perfidy

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On March 15, 1962 - during the run up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet First Secretary Khruschev said,

We can launch missiles not only over the North Pole, but in the opposite direction, too. . . . Global rockets can fly from the oceans or other directions where warning facilities cannot be installed. Given global missiles, the warning system in general has lost its importance. Global missiles cannot be spotted in time to prepare any measures against them.

The Fractional Orbital Bombardment system was conceived by the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces to exploit a backdoor vulnerability in the United States’ strategic defenses. As ballistic missiles began to eclipse nuclear-armed bombers in the 1950s, both sides deployed Ballistic Missile Early Warning nets. The first generation of American BMEW radars were deployed along the northern fringe of North America and Europe, intended to detect incoming Soviet missiles as they came over the pole and rose above the radar horizon. The Pentagon hoped to achieve at least a half-hour’s warning of a nuclear strike, to allow Strategic Air Command to launch its second-strike bombers and deciding where to target its own missile counter-strike.

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But into the 1960s, the US was blind to attacks from the southern arc. FOBS was intended to exploit that blindness. By launching into a low polar orbit, the nuclear warhead could approach the US from any direction - and particular, directions not covered by the American early warning radar lines. The first warning the US would have a strike would have been the EMP effects of the weapons detonating over their targets.

Development of an orbital weapons system

The byzantine nature of the Soviet system led to the initiation of three programs to develop a FOBS.

FOBS 1

In 1962, Sergei Korolyov, the famed Soviet rocket scientist, began development of the GR-1 (Globalnaya Raketa -1 or Global Missile 1) - his last ballistic missile design. Development had ceased by 1964 without a single test launch. That didn't stop the Soviet Union from using the program as part of its extensive strategic deception efforts. The Soviets displayed the missile as an operational system during their annual Red Square parades in Moscow in the early 60s.

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FOBS 2

The Soviet's second FOBS effort came from General Designer Vladimir N. Chelomey at OKB-52. His plans initially envisioned two global missiles based on the UR-200 and UR-500 ICBMs. The latter could have lofted a 30 megaton warhead into Earth orbit. For reasons that aren't clear, the heavy lift option was discarded in favor of the lighter UR-200 missile. This all became moot, however, when Chelomey's patron Nikita Khruschev was overthrown in a coup in 1964 and Chelomey's attempts to keep the project going proved futile.

FOBS 3

The system that actually did become operational came from Designer Mikhail Kuzmich Yangel, based in Dnepropetrovsk, in the Ukraine. His R-36 (NATO designation SS-9) missile became the R-36-O or 8K69 in the FOBS context. Like the R-36, the R-36-O was a multistage missile fueled with storable hypergolic propellants. For deorbiting the warhead, the R-36-O added a third stage for which the Soviets used the designation of 'Orbital Payload' (OGCh).

There are conflicting reports on the size of the warhead. Some Russian sources claimed up to 20 megatons, though US intelligence reports suggest a yield in the 2.0 to 3.5 megaton range.

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Deployment

Having won by process of elimination, Yangel’s FOBS was approved for deployment by the RVSN. From 1965 to 1968, a series of test launches from the Baikonur complex established the system’s readiness. The Soviet authorities decreed that the missile be redesigned as an ‘encapsulated’ launch system. This new packaging scheme saw the ICBM stacked and then installed in a hermetically sealed container and then emplaced in the silo for long duration standby operations. Just prior to sealing the container, the missile was fueled. For over seven years before refueling and overhauling, the missile would be ready for launch at five minutes notice.

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After the test program, the R-36-O / 8K69 was accepted into service in 1968 and remained in service until 1983. The Soviet Union built 18 operational FOBS silos at a site near Tyuratum, and stood up the first operational unit in 1969. Three FOBS battalions were part of the 98th Missile Brigade until 1974 when they were transferred to the Orenbugh Missile Army of the RVSN.

Employment

Were it actually used in a nuclear first strike, the missile’s flight profile had four phases: boost, orbital, braking and re-entry. Unlike a traditional ICBM, the FOBS missile had a much lower profile. A traditional ICBM rises on a steep trajectory and reaches an altitude of 1200 miles above the Earth before returning to Earth and its target. The FOBS would never ascend above 150 miles on its depressed trajectory and orbital insertion - and would not appear above the radar horizon of US early warning systems until almost at its final destination.

The 8K69 used its first and second stages to achieve orbit. At launch, the missile would head south toward the pole - a near polar orbit. The warhead, once past the south pole, flew north over the Southern Hemisphere, and eventually on track to hit targets in the central US. A slightly higher inclination launch could hit West Coast targets; a little lower would hit the East Coast.

As it approached the de-orbit entry point, the vehicle would pitch to orient for re-entry. The third stage rocket would fire for one minute, braking, changing the warhead’s trajectory from orbital to ballistic. And set the warhead on course for re-entry and its target. Given that it would be approaching from the south where the US had no early warning nets - time from detection to impact would be almost nil.

Degrading Utility

By the time the FOBS had been operationally deployed, the United Nations had passed the Outer Space Treaty which forbade the use of nuclear weapons in space. To the Soviets, this was a matter of semantics, and they promptly called their system a ‘fractional’ orbital bombardment system. Since the warhead never completed an orbit, it was thus in compliance with the letter of the international space treaties. (Of course, fully orbital weapons systems would require no additional development. Converting a FOBS to an OBS is simply a matter of not firing the retrorockets.)

FOBS faced a regime of degrading strategic utility soon after it was deployed. Over the course of the 1960s, the US expanded its BMEWS to a full circle around the continental US, limiting the value of attacking from the south. Further, the US deployed infrared early warning satellites that could detect launches over the Soviet Union. This rendered the surprise attack value of FOBS near useless.

While FOBS had near-unlimited range, the loss of the element of surprise relegated the system to an expensive collection of single-warhead missiles with low accuracy and only moderately powerful megatonnage. US Strategic planners believed that FOBS could be used as a pathfinder - attacking command and control centers rather than hardened silos and military targets. If the US lost the ability to coordinate a counter-strike, that could still be a significant advantage.

But what really killed FOBS was Soviet submarine designers. In the submarine-launched ballistic missile, Soviet planners had a vastly stealthier platform for launching a disarming first strike on the United States. SLBMs could be cheaper, more powerful and more accurate than any FOBS missile. And by the time of the SALT II negotiations in the late 70s, the FOBS program neared its end.

There's been a veritable avalanche of articles about the United States invading Canada in the last few weeks. Which, for such an arcane topic, means three.

Back in the awkward in between phase of the Early 20th Century global war, the US War Department made plans for fighting pretty much everyone. Which is the sort of thing sensible War Departments do. It's not likely you're going to fight anyone in particular, but if the Pres picks up the red batphone and says, "We're invading Zimbabwe tomorrow," well, you don't want to get caught short. Back in the day, we had cool color codes for the war plans, and War Plan Red was the one in case shit got real between the US and the British Empire. Since Canada was the biggest and closest part of the Empire Upon Which The Sun Never Set, much of the war plan involved invading, oppressing and occupying Canada.

These plans were developed during the 1920s and ’30s by the U.S. Joint Planning Committee (later to become the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and each assigned a color to a particular world power the United States saw as a potential adversary. Black for Germany, Orange for Japan, and Red for the British Empire.

The first two articles are from War Is Boring and Vice, and cover the details pretty well. The War is Boring link also mentions Canadian Defense Scheme №1, which was a pre-emptive strike intended to slow the coming American onslaught by invading and then conducting a scorched-earth retreat to buy time until the Brits could come and save their (Canadian) bacon.

The hope was that the U.S. would be caught off guard, allowing enough time for the British to come to Canada’s rescue.

At the first sign of military aggression, Canadian forces would push into the states and take Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Fargo, portions of the Great Lakes region and Albany. When the inevitable retaliation came, the Canadian military would withdraw and destroy bridges, factories and other infrastructure as they went.

The Vice article quotes a defence analyst on the probable chances of Defense Scheme №1

Fortunately, there was also a Canadian counter-plan created in case of a US invasion during the same time period as War Plan Red, called Defence Scheme No. 1 (the Canadian military is apparently not that creative with naming battle plans), which would involve a pre-emptive strike on the States. At the time it was described as "suicidal," a sentiment that's only grown with the growing disparity between the two countries' armed forces.

"A pre-emptive strike of that nature just wouldn't work," said Coombs. "It would be completely out of the question. The people who did it would be a speed bump on the path of the US Army."

The last article, in the national interest, claims that tensions between the US and Britain were rather, well, tense in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, and had it not been for general war-weariness and the Washington Naval Treaty that settled the issue - might have actually gone hot.

Even as the guns fell silent along the Western Front in 1918, the United States and the United Kingdom began jockeying for position. Washington and London bitterly disagreed on the nature of the settlements in Europe and Asia, as well as the shape of the postwar naval balance. In late 1920 and early 1921, these tensions reached panic levels in Washington, London and especially Ottawa.

The article goes on to present a short alt-history scenario for the War of 1921. Excerpts below - but srsly, read the whole damn thing:

Given the overwhelming disparity between available U.S. and Canadian military forces, most of these offensives would probably have succeeded in short order. The major battle would have revolved around British and Canadian efforts to hold Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and especially the port of Halifax, which would have served both as the primary portal for British troops and as the main local base for the Royal Navy. U.S. military planners understood that Halifax was the key to winning the war quickly, and investigated several options (including poison gas and an amphibious assault) for taking the port.

...

British war planning considered the prospect of simply abandoning Canada in favor of operations in the Caribbean. However, public pressure might have forced the Royal Navy to establish and maintain transatlantic supply lines against a committed U.S. Navy. While it might have struggled to do this over the long term, the RN still had a sufficient margin of superiority over the USN to make a game of it.

But how would the RN have deployed its ships? Blockading the U.S. East Coast is a far more difficult task than blockading Germany, and the USN (like the High Seas Fleet) would only have offered battle in advantageous circumstances. While the RN might have considered a sortie against Boston, Long Island or other northern coastal regions, most of its operations would have concentrated on supporting British and Canadian ground forces in the Maritimes.

...

Both the United States and the United Kingdom expected Japan to join any conflict on the British side. The connections between the Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy ran back to the Meiji Restoration, and Tokyo remained hungry for territory in the Pacific. In the First World War, Japan had opportunistically gobbled up most of the German Pacific possessions, before deploying a portion of its navy in support of Entente operations in the Mediterranean. In the case of a U.S.-UK war, the IJN would likely have undertaken similar efforts against American territories.

...

In the end, however, the United States would have occupied the vast bulk of Canada, at the cost of most of its Pacific possessions. And the Canadians, having finally been “liberated” by their brothers to the south? Eventually, the conquest and occupation of Canada would have resulted in statehood for some configuration of provinces, although not likely along the same lines as existed in 1920 (offering five full states likely would have resulted in an undesirable amount of formerly Canadian representation in the U.S. Senate). The process of political rehabilitation might have resembled the Reconstruction of the American South, without the racial element.

The new map, then, might have included a United States that extended to the Arctic, an independent Quebec, a rump Canada consisting mostly of the Maritimes and Japanese control of the entirety of the Western Pacific. Tokyo, rather than London or Washington, would have stood as the biggest winner, hegemonic in its own sphere of influence and fully capable of managing international access to China.

It's interesting that pretty much everyone thought that the Japs would jump in on it - but given their behaviour in World War Phase One, just completed, maybe not such a stretch. Lose the Philipines and some Pacific Islands in exchange for pretty much all of English-speaking Canada? On the whole, probably a net gain, assuming that you don't end up with most of a century of die-hard Canadian loyalist terrorism. Even if Britain won on points in a War of 1921, they'd be proper fucked in a couple decades when the US doesn't come in on their side in the big one.

Over at the Veil War, the battle continues. Lots of new fun stuff going on, and lots of explosions. So give Chapter 21 a read. If by some supremely odd chance you are a reader of this blog and yet still are unaware of the Veil War, imagine that some alien scooped out some of JRR Tolkien's brains, and mixed them with a shot of Tom Clancy's brains. Continue to imagine that the alien then shook the brains together, added ice, and hooked the result up to a word processor and told it to write a novel. Finally, imagine that the brain set a up a webpage to publish the novel. The result would be the Veil War. Read it, love it, tell your neighbors and friends. Link it on your blog, friend it on facebook, tweet about it, and hire a herald to declaim its victories. And really, let's be honest. It's been too long since you linked the Veil War.

Interesting discourse on guns and gun games between Tactical Death Ninja and his interlocutor.

Tactical Death Ninja: "They can't adapt.  Only I can adapt.  This shit is proprietary and requires very special training that only I can provide, but it is also instinctive and anyone can learn it in 5 minutes.  That sounds like a contradiction until you realize just what kind of f-n' badass instructor I am.  The bad guys don't get it and as a result they must remain still in every way, and suffer a -4 to initiative and other modifications to both armor class and hit points."

Read it all here.

h/t K. Hungus

Like the previous post, this was originally written back in 2004. I realize, eight years later, that I never finished it. Oops. Anyway, here it is, and maybe I'll finish it this week.

The primary tactical function of a battleship is to engage and destroy the enemy naval forces, which obviously supports the naval mission of protecting friendly shipping and ensuring control over the space.  The essence of space power will (like sea power) rest in the ability to dominate space.  You do that by denying use of it to the enemy.  And you do that by destroying his navy if it comes out of port.  But how will this happen, and what will future battles look like?

A lot depends on the political nature of the war in which the battle takes place, and the geography of the solar system.  (Interestingly, this will be constantly changing – as the planets, moons and asteroids orbit the sun, each at their own pace, the distances and relationships between them will change.  There will not be, as on earth, constant or permanent sea-lanes, straights, or territorial waters.  From month to month, minimum energy orbits between the planets will be in constantly different arrangements.  It will become easier to get to one place, and harder to get to others.  This will affect naval strategy.) Further, what will each power be trying to achieve or trying to protect?  Is the goal invasion and conquest, or merely to frustrate the goals of the enemy?

The greatest naval battles involving battleships were Trafalgar and Jutland.  In each case, the British were trying to frustrate the enemy.  That is to say, the British had no desire to follow up a naval victory with large-scale invasion.  However, the French in 1804 and the Germans in 1916 needed to defeat the British in order to achieve other desirable goals.  All the British need to do is to defeat the enemy fleet, and everything else follows.  Let’s assume that the Europans, long the dominant power in the outer solar system, are content with their control over trade routes in the Jovian system, and between Jupiter and the outer planets.  They are growing fat and rich on the trade that passes through their ports.  However, the Titanians, upstarts and growing powers in the Saturnine system, are deeply unhappy that the arrogant Europans get all the money and all the glory.  They want their own share of the trade with the populous inner system, and further want a piece of the growing pie that is comet harvesting in the Kuiper belt at the outer edge of the solar system.  (Which the sneaky Europans are poaching on.)

This was originally posted back in 2004. We've since moved to a new hosting engine, and this has been kind of buried for a while. Thought I'd repost it in one convenient lump for your edification and enjoyment:

Steven den Beste has written a two part (so far) article on the possible outlines of combat in space. As is typical for the master of the USS Clueless, it is long and examines the topic in a thorough and logical manner. However, I find that his thinking diverges significantly from my own thoughts on the matter.

The first essay is a compressed history of naval combat here on Earth. The second part begins the discussion of what might happen in space. Clueless makes two central assumptions: 1) Stealth will be difficult if not impossible to achieve; and 2) that nuclear weapons will not be used. I’ll talk about the second one first.

[wik] and here is a description of a possible battle in space. You can read the comments - and many of them are quite interesting - here.

Gravity Gauge

When we think about battles in space, it is useful to draw some parallels to earthly naval warfare. Just as there is a distinction between blue water and brown water navies, there will be a similar divide between warships designed to fight within the gravity well of a planet, and those intended to fight in the depths of interplanetary space. Warships designed to operate in close proximity to bases, and to deal with the rigors of maneuver in a steep gravity well will be very different from those required to make long journeys in flat space between the planets. We can think of the former as river gunboats, the latter as battleships.

It is a commonplace that the advance of technology killed the Feudal age. The cost of training, equipping and supporting the Medieval knight was large, relative to the economic output of the era. And this cost was necessary because in many respects it was the best bang for the buck given the technological and economic realities. So the military necessity, the social structure and the available technology mutually created and supported each other in an environment where there had been significant collapse of large-scale institutions and in which there were powerful threats to local populations.

As technology fitfully advanced, new military paradigms arose. The rise, first of archers and pikemen and then the firearm, created a tactical environment unfriendly to the armored knight, which then made the cost of training, equipping and supporting the expensive and arrogant knight sufficiently unpleasant that he faded from the scene.

Technology didn't stop with killing the knight. Masses of musket-equipped soldiers were eventually joined with mass-produced muskets, mass-produced canned goods, and eventually mass-produced mass production. Soon, even the emaciated descendants of the knight - the aristocracy - was on its knees.

Democracy triumphant! Workers of the world unite, and eat the rich! Buy large quantities of Chinese trinkets!

However, the rise of capitalism and democracy were not without their downsides. While the initial wave led to decentralization of economic and political decision-making, the system did not provide much in the way of safeguards against the eventual re-centralization of power using the techniques and technologies that the age of mass production and eventually the information age provided.

Crony capitalism, regulatory capture, the unfettered rise of the financial industry - we are seeing that allowing these things to happen, and especially to happen with the seal and approval of a democratic mandate, equivalent to the mandate of heaven - is probably not a good idea. In fact it likely will lead to the collapse of modern society - and if you read zero hedge, you'll know that this will happen sometime before next Tuesday.

There are new technologies on the horizon. The maker movement, 3D printing, home fabricators, automated CNC routers, the nascent technological cornucopia will soon force upon us vast changes, fully equivalent in scale to the changes brought by the industrial revolution, and before it the late medieval technology boom in metallurgy and clockwork and the harnessing of wind and water power.

These technologies, if you listen to the hype of their creators and promoters, will lead to a golden age of libertarian skittle-shitting unicorn rainbow happiness. And hey, they might be right. It might be stage one of the rapture of the nerds, and all humanity will just leap forward into the promised land where everyone is safe from obnoxious jocks with big muscles and little understanding of the wonders and nuances of star trek minutia and WoW guild politics.

But will it?

Just to be contrarian here for a moment, what if the new technology does not result in further democratization and libertarian society fertilization? Okay, sure, the cost of many things will go down, and that would be an argument in favor of the established perception of the economic and social potential of this complex of technologies. Global design and local production will surely have a vast effect, one corner of which will be lower cost of some goods.

But will the cost of absolutely everything go down? I think, yes and no.

The rifle is a simple piece of technology. Mass produced in quantity and distributed, it is and has been the center of large national armies for half a millennium. To be sure, we have accreted a lot of things around the hoary and grey-bearded rifle-equipped infantryman. Artillery, air forces, etc, ad nauseam. And those can generally only be produced by nation states because you need to own the factories to make these expensive items that allow the democratic citizen soldier to prosper on the battlefield.

The concentration of power enabled by mass production and democratization has been focused on the nation-state, and increasingly on the parasitic large corporation/finance behemoths that interpenetrate and influence the nation-state. As Aretae recently pointed out, the interference of the nation state in even simple things like transportation networks hugely distorted the 'natural' growth of economies. And this leads to interesting thoughts.

The growth of new methods of production might lower the cost of some things enough that the cost of other things, especially networks of things will go up, relatively speaking. (If useful things become cheap enough, you can get lots of them. If they are intelligent things, having lots of them will grant capabilities beyond a linear extrapolation of having just one would lead you to expect.) Will the cost of these networks of things rise to the level at which you need the concentrated essence of economic power - the nation-state - to effectively field fighting forces with them? The likeliest case, given the wider range, is that the cost would fall between the normal individual's means and national-debt-inducing.

If there is a collapse, or pseudo-collapse, in national and international economies and society as a result of the recent and ongoing unpleasantness - what will happen? Local-producing makers and fabricators will create regional trade networks. Trading designs globally, but producing locally, we can imagine whole new industrial ecosystems growing up around descendents of today's maker spaces. The modern smithy will be a fab lab where the local artisan can produce circuits, finished parts in plastic and metal or wood - customized and perfectly suited to the task at hand. No more mass-produced assembly line toys from China - if you want something, you go to the smithy and he makes it, just like of old.

But the thing is, a fully realized maker fab will be able to create enormously sophisticated devices and indeed entire infrastructures on a custom and ongoing basis. This goes far beyond printing interesting dildos in pink ABS plastic. Drones, drone controllers - and therefore systems of surveillance, mini-missiles, over the horizon attack capabilities, metalstorm pods, munitions, AAD systems, all networked and controlled by systems of software modeled on modern game software.

Producing rifles - even super-cool, electrically activated, rapid-fire, armor-piercing, self-homing bullet firing metalstorm rifles - with this nearly automated manufacturing technology would be the smallest thing. Equivalent to the medieval smith making a knife - a trivial exercise.

In a world that is suddenly regionalized (at best) or hyper-localized (at worst), where large-scale institutions are enfeebled both by the growing power of new technologies and the economic systems that evolve around them as documented by people like John Robb; and of course by their own inherent flaws as ably documented by Moldbug and Foseti - you have something that starts to look a lot like the pre-feudal age where the common folk are at risk from the still powerful remnants of the old order, and from out of context threats like vikings and other mobile bandits.

And what defends local communities from threats? A defense infrastructure that is complicated to produce, and difficult to utilize. While the local maker can produce any simple tool almost at cost from scrap metal and plans pulled out of the cloud (just as the medieval smith could produce simple tools from pig iron and the sweat of his brow) creating a complex of drones, missiles and automated defense systems that might be very like that imagined by Daniel Suarez in his books Daemon and Freedom(tm) is more on the order of a highly skilled armor smith producing a complicated and effective suit of armor, and the sword smith creating a usable and durable sword out of high-grade steel. And the horse breeder providing destriers, and the community providing for the feeding and training of the knight who used them...

What if the new proto-medieval knight (the old one was the thug who was skilled at arms, and seized the opportunity to create an economic situation that would support him and provide defense for the people sufficient enough that they accepted the rest) is the techno-geek gamer who understands the means of designing and utilizing the new high-tech to provide for the defense of the commons. And whose training to be effective takes years, and requires the output of a significant community, and works best when the skills are transmitted in a master/apprentice mode.

Because one guy with a rifle won't be an effective combatant in a world with networked drones, micro-missiles, sensor networks, and who knows what else that could be created with a mature fabbing technology. And as easy as a rifle is to learn to use, learning to use complex networks of weapons won't be.

Technology forces cultural changes. But not usually in ways that we expect. Our current system is between two and four centuries old, depending on how you count it. Technology is undermining it, along with its own inherent and multiplying flaws. That's about as long as things generally last. In times of great change, things don't normally continue on a linear extrapolation of current events, or even the events of the last century. We are perhaps foolish to imagine that the result of the changes taking place will be merely the elimination of only the bad parts of the current system.

I've been busy.  In fact, I am still busy, and am sacrificing my work for your benefit right now.  Because I love you, and you're just that cool.

So, from the now defunct blog Seasons of Tumult and Discord, there's this bit that caught my eye.  Since you can't go to the blog anymore I'll post the whole thing and italimacize the part that caught me:

Guilt is a luxury by Talleyrand

Specifically white guilt.  People assume that white guilt will continue until they are completely dominated.

Keep telling yourself that lie if it makes you feel better.

Whites have been feeling guilty for the past, because they can afford to feel guilty about the past.  Does it matter if the government discriminates against them in good times?

Nope, they can do well somewhere else.

But in the lean times that are coming, it will matter and it will matter more and more.

Just as feminism will never be satisfied if men have any power or autonomy, because any power a man has by its very nature diminishes the power of women, so too do racists view any power a white man has as limiting the power of minorities.

Some of my faithful readers probably read racist and got a little confused because the word racist wasn’t used to describe white folk.

The word racist itself is beginning to lose its meaning, because everything a white person does is deemed racist.  And although whites have rolled over for decades, because they could afford to roll over, when it becomes an obvious issue of survival, whites aren’t going to care about being a racist.

In fact, if I were hazard a guess, in ten years there will be politicians that will embrace that they are “racist” and it will work in their favor, that is the kind of shift that I see coming, and it won’t be a pretty one.

Those that see the next century as asian, I’m telling you right now that the Chinese empire will fall as surely as that gigantic dam they built will collapse in the next ten to twenty years causing widespread destruction and upheaval.

Whites aren’t behaving ferally tribal... yet.  But they will be the way things are going.  When there is a huge societal shift, the behaviors of yesterday get repudiated and the pendulum swings in the other direction hard.

And the last time they were that way, the whites conquered most of the world and subjugated native people everywhere.  Is this really the sleeping giant that we want awakened?

Apparently it is.

You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. The whole western world going hulk-smash would be a bad thing, to be sure. But there ain't a lot the rest of the world could do to stop it, no matter how many more of them than us there are.

This is actually from a few days back:

Humans are very tactical. This is altogether fitting. Not every tactic is strategic but all strategy is tactical. Strategy is always an accumulation of tactics. Tactics are concrete. The strategy that connects them is less so. Moment by moment, every life is tactical. However, in the same flow from moment to moment, life is not necessarily strategic. A focus on tactics is natural and a focus on strategy is somewhat unnatural. This drags the mind strongly to the concreteness of tactics and away from the diffuseness of strategy. Tactical thinking tends to reduce strategy to a parliament of hammers and every situation to a nail.

From the Committee of Public Safety.  The whole post is excellent, and kind of a distillation of a series of posts he's been doing strategy.  He's gone into the the distinctions between magic bullet and attritional styles of strategy, linear v. parallel, and so on.  All well worth your time and very insightful.  What I particularly liked about this one is that it takes the tactical/strategic dichotomy out of its normal realm of military considerations, and makes you look at it from a new perspective.  Plus, its alternate history thinking, which I am congenitally incapable of resisting.

Interesting little animation:

<sadly, a flash animation>

Looks like we nuked the ever-loving fuck out of Nevada. What'd they ever do to us?

[wik] I don't think we've ever had a more appropriate use of the category icon for "Cry Havoc" here on perfidy.

[alsø wik] hat tip to A.E. Brain

[alsø alsø wik] The Ministry of Future Perfidy remembers this animation from its distant vantage point in the unimaginably far future year of 2025. This YouTube video is something like it:

We had a few great comments on the previous post.  After I posted that, I spent the majority of the next two days in an interminable, useless exercise that was euphemistically referred to as "training."  So I had lots of time to think, and one of the things I was thinking about was a goblin invasion of the United States.

Nadporučík Lukáš actually hit the first thing that occurred to me.  Fuel Air Explosives are the next best thing to a pony nuke, and can be delivered from well outside of bowshot.  To say the least.  Air power and artillery are going to be the biggest tools in our pocket.  Isegoria chipped in with some insightful analysis - especially the point about mechanized infantry.  Goblin swords are not going to cut open Abrams tanks (or at least, not fast enough) to do the trick, and meanwhile the heavier weapons mounted on Bradleys, Strykers, even Humvees are powerful enough to kill Goblins as I described them.  And mechanized infantry and armor units are going to be significantly more mobile - both in the field, and on the roads and rails.

Now, even with the advantages pointed out, the goblin armies are going to be like Japan in the first part of WWII.  They're going to run wild because I doubt even the most paranoid members of the Pentagon's planning apparat have seriously laid in plans for a goblin invasion straight into the middle of the country.  When I was first imagining this, I was picturing the gate as a kind of shimmering aurora that ran east west from roughly Oregon through the midwest, up through Ohio across Pennsylvania and out into the Atlantic somewhere south of NYC.  And the Goblins pour out of this in uncounted hordes - because that's what goblins do.

A huge fraction of our ground forces are deployed overseas, and useless in the near term.  Most of our military bases are not located close to the veil - they're in the south or southwest.  The Air Force could deploy in strength immediately, and Naval and Marine Aviation could chip in as well.  But there's nothing but lightly armed civilians through most of that area, and in the east, mostly unarmed civilians.  How long before guard units are called up, divisions moved by rail and road up from the south?  It'd be a while - and even longer before we could get anything back from overseas.  And really, this would probably be a global phenomenon - will all the forces be able to disengage immediately?

I think they could conquer a large amount of territory before we could launch an effective response.  There'd be millions of refugees fleeing south on all the major roads, and north into Canada.  Millions more Americans wouldn't be fast enough, and would probably be killed, raped, and then eaten.

Once we get moving, the advantages Isegoria pointed out would come into play.  But a lot of the fighting would not be in open terrain - forests, woods, urban terrain do not generally allow 500 meters for restful plinking.  It's door to door, and dense undergrowth.  This will limit, to a degree, the advantages of infantry firepower. In house to house combat, I think a full suit of bullet proof armor, a magically sharp sword and a determined attitude will count for a lot.

Still, I think that Isegoria is right.  Modern American technology is going to win the day in that scenario.  Our logistics - rail and roads - will allow us to move forces outside the immediate combat zone far faster than they could imagine.  Paratroopers, vertical envelopment.  Tanks and IFVs.  Artillery, MLRS, down to mortars.  GPS guided bombs, FAE, napalm, daisy cutters, and when all else fails, strafing runs from A10s and their very, very large gun.  Spectre gunships, fer chrissakes.  Air superiority and artillery, logistics and mobility would all trump a moderate immunity to bullets.

So, what would the goblins need to even the odds a bit?  If we were writing a story, we wouldn't want the US Army to stomp right back to the veil in a week, and then go straight off and free magical worlds for democracy.  That's a horror story, not an adventure.

My first thought was the other standby of fantasy, the dragon.  If the goblins can have bulletproof magic armor, then I think that we can reasonably presume that a dragon is going to be at least as formidable as an Abrams tank.  With monomolecular claws, airmobility, and plasma bolt breath.  Now, the dragon probably wouldn't be as fast as a helicopter, but it would be much harder to kill.  If it's plasma breath can cook a tank, then the goblins have a force multiplier.  Would this even the odds?  Not by itself, unless there are a fuckload of dragons.  So let's assume that each regiment of goblins has a dragon.  The dragon can offer:

• CAS - its plasma cannon mouth will cook unprotected infantry easily, and a well-aimed shot will light up a tank - especially from above.  While there aren't as many dragons as tanks, the dragons will be harder to kill.
• Limited air superiority - the dragon might not be as fast as human aircraft, but it is maneuverable and very heavily armed.  It could knock helicopters down with its claws, and planes with a dose of plasma.  This would pretty much remove the spectre gunship and apache threat, and pose serious harm to anything flying relatively low.  It would not help against stand-off weapons and bombardment from altitude.
• Tactical mobility - it could carry thirty or forty goblins at a time - dragonborne troops.

Look at this as if you were a cthulhoid malevolent intelligence planning the invasion of Earth - what creatures of legend, or what types of magic, would be required to even the odds?

What would happen if we were faced with an alien menace immune to bullets?  Or at least, largely immune to bullets?  How would the tactics of our beloved armed forces have to change?

Today, the Amazon fairy brought the lastest of Charles Stross' Laundry books, The Fuller Memorandum.  For those who haven't, the previous two installments - Atrocity Archives and the Jennifer Morgue - are great fun, a hash-up of the great spy novels and Lovecraftian horror.  And the protagonist is a UNIX guru.

It occurred to me that another fun match up would be Tom Clancy and Lovecraftian Horror.  There was a movie that came out a couple years back, involved dragons going up against modern technology - duels between Apache gunships and dragons; M1A2 tanks and dragons, parked cars and buildings against dragons.  (The dragons won.)  The movie overall sucked all ass, but some of the imagery was cool.

Most fictional accounts (and all factual ones, so far as I am aware) involving mythical creatures tend to deal with the typical quest architecture - single hero or small group of heroes against said mythical creatures.  Usually, using the same weapons as our medieval forebears, rather than the best modern science and engineering have to offer.  Personally, if I was going up against a troll, I'd rather have a Barrett .50 than a rusty longsword.

So, what if a mystical veil appears (or re-appears...) - a gate between our world, and other places where there are dragons, goblins, dwarves, and whatnot.  And what if they all have magical weaponry and armor.  And they invade in force - huge numbers, hundreds of divisions?  What then?

Let's lay out the ground rules - magic is, on the whole, subtle.  No fireballs.  But it can be used to enhance the properties of otherwise normal physical objects.  So, the magical steel breastplate is significantly more bulletproof than the garden-variety conquistador relic.  Say, more bulletproof than the best body armor issued to our own soldiers.  This armor will deflect anything shy of a .50 bullet, giving the ugly nasty a bruise but not otherwise hindering his attempts to gut you with his magic sword - which, similarly, is magicked up to preternatural sharpness.  The magic sword is equivalent to the sf descriptions of a monomolecular blade - cuts through just about anything, given time.  Magic bows and arrows are super accurate, have longer range, etc.

So, a fully geared up goblin warrior is armored over most of his body, but certainly the head and torso.  Regular small-arms fire is functionally useless - only a shot to the face or multiple wounds to the extremities will stop him.  At range, he's got a bow and a quiver of arrows.  These are at least as accurate as the English longbow, but with a tendency to result in head shots.  And, once they get close, they've got super-sharp can openers that will cut right through any body armor.  They've got no artillery to speak of.  They depend on mass assaults in the medieval style to close and gut their opponents who are typically other goblins, armed similarly.  (The Scots, locked in eternal combat with their mortal enemies, the Scots.)

So, invading on a broad front through the middle of the US, they find almost no resistance at first -  no army there.  But we get our collective asses in gear, call up the guard, bring troops back from Kerplackistan, and engage.

Our typical tactics involve dispersed formations and small caliber weapons.  The only way an M16 armed US soldier is going to kill a goblin is with a head shot.  Artillery will work on them - but only more or less direct hits, as their armor will protect them from shrapnel well into what we'd normally consider the 100% kill zone.

Would we be able to kill enough - put enough hits on target before they close and chop us to gibbets?  I don't think so.  What tactical changes would we have to make to deal with this threat?

I invite your suggestions in the comments.

The iPad can be a nearly perfect game tool. Computers corrected some of the grievous flaws of the tabletop wargames - insane tedium in setup, overly (if sometimes necessarily) complex rules, and difficulty in modeling the fog of war. But they also took away the physicality of the games - of being able to walk around the game. The touch aspect of the iPad brings back some of the physicality of the games, while the computer handles minutia. Although what would really be awesome would be an entire tabletop running the iOS...

As the proud owner of an iPad, I've been waiting for someone to come up with a good Axis and Allies game. It looks like my wait may soon be over. Here's a demo of a new game called wwTouch, which looks to fit the bill.

Axis and Allies is the perfect middle ground. Complex enough to be interesting, but not so complex as to be unwieldy. Streamlined rules, moderately easy (compared to say, Panzer Leader) set up and clever design of the board and pieces. And still, a physical game, but one whose rules you could easily keep in your head - which allows you to actually act like a general in that you can have an intuitive idea of how things should turn out, and act accordingly. If the matter of the game and how the pieces interact is too complex, you can't internalize your knowledge of the game quickly enough - which means that unless you have hundreds of hours to devote to the game, you're not going to really enjoy it, or learn from it. Personally, I don't have hundreds of hours to devote to anything anymore, let alone wargaming.

As much as I love civ, with its city and empire building, it lacks any incorporation of strategy in the combat mode. It's all a matter of mass and gaming the idiosyncrasies of the combat system. Axis and Allies comes the closest of any game I've played to balancing the economic and strategic aspects well - though I'd dearly love someone to invent a game that really combined the two.

This post was inspired by something Instapundit linked to - an article by Jonathan Last in the WSJ about a new game called Making History II, made with the connivance of historian Niall Ferguson.

[...]where players choose a country and, beginning in 1933, guide it—diplomatically, economically and militarily—through the great conflagration. The new version boasts many intriguing features, not the least interesting of which is the involvement of historian Niall Ferguson.

Prof. Ferguson, author of "The War of the World," says that he spent a lot of time playing World War II games over the years. But he often found these games lacking.

"What drove me crazy was the way economic resources were so arbitrarily allocated to countries," he explains. "Rather in the same way that Monopoly is economically unrealistic (there ought to be a central bank with the power to vary short-term interest rates) all these early strategy games would greatly exaggerate the resources of countries like Japan and Italy, and underestimate the vast wealth of the U.S. so one had a completely false impression of the odds against the Axis."

So Mr. Ferguson worked with the developers at Muzzy Lane to realistically map material resources and economic frameworks. As such, Making History II may be the apogee of a breed which has been quietly beloved of boys and men for half a century: the war-strategy game. While computers have added a level of mathematical sophistication to the genre, the older, hands-on war-strategy games retain an elegant charm.

Sounds interesting, but the game is Windows only, can't download it, and the Amazon reviews say the early version is buggy.  I think I'll wait.  The article also notes that Prof. Ferguson is also a big A&A fan - another point in his favor. I may have to load up my old version of A&A Iron Blitz on the windows virtual machine...

A trio of excellent posts have examined the role and status of Dugout Doug, aka General Douglas MacArthur.  Foseti starts off with a review of "American Caesar" and then Isegoria and Joseph Fouche chime in.  The latter two are a little less convinced of MacArthur's greatness than Foseti.

Over on those three posts, you'll get a deluge of information about MacArthur, all factually accurate and fascinating.  While I am dubious of MacArthur's Alexandrine brilliance, I will fully grant Foseti's point that his role as proconsul in Japan was near genius, perfectly executed, and of long-term significance.  And he is certainly not the worst American general - Foseti names Mark Clark in WWII, and I could add Bradley and others to the list.  But to get to the worst American commander, you'd probably have to look back to the Civil War, where Union generals in the early phases of the war (the first two years, mostly, but some lasted much longer) were frighteningly incompetent, or administrative geniuses totally lacking in a martial spirit.  Ambrose Burnside and George McClellan are the two exemplars of each type.  Even the better Union commanders were noticeably flawed - Meade, Hooker, and the like lost their nerve at key points.

My view is that the greatest American general of the Second World War was undoubtedly Patton.  Three times Patton broke free, and started making huge advances against the Germans - and each time, he was reined in and forced to slow his advance.  And each time he did, the Germans were able to dig in and the whole process had to be repeated.  The Third Army advanced further, and captured more German soldiers than any other element of the European war.  Had Patton been given operational freedom, I believe he would have been across the Rhine in October '44 at the latest.  Hell, the rumor of his command of an army of invasion aimed at Calais was one of the factors that kept German forces concentrated out of Normandy.

Bradley defenders will generally argue that the hard facts of logistics are what led to Patton's leash being yanked.  That's true to an extent, but resources were diverted from Patton's rapidly advancing formations to units that units that were not achieving similar success, or in fact were stationary.  And then you have the whole Market Garden disaster.  I think Montgomery and MacArthur have a lot in common, and not the good stuff.

It's inarguable that Patton and MacArthur shared the view, "I am the greatest general now living."  MacArthur's lauded island hopping strategy resulted in a slow slog through strategically unimportant territory.  At the operational level, his strategy resulted in brutal frontal assaults against prepared positions.  Where he was most successful, it was the result of his enemy being isolated or starved into ineffectiveness by the efforts of his real rivals, the US Navy.  The signal victories of the Pacific Campaign are mostly owned by the Navy - which is to be expected, they don't call it the Pacific Campaign for nothing.  But the significant land victories were most often won by the Marines.  (A Marine friend of mine said that MacArthur designed his strategy to kill Marines.)

And on top of that, MacArthur was fighting the Imperial Army.  Of the Japanese Army and Navy, it's clear that the Navy got most of the brains in the family.  The Japanese never did figure out how to kill an American soldier without losing ten of his own.  I don't think anyone would rank the Imperial Army even in the top ten of the 20th Century.  Maybe in the top ten of WWII.

Patton, on the other hand was up against what is widely regarded to be one of the best armies of modern times.  The Wehrmacht was better trained, better equipped, and better led at the lower levels than the Americans could hope to match.  They were often fighting from prepared positions, and had the advantage of interior lines and better logistics.  What the Americans had was air support, and Patton.

Yet, over and over, Patton forced them out of their positions and onto the tun.  I think that Patton has a much stronger claim to being right.

[wik] I'd say that the three greatest generals in American history are, more or less in order, Sherman, Patton, Stonewall Jackson.  They are the best of the best of the best.  Other candidates for rounding out a top five would be Winfield Scott, Lee, Grant, and Washington.

h/t Aretae

From boing boing:

When you're not sure you can hit a target in single-fire mode:

[wik] We'll never know now, as the video no longer exists.

The BBC reports "Fierce fighting in Somali capital", a "battle" complete with

...heavy artillery fire in Mogadishu. Both sides claimed to have won the battle, fought with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, inflicting high casualties on the other.

Sounds serious. And it would continue to sound serious if you didn't read the whole piece. One side says it killed 10 enemy fighters (likely exaggerated); the other side says it killed 21 (likely exaggerated). Another four hapless souls, noncombatants, were killed in the crossfire.

So this fierce battle with heavy artillery exchanges and high casualties actually yielded under 40 dead?

I'm not trying to come across as bloodthirsty here, but I think the BBC is overstating things a bit. By which I mean a lot. I don't have a number of casualties in mind that, once reached, we've left "skirmish" and are into "battle". But if you tell me there was a fierce battle with heavy artillery and high casualties...I'm thinking Verdun and Kursk and Normandy and Inchon and Hue City and Khe Sanh. I'm thinking Mars and Marduk and the right-effing-hand of Satan. I'm not thinking of so much high-explosive posturing.

And hey not for nothing but if these clowns shoot artillery like our old friends, the Liberian infantry, handle small arms it's no wonder these wars take 30 years to fight.

Deutsche Welle's picture of the day for 25JUN:

Am Mittwoch (25.06.2008) wurden in Kerbela, 80 Kilometer von Bagdad entfernt, 115 weibliche Polizisten in ihren Dienst entlassen. Sie hatten in der irakischen Stadt die Polizei-Akademie besucht.

On Wednesday in Karbala, 80 kilometers from Baghdad, 115 female police officers left for their service. They attended the Iraqi city's police academy.

[wik] Dig it- Murdoc found another pic from what might be the same activity. Not sure whether the chador/burqa is ideal field gear, but they seem to have it together in the weaponry department.

AKs and Glocks- like peanut butter and chocolate.