Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
Noted the following paper “The Probable Characteristics of the Next War and the Organizations, Tactics, and Equipment Necessary to Meet Them.” It was dated February 29, 1932 and done at the U.S. Army War College. The author was Major G. S. Patton, Jr. Cavalry: Patton Paper, 1932
A relevant article from The Strategy Bridge: Reviewing 21st Century Patton: Strategic Insights for the Modern Era
Just published by The Institute of Land Warfare is a paper by Major Amos C. Fox, U.S. Army called “Cyborgs at Little Stalingrad”: A Brief History of the Battle of the Donetsk Airport. It is not long (16 pages) and definitely worth a read.
A few highlights:
To quote from the last paragraph of my book, War by Numbers (page 328):
The post-Cold War world appears to be world of many small conflicts…the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 proved that the United States is not immune to attack and that we do have to remain engaged with the rest of the world to some degree. Certainly U.S. armed forces will be part of that engagement, and they will be called upon to fight a range of wars, from drone strikes and special operations to full-scale guerrilla wars and conventional campaigns. All must be addressed and planned for.
One last reminder, if you pre-order The Battle of Prokhorovka through Amazon.com it is selling for $28.43: Buy from Amazon. The list price on the hardcover is $44.95. I do not know what price it will be listed at on Saturday, 1 June 2019 (nor do I have any involvement or say in these matters).
The chapters for the book are listed in this post:
https://dupuyinstitute.org/2019/05/07/the-battle-of-prokhorovka-16-chapters/
What else is in the book (besides words) is listed in this post:
https://dupuyinstitute.org/2019/05/08/the-battle-of-prokhorovka-what-does-the-book-consist-of/
The reason why I wrote this book is discussed in this post:
https://dupuyinstitute.org/2019/05/09/the-battle-of-prokhorovka-book-why/
The book can obtained from Stackpole at: Stackpole Books
Or from Amazon.com at: Buy from Amazon
As some are aware, I am working on a book on the air battles during the Battle of Kursk. On 2 June 1943, the Germans organized a mass raid on the Kursk railway station using aircraft from the 1st Air Division of the Sixth Air Fleet and from the VIII Air Corps of the Fourth Air Fleet. The Sixth Air Fleet sent in 95 bomber sorties and 64 “destroyer” sorties (Me-110s) during the day, with heavy fighter cover. That night, they hit the Kursk area again with another 52 bomber sorties. The VIII Air Corps sent in 138 bomber missions during the day and 150 more during the night.
The German Air Force (Luftwaffe) burned its records towards the end of WWII, so in most cases there are not detailed records of their activity. In this case, there was. In the files of the Second Army, west of Kursk, are the records of the air liaison officer. It is in the National Archives, in the Captured German Records collection, file T312, roll R1234. The sortie counts given above are from those records. They also report their losses as 13 aircraft. The VIII Air Corps lost 1 Hs-126, 1 Ju-87, 3 He-111s and 1 Me-109 during the day and a Ju-88 at night. The Sixth Air Fleet lost 4 Ju-88s, 1 Me-110 and 1 Fw-190 during the day and nothing at night. I state in my book that “German losses connected with these raids were about 10 aircraft (2 percent losses)” as I am guessing that some of those 13 planes may have been lost in other operations (for example, the lost Hs-126 was probably doing reconnaissance). See Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka, page 303. E. R. Hooton in the book War Over the Steppes, page 200, states that the Germans lost 17 bombers. He does not footnote his sources. Bergstrom in Kursk: The Air Battle: July 1943, page 21, states that “Seventeen of these aircraft were shot down and destroyed and another eight sustained severe battle damage.” His source is the Luftwaffe Quartermaster reports. These claims from the Luftwaffe Quartermaster reports probably include losses from other causes (like mechanical, accidents and returned planes that were later scavenged for parts) and other missions.
On the other hand, another book written by two U.S. based authors state that “Certain Soviet sources list 145 German aircraft down (104 by VVS fighters and 41 by antiaircraft fire), with a modest loss of 27 Soviet fighters.” They footnote the source as a Soviet-era book from 1977. I had found the same claim of 145 kills in a Soviet-era Progress Press publication from 1974.
I am not breaking new ground by pointing out that Soviet-era publications often exaggerated enemy casualties. As discussed in my Kursk book, the units involved often made these outrageous claims and this it what was in their unit records. Therefore these claims ended up in the Soviet historical accounts.
Needless to say, one needs to cross-check all Soviet-era claims before they are used in a book. It is not enough just to say “Certain Soviet sources…” and ignor the German records. It certainly does give the wrong impressions of the operations, especially to the casual reader. Yet this is done repeatedly in this book, even though it was updated and published in 2012.
Since 1990, the U.S. has always maintained a presence in and around the Persian/Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. The UK also traditionally has a presence in the Gulf. Exactly what is there now?
In Iraq: 6,700+ U.S. and allied troops and supporting civilians
Kuwait:
Bahrain:
Oman:
The Fifth Fleet:
Sending to the Gulf as of new reports of 10 May and after:
This listing was quickly cobbled together from open sources. It should not be quoted without verification.
Back in 2001 we did our first report on urban warfare. It was followed by three two others. It was the report that forced RAND to completely reverse revise their position on urban war. Report is here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/urbanwar.pdf
Our three urban warfare reports are the basis for two chapters in my book War by Numbers. They are Chapter 16: Urban Legends and Chapter 17: The Use of Case Studies. I did brief it in several forums inside of DOD back in the early 2000s. I did consider at one point doing a separate book on urban warfare, but the interest in the subject appeared to be waning and we switched our work to examining insurgencies. I did brief part of Chapter 16 in my presentation at NYMAS (but the podcast has not been posted yet).
Urban warfare now seems to be a major topic once again. There are a number of sites and links that reference many reports, articles and studies on the subject. What is curious is that our original reports nor is my book listed on most of these sites. Our original urban warfare report was significant enough to help answer the Center for Army Analysis (CAA) questions about modeling urban fighting in their simulations and to cause RAND to issue out a revised urban warfare report based upon our report. Yet, it is not significant enough to be listed on these various reference sites. Is it because it does not provide the answer that some people want to see?
We did put the data we used for this analysis in our appendices to these reports. This resulted in one student at the Naval Postgraduate School putting out a report called “Analyzing the Effects of Urban Combat on Daily Casualty Rates.” Basically, he reworked our analysis using the data in the appendices. So he looked at 253 battles, of which 96 occurred in urban areas. The link to that report is here: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a424898.pdf
It was work done by a graduate student named Hakan Yazilitas (First Lieutenant, Turkish Army). It was for his master of science in operations research. According to his abstract:
Hypothesis tests are used to find if the DCR [Daily Casualty Rate] is different in urban operations. A linear regression model is constructed to predict outcomes of similar engagements and to see the effect of each variable. It is conluded that the attacker’s daily casualty rate is, on average, lower in urban operations. Terrain and force ratio are the most effective drivers of the daily casualty rate.
I am thanked in the acknowledgments, although I don’t recall what I did to help.
A few things of note:
One more reminder, if you pre-order The Battle of Prokhorovka through Amazon.com it is selling for $28.43: Buy from Amazon. The list price on the hardcover is $44.95. I do not know what price it will be listed at on 1 June 2019 (nor do I have any involvement or say in these matters).
The chapters for the book are listed in this post:
https://dupuyinstitute.org/2019/05/07/the-battle-of-prokhorovka-16-chapters/
What else is in the book (besides words) is listed in this post:
https://dupuyinstitute.org/2019/05/08/the-battle-of-prokhorovka-what-does-the-book-consist-of/
The reason why I wrote this book is discussed in this post:
https://dupuyinstitute.org/2019/05/09/the-battle-of-prokhorovka-book-why/
The book can obtained from Stackpole at: Stackpole Books
Or from Amazon.com at: Buy from Amazon
Spotted this article that reports that U.S. fertility is the lowest it has been in 32 years: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/15/health/us-birth-rate-record-low-cdc-study/index.html
The article reports a rate of 1,728 children per 1,000 women, or 1.728 per woman. This is 3.79 million births in 2018. For obviously reasons, replacement rate needs to be more than 2 kids per woman, usually assumed to be 2.1 (which is the figure used in the article, but I don’t know what the actual replacement rate figure is).
So, this is a shortfall of 0.372 children per woman. Now, how significant is such a shortfall? Well, we need a rate of 2.1 and we are getting 1.728 so 2.1/1.728 = 1.215 times the 3.79 million births = 4.61 million births needed. So 4.61 – 3.79 = 820,000 new people needed each year (there is probably a more sophisticated and more correct calculation out there).
The alternative is this scenario:
Therefore, it looks like we have to accept at least 820,000 immigrants a year to maintain status quo. There are a lot of economic reasons why this is probably needed and I don’t know a whole lot of people who dispute this. This of course, assumes the birth rate remains constant and right now it is declining, Currently, the U.S. accepts 1.2 million legal immigrants a year (2016). It appears that the United States receives around 300,000 “permanent” illegal immigrants a year (see this blog post):
With 1.3 to 1.5 million immigrants coming in each year, this means we do have a 500K – 700K surplus, which will cause the U.S. population to grow. There is also a certain number of people that migrate from the U.S. The U.S. population growth rate is currently around 0.8% a year.
On the other hand, I am sure some businesses and economists would argue that the United States needs a positive immigration flow to maintain and expand the labor force and to expand the economy. I am not sure of the specifics of this, but there certainly has been work published on this.
I am very much out of my lane here, in that I have not invested any significant time in examining these issues. I am sure there are more rigorous calculations efforts out there. But still, it does indicate that the U.S. does need to maintain over 800,000 migrants a year to sustain its population, and probably several hundreds of thousands above that to maintain its labor force and economic growth.
Max Boot, author of Savage Wars of Peace, among other books, wrote the following op-ed for the Washington Post:
One reason we are posting this is that he linked a line in his article to our blog post:
But this is a op-ed worth reading. There are few points of significance here:
I do note that Iran could probably also shut down the flow of oil from the Persian/Arabian Gulf for a while. This will certainly affect oil markets worldwide. Still, there is no question that the Saudi Arabia (with the other Gulf States) and/or the United States could establish air superiority over the Gulf. In the long run, that will work to our advantage. There will be a cost to this.
Saudi Arabia has the third largest defense budget in the world. A lot of that has gone to aircraft. Their air force currently consists of 844 aircraft and 81,000 personnel. Combat aircraft include:
Lots of support aircraft. See Royal Saudi Air Force
Everyone else’s air force is notably smaller, except for the UAE.
Between these seven nations, this is something like 595 air superiority and multi-role modern aircraft, plus another 100 or more ground attack aircraft. Certainly enough to patrol the Persian/Arabian Gulf, which is about the size of the state of Wyoming.
On the north side of the Gulf is Iran. It has an air force of 37,000 (2011 estimate) consisting of:
So, 142 air superiority and multi-role Iranian jets compared to 595 controlled by the seven Arab states lining the Gulf. In most cases, the Arab nations have better quality aircraft…and 33 Ground Attack aircraft vice 100+. No question who will be able to establish air superiority if there is a hot war.