sfoil blog – Page 5

If You Speak English, Read Paradise Lost

On July 18, 2018

You shouldn’t read the Inferno without reading the Purgatorio, at least. Should English-speaking students be required to read the entire Divine Comedy as do their Italian counterparts? No, if they have to read an entire epic, it should be Paradise Lost instead, although the current-day focus on Shakespeare is fine.

Dante is important to Western culture broadly, but he’s far more important to Italy in particular. From what I can tell, Dante is far more important to the modern Italian language than Shakespeare is to modern English. Milton himself wrote in English of course, and while admittedly the language of Paradise Lost is more difficult in general than Shakespeare, it’s not impenetrable to a bright student, nor does it require an antiquarian bent to appreciate as does Spenser. I can’t read Italian, but translations of Dante don’t have the same touch as Milton’s English.

The Inferno Isn’t the End of The Divine Comedy

By sfoil

On July 17, 2018

In Classic, Review & Recommendation

As a high school student I was assigned Dante’s Inferno. Well, selections from, although being an overachiever I did read the whole thing. Unfortunately, this is no way to go about doing things, although in hindsight I oughtn’t be surprised that our glorious public education system prefers to teach children about Satan, or to dwell on sin without repentance or redemption.

gustave-dore-the-inferno-canto-15-1861-trivium-art-history-1.jpg

Pictured: Divine Retribution. Not Pictured: Divine Mercy.

Women in Combat Pt 2: The Nose in the Tent

By sfoil

On July 16, 2018

In Current Affairs

Women are generally incapable of reaching the level of fitness required of male soldiers, and cause social problems when integrated into previously all-male units anyway. This doesn’t matter, because effectiveness doesn’t motivate military gender integration. Ideology and careerism do. These same factors virtually guarantee that the military won’t be able to hold the line on a single, high standard that only a vanishingly small number of women have any hope of achieving.

What is “Combat” Anyway?

Advocates of gender integration are quick to point out that women have already been in combat (Gen. Neller’s predecessor openly opposed integration). The problem is that “combat” is a broad category. The Army, for instance, considers “close combat” to be the use of direct-fire weapons (engaging with or being engaged by anything pointed directly at a target, as opposed to standoff weapons like artillery). The following activities are all (rightly) considered to be “combat”:

A truck driver being blown up or ambushed while on the road. On top of the truck sits a gunner who’s responsible for shooting anyone who’s a threat. This is dangerous, but does not require a great deal of technical skill or physical fitness, and rarely or never involves sleeping rough.
A tanker or other combat vehicle crew securing the above convoy. This appears similar to the truck driver, but operation and maintenance of these vehicles requires substantially more physical strength and endurance than noncombat vehicles. Also, the crew are expected to endure worse conditions as a matter of course.
An artillery battery that often fires directly at enemy on the mountains surrounding their firebase. Living conditions are the firebase are austere but reasonably comfortable.
An infantry unit that guards the perimeter of the firebase. Occasionally they shoot or get shot at. Patrols over a single night occur but are rare and even more rarely result in fighting.
A special forces team that lives in a foreign village for several months at a time. Shooting is rare, but when it does occur, the team may be on its own for several hours at least. Living conditions are extremely and deliberately primitive.
A direct-action task force. They attack at least one objective (possibly several) every night but live on a major base where living standards approximate an American town.

All of these tasks have differing physical demands and living conditions. Note that while a woman should have little problem with being a truck gunner, she will have a much harder time being a tank gunner. Likewise, while she can man a guard tower, she won’t be suitable for an extended patrol. The specific conditions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan mean that these roles have suffered some degree of conflation, usually biased towards becoming physically easier. Many infantrymen spend an entire tour guarding a wall, and many (most, actually) tankers never spend 24 hours outside of a base. This creates an opening for claims about units like military police or truck drivers to say they do “the same job”, which is true, but what’s different are expectations, that combat units be required to do things they may not actually have had to do in a specific conflict.

Likewise, something about the elite direct-action teams. They spend most of their time hanging out on large bases. This allows for female support personnel to “work with the Rangers” or whoever, outside the wire even, while living in extremely comfortable conditions and, of course, not having to actually meet the incredibly high standards for the operators of these teams.

By the way, anyone claiming that “modern combat” isn’t physically demanding because you just press a button or whatever is either clueless (most likely) or deliberately and outrageously mendacious, and anytime someone emits such a statement I invite the hearer to scrutinize the background of the speaker carefully; the result is often illuminating. Yes, such roles do exist, but it’s not what we’re talking about. And they’re not enough to win wars on their own, anyway.

The point of all this is that just because women have “been in combat” and even generated photogenic casualties, it doesn’t follow that they ought to be integrated into combat units.

The “Fine-Toothed Comb”

The military services will never lower standards, but they will change them. For instance, recruiting standards were changed around 2005-2008 in order to support the “Surge” in Iraq. Qualitatively inferior soldiers were admitted to the Army. Externally, the Army claimed that it was simply examining the records of prospective recruits more closely. For instance, instead of automatically rejecting anyone diagnosed with a felony conviction or diagnosed psychiatric condition. After all, just because someone was prescribed Ritalin for ADHD or got busted for a bag of pot a few years ago shouldn’t preclude someone from being able to Serve Their Country, right? Lies, of course — standards were lowered. The quality of these soldiers was immediately obvious to unit leadership, as it had been with McNamara’s Morons two generations before (the Surge recruits weren’t that bad, but it was noticeable). Internally, a colonel in the Army’s training command went on a tour of major installations and gave a presentation where he blamed the problem on Millennials. Eventually, the “suicide epidemic” (in active service, not among veterans) turned out to be an artifact of admitting recruits with psychiatric conditions.

This sort of history is probably the number one reason that service members are suspicious of any changes made to physical fitness requirements. The current standards aren’t as relevant to task performance as they need to be, but at least they were developed before pro-integration meddling was a problem.

The “Standard” isn’t the Norm

One thing I’m suspicious of personally are canards along the lines of “Only Those Who Meet The Standard” will be permitted into combat units, because as things are now The Standard doesn’t reflect actual expectations. Anyone who barely clears the bar to graduate initial entry training is borderline if not outright inadequate for performance in an actual unit, and absolutely unacceptable for a leadership position. I’m extremely concerned that women meeting the “you’re allowed to wear the uniform” but not meeting the customary standards of their unit will lead to such customary standards being declared “toxic” even though they are a direct result of the tactical tasks required of such units.

Efforts to quantify combat tasks remind me of McNamara’s failed Vietnam-era policies; that they’re openly motivated by gender integration efforts doesn’t inspire confidence.

What Will Be Enough?

Any reasonable standard will mean that only very small numbers of women will be permitted into combat units, and those women will be markedly substandard in their physical capabilities, especially compared to unit leadership. Because of the twin motives of egalitarian/feminist ideology and careerism, I don’t think that a 1-5% proportion of female combat troops with below-average promotion rates will mollify calls for gender integration. Once it’s “proven” that (some) women can “meet the standard”, that standard will then be lowered, both formally and informally, in order to increase the proportion of female combat troops. Emphasis on physical fitness and even tactical performance, being a barrier to the advancement of female soldiers, will become toxic. Careerist female soldiers will happily go along with this, probably with the usual resentments resulting from a correct perception of contempt from the men around them.

Slanted media/propaganda coverage, along with simple institutional repression, will ensure that dissenting voices are unheard while misleading the public about the demands of service and the capabilities of soldierettes. I have personally witnessed unexceptional or downright incompetent women made the subject of glowing public-affairs releases, as has most anyone who has served for any length of time.

Women in Combat Pt 1: A Bad Idea

By sfoil

On July 7, 2018

In Current Affairs, Military Theory

Physical differences between the sexes are so great that any reasonable definition of fitness for combat will exclude the overwhelming majority of women. The remainder aren’t worth the justification that they will provide to lower standards or the negative social effects on previously all-male units.

Physical Differences

Strength differences between men and women are so great that only the very strongest women are around the average level of male fitness. A man of above-average strength will probably never encounter a woman stronger than him between puberty and senility. This gap can be “rectified” somewhat through the administration of androgenic hormones, but unless the treatment starts before puberty and continues indefinitely it won’t succeed in closing the gap and will probably only make the ersatz male more prone to injuries given differences in skeletal structure. (Differences in skeletal structure already account for some portion of the increased musculoskeletal injury rate of females under heavy loads).

Mint Julep Idiosyncrasy

By sfoil

On July 6, 2018

In Drinks

It’s hot, and you don’t like to drink the chilled rice-based swill that passes for “beer”. What do? Perhaps the mint julep…is right for you.

Mint julep recipes are highly variable, but have several things in common: mint, sugar, bourbon, and ice. The IBA recipe:

6 cL Bourbon whiskey

4 mint leaves

1 teaspoon powdered sugar

2 teaspoons water

In a highball glass gently muddle the mint, sugar and water. Fill the glass with cracked ice, add Bourbon and stir well until the glass is well frosted. Garnish with a mint sprig.

Aside from the fact that this is a triple-strong drink — which may or may not be what you want — it’s light on the mint. I’m not sold on powdered sugar either. By the way, in this and other julep recipes it’s assumed that the highball glass is metal, hence the “until frosted” direction. Don’t wait for glass glasses to frost. Silver straw optional.

“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

RIP Harlan Ellison – Story Recommendations

By sfoil

On June 29, 2018

In Anthology, Classic, Review & Recommendation, Science Fiction

Plenty of people knew Harlan Ellison personally, I don’t have anything to add. Here’s one anecdote, courtesy of Cirsova. I’ll recommend some of his short stories to read in memoria, however.

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.

Count to a Trillion as the American Three Body Problem

By sfoil

On June 27, 2018

In Modern, Novels, Science Fiction

The Three Body Problem and John C. Wright’s Count to a Trillion are both about humanity confronting imminent invasion by highly advanced aliens. However, Liu is an Atheist Chinese and Wright is a Christian American, so things don’t go quite the same way in the two stories.

I will point out one significant technical difference. The Trisolarans in 3BP will arrive from Alpha Centauri in 400 years, while the much more massive Hyades Armada spends a leisurely 10,000 years en route to Earth. Eschaton’s characters acknowledge that maintaining a single continuing civilization on this time scale is preposterous, something that 3BP’s characters don’t (think they) need to worry about.

Wright’s characters are much more proactive in attempting to control their destinies than Liu’s. Fatalism, not to say nihilism, dominates the worldview of the characters in Liu’s series. Ye Wenjie and the ETO betray humanity because she wants to see the world burn; Del Azarchel and the Hermeticists do it because they want power. Both Azarchel and Montrose refuse to give up their attempts to assert their will against the powers of the heavens.

North Korean Nuclear Weapons as Economy of Force Pt 3: Conclusion

By sfoil

On June 26, 2018

In Current Affairs, Korea, Military Theory

We took a look at the comparative effects of a conventional artillery attack and a nuclear attack on Seoul. North Korea has maintained the ability to inflict tens if not hundreds of thousands of fatalities on the South using inaccurate and labor-intensive but voluminous long-range artillery fire for decades. Nuclear weapons allow North Korea to maintain the threat of a countervalue attack on Seoul, while providing more flexibility than their current deterrent forces. Also, the probable reliance of the North Koreans on chemical weapons in a shooting war means their legacy “conventional” deterrent already stands a high likelihood of provoking nuclear retaliation by South Korea’s American ally.

Even given high rates of missile interception, nuclear weapons allow the North Koreans to accomplish with a few munitions what previously took hundreds of thousands. And antimissile defenses are not perfect. Not every missile will be hit, and not every hit will actually kill the warhead. The use of decoys and saturation salvos are likely tactics that would lower the intercept rate against North Korean missiles compared to those fired from Yemen in the linked article.

The nuclear deterrent is also more flexible. Nuclear-tipped missiles can threaten not only all of South Korea — including important ports like Busan and Pohang that are out of reach of long-range artillery — but also off-peninsula support zones such as Japan, Okinawa, and Guam. (North Korean nuclear ballistic missiles are probably useless against naval targets — they aren’t accurate enough and they can’t likely get target-quality data anyways). They even open up the possibility of retaliation against the US mainland.

missile ranges

Ranges of North Korean missiles, 2016

Nuclear weapons can point not only to the south but to the north. The North probably doesn’t consider China a threat in the same way they do the South Koreans or the United States, but there’s intents and then there’s capabilities, and China has a lot of capability sitting on the other side of a comparatively lightly-defended border. If Kim thinks he’d ever like to do something the Chinese might not like — such as Korean reunification — he’ll probably feel a lot more comfortable being able to announce that any invasion would or could be met with nuclear retaliation.

The point is that the North’s nuclear weapons can replace their conventional deterrent while adding a lot of capabilities that howitzers and artillery rockets can’t, and it probably isn’t even costing them that much. Again, North Korea can spend ~10% of its current defense budget on its nuclear program to replace an entire artillery corps, at the absolute minimum, and may set the stage both militarily and politically within the North for an even further drawdown of the North’s bloated conventional forces, a legacy of Kim Jong-Il’s “military first” economic policy.

North Korea isn’t the only country which has ever made this calculus. The United States made a similar, deliberate choice in the 1950s to counter Soviet forces in Europe with nuclear weapons on the grounds of cost-effectiveness. Stephen Schwartz of the Brookings Institution, who wrote the Atomic Audit book I cited in the last post, believes that this was ultimately false— however, he attributes this to the development of an excessive diversity of warheads and delivery systems, pork barrel politics, and mismanagement of the targeting process, NOT to the cost of nuclear weapons themselves. North Korea, even if they are totally unaware of this history, is constrained by its poverty into not investing trillions of dollars into overkill. One warhead type mounted on a few dozen missiles of various ranges — culminating in submarine-launched and intercontinental types — will suit them fine.

All of these benefits also suggest that North Korea’s nuclear weapons aren’t going away. The “international community” has already “allowed” Pakistan, Israel, India, and the People’s Republic of China to build nuclear weapons. The examples of Pakistan and Israel are particularly instructive: in both instances, a relatively small state threatened by larger neighbors (India, the Arab states) maintains a nuclear deterrent as an equalizer. In many ways this asymmetric viewpoint is a more natural use of nuclear weapons than as one more asset in the arsenal of wealthy states with large militaries.

Robert Oppenheimer cropped

God created the nations, but J. Robert Oppenheimer made them equal.