Mystics & Statistics

Military History In The Digital Era

Volumes of the U.S. Army in World War II official history series published by the U.S. Army Center for Military History [Hewes Library photo]

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has released a draft strategic plan announcing that it will “no longer accept transfers of permanent or temporary records in analog formats and will accept records only in electronic format and with appropriate metadata” by the end of 2022. Given the widespread shift to so-called “paperless” offices across society, this change may not be as drastic as it may seem. Whether this will produce an improvement in record keeping is another question.

Military historians are starting to encounter the impact of electronic records on the preservation and availability of historical documentation of America’s recent conflicts. Adin Dobkin wrote an excellent overview earlier this year on the challenges the U.S Army Center for Military History faces in writing the official histories of the U.S Army in Afghanistan and Iraq. Army field historians on tight deployment timelines “hoovered up” huge amounts of electronic historical documentation during the conflicts. Now official historians have to sort through enormous amounts of material that is often poorly organized and removed from the context from which it was originally created. Despite the volume of material collected, much of it has little historical value and there are gaps in crucial documentation. Separating the useful wheat from the digital chaff can tedious and time-consuming.

Record keeping the paper age was often much better. As Chris wrote earlier this year, TDI conducted three separate studies on Army records management in the late-1990s and early 2000s. Each of these studies warned that U.S. Army documentation retention standards and practices had degraded significantly. Significant gaps existed in operational records vital to future historians. TDI found that the Army had better records for Red Cloud’s War of 1866-1868 than it did a hundred years later for Vietnam.

TDI is often asked why it tends to focus on the World War II era and earlier for its analytical studies. The answer is pretty simple: those are the most recent conflicts for which relatively complete, primary source historical data is available for the opposing combatants. Unfortunately, the Digital Age is unlikely to change that basic fact.

Anyone Can Be A Historian

In the world of government contracting, it is hard for a contractor to remain working with the government for longer than 3-5 years. Problems happen, people annoy each other, mistakes are made, frictions develop, and pretty soon people start wondering if they could do better with another contactor. So it not unusual to see contractors fall in and out of favor. I have seen it happen repeatedly.

Many years ago a company that was a competitor to Dupuy’s HERO conducted a study. It was well done as they hired one of our employees as their employee and another of our employees as a consultant. They got a follow-on contract. But, this being the government, as is often the case, the follow-on contract came a year or so after the original effort was completed. The original team had move to other projects in the company. As it was, defense budgets were in a period of decline, so the company decided they could conduct the next study using available staff so they could keep them employed. The former HERO employee was not available as he had been assigned to another project, and that project manager did not want to let him go. The consultant was not called back. Instead they took some available engineers who were between contracts and put them on the project. After all, anyone can do history.

Needless to say, the next study was a failure. I was later told by a manager in the government that they would never hire that contractor back. Apparently this work requires enough expertise that we cannot be easily replaced by any bright guy.

Against the Panzers

The book that came out of the A2/D2 Study (Anti-Armor Defense Data Study) was Against the Panzers, by Allyn R. Vannoy and Jay Karamales: Against the Panzers: United States Infantry Versus German Tanks, 1944-1945

The graphics person for of my three books and the images for this website is Jay Karamales. Jay is a multi-talented person whose primary occupation is a programmer. Unfortunately, there was never an Against the Panzers II, although I gathered he did some work on it.

For a taste of Mr. Karamales’ book, I recommend you take a look at his article in the TNDM Newsletter: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/v1n6.pdf

A2/D2 Study

A2/D2 Study = Anti-armor defense data study.

In the last days of the Soviet Union—before anyone realized they *were* the last days—the NATO nations were still doing all they could to prepare for a possible Soviet onslaught into Western Europe. They had spent decades developing combat models to help them predict where the blow would fall, where defense would be critical, where logistics would make the difference, what mix of forces could survive. Their main problem was that they didn’t know how far they could trust those models. How could they validate them? Maybe if they could reverse-engineer the past, they could be relied upon to predict the future.

To that end, the American Department of Defense (DoD) and (particularly) the British Defence Operational Analysis Establishment (DOAE) undertook to collect data about historical battles that resembled the battles they expected to be fighting, with the aim of feeding that data into their models and seeing how much the models’ results resembled the historical outcomes of those battles. The thinking went that if the models could produce a result similar to history, they could be confident that feeding in modern data would produce a realistic result and teach them how to adjust their dispositions for optimal results.

One of the battles that NATO expected to fight was a Soviet armored drive through the Fulda Gap, a relatively flat corridor through otherwise rough terrain in south-central West Germany. The battle that most resembled such an operation, in the minds of the planners, was the December 1944 surprise attack by the German Army into the Ardennes Forest region along the German/Luxembourg/Belgian border, which became known as the Battle of the Bulge for the wedge-shaped salient it drove into American lines. As the British involvement in this epic battle—what Churchill called the greatest battle in the history of the U.S. Army—was minor, consisting of a minor holding action by XXX Corps, the DOAE delegated collecting the relevant data for this battle to the DoD. The responsible element of the DoD was the Army’s Concepts Analysis Agency (CAA), which in turn hired defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to perform the data collection and study. In late 1990 SAIC began in-depth research, consisting of archival reviews and interviews of surviving veterans, for the project which hoped to identify engagements down to vehicle-on-vehicle action, with rounds expended, ammunition types, ranges, and other quantitative data which could be fed into models. Ultimately the study team, led by former HERO researcher and Trevor Dupuy protégé Jay Karamales, identified and recorded details for 56 combat actions from the ETO in 1944-1945, most from the Battle of the Bulge; and the detailed data from these engagements was used in the validation efforts for various combat models. This quantitative data, along with a copious amount of anecdotal information, was used as the basis for Karamales’ 1996 book with his co-author Allyn Vannoy titled Against the Panzers: United States Infantry versus German Tanks, 1944-1945: A History of Eight Battles Told through Diaries, Unit Histories and Interviews.

Copies of this study are available at DTIC. If you put “saic a2d2” into a search engine you should find all the volumes in PDF format on the DTIC website. As an example, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a232910.pdf or http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA284378

 

Pigs Blood

We do have a section on rules of engagement in my book America’s Modern Wars (Chapter 9). In that effort, I ended up coding by judgment the rules of engagement in five categories (polite, strict, restricted, unrestricted, brutal). The telling chart is here:

As one can see, success tends to be at either end of the spectrum, with the counterinsurgents winning around 75% of the insurgencies fought with strict rules of engagements and the counterinsurgents winning around 75% of the insurgencies fought brutally. Anything in between those two points does not work as well.

We ended up doing this for all “83 insurgencies, interventions and peacekeeping operations” (the only category that had the “polite” cases, and they were 100% successful), for the “62 insurgencies” (show above), for the “36 insurgencies versus foreigners” (same pattern as above), and for the “26 insurgent civil wars” (same pattern as above). See pages 85-86 of America’s Modern Wars.

While the results were not statistically significant (see pages 86-87), the fact that the four different tests were all pretty consistent in results no matter which way you cut the data tends to indicate that there is something there. Clearly more work needs to be done, but we were never able to get back to this issue. On the other hand, lots of people have strong opinions on the subject based upon a lot less data. 

This is explained in more detail in this post from 2015:

Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks?

Tanks With Frickin’ Laser Beams On Their Heads

Portent Of The Future: This Mobile High-Energy Laser-equipped Stryker was evaluated during the 2017 Maneuver Fires Integrated Experiment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The MEHEL can shoot a drone out of the sky using a 5kW laser. (Photo Credit: C. Todd Lopez)

As the U.S. Army ponders its Multi-Domain Battle concept for future warfare, it is also considering what types of weapons it will need to conduct it. Among these is a replacement for the venerable M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank (MBT), which is now 40 years old. Recent trends in combat are leading some to postulate a next-generation MBT that is lighter and more maneuverable, but equipped with a variety of new defensive capabilities to make them more survivable against modern anti-tank weapons. These include electronic jamming and anti-missile missiles, collectively referred to as Active Protection Systems, as well as unmanned turrets. Manned vehicles will be augmented with unmanned ground vehicles.The Army is also exploring new advanced composite armor and nanotechnology.

Also under consideration are replacements for the traditional MBT long gun, including high-power lasers and railguns. Some of these could be powered by hydrogen power cells and biofuels.

As the U.S. looks toward lighter armored vehicles, some countries appear to going in the other direction. Both Russia and Israel are developing beefed-up versions of existing vehicles designed specifically for fighting in urban environments.

The strategic demands on U.S. ground combat forces don’t allow for the luxury of fielding larger combat vehicles that complicate the challenge of rapid deployment to face global threats. Even as the historical trend toward increasing lethality and greater dispersion on the battlefield continues, the U.S. may have little choice other than to rely on technological innovation to balance the evolving capabilities of potential adversaries.

How Accurate is Dunkirk?

Article from the History News Network (HNN) on the recently released movie Dunkirk: How Accurate is Dunkirk

We don’t do movie reviews here, but I have seen the film. All characters and their personal stories are fictional. The movie is notable in that there are no American characters in a Hollywood blockbuster.

The article from HNN is more of a history of the battle than it is a movie review.

 

Then again, maybe it is not 100,000 troops

Article on the size of the exercises in Belarus: https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/heres-know-reported-100-000-173231187.html

Quote from the article: “Either way, that “100,000 figure is pretty off the wall,” Mark Galeotti, a senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague, told Business Insider in an email.”

This is a follow-up to this blog post:

First Guards Tank Army and new exercises

One wonders if we are in a state of perpetual panic; with North Korean nuclear-tipped missiles about to hit the United States that are neither nuclear tipped and may not be able to reach; and large exercises in Belarus of 100,000 that may only consist of 13,000 troops. I do not know what the truth is here.

Then again, maybe North Korea can’t hit the Continental U.S.

Military History Publications By Women

Grace Person Hayes, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in World War II: The War Against Japan, Naval Institute Press, 1982. If you have an interest in World War II, strategy, and strategy-making and have not yet read this, I highly recommend it.

Lists of suggested and recommended books continue to be popular in national security and strategic studies circles. General Mark Milley, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, recently released his professional reading list for 2017. This list covers topics addressing battles and campaigns, the army profession, and strategy and the strategic environment.

While the extended list comprises many relevant and notable works, some readers pointed out that it contains only one work authored by a woman, Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic The Guns Of August, published in 1962. In response, a call went out on Twitter to solicit titles of books by women on military history subjects. The initial version of this list is posted here.

This list of books on military history (and other related topics) is not exhaustive, nor the only one available, but it amply demonstrates that in 2017, there really is no shortage of worthy and appropriate publications written by women available for inclusion on professional reading lists. The addition of any of these titles would provide a broader perspective to any undertaking specifically intended to expand the thinking of students and practitioners.

It also shows that women are publishing works that are interesting in their own right but don’t seem to be getting the recognition that they deserve. Like Eric M. Murphy, I took a look at my own personal book collection and realized just how few of them were written by women. I am reasonably certain that I don’t intentionally avoid buying books by women, but I have tangible proof that I have done so regardless. I have read or am familiar with many of the works on the list cited above, many of which I can and have recommended without reservation. But there are also many titles that I have not yet looked at, so I have some work to do. I can do better at this and if I find something noteworthy, I can pipe up about it. I think we all can.