Plus ca change

I’d recommend Low intensity operations: subversion, insurgency, peacekeeping by Sir Frank Kitson.

I wrote about an aspect of it here which may or may not be of interest.

inexcusably allowed to stagnate (pre-Crimea, pre-WWI) to the point where it is far less effective than it should be

This implies some assumptions about the value of an effective military that perhaps shouldn’t be taken for granted.

I reckon in the modern world, in the large majority of cases where a country’s political leadership has been constrained by a lack of military capacity, the bulk of the popualtion have been better off as a result. No?

(Which is not to say anything against a personal interest in things military.)

If you finish with the army and want to go on to the navy, N.A.M. Rodger would be your go-to guy.

I’d have to recommend:

Beevor’s A History of the British Army – deals superbly with the passing of the old British ‘regimental’ system in the ’90s, and gives an intimate and sympathetic view of life at all ranks in that era. And;

Lewis Page’s Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs – a much less reverent view than Beevor’s, focussing primarily on the war profiteering of BAe, and highlighting the scandalous amounts of UK taxpayers’ money flowing into that multinational’s coffers . Good book, albeit from one of the Tweedle-Dum Tweedle-Dee climate cranks at The Register (Page should really have stuck to writing what he knows best).

Depends when you draw the modern cut-off line – Poland, for example, didn’t exactly fare too well when sandwiched between Prussia and Russia

Yes, I’m not sure about that — when did warfare become so clearly negative-sum as it is now? On the other hand, I wouldn’t take it as given that the majority of Russians or Prussians were better off thanks to their military superiority over Poland.

I just did a delayed take over the following:

Cousins ably describe the intricacies of rank, something I’d previously had only the vaguest idea about, most of it picked up from Persuasion and Vanity Fair.

But Persuasion is about the Navy. I don’t want to seem condescending, but you do know these are two distinct organizations, right? To be distinguished, to a first approximation, as follows: Navy – wears blue or white, rides in boats; Army – wears earth tones, crawls around in the mud. They do both have captains and lieutenants, which is confusing, but if you run into an admiral (Navy) or a general (Army), you pretty much know where you are.

(With Austen, you also get the Navy in Mansfield Park. The Army comes into Pride and Prejudice, where its principal occupation is seducing bubbleheaded teenagers. Austen of course was prejudiced in favor of the Navy, two of her brothers being admirals and all.)

@roac
“I don’t want to seem condescending, but..”
Wow, imagine the tone when the condescension is intentional.

@Maria
Thanks, very interesting post.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t take it as given that the majority of Russians or Prussians were better off thanks to their military superiority over Poland.

Oh, definitely – the position of an average Russian or Prussian was definitely made worse by the presence of a standing army, but the respective states to which they belonged (literally in the former case) managed to make the position of an average Pole considerably worse…

Something about Lewis Page winds me up a bit; a slight allergy to polemic, I think.

They do both have captains and lieutenants

But they don’t mean anything like the same thing.

Until I read this book I had little idea about the sheer intensity and scale of violence in the Revolutionary War, tho’ perhaps not so surprising once you learn about the toughness of the British foe. What’s more a source of wonder is where the Americans found the bottle to take on and persist with such a fight.

Well, technically, they were British too at that point… :)

Standing armies

The aversion to standing armies is hardly a phobia.

No, the main problem is not a direct takeover of the government by your standing army. As long as the army isn’t the most, or only, competent organization in the country (i.e., if you’re not Pakistan or some Central American banana republic), it would seem at least as likely to defend the civilian govt against armed takeover as to perpetrate such takeover.

The problem is that a standing army takes over the rationale of govt, and becomes a purpose of govt, not one of its instruments. “Overcoming a fear of standing armies” is just a nice way to intellectually launder “overcoming a reluctance to become a predator nation and start an empire”.

Even if you have no moral objection to imperialism, it has two inherent practical flaws that should buttress common decency with common sense, and thus lead to rejecting it, and its standing armies.

Once you have a sizeable military force always at hand, using it to solve problems will always dominate other strategies for dealing with the real world, because these other strategies are complex, messy, and involve the certainty of giving up something, while the military option always promises “victory”, whole and unsullied by compromise. His Majesty’s Govt might have responded politically to agitation over taxation from the colonies, and, while one can never be sure about the interpolated outcomes of alternate history, it certainly seems reasonable to conjecture that GB could have had its taxes, and kept the whole continent indefinitely, just by giving 13 colonies a couple of MPs each, and creating a half dozen American peers. But a political solution would have involved creating more Whigs in Parliament, and increasing the pressure for electoral reform at home, and who knows what other complications (most of which actually look more like features than bugs anyway). The govt probably would have muddled through with some such messy, but quite rational, solution, except that it had a miracle cure at hand for all political dilemmas — “Send in the army!”. The victims of this stupidity, the folks who made the new US, took from this experience the lesson that standing armies aren’t even a smart way to do empire, because having one led even a political system for which they otherwise had the deepest respect, that of GB, into abject, howling folly.

The other problem with standing armies is that the stagnation you refer to is their inevitable concommittant. Armies always prepare for the last war, because that’s their only reasonable best approximation for the next war. War is far too complex that anyone could derive a useful approximation of what the next one will be like just from a “bottom up” analysis of the current state of technology. Even if you get one element right of what the army needs to best fight the next war, say you’re the Red Army before WWII and your pre-war doctrine will be proven by that war to be the best available, you’re going to expereince the same disastrous failure as the Red Army early in the war if you don’t have the organization to implement and equipment right for the doctrine as well. In that case, the Red Army actually had the best equipment as well, but it was sunk by its implementation. It was sunk by being a large standing force, too institutionally unwieldy for the organization to assimilate the right ways to implement what it needed to do for the next war, until after they had been forced to muddle through the first two years of that war doing things the wrong way, and thereby learning the right way from on-the-job experience. The Wehrmacht, in stark contrast, had the gift of Versailles, which forbid Germany from having a standing army. They were able to get the organization right because they had to build a new organization to meet the needs demonstrated by the last war, specifically the need to not get bogged down in positional warfare. This new organization, capable of implementing a doctrine that, while not as good as the Russians’, and with deeply flawed equipment (Guderian was so smart, he just knew that his tanks would not have to fight enemy tanks! So he designed them so that they couldn’t, so as not to tempt commanders to use them against enemy tanks.), was apt enough that sound implementation, often forced to improvise, almost won them a war they had no business even coming close to winning, given the materiale and manpower odds. The US did almost as well (though not as spectacularly, since it never had to fight long odds, and a more cautious approach was called for than what the Wehrmacht had to do to stand any chance of winning the unwinnable wars that Hitler got it into) because it also had to build from essentially zero organization after it reintroduced the draft in 1940. By the time the first US ground troops got into combat in North Africa, its Major Generals were almost entirely people who had been Colonels, and even Lieutenant-Colonels, in 1939. This was the key factor that let us start the war with a non-stagnant army, and it would not have been possible had we been burdened with a standing army, with whole echelons of peacetime division, corps, army and army group commands that would have required keeping on hundreds of old-school generals.

The best way to have non-stagnant forces ready for the next war is to mainain in peacetime the absolute minimum force structure needed to ward off any attack on your borders or commerce that potential adversaries can mount with what they already have on hand. (For the US, this means a battalion or two of land forces, and maybe fifty ships, allowing for a very aggressive idea of what protecting our commerce might entail. I can’t see GB requiring any more than that either.) There will be time to build more forces if the need arises, forces tailored to the other side’s preparations, and taking advantage, unburdened by institutional inertia and old generals, of any relevant new technology. If you wait until the need arises, you are much more likely to get what you need for that war, and not be burdened with a standing force that is so prepared to refight the last war, only better this time, that it can’t fight this war effectively.

21:
Do you really believe that two battalions could protect the entire coast line of the United States?

Glen Tomkins …

The Germans and Japanese were certainly better prepared for WWII than anyone else.
But I can’t seem to find anywhere on the internets how all that preparation worked out
for them. :-} In the end did German/Japanese boots host victory parades in London,
Moscow or Washington? Of course they held one in Paris … but that’s because “the
Fwench” are all cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys!

Maybe preparing for the last war is a wiser OVERALL strategy.

Winning the first battles – or even ALL the battles – of a war doesn’t necessarily equate to
“Victory”. The US pretty much controlled the battle field during Vietnam. But, at the end
of the day, when Congress refused to support the South Vietnamese regime, the war
was lost.

Go figure.

Richard J 12.14.09 at 9:06 pm

“Depends when you draw the modern cut-off line – Poland, for example, didn’t exactly fare too well when sandwiched between Prussia and Russia…”

However, Poland was not really constrained by a lack of military capability, in any achievable sense. Poland was not capable at all of withstanding modern Germany and the USSR.

The Germans and the Japanese were not necessarily better prepared for WWII than anyone else. Given that the Wehrmacht was still largely dependent on horse drawn support in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 the America productive capacity in trucks covers a multitude of sins.

And the Japanese pilot training system, while very good for producing a few excellent pilots who got to practice in China for ten years, was completely inadequate for a protracted conflict against real powers.

Only two examples off the top of my head, but things like that count. A lot.

And I never had any problems with the complexities of rank — my mother, who was a full lieutenant in the Navy (some sort of intelligence liaison with the RN — a month before she died two years ago she was telling my daughter “but I can’t talk about that”) drummed it into my head from an early age that a Navy lieutenant was the same as a captain in the army — and a Navy captain (ambiguous title) was close to God.

Thought so.

In the spirit of un-asked-for book recommendations, I’d like to add Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, a study of the counter-insurgency techniques used by the British in Malaya and the U.S. in Vietnam. It reads like a thesis (which makes sense, since it’s based on one), but is the information and lessons are still interesting.

“LEADERSHIP, CHARACTER and INTELLECT are best developed by MARCHING, IRONING and SHOUTING.”
I’m not surprised to hear they still run on the time-honoured standards. My army experience was in the 80s, South Africa rather than British, but from all my reading armies have been much the same since the Romans. They taught me how to iron, sew, make a bed, polish a floor and boots, fold socks; yep, the Army sure made a man out of me. I knew how to do all those things before of course, but not Army Style. It turned out that different corps had different bed-making standards, which was a source of not a few pushups. During officer training, at one point we had to stand at each end of a quarter-mile parade ground, bellowing commands at each other. In a supposedly bilingual environment, I always drilled my squads using English commands, most of which were unknown to the squad. Luckily it worked as for dogs, the tone of command and context were usually enough for surprisingly accurate manoeuvrings.

…”normal nation we used to be”? There’s no such thing as a ‘normal nation’ without military force and the will to project it, at least not if by ‘nation’ you mean ‘nation-state’. Even the peculiar exceptions in the short term, like Sweden and Switzerland, turn out in the longer term to have either an expansionist imperial past or a tendency to export violence in the form of organised mercenary service. Tell Mexicans about the isolationist pacifism of the USA – heck, tell a Native American!

Your argument is not for ‘normal nationhood’, but for anarchism, because it is only without the state itself that you could hope to contain the drive to organised violence that human societies have forever demonstrated. But to get to that state of anarchism, you would first have to have in the minds of the mass of people an unwavering commitment to such an end – else every other political strand, each of which accepts or embraces state violence, would overwhelm [or just ignore] your efforts. When you have that, call me, because I’d love to join.

40:, 41:

By “normal”, I didn’t mean anything normative or ethically fancy, but simply what has been typical behavior for our admittedly wicked country throughout its history.

Sure, “property is theft”, and any country at all has to have, at least in its past, the crime of theft, because you can be sure that the land it occupies used to belong to someone else, which someone was dispossessed with extreme prejudice. But, you know, just because the habits and expectations passed down in my family that made me become a doctor are inextricably intertwined with our past history of owning slaves in order to fund our dabbling in medicine (which did not pay its own way in those days), that does not give me the right to own slaves today, out of some idea that my profession is a noble one that does great good for the many patients I have helped, so I have some right, duty even, to exploit slaves so that I can have the leisure to do all that good. Maybe I could make that argument, outrageous as I actually think it to be, if there were still no other way to support the profession of of medicine other than the exploitation of slaves to do the menial work of living. But we have perfected other social arrangements to support my profession, and so there is not even a question about my needing to add fresh crimes to our long history of such criminality, in order to support the continuation of my family’s less ethically unfortunate little habit of medicine. And so, just because there is a history of crime, and ungoverned expansion and exploitation of other nations, in the history of every nation, that does not at all, even a little bit, justify continuation of ruthless ethnic cleansing now that such is not necessary. Such behavior, when not absolutely called for to eke out survival in the face of similar from some other nation, is, yes, clearly abnormal, and pathological.

Yes, we have a history of stealing this land from the folks who used to live here, and mainly by way of murdering them. And yes, even after and aside from that behavior, we have long had the habit of the occasional crusade. We get all hepped up for a while with the idea that an expeditionary force we send off somewhere in the world will accomplish some good by blowing things up. Or we convince ourselves that if we don’t act, the Kaiser will kill us all in our beds, after raping our women. Sometimes the reality actually does justify some level of crusading activity, as when we went off to end the slave system that my family used to live off of. But usually not. (Anybody out there still think the Spanish-American War was anything but a bloody stupid criminal mess?). And always, well, always before the end of WWII, we would wake up from the madness of the moment, regret at least a folly of going too far in the service of perhaps somewhat justified violence, and cut our military establishment back to the normal corporal’s guard it needs to be to actually defend our country, as opposed to the much larger forces needed for going off blowing things up in foreign countries up in order to improve them.

You don’t keep more than you need for actual defense, in between foreign wars, in normal times, unless you have decided to institutionalize the insanity that once only gripped you in fits. That’s what we’ve done since WWII, and it’s not normal, not for our history, and not for the vast majority of nations for the majority of their histories. It’s not normal to embrace criminal violence beyond the strict limitations of what you have to do to survive. It’s not normal to pretend that this insane, pathologically abnormal way of life comports with either common sense or common decency.

We spend more on “defense” than the rest of the world combined, and we have two oceans to hide behind. That we spend so much, and yet still feel the need to call it “defense”, says it all. If we actually needed all that military might for defense, then maybe we would be in normal ethical territory when we discuss the use of that force. We could talk about whether our need to survive genocide at the hands of some enemy justifies our doing unto them first. But threatened survival is not our situation, not even close, so talking as if we were in some mortal peril from the made-up enemy of the day, and therefore need to incinerate a certain number of “enemy” children in the course of doing a bit of COIN, isn’t normal even for this sinful world we live in. It’s psychotic.

Most countries in history, our country for most of its history, have been constrained to at least some rationality in their military thinking. Military establishments are ruinously expensive to maintain, and we have not had the luxury of being able to afford ruinous expenditure, certainly not for non-productive, counter-productive ends, for most of our history. And the human cost of actually using these establishments for anything beyond the parade ground has, for most nations at most times, kept them back from too easy and ready use. Countries that border other powers have some difficulty staying completely reasonable, because defensive and offensive capability, for countries that share a border, are impossible to disentangle, and so there actually is a potential existential threat even just in their neighbor’s defensive capability. So history is indeed full of the sad consequences of frequent miscalculations in that respect, of stupid wars stupidly conducted. But what we have in the US right now is a whole new level of stupid and pointless warmaking. No nation in history, not even the US in its earlier history, has been able to afford this level of sustained stupid. We don’t even have threats on our borders to inspire any level of rational fear of conquest. We’ve let paranoia take on a life of its own. We invent threats to fight, then listen breathlessly to official reports that, for what, the twentieth time, our forces have succeeded in killing al Qaeda’s number three man. As if there is anything to al Qaeda except an idea. As if al Qaeda has some sort of table of organization, with a little box marked “number three man”.

The people who buy this crap aren’t normal. Killing to survive may not be pretty, but yes, it is normal. Killing for no better reason than to perpetuate a system that allows us to sleep-walk through history is not normal. It’s pathological. It’s like a malignancy, in that it has no limits within itself, and can only be controlled by destroying either the mad idea or the people possessed by the idea. I vote for the former of the two alternatives, but that position could become an increasingly small minority in this world unless we stop behaving insanely in that world and learn some self-control.

I’m not convinced there is a country on earth today with a functioning state (certainly no rich country) whose residents’ physical security is more threatened by a lack of military capacity, than by an excess of it.

Well, duh. Because if there were a rich country whose security was so threatened, they’d, you know, buy more military capacity.

any country at all has to have, at least in its past, the crime of theft, because you can be sure that the land it occupies used to belong to someone else, which someone was dispossessed with extreme prejudice.

“The US” != “every country in the world”.

I subscribe wholeheartedly to the propositions that (1) the US military is too big, and (2) the US has, throughout its history, gotten itself into far too many unjust and/or unnecessary wars in the past 50 years. However, I don’t think that as a practical matter, fixing (1) is a very promising way of fixing (2). I’d rather tackle (2) directly.

Read a lot of military history, I do, and the rap on the British Army is that they produced tough, skilled enlisted men but the officer corps suffered over the centuries, thanks to the vicissitudes of the class system. Too many dilettantes, and too much professional military education for officers was self-education on the part of the competent few. In the American Revolution, for example (yes, David Hackett Fischer’s _Washington’s Crossing_ is a modern classic) there were some true professionals like Clinton and Cornwallis, but they were outnumbered by incompents like Burgoyne and, most disastrously, Howe. Sir William was far less a soldier than his brother was a sailor — Howe was popular with both the troops in America and the ruling class back home, but notable for both tactical incompetence (Breed’s Hill) and operational/strategic bungling (the followup to Long Island plus the New Jersey & Philadelphia campaigns). Whoever mentioned the Flashman novels is on target — a great thing about those books is that they often highlight not only the famous Victorian-era buffoons but also the lesser-known professionals who really did built the Empire. Good luck with your reading!

@49 – and thus very important to the standard of living we enjoy today… [/irony]

It is always worth thinking on the subject of ‘what would have happened in India [e.g.] without the British?’ When one actually does that reflection, in the knowledge of what other rulers in the region from the late seventeenth century were like, it is quite hard to imagine a way in which it could have turned out better. [There were ‘modernising’ Indian rulers by the early C19, for example, but as they ‘modernised’ their armies and their state administration, they tried to use them to expand their monarchical power and territory by force.]

Which is emphatically NOT to say that it turned out unequivocally well, and people may have an irrational prejudice for being oppressed by rulers with the same colour of skin if they choose, but it is at least arguable that a] there wouldn’t be an ‘India’ and ‘Indians’ today without the British Raj, and b], without coming on all Monty Python, India might well lack the infrastructure and the rule of law it has today likewise. And who knows what horrors might have been perpetrated to at least match, if not surpass, the 1857 repression, the Bengal famines, etc etc etc?

If one is to go down the road of decrying imperialism out of hand, one is not very far away from wishing that nothing had ever happened, anywhere, to change anything. Which is a fair point, ethically, given all the downsides of change, but then can we brutal oppressors have our internet back, please?

When the British (actually the British East India Company…the 1857 rebellion was not a revolt against the Raj but against rule by a corporation) invaded India it was one of the richest regions in the world. When they left, it was one of the poorest.

When I was born, I was less than half as tall as my father. I am now slightly taller than him. But it does not therefore follow that, at some point in the last few decades, I sneaked up on him and cut his legs off.

If one is to go down the road of decrying imperialism out of hand, one is not very far away from wishing that nothing had ever happened, anywhere, to change anything.

Wow, just wow.

I’m not going to respond to Alex, I think. I’m just going to contemplate that glorious bit of Fail.