shaky human reasoning in the arena of war and warfare, and resistance to data-driven analysis over legacy knowledge.   “Legacy Knowledge” in any field usually begins with the stuff “everybody knows” – whether it’s at their mother’s knee, in a classroom, from a mentor, or from their experience, and if they’re smart – from the experience of others.   History is replete with stories of conquering armies that accepted their own status quo for too long, only to be overturned by an upstart foe.  One common element in that acceptance is a tendency to believe the legend.

As Vladimir Putin is now amply demonstrating, decisions about making war are frequently affected by mistaken perceptions regarding threats and miscalculations about the conduct of war.  I have also seen at least one as yet unverified claim that the professional cadre of analysts at the FSB, Russia’s intelligence service, are putting out the word that they predicted this outcome, but Putin and his cronies ignored their warnings.

Some years ago, I went to see a movie called “Moneyball”, based on Michael Lewis’s bestselling book about the impact of data science on baseball.  I finally got around to reading the actual book last year and recognized that this story echoed themes from similar earlier episodes, as well as numerous comments from operational analysts, conflict simulation/war game designers, and systems thinkers about the resistance to their observations from their uniformed services and associated civilian officials.

Previous to “Moneyball”, Steven Johnson wrote “The Ghost Map” about the cholera outbreak in 1854 London and how one persistent maverick physician tracked down its source by the careful collection of information about who was contracting cholera, where, when and looking for the how by systematic study of his data.  His findings were rejected outright and ignored until another outbreak about 10 years later forced the issue.

These stories also bring to mind Thomas S. Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (originally published in 1962) which offered insight into how our knowledge of physics advanced as new hypotheses and theories supplanted old ones.  His study of how the scientific ‘establishment’ resisted new theories and new data contributed to a pattern of revolution in science when suddenly the establishment resistance to new thinking was finally swept away.

Kuhn argued that this concept was not applicable to other fields of human endeavor, I and others disagree with him and have found other fields of human activity in which ‘new’ knowledge faces similar challenges in the face of ‘legacy’ knowledge – for example, the ‘revolution in military affairs.’  The common thread linking these stories is the recurring contest in the human mind between ‘legacy knowledge’ and new data-driven ideas.

How Long Does It Take to Build an Army?

 

An army was originally raised simply by gathering together groups of people (usually men but sometimes women and even children) with whatever weapons they had to hand or could be given.  When the conflict for which they were raised came to an end – the survivors mostly went home.  Over the centuries, it occurred to several civilizations that there was a benefit to keeping an army together even after the conflict for which it was raised had ended.  They apparently knew enough about history and humanity to realize that there was very likely to be another conflict in the not so distant future and keeping an army together that had already fought and presumably won, or at least not lost, the last war was probably a good idea – it would certainly save time when the next conflict popped up and such an army of veterans might even have an advantage in that next conflict.

Keeping an army together even when there is no war for them to fight does offer an opportunity for peacetime training and an improvement of its military skills, and perhaps an opportunity to explore and develop more sophisticated tactics and even operations drawing on the experiences of those veterans.  Improvements to existing weapons or the acquisition of new weapons and the training of soldiers on these weapons might further improve such an army’s prospects in the next conflict.

History is replete with examples of the costs and benefits of sending an army home versus keeping it together against the dangers of another conflict.  I think this is the point at which we transition from raising an army to building an army as a social artifact, an institution within a larger socio-political-economic unit.  So just how long does it take to ‘build’ an army?  History suggests that this is a process of decades.

The army of the United States has been both raised and built over its history.  The army of George Washington was raised and brought to a level of capability that would win our independence, but then it was sent home.  We followed this pattern for much of our history, through a second war with Britain, a war with Mexico, a civil war, a war with Spain and two wars in Europe against Germany and its allies.  For most of that history, we also had a small standing “cadre” army, intended to provide the leadership and training for the army that was raised to fight each of these conflicts.

Faced after World War II and Korea with a potential armed conflict with the expanding Soviet Union and its ‘allies’, the USA decided that it was time to build an army, though still modeling it on our experience with citizens inducted into its ranks for short periods.

One key element in building of an army involves training that army on how to train an army.   Baron von Steuben in his drilling of the men at Valley Forge was actually training trainers as each soldier who passed through his tutelage was expected to return to his own unit and pass on what he had learned.  A critical tool with which you build an army is having good examples.  An army can find these in the performance, behavior, and even demeanor of those who previously served in that army.  The U.S. Army and many others draw heavily upon their own history in heritage programs that endeavor to give the latest generation of soldiers positive role models.  The ranks of our armies, especially among the cadre, have always included members of families for whom such service was a tradition if not the occupation of choice and their names are quickly recognized by students of our military history.  In other words, the examples provided of service across generations are invaluable assets.

A second critical element is that an army has to have something to fight for.  Historians and others have long noted that for Americans, each war is usually presented in the terms of a crusade by which we hope to achieve something better.  Author Michael Shaara gave Colonel Lawrence Chamberlain a speech that addresses that question rather well –

“This is a different kind of army. If you look back through history, you will see men fighting for pay, for women, for some other kind of loot. They fight for land, power, because a king leads them or — or just because they like killing.

But we are here for something new. This has not happened much in the history of the world. We are an army out to set other men free. America should be free ground — all of it. Not divided by a line between slave state and free — all the way, from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here, we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here, you can be something. Here, is the place to build a home. But it’s not the land. There’s always more land. It’s the idea that we all have value — you and me. What we’re fighting for, in the end, we’re fighting for each other.”

Historically, individuals fight for survival, for the comrades alongside them, for their families and their larger community even up to and including the nation they represent.  They fight in the hope that by winning their fight, their families and their descendants will have the chance to live an even better life and not just in a material sense.  But they have to hope and believe that that better future is possible or else individual survival again surpasses all of these other things in importance.

Finally, as with many aspects of the human experience, building an army is not something that can be done for a society – that society has to do it for itself, it has to own that army, that army has to reflect the society for which it will be asked to go to war.  Armies that are not integral to the society will not succeed in defending that society and both will fail.