perfidy

Naked Villainy has an all-new, completely redesigned site that, mysteriously, looks exactly like the old one. Though it was irritating seeing the blank screen over the weekend when I wanted to see if he'd commented on the Civil War post...

The funny thing about this result is that I just can't see well enough to hit much beyond 250m consistently. Even 300m is a little, um, hit or miss, and I never qualified Expert because of it. I fired an SVD once, and was hitting at 500m+ with no optics, but still I doubt that I would ever be capable of real reach-out-and-touch-you shots that real snipers can make. And my personal safety equipment doesn't include far shooters. I do have a Chicom SKS, but even with its robust round I wouldn't trust it much beyond 200, 250m and anyway it's in rough shape. Instead I rely on close-in stuff. Well, it's all about the threat you preceive you're facing. For me, it's zombies, and I'm putting my stock in point defense and escape.

"You scored as Sniper Rifle. You like sharpshooting. Stealth, accuracy and range are your best friends. So you a need sniper rifle (if you don't already have one)."
 

This cow and this cow should not be allowed to meet and breed.

Or so sez Carston Stormer in his second installment in Die Welt. Apparently he is touring Iraq with American forces and writing about these half crazy warriors, their war movie existence, and "extinct" cities like Fallujah. At times the trip really seems to be a vehicle for Stormer to write about himself, but that's really nothing unusual in modern journalism is it?

The short version of the article is that he was waiting for a helicopter by himself, reading a book. After a bit a soldier walks up, seemingly to wait for the same ride, says "God bless you", and sits on the ground next to him. Hilarity ensues.

In my sole interaction in a quasi-journalistic fashion with Special Forces, they were nothing but helpful and professional. Now, I was working for a guy who was there at the invitation of unit leadership. But I think that's nominally beside the point. The fact that Stormer's understanding of SF lies somewhere between a war movie and mythology is enough for you to understand his limitations.

My translation below the fold. For a cleaner version consult with NDR or your local native speaker.

Jesus and the Special Forces

It is said that soldiers of the Special Forces shoot first and ask questions later- which is usually unnecessary by that point. Journalists to these men are “scum”.

Have you ever seen an American war movie? Black Hawk Down or Jarhead? If you haven’t, it’s really not so bad. You see bold men, with full beards and weatherbeaten faces, burnt brown, without uniforms but heavily armed. That is the Special Forces. They jump with precision behind enemy lines, riding on horseback through the desert, a saddlebag stuffed full of dollar bills. So soll schon manch ein Kriegsfürst umgestimmt worden sein (you’re on your own with this turn of phrase, sorry).

In Germany the Special Forces are called the KSK (Kommando Special Kräfte). No one knows exactly what they do, everything is secret. It is said that they shoot first and ask questions later- which by then is usually not necessary. It’s best if one treats it like buffalo- without looking it in the eyes. You might try to photograph them once; at best you’ll lose your camera.

The other day I was sitting on the airfield in Baghdad, waiting for a helicopter and reading Axel Hacke. The sun shone, a nice winter day in Iraq. I was sporting a beard. And I was burnt brown, since when I was home in Germany I took a couple sessions in a tanning bed- the better to hold my endorphin levels (?) in balance on gray winter days. But otherwise, I had nothing in common with members of a Special Forces unit. So anyway that was my look- fatigue pants, bulletproof vest, and smoking a Camel.

After a while a soldier came over and planted himself next to me in the gravel. “God bless you”, he said. I nodded and, unsolicited, he told me his life story.

That he was depressed after returning from the the first Gulf War. That he never again wanted anything to do with war. So he got out of the Army. Stupidly he took to drinking, and it cost him his wife. One night Jesus appeared to him in a dream, two weeks after the United States & co marched into Iraq.

“Rejoin the Army, my son”, Jesus said. “Go to Iraq and convert the unbelievers to the True Faith. That is your mission.” He listened. “Jesus was my rescue.” But He had concealed that Muslims make unwilling converts. That’s why you have to kill so many of the guys, said the soldier. It’s really pretty frustrating- but it’s the only way. Then he asked what I did for the Army- Special Forces? Private security?

Journalists are “scum”

“What? No. Journalist.”

“Uups.”

He didn’t run away, but he didn’t say anything more to me, either. Just took another quick drag on his cigarette. A few moments later another guy sat near us. Beard, khaki pants, M-4 machinegun. And he said “Buddy” to me. He too immediately began to chat about his life. The fact that I was trying to read a book was of no interest to either of them.

He said, “I was in the Special Forces for a time.”

“Sir...“, said the one to whom Jesus had appeared, to the other. “Sir...“ No reaction.

It’s a shame that I’m too old for that sort of work now, the bearded one continued. The hip, he said, still has shrapnel in it. Souvenir from Afghanistan. That’s why he’s now with a private security firm. Convoy security, that kind of thing. “Good money, very good money.“

“Sir!“, quacked the other one next to me, this time emphatically. “Sir!“ No reaction.
Then he told me a good deal of the funny and secret details of the hunt for terrorists behind enemy lines.

“So,” he asked me, “What’s your mission in Iraq, buddy? Special Forces? Marines?“

“Ahhh…”, I said.

„Siiiirrrr, now listen up“, said the first one. „That is a J-o-u-r-n-a-l-i-s-t.“

Journalists are sort of the natural enemy of the Special Forces. Or is it the other way around?

Silence.

“Scum,” he said, the one who’d called me “Buddy”, and both men disappeared.

The whole thing was a little unpleasant, and in the whole time I had hardly said a word.

Rocket Jones totally breaks character and links to something relating to rockets instead of his usual diet of never-ending reviews of very, very bad movies. This one is an interesting one - on how economy of scale could make even disposable rockets reasonably affordable. Most of the skullsweat invested in lowering the per-pound-cost to orbit focuses on building reusable vehicles, or in some way using advanced technology to duck the inherent limits imposed by the rocket equation. (Or, the think up crazy shit like using atom bombs or Indian rope tricks.) This guy points out that if we just build rockets in job lots of thousands, they'll be cheaper. I find it hard to find any flaw in what he's saying, especially since our entire economy is based in large part on that very concept. The funding proposal he ends his article with is in line with my own thinking - the key point being that the chicken/egg dilemma is the real stumbling block in the development of affordable space travel. I've said before that a guaranteed government contract for ten launch vehicles of a given level of performance would result in advances pretty darn quick. His idea has the advantage of supporting effectively any launch technology - by aiming at launches, rather than vehicles. A cheap enough disposable rocket could meet the requirements as well as a more advanced reusable, and would be an easier technological target - and would, in the meantime, provide the launch market that everyone insists is there, waiting for launch costs to drop sufficiently. That alone, and certainly in addition to government launch contracts, would get the ball moving.

And all for less than the cost of a single shuttle launch...

You may think that there is no connection between Apple's OS X operating system and German armored vehicles. You would be wrong. I knew there had to be a real reason I wanted a Mac, and not just effete aesthetics.

People who know me well know that my political views are a hybrid - I'm incredibly socially liberal (in fact I'm buying heroin from a gay BDSM enthusiast right now while putting the finishing touches on my homemade beer sales business) but economically variable.

You see, I’m a knee-jerk fiscal liberal. How can it possibly be that there are limits to what the richest, most powerful nation in the history of the world (and how good it feels to write that, ya know!) can accomplish? But of course, this lovely theory crashes and burns in practice. I would love, in an ideal world, for our government to handle feeding the poor and clothing the naked and fighting all the good wars and making peace in all the bad ones, but here in the real world, the list of low points in government competence just in recent years is longer than King Kong’s member and growing. Therefore all available evidence suggests that, no matter what my candyland fantasies are, the government is really bad at doing anything even slightly more important than deciding on which Thursday Thanksgiving should fall.

Let me share with you a story I heard recently. It’s a funny story, if by funny you mean “sad,” and it’s a perfect parable for why our government is not to be trusted under any circumstances.

You see, the small seaside town I live in is home to a National Park Service historical site, which as I’m sure you’re all aware means there’s some land, a brown building, and some signs around telling people what it’s all about. As far as parks go there’s a lot of cool stuff to draw on, including a fullsize working replica of a cargo ship from the great age of sail, numerous historic homes, and the good (?) luck to have been the site of a major event in early American history that still brings in tourists by the busload.

But for all the potential, the tours and interpretation at this park (“interpretation” in the public history sense of ‘helping people understand what they’re looking at and why it matters’) are kind of for shit, and I’ve always wondered why.

Back in the 1980s, my small seaside town was not as gentrified as it currently is, and very close to downtown there existed some pockets of serious sketchiness. At that time, the lead protection ranger (the guys with guns) at the Park was a guy whose name I’ll say was Duke. Duke’s job was to enforce the laws of the USA and the Commonwealth on the grounds of the park and in all the adjacent buildings it owned. He had a team of armed rangers who helped him with this important mandate.

One day, the local police force turned up in great numbers to a house owned by the National Park Service, and proceeded to invade the upstairs apartment, which was rented out to civilian tenants. It turned out that this raid was the culmination of a three-year investigation into a major drug trafficking ring operated out of that apartment, which I remind you was owned by the United States of America. Among the parties convicted of felonies were two of the park’s protection rangers, who had participated in drug transactions while armed, on duty, in the employ of the Federal government, on the grounds of the very park they were being paid to protect.

Duke was taken entirely by surprise by the raid; nobody had thought to tell him. It soon emerged that this was deliberate – the drug activity had gone on for so long, and so blatantly, that the local police were convinced that he was either in on it or spectacularly, stupendously, incompetent.

This being the US Government, Duke was not fired from his job for being stupendously incompetent at doing it. Instead, he was placed on a brief administrative leave and then moved to another department. That’s right… Duke, a dangerously incompetent law enforcement officer whose training was nonetheless in the area of law enforcement, was put in charge of the Interpretation department, with the historians and tour guides, where he remains to this day. That is why the tours for the most part suck at the National Park in my small seaside town.

In another more recent case, it took four years for the National Park Service to terminate the employment of a ranger at the same park who was convicted on child porn charges, including, I believe, some based on evidence found on his work computer.

So, as I prepare my 1040s this year, I thank the deity of my choice (“none of the above”) that the business of running our country is in good hands. Clearly the US Government is using my little National Park site as a holding cell for all the morons and misfits, the drain circlers and mouthbreathers, the nebbishes and ne’er-do-wells, who they accidentally gave jobs to and now feel too sorry for to fire. With all of them here, everyone else can go about the business of managing our nations’ affairs with the intelligence, decency, and wisdom that such weighty matters deserve.

Clearly.

Comic book hero Captain America has been killed off by his corporate masters. With a sniper bullet. From my title, please don't think that I am speaking ill of Captain America. Cap was always, after Batman, one of my favorite comic book heroes. I think that putting him down in this manner is cheap. It's Captain America, fer chrissakes. Cap should have gone down, if at all, in a blaze of glory saving us from a certain doom. Martyrdom, if anything. Heroic sacrifice. Not a pot shot on the streets.

Perhaps someday, Sports magazines will report on sports, and not offer fatuous environmental pap.

The Maximum Leader, my go-to source for blogging inspiration these days, has written a longish bit on why he thinks the Civil War is bollox. ML claims that the Civil War is interesting, at best, in a purely tactical sense, or perhaps as a parade of amusing incompetence on the part of the Union generals. Now, I for one am not going to say that hundreds of thousands of Civil War round table participants, re-enactors, historians and others have wasted their lives in such a tragic manner.

In fact, I find the Civil War fascinating in large part exactly because of many of the things the Maximum Leader finds icky and bad-smelling.

The wars’ end was a foregone conclusion. Well, let’s let the odds makers decide and not run the race, what? The Greeks, faced with the unprecedented size and strength of the Persian army, should have just rolled over. But Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea proved that the side facing the short end of the materials and logistics stick is not normally foredoomed to failure. Granted, the safe bet is, as Napoleon remarked, on the side of the biggest battalions. But the safe bet is not always the winning bet.

Many of the Confederate leaders were well aware of Greek history, and in fact made conscious analogy between their cause and Sparta. This, considering the lot of the Messenian Helots, and the eventual fate of Sparta once the Thebans got sufficiently pissed off at them, was an ironic choice of historical model. Lee was certainly aware of the material advantages of the North, yet he and his army fought anyway. That is historical drama of the best sort.

What-if’s. The Civil War has, more than any other war, been the fount of what-if scenarios. (Read any good alternate WWI stories lately?) The underdog south came close – if not to winning outright – to putting a serious spoke in the Union’s wheel on several occasions. And the margins that saw them fall short were often short indeed. The south got the cream of the US military leadership, and they eked out every last bit of potential from the Rebel armies. Few could argue that the south missed its chance for lack of trying.

It was not until late in the war that the North even had commanding generals worthy of the name – Sherman, the only real strategic genius in the war, and Grant, who was dogged, determined and tactically skilled enough to actually put the Union armies’ advantages into battle, no matter what the cost. The most fertile ground for speculation, therefore, is in the earlier stages of the war, when southern advantages in leadership and elan gave some chance of overthrowing northern advantages of numbers and supply.

Most of these what-ifs focus, typically, on Antietam and Gettysburg. If the orders hadn’t been lost before Antietam, surely Lee and Jackson could have run wild through the north. Or Gettysburg, which is often called the high water mark of the Confederacy. Those are wrong, however. I think the most interesting turning point is Jackson’s depression in the seven days.

The thing is, the south was looking for its Thermopylae, and got it in hundreds of battles, small and large, where they slowed or even stopped but could not destroy the union army. And always at heavy cost of irreplaceable Confederate soldiers. What they needed was a Salamis, the titanic gamble that paid off in the annihilation of the Persian Army. Which is what Lee almost had in the Seven Day’s. McClellan had fallen back from Richmond; and Lee, finally in command, was pushing the Union troops down the Peninsula. He was aiming at a colossal envelopment, and he needed Jackson to bring the other arm home. If Jackson had done so, the entire Army of the Potomac might have been destroyed or captured. But Jackson, uncharacteristically, was not as aggressive as he was in the Shenandoah, or at Chancellorsville. The pincer didn’t close, and the Union Army was able to escape.

All of these what-ifs are endlessly fascinating mostly because the war should have lasted about three months and ending in total Union victory. The very fact that the able Confederate military leaders were able to prolong the war so long in the face of numerous Union advantages is remarkable – the achievement of the impossible. It is almost irresistible to think, that with some change, they might have pulled off their Salamis.

Foreign involvement. I largely agree with the Maximum Leader’s professor in thinking that it would have taken an extraordinary confluence of events to cause France or Britain to become involved in the Civil War. The fact is that it served both of their interests to see the United States divided, or at least exhausted by internecine warfare. France’s ambitions in Mexico, and Britain’s more global interests, both were advanced by America self-destructing.

The reason it would have taken a unique set of circumstances to see foreign intervention is that two things would have to happen: a signal Confederate victory that would make at least diplomatic recognition reasonable, and something to overcome the continental power’s distaste (in Britain’s case, extreme distaste) for the South’s “peculiar institution.”

One thing that nearly did it was the Trent incident. The Federal Navy seized a British Mail Steamer carrying two Confederate diplomats. This violation of British sovereignty rather exercised the Brits. If it had been followed, a few months later by a victory in the Seven Days’ Battles, we might have seen British diplomatic recognition if not actual intervention. By Antietam, I think it was already too late, and Lincoln learned from the Trent Affair not to piss of the Brits.

Lee. All of the major military figures in the Civil War were flawed, well, because they were human. They are interesting because of those flaws. Jackson, a religious fanatic. Lee, the good man who chose the wrong side. Grant, the drunk who overcame the drink. Sherman, the depressive who was the most brilliant strategist of the war. WWI is not interesting in the way that the Civil War is largely because there are no contending minds on the opposing sides. The story of the war is the story of innocents thrown to the slaughter by the millions, for marginal gains and little strategic purpose over four years, to achieve a (nearly) Carthaginian peace that led inexorably to even greater slaughter. It’s depressing. The Civil War, while certainly not absent immense slaughter (the slaughter was all that the technology of the time could manage, and more) saw strategic contest, a conflict of wills that is inherently fascinating.

In the early stages, the brilliance of the team of Lee and Jackson is balanced by the frustration and tenacity of Lincoln. But as the war drew on, in the west arose Union commanders the equal of the best the Confederacy had to offer. The narrow window of opportunity for the South to make use of its advantage in leadership passed, and Sherman and Grant caught Lee in what is really the largest envelopment in military history, with Grant as the anvil in the north and Sherman coming up from the south as the hammer.

All of this would be fodder for the military enthusiast – and it is, of course. Jackson’s valley campaign, Sherman’s march to the sea, the duel between Lee and Grant – these are all celebrated campaigns that are studied in military academies throughout the world. What makes it all so endlessly fascinating is the moral dimension of the conflict. Now, most of that has been overlaid over what was thought by the participants at the time. Lee certainly didn’t feel that he was fighting solely to preserve slavery. From our perspective, however, it is a story of good v. evil, freedom v. slavery. A story made compelling by the lack of personal evil on the part of many leaders on the “bad” side, and by the incompetence, greed, insanity, drunkenness or timidness of many on the “good” side.

That, my friends, is good historical drama. Again, contrast with the Great War. Both sides were imperial powers leaping into war with no real thought for the consequences. Destroying, nearly, a civilization by accident, and in the process killing millions for no gain and in the end not resolving anything, in fact, setting the stage for yet more destruction. The leadership of the Allies was no more honorable, good, competent or nice to puppies than that of the Central Powers. There is little to distinguish the two sides, and that makes the war about as interesting as watching someone punch themselves in the face. Sickly amusing for a moment, but after a while you just want it to stop.

Anyway, that’s why I like the Civil War, and why the Maximum Leader is wrong. But at least he’s wrong in an interesting way.