Category: Military History Page 1 of 2

Go Tell the Spartans

On August 9, 2019

In Defense of the Spartans

Sparta is synonymous with discipline and militarism, and has been since at least the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. Some people have a problem with this. Sparta’s reputation exists and promotes certain forms of virtue; it’s also simply a description of the way the United States currently handles war.

I’m going to link several articles disparaging the Spartans, their reputation, or their admirers, and I was specifically motivated to write this in response to Myke Cole’s article in The New Republic. However, this isn’t just about these links, but also what I’ve observed in reactions and comments to these writings, often from people I respect, and some private and/or offline discussions and conversations I’ve had in the past few years.

The Spartan Mythos

In brief, the Spartan mythos: warfare is the most important of human endeavors, and excellence in warfare is thus the highest form of human excellence. The foundation of excellence in warfare is discipline and training. War and the preparation for war being the most important individual or collective effort, they should be emphasized and prioritized at the expense of all other fields – commercial, artistic, philosophical, romantic, religious, etc. Sparta is the exemplar of all these things. I would add that even in the meanest conceptions this mythos is readily scaled – it can apply and be applied anywhere from the individual to the national level.

There are some other important secondary attributes of this mythos. In short these are elitism, austerity, and the primacy of human over other factors in performance. The Spartan mythos is also highly masculine, historically sometimes to the point of homoeroticism.

Modern complaints about this mythos amount to three things: that it’s factually incorrect, that it’s immoral, or that it inspires bad people.

The Myth as History

The focused study of anything will reveal previously unknown knowledge to the student. This sounds obvious, but if the student subscribes – even implicitly – to critical theory, then even trivial revelations on hoary topics like Athens & Sparta can produce a sensation of toppling temples of narrative oppression. My eighth grade teacher LIED! In reality this is little more than a variation on the strawman. Yes, there is more to the history and legend of Sparta than what’s in the head of a bro who just watched 300. No, this doesn’t mean that you’ve “deconstructed” said history.

Just as a particularly egregious example, take this article. The most charitable explanation for what’s written at that link is that the author – probably angry about seeing someone he didn’t like sporting a molon labe and/or 300 helmet symbol (this is a common irritant) – typed “Sparta” into Wikipedia, and combined it with some unexamined conceptions about Ancient Greece. For instance, we learn that “The Spartans were Morons” because they used terrain to their advantage and, besides, “they lost”. The battle, that is, not the war.

I know this might seem like cherrypicking a bad example, but the link above is only meant to illustrate the tendency of certain acquaintances to “well acktually” about various details whenever Spartan Ideals are brought up.

The facts are this: the Spartans had a distinctive constitution distinguished as much from other Greek states by communalism as by militarism dating back to some indeterminate period after the Greek Dark Ages. By the time of the fifth century BC, Sparta was clearly one of the major, successful poleis. The Spartans cemented a reputation for military prowess at Thermopylae in 480 BC, and continually proved their predominance until they were decisively defeated by the Thebans at Leuctra in 371 BC. Yes, they had a hard time of it during the Peloponnesian War and some Spartans surrendered at Sphacteria, just as a far larger body of US Marines surrendered on Corregidor. Sure, Thermopylae was a loss and the numbers involved were somewhat exaggerated for propaganda purposes. But it was indeed a very heroic act of uncommon valor, had a significant if not decisive effect on the invading Medes, and inaugurated several generations of Spartan success.

So, a hundred-year run of markedly superior performance if not outright supremacy in war. And that, without the benefit of any real edge in either armament or numbers. Sparta instead relied on a “Spartiate” warrior class who trained a little harder than their competitors by driving their slaves a little harder to pick up the slack. At the same time, this period happened to coincide with the Athenian Golden Age, supplying the historical record with several immortal philosophers and historians praising not merely the combat record of Sparta but also its national character, and by which we receive most of the details of the Spartan mythos: discipline, quasi-ascetic restraint, laconic wisdom. While war and training for war enjoyed primacy in Spartan society, it did not come at the total exclusion of other functions: the Spartans held festivals, composed and recited poetry, constructed public buildings and monuments, etc. The Spartans were rather insular and secretive compared to other Greek states and Athens in particular – “xenophobic” might be an appropriate modern term — something that subsequently got rolled into a general perception of “elitism”. Nevertheless they were not a hermit kingdom, and conducted foreign relations in a more or less typical manner.

While it’s quite true that Sparta’s time in the sun didn’t last forever, it did in fact take place. Yes, Sparta declined and eventually became a tourist attraction before fading into more or less complete irrelevance. So have other great states, and on the subject of longevity I very rarely hear the same mouths mock the Spartan failure to maintain a three-thousand-year polity praise the millennial longevity of the Roman church. There is certainly a degree of historical contingency as to why Sparta rather than, say, Thebes, or Switzerland, or Qin China epitomizes the militarized state in the Western mind. But it is not a bad example of such a state; there is real history behind the legend.

The Moral Status of the Spartan Mythos

A more intelligent objection to the Spartan is that while it has a real basis in historical fact, it is morally wrong or just plain contradicts other values like republican democracy. King Alfred may have been a great guy but that’s not how we roll.

I think it’s important to draw a distinction between Sparta as an object of national mythology or even emulation, and of individual inspiration.

Myke Cole’s article cites several historical examples (Machiavelli, John Adams, the Kibbutzniks, the Nazis, Brexiteers) of people or groups who aspired to some variant of the Spartan mythos. I’d like to point out that none of these examples – even including the later, racist people who are Cole’s ultimate subject – wholesale adopted the constitution and social organization of a fifth-century BC Greek polis, what the kids today refer to as “LARPing”. Indeed the very diversity of Cole’s examples shows that details matter and in reality even those who buy pretty heavily into Spartan mythology as an organizational principle can and do pick and choose what aspects of the mythos to incorporate without much danger of accidentally adopting Lycurgus the Lawgiver’s views on slavery. This is something that I’m sure Cole has little trouble seeing when looking at e.g. ISIS vs the Islamic Republic of Egypt.

There’s also the fact that “Spartan” works just as well as an individual ideal as a national or organizational mindset. It’s perfectly common for anyone who pursues excellence in some specific field to do so without any expectation that his goals have some universal applicability, and if this causes the practitioner to come across as or even actually be somewhat elitist in outlook this is not some great moral crime. There is a very real and recent history of tremendous evil committed in the name of workers’ rights, but this isn’t automatically grounds to discredit OSHA, or the SEIU.

Besides, the Legend of Sparta isn’t even some key ingredient in actual militarized states! North Korea, particularly under Kim Jong Il’s “military first” program, is at least a candidate for the closest extant analogue to the literal Spartan polis, and yet while I’m sure that some of their founders and leadership have at least heard of Sparta, Classical Greece Laconic or otherwise has no real historical influence on Korea.

(The other strong candidates for a modern Sparta are Switzerland and Israel. Notice that all three are substantially different.)

Even other states that have to some degree deliberately adopted Spartan mythology have done so only partially, and the relationship is typically one of convenience rather than causation, the way interventionists prefer the philosophy of Wilson to Washington. Neither Frederick II nor Jefferson Davis would have acted any differently had Sparta never existed.

This is particularly relevant to Myke Cole’s article – which is after all entitled “The Sparta Fetish is a Cultural Cancer”. Cole notes, as I have, that a large and diverse array of people and peoples have expressed some admiration of the semi-mythical Spartan ideal, repeatedly and often with considerable fervor, since the establishment of the Spartan constitution sometime around 900 BC. While this includes such benign entities as Medici Florence, it also includes people whom Cole doesn’t like (Trump supporters), and people whom nobody likes (Hitler). Well, so what? The very ubiquity of Sparta’s appeal across time, space, and ideology suggests that Cole’s “concern” about the appropriation of Spartan imagery by his political opponents means very little.

The Spartan Ideal as Descriptive

I think there is something else going on here too. The Angry Staff Officer gets at it in this post. “Stop Calling Us Warriors”, he pleads, singling out the Spartans among a few others. I agree, but there’s a problem, which you might have noticed in the section above. The Spartan mythos isn’t merely aspirational. It can also be descriptive. And the description is basically accurate in an important way.

The United States is openly engaged in combat in 14 different countries as of January 2019, not to mention dozens of other “training and assistance” missions in which combat is at least a prospect. Virtually all of this is conducted by special operations forces, who employ only the most rigorously selected and intensely trained troops in actual combat while maintaining a comparatively high ratio of support personnel and “enablers”. If SOCOM thinks of itself as “Spartan”, as both Cole and Angry Staff Officer rightly point out they quite often do, then where’s the lie? They are what they are, a feted warrior elite, and when they reach into the big bag of signifiers describing what they do all day, that helmet is going to be in there somewhere near the top.

This also, by the way, applies to law enforcement, which is afforded all sorts of privileges over the citizenry which bear more than a passing resemblance to those exercised by the Spartiate over the helot even as the origins of “law enforcement officers” as militia officers becomes ever less relevant.

The role of Spartan imagery in the above is completely irrelevant to any objections about the professionalization of military and law enforcement.

In conclusion, the legend of Sparta’s military prowess has a real historical basis, the legend itself has a long and varied history, and is a legitimate if rather amoral source of inspiration for both movements and individuals.

Clausewitz and Jomini

By sfoil

On April 29, 2019

In Military History, Military Theory

Now that I’ve read Clausewitz and Jomini, I suppose it’s only fair to compare them. I think it boils down to this: Clausewitz attempted to gain timeless, fundamental insights with some success. Jomini thought in more practical, concrete terms. This (along with Clausewitz’s early death) probably accounts for the popularity of Jomini’s views in the 19th century, and Clausewitz’s 20th century resurgence.

Notes on Jomini

By sfoil

On April 22, 2019

In Military History, Military Theory, Tactics

Having read Clausewitz, the natural thing to do is to read Antoine-Henri Jomini. So what does he say?

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I read the 1862 translation of The Art of War (1838), which includes some later-written appendices and afterthoughts.

On the whole, Jomini concerns himself with the practical side of military operations, even delving down to the lowest tactical level. He considers politics (and morality) only loosely connected to the question with which he concerns himself: how best to move, sustain, and employ military forces most effectively. Despite his reputation as a highly prescriptive theorist, he is too wise to claim that following his dicta will guarantee victory even in favorable circumstances, although he writes in a very forthright and confident manner when expressing his ideas.

Jomini has two basic principles: identify and concentrate on a “decisive point”, and ensure that one’s line of communications be kept open to the “base” from which the army issues. His major corollary: the use of interior lines allows an army to outperform its opponent in accomplishing these tasks.

How Effective Were Civil War Rifles?

By sfoil

On September 30, 2018

In Military History

The armies of the American Civil War fought (mostly) with muzzle-loading rifles. The expanding Minie ball allowed muzzle-loaded rifles to fire at the same rate as smoothbore muskets. Rifled muskets had existed for hundreds of years previously, but rifling required a tight seal between bullet and bore to work and so loading a rifle meant hammering the bullets down inside instead of just dropping it. The Minie ball fell freely down a rifle barrel, then expanded against barrel grooves when fired.

This made bullets more accurate. How much did this contribute to the bloodshed? In Battle Tactics of the Civil War, Paddy Griffith proposes that it made little difference. Griffith’s overall thesis is that the Civil War was the last of the Napoleonic wars, not the first of the modern wars. Regarding the alleged impact of rifled muskets, he basically makes the following claims:

1. Increased length of battles, not improved weapon effects, drove casualty rates. Civil War soldiers didn’t die in such large numbers because rifle fire was more lethal, but because because they fought longer.

2. Documentary evidence, while sketchy, suggests that the actual engagement range of Civil War rifle infantry units was no higher than of Napoleonic smoothbore infantry, and this fire was no more effective (see above).

3. Whatever the theoretical capability of Civil War rifles, soldiers lacked either the training or experience necessary to exploit it.

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Chart from Griffith’s book comparing the Civil War to the unquestionably “modern” WWI and Napoleon’s campaigns.

These assertions might be true. The rifled musket didn’t need to significantly improve the killing power of infantry fire to have a tactical effect. I believe that above any improvement in killing power, rifles enabled Civil War units to deliver suppressing fire effectively in a manner that was not possible with smoothbore muskets.

Griffith’s Assertions Are Not Ridiculous

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I have this rifle, an M1903, sighted at 100 yards. I fire at a target 400 yards away. Based on intuition, how far does the bullet fall below my sight?

“Hanoi’s War” by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

By sfoil

On August 27, 2018

In Book Review, Military History

Lien-Hang Nguyen used unprecedented access to Hanoi’s governmental archives to write her 2012 book Hanoi’s War, a political history of the Vietnam War from the northern perspective focused on two powerful key figures in the North Vietnamese government, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho — the most powerful man in the northern government and his protege and chief negotiator, respectively. The book had less insight into northern military operations than I’d hoped, but it’s still an excellent if somewhat preliminary work and I eagerly await Nguyen’s next major work.

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The ATGM Threat Part 2: Early Countermeasures & Modern Developments

By sfoil

On August 5, 2018

In Military History, Military Theory

In the last post, I recounted the history of antiarmor weapons up to the development of the anti-tank guided missile (ATGM). Now I’ll look at early countermeasures, and how well they hold up now.

Tactical Countermeasures

As stated previously, ATGMs allowed standoff both for aircraft and ground troops against armored vehicles. The Israelis, facing these weapons for the first time in 1973, struggled to counter the new threat of the AT-3 Sagger ATGM. The Yom Kippur War only lasted about three weeks, so all combatants were stuck with the equipment they had at the outset with no time to develop or even purchase new weapons. With no hope of a technical solution, the IDF settled on three basic tactics: suppression, evasion, and obscuration.

The ATGM Threat Pt 1: A Brief History of Anti-Armor Weapons

By sfoil

On August 2, 2018

In Military History, Tactics

Right now, I think that anti-armor weapons have gained an upper hand over tanks and other armored vehicles, and that the United States is falling behind in anti-anti-armor measures. They can take several courses to correct this. First, however, I want to lay out the history of the threat and how the current situation developed.

The First Tanks

Although it wasn’t the first battle in which tanks took part, the Battle of Cambrai in 1917 is the first major combined arms attack with a significant armored component, the use of armored vehicles beforehand having been relatively piecemeal. Together with the infantry of the 51st Highland Division, 476 British armored vehicles took part, of which 350 were combat vehicles (the rest were supply carriers and mobile radio stations, with perhaps some engineers in the mix). The attack succeeded, although as usual in the First World War the attackers proved unable to exploit their gains over the following days.

Are Paratroopers Good For Anything?

By sfoil

On July 30, 2018

In Current Affairs, Military History, Military Theory

Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls, mountains, nor seas could afford security.

– From Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson

Inspired by a recent discussion at Naval Gazing.

“When Failure Thrives”

Airborne operations have not, historically, proven very successful. The current size of airborne forces in Russia (VDV) and the United States is purely the result of institutional inertia and parochialism. Read this and weep.

To briefly recapitulate the linked article: The most successful airborne assaults, launched by the Germans in 1940 (e.g. Eben Emael) in hindsight relied on the total novelty of parachute infantry. Even by later in WW2, airborne operations became less likely to succeed and more costly when successful than the Happy Time of the early war. At any rate, advances in air defenses and increases in the numbers of light armored vehicles (which lightly armed paratroopers have difficulty fighting) in rear areas made a repetition of operations like Neptune (Normandy jump) suicidal after WW2. Airborne operations, being useless against serious militaries, were increasingly confined to “interventions” against weak or non-state forces.

fallschirmjager

The 82nd Airborne owes more of its existence to the Nazis than NASA does.

“Crusade” by Rick Atkinson

By sfoil

On July 3, 2018

In Book Review, Military History

I originally heard Rick Atkinson’s “Crusade” mentioned in a discussion about French & British forces underperforming during Desert Storm . I put it on my to-read list, found a copy in a used bookstore, and read it. Atkinson doesn’t actually have that much to say about the British or the French. “Crusade” is a solid chronicle of the war, and even though it’s not in the same league as Atkinson’s best work, he did produce it rather quickly (published 1993), especially given the detail of both the sources and the writing. The title derives from Atkinson’s thesis — that President George H.W. Bush drummed up support for the war by turning it into something that it wasn’t, a great Crusade — but he thankfully doesn’t spend much time on this.

crusade

Is There A Mission For A Space Force?

By sfoil

On June 28, 2018

In Current Affairs, Military History, Military Theory

Or is it like Indians trying to form a navy with their canoes? There aren’t any significant space trade lanes to block or keep open (…someday…), but a space force could focus on establishing “space supremacy” in a manner analogous to air supremacy.

Why Separate Service Branches Exist

The army is the oldest and most basic military service (indeed, “military” used to refer only to the army). I’m not familiar with the history of navies as a distinct organization from the army, but humans have been plying the oceans since well before recorded history. It’s clear that the crew and officers of military vessels were at least somewhat distinct from soldiers even in Antiquity. What’s important is that a navy does something that doesn’t and can’t involve the army: enforcing or denying freedom of navigation. This requires establishing command of the sea.

Sometimes an army may need to move things across the water in support of their operations on land, and they might have some vessels to enable this. Likewise, navies use marines in support of their own operations. But “the navy” doesn’t invade Donovia, and “the army” doesn’t blockade ports.

Which brings us to air forces. The fundamental reason that independent air forces exist is strategic bombing. Armies and navies only operate on the two-dimensional surface of the earth or ocean. If an army wants to burn down the enemy’s capital, they have to move there, and if anyone else is in the way they have to fight them and win first. The navy has to get off their boats if they want to take anything over, especially if the objective isn’t near the coastline. With the airplane, you just fly over the enemy, drop your payload, and the target dies.

In theory, at least. Air power advocates had and continue to have a serious problem overestimating the effects of strategic bombing. That being said, it ain’t worthless, it isn’t going away, and it empirically exists outside the purview of the army and navy — that’s what the “strategic” adjective is really doing there.

In an air power-centric view, establishing air supremacy (which is air superiority, but more of it) is a derivative mission of strategic bombing. Air forces must establish some control of the air in order to attack targets on the ground and bomb the enemy into submission. Destroying enemy aircraft accomplishes very little, materially, on its own. Of course the army and navy don’t want to be attacked by enemy aircraft either, and in reality this is part of the reason you want air supremacy, not just because it enables you to conduct strategic bombing. At any rate, we can see that air supremacy is basically a “shaping” or enabling rather than decisive mission, not something that achieves strategic objectives on its own. You’ll note that “air operations in direct support of ground forces” or close air support doesn’t really fit into this picture; this is the source of endemic squabbles over whether the USAF should have any responsibility for it at all.

The air force isn’t the only novel service branch. The Soviet Union maintained a separate Air Defense Force. I’m not directly familiar with the logic for doing so, but I would guess it is because their view of air supremacy aligned with the above: it’s to enable strategic bombing and maybe protect expeditionary ground and naval forces, not to defend against enemy bombing. Russia continues to have a separate “Strategic Missile Force” service for the operation of nuclear missiles, viewing this as sufficiently different from strategic bombing by aircraft to justify a separate service.

So What

Right now, the individual services put things into space in support of their operations on the ground. Joint coordination must occur to make sure no one crashes into each other, and to mitigate the formation of information silos, but that’s about it. Claiming that this justifies a new service branch, on its own, is a bit like deciding that naval aviation or army mariners should form their own service.

The lame answer is that the Space Force just serves as a coordination center for defense-related space operations, sort of like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. This might fix some hypothetical coordination problems between the uniformed services and civilian agencies like the National Reconnaissance Office, but while the current state of such coordination is far from public knowledge there aren’t any obvious signs of problems.

The most obvious role for a Space Force is “space supremacy”: deny the use of space to the enemy and enable it for the United States. Since there are no strategically significant activities in space outside of Earth’s orbit, the space force’s purview would be limited to near Earth, as a practical matter.

The space force could also supplement or supplant civilian agencies like NASA in conducting space exploration, in a Faustian bargain exchanging militarization for funding. However, while space pilots usually come from the military, the majority of work is done by civilians doing identifiably civilian jobs in science, engineering, and administration.

Notice that space supremacy doesn’t derive from the need to live or trade in space. Even space-based weapons would only be incremental upgrades from currently existing strategic bombing methods. So far norms against space weapons have held up pretty well, if only because any “improvements” over ICBMs are likely to be self-defeating for game theory reasons.

Perhaps someone in the White House or DoD thinks they can skirt the relevant norms and treaties by putting only “space-to-space” weapons in orbit — the real fear being space nukes — by avoiding nuclear or even kinetic weapons (orbiting jammers). I don’t know if anyone has ever recovered an enemy satellite from orbit for investigation — it’s possible. If so, sensitive satellites might have anti-handling devices. EOD…in space.

The need to police and control access to off-world or orbital installations, which would pretty strongly justify a space service, is completely irrelevant for the foreseeable future, as those things don’t currently exist.

Space Supremacy

So, at least for the foreseeable future, “space supremacy” is probably going to be the basic mission of the space force. Separation from the air force would be justified on the basis of differing technical requirements and — maybe — even to avoid excessive militarization by keeping the brimstone scent of strategic bombing away. What space supremacy is, is obvious by analogy to air supremacy: allow friendly use of space and deny it to the enemy. How to go about it, and then actually doing it, might be something for a new service to work on.