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.
Having read Clausewitz, the natural thing to do is to read Antoine-Henri Jomini. So what does he say?
![200px-Gleyre_Antoine_Henri_Jomini[1]](https://i0.wp.com/sfoil.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/200px-gleyre_antoine_henri_jomini1.jpg?resize=200%2C249&ssl=1)
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.
It will soon be summer time and I haven’t written anything here in a while. So, let’s start off with some refreshments: orgeat syrup. Orgeat syrup is, basically, sugar syrup flavored with almonds. It generally imparts a more “refreshing” taste with nutty undertones when used in place of simple syrup in a given drink.
Commercial preparations are available, but rare. So if this sounds interesting, you’ll probably want to brew your own — and fortunately you’re reading this.
I started writing this in January and sort of got stuck on it, along with some other things going on. I’m writing here to sort my thoughts out about something, so it may not be the most coherent.
City-fortresses don’t really exist anymore. If they did, what might they look like? Why would anyone want one?
Bottom Line
Fortifying the city as-is will require billions of dollars, a reserve system, and would probably create a tradeoff between mass resettlement and maintaining accustomed levels of economic activity. Two historically novel problems are the volume of traffic required for commerce and the threat of stand-off attack. The fortress would have no strategic depth to mitigate the effects of air and missile attacks, which are much easier to carry out on the margin than even in the mid-20th century.
On October 22 this year, an Afghan soldier shot three Czech troops in a “green-on-blue incident”, killing one. Afghan security forces captured the shooter and handed him over to the Czechs, who beat him to death. This was an understandable and in fact morally acceptable alternative to turning the prisoner over to a legal system that has lost the trust of those it ostensibly serves through its inability to deliver justice.
What would have happened had the Czechs turned the man, Wahidullah Khan, over alive to the proper authorities? He would have been interrogated; the interrogation would determine whether Khan acted on behalf of others or — often happens — for personal reasons. The problem is what happens next.
Last week, the commanding general of SOCOM Africa was reprimanded over an October 2017 skirmish/ambush in Niger that left four special forces soldiers dead. In all likelihood the actual issue is that the incident brought unwanted attention on the American presence in Niger. Nevertheless, Army’s attitude toward this incident reminds me of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff:
Barely a week had gone by before another member of the Group was coming in for a landing in the same type of aircraft, the A3J, making a ninety-degree turn to his final approach, and something went wrong with the controls, and he ended up with one rear stabilizer wing up and the other one down, and his ship rolled in like a corkscrew from 800 feet up and crashed…after dinner one night they mentioned that the departed had been a good man but was inexperienced, and when the malfunction in the controls put him in that bad corner, he didn’t know how to get out of it.[…]Not long after that, another good friend of theirs went up in an F-4, the Navy’s newest and hottest fighter plane, known as the Phantom. He reached twenty thousand feet and then nosed over and dove straight into Chesapeake Bay. It turned out that a hose connection was missing in his oxygen system and he had suffered hypoxia and passed out at the high altitude…How could anybody fail to check his hose connections? And how could anybody be in such poor condition as to pass out that quickly from hypoxia?[…]When Bud Jennings crashed and burned in the swamps at Jacksonville, the other pilots in Pete Conrad’s squadron said: How could he have been so stupid? It turned out that Jennings had gone up in the SNJ with his cockpit canopy opened in a way that was expressly forbidden in the manual, and carbon monoxide had been sucked in from the exhaust, and he passed out and crashed. All agreed that Bud Jennings was a good guy and a good pilot, but his epitaph on the ziggurat was: How could he have been so stupid? This seemed shocking at first, but by the time Conrad had reached the end of that bad string at Pax River, he was capable of his own corollary to the theorem: viz., no single factor ever killed a pilot; there was always a chain of mistakes. But what about Ted Whelan, who fell like a rock from 8,100 feet when his parachute failed? Well, the parachute was merely part of the chain: first, someone should have caught the structural defect that resulted in the hydraulic leak that triggered the emergency; second, Whelan did not check out his seat-parachute rig, and the drogue failed to separate the main parachute from the seat; but even after those two mistakes, Whelan had fifteen or twenty seconds, as he fell, to disengage himself from the seat and open the parachute manually. Why just stare at the scenery coming up to smack you in the face! And everyone nodded. (He failed—but I wouldn’t have!)–Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff
Feel free to read the whole thing, it’s worth it. Anyway, contemporary “flight test”, and later NASA, were organizations with no tolerance for human error. If cultivating such an attitude required occasionally blaming someone for something that was not, objectively speaking, their fault, well the payoff in effort and vigilance were worth it. Better to reprimand one innocent man than let two others make avoidable mistakes.
How far did the Whorl in Gene Wolfe’s Long/Short Sun books travel? The author leaves a few hints, although they are ultimately inconclusive. Fair warning: if you haven’t read the later novels in Wolfe’s Solar Cycle, this will be of little interest to you.
First, here’s a highly relevant passage from In Green’s Jungles. Silk/Horn discusses how long the Whorl’s journey was, and other characters try to determine how much time has elapsed on Urth since the unruined if rather decadent world remembered by one of the Whorl’s hibernating passengers:
“I only know that it has been about three hundred and fifty years since the Whorl left [Urth]. A bit more than three hundred and fifty, really–three hundred and fifty five, or some such figure.”
“There are seven thousand steps in a league…From what I’ve seen here, the streets are seventy or eighty double steps apart. Say a hundred to be safe. If Eco’s correct in his estimate, four leagues, they’ve been falling down for about two-thousand, five hundred years. If your son is, three-quarters of that should be one thousand, nine hundred, unless I’ve made an error”
[…]
“Old though these houses clearly are, I can’t believe they’re as old as that. No doubt the rate at which they’re abandoned was much higher at one time; but if we accept Cuoio’s estimate and the error is fifty percent, they’re still a thousand years old, roughly.”
So the Whorl traveled for about 350 years. However, it spent an unknown and possibly significant amount of time parked around the Short Sun — possibly as long as fifty years, about the time the other gods rebelled against Pas and Quetzal entered the Whorl. Somewhere between 1000 and 2500 years passed on Urth. Before I go further, I’d like to note something: Gene Wolfe’s Urth is nowhere near as ancient as Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, where the very mountains have worn down to hills.
Anyway: here’s The Relativistic Rocket, which explains in relatively simple terms how to calculate distance, velocity, and time in separate frames given acceleration and other values — which we have.
In my review/exhortation to read of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Short Sun, I avoided spoilers. I will not do so here, regarding my thoughts on certain details of these books.
Well, I’ve done it. I’ve finished The Book of the Short Sun and, with it, Gene Wolfe’s “Solar Cycle”. It was worth it. The rest of this post will assume that you have read or are at least familiar with The Book of the New Sun. The Book of the Short Sun tells the story of a man who strives to fulfill a great vow, perhaps taken too lightly, and changes greatly because of it.
Assuming one has read The Book of the New Sun, I hope to convince you to read the rest of the Solar Cycle.
Senate Armed Services Committee, 2031
Sen. Cynthia Lederhaut: Admiral, this is the third woman to come forward with similar allegations. There seems to have been a pattern.
Adm. William B. Norden, Pacific Command: Senator, I flatly deny these allegations. I’m a married man. I’ve been a married man for my entire service career. I’ve never met any of these women. I’ve —
Sen. Lederhaut: But you were in Laem Chabang on the date Ms. Ginting alleges that you attacked her?
Adm. Norden: I have been there, ma’am,. I’ve been in dozens of ports. I’m a man of the sea. I couldn’t tell you the exact date off the top of my head.
Sen. Lederhaut: But you do remember you never went into the Paupau Sports Bar?
Adm. Norden: I don’t recall, ma’am, no. It’s standard for ships’ officers to conduct a walk-through of bars where the sailors might be going. I’ve been in hundreds of these establishments. But I certainly never assaulted anyone.
Sen. Lederhaut: And no one ever assaulted a local woman? This seems to have been a problem. Maybe still is a problem.
Adm Norden: Well, occasionally we do have sailors commit crimes while ashore, unfortunately — they also commit them at sea and at home, I would add. But they are punished to the full extent of military law.
Sen. Lederhaut: Back to the subject: how do you account for Ms. Ginting’s accusations? And Ms. Ocampo? Ms. Reyes? Maybe there was a misunderstanding? Maybe they mistook you for someone else?
Adm. Norden: I suppose they might be mistaken, Senator. I suppose they might also be lying.
Sen. Lederhaut: Did they all get together and make this up? Is it a conspiracy?
Adm. Norden: When the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains — however implausible — is the truth.
Sen. Lederhaut: And these allegations are impossible?