Mystics & Statistics

New WWII German Maps At The National Archives

The situation in Army Group Center’s sector of the Eastern Front on 6 December 1941. [National Archives]

The Special Media Archives Services Division of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C. announced on it’s blog, The Unwritten Record, the recent opening of two new series in Record Group 242: National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized. The new series are German Situation Maps of the Western Front, 1944-1945 (NAID 40432392) and Various German World War II Maps, 1939-1945 (NAID 40480105).

The collections contain photographic reproductions of a full map of Germany including how many states in Germany existed at the time, as well as reproductions of various daily situation report maps created by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command) and Oberkommando des Heeres (Army High Command) to brief Adolph Hitler and senior German leaders. They show friendly (blue) and enemy (red) forces down to the division and detachment level. The original maps were captured by U.S. forces, which were later duplicated and then returned to the Germans.

Maps. Beautiful Maps

The NARA blog post includes several wonderful, high-quality digital scans in JPG format, although a quick check of the online NARA catalogue shows that these digital maps have yet to be posted online. As the existence of the images in the post show, however, this cannot be too far behind.

The maps themselves are priceless historical records containing truly amazing amounts of information. A portion of the Lage Ost (Situation East) map for 6 December 1941, above, is particularly notable. It depicts the military situation at what can be argued as the high tide of German fortunes in World War II, with its forces closing in on Moscow. However, 6 December was also the beginning of the great Soviet winter counteroffensive that would drive the German Army permanently away from Moscow.

A Map Is Worth At Least A Thousand Words

Several details immediately jump out. The northern prong of the German offensive, led by the Third Panzer Group and Forth Panzer Group, and the southern thrust by the Second Panzer Army can be clearly seen. While Second Panzer Army’s divisions are concentrated for the push from Tula northward, the army’s eastern flank is merely screened by elements of the 10th and 25th Motorized Infantry divisions, the 112th Infantry Division,  and a detachment of the 18th Panzer Division. Large-scale, abstract maps of the war on the Eastern Front often depict the battle lines as solid, when in fact, they were thinly-held or gapped.

This is significant because of what this map does not depict: the several dozen divisions the Soviets had amassed around Moscow for their counter-offensive. In fact, the first Red Army counterattacks had started on 5 December, against the LVI Panzer Corps, north of Moscow (at the top of image above). Soviet maskirovka, or military deception efforts, had successfully hidden the build-up from German intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets. Soviet troops infiltrated these gaps, forcing the Germans to halt their attack and then withdraw to avoid encirclement.

This is only a fraction of the story contained in these maps. Hopefully, NARA is diligently digitizing the rest of the collection and will get them online as soon as possible,

Life is at least 3.8 billion years old

This post is totally unrelated to any legitimate national security concerns, but I think it is damn interesting anyway. In Canada they found a fossil of bacteria that is 3.77 to 4.30 billion years old. Now the earth is 4.54 +/- 0.05 billion years. So this would indicate that life, at least in the form of bacteria and being created around hot jets in water, formed within hundreds of thousands years after the earth formed. Added to that we have found dozens of planets within the habitable zones of many stars out there, including three new ones last week around one star less than 40 light-years away. Pretty hard to imagine that there is not life out there, at least in the form of bacteria.

A few links:

worlds-oldest-fossils-discovered-Canada

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth

earth-size-planets-found-orbiting-star-could-hold-life

 

10% or 3% ?

Apparently the proposed defense increase by the Trump administration is a 3% increase, vice a 10% increase. The FY2017 Defense Budget is around $582.7 billion. The Trump administration’s proposed budget for FY2018 is $603 billion. This is a 3% increase. It certainly won’t pay for a 540,000-man army or a 355-ship fleet. Senator John McCain is not too impressed by this. McCain is looking for a $640 billion dollar budget for defense for 2018.

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/321374-mccain-trump-defense-budget-not-enough-for-world-on-fire

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/652687/department-of-defense-dod-releases-fiscal-year-2017-presidents-budget-proposal

I guess this blog post is my penance for making the mistake of talking about the issue of the day. Maybe I should just go back to blogging about history.

A Roundup of Recent Reading Lists

Books in the vault, Deck C, Folger Shakespeare Library, 9/11/09

Everyone who is someone and every organization that is something seems to be putting out a reading list these days. Perhaps I can persuade Chris to put one together for TDI sometime. In the meantime, several lists have popped up recently that are worth the time to peruse. They are particular good for sparking arguments over what was omitted and should be added.

The first is from LTG H.R. McMaster (scroll halfway down for the sidebar), the newly appointed Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. He actually put this together a few years ago to outline his reading choices for military professionals. The list should be familiar to military historians and folks working in defense-related fields. It definitely delivers a sold grounding in theory and practice and informs McMaster’s view of the relationship between war and policy.

However, policy-making veteran Heather Hurlburt pointed out that McMaster’s list included no works written by women or non-Westerners. So she compiled a list of additional selections written primarily by women, including several contributors to the current ongoing national security conversation. As for non-Westerns, she only offers the ubiquitous Sun Tze, so there is room for more recommendations on that score.

The next comes from the membership of War on the Rocks and addresses the Vietnam War. It is an impressive mix of classic works on the subject and newer revisions based on declassified primary sources from all of the belligerents. The list also includes personal memoirs and novels. As a former Special Operations Forces historian, I lament the exclusion of any titles related to the covert side of that conflict.

The last list comes from Professor Andrew Bacevich, by way of West Point’s Modern War Institute. His list of five works includes Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Dr. Strangelove. Bacevich also cites the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr’s The Irony of American History. His admiration for Neibuhr’s work is shared by former President Barack Obama.

So, has anyone read anything interesting lately?

Proposed Defense Increases

President Trump has proposed a 10% increase in the defense budget. I gather this means he will request supplementary spending of $30 billion for FY2017 (this year) and a full $54 billion for FY2017. This will put the defense budget at $603 billion and non-defense discretionary spending at $462 billion for FY2018. Of course, this has to go through congress, as the House of Representatives only can initiate spending bills, and they somehow or the other have to pay for this (which is going to be an issue). No specifics on what the money will be spent on, although they mentioned planes and ships.

Donald-Trump-defense-spending

Trump-plans-to-cut-funding-for-most-government-agencies

Trump-budget-proposal

The cuts will be a challenge. According to one article: “Two officials familiar with Trump’s proposal said the planned defense spending increase would be financed partly by cuts to the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency and other non-defense programs.”

The State Department and U.S. AID budgets are around 50 billion. Around $26 billion goes to foreign aide. The top four recipients for aid are Israel (3.0 billion), Egypt (1.3 billion), Afghanistan (1.3 billion) and Pakistan (700 million). I can’t envision we would cut any of these four aid programs, so savings from these budgets may be limited.

The EPA budget is 8 billion. They are talking about a 25% cut there, so $2 billion.

The rest of the money will have to come from other non-defense discretionary programs (vice Social Security, Medicare, paying interest on the debt, etc.) or we will have to increase the deficit. Right now, I suspect it will be the later. The last two major defense build-ups were funded by deficit spending.

 

Status of Service Secretaries

The nominee for Secretary of Navy has withdrawn his nomination: navy-secretary-nominee-withdraws

Army: Robert Speer (acting). No one new nominated yet.

Navy: Sean Stackley (acting). No one new nominated yet.

Air Force: Lisa Disbrow (acting): Heather Wilson nominated.

 

All the acting secretaries are hold-over undersecretaries and assistance secretaries from the previous administration. I gather that the various deputy, undersecretary and assistant secretary slots are also mostly not filled.

 

Iraqi Casualties in Mosul

I don’t think Iraqi casualties in the Mosul operations have been published. This article has a report that the fight to take the eastern half of Mosul cost Iraqi forces 500 dead, with another 3,000 wounded in three months of fighting (6-to-1 wounded to killed ratio). On Saturday, Iraq had four soldiers killed and 53 wounded in the fight for western Mosul: U.S. Forces Push Artillery, Rockets and Helicopters Closer to the Fight in Mosul

The source of the estimate was General Joseph Votel, head of the U.S. Central Command. Suspect they have more precise figures. Not sure if the figures include Kurdish forces or Iraqi Shiite militia. Also see: iraqi-army-ahead-of-schedule-in-fight-for-west-mosul

List of U.S. Arms Sales

I like lists. Here is an interesting one: Countries Buying the Most Weapons From the US Government

Last year the U.S. government sent almost $10 billion worth of vehicles and arms to other countries. In the past five years, more than 100 nations have purchased from us. Thirteen countries accounted for almost 70% of our 2016 arms exports. The list is:

  1. Saudi Arabia: $1.9 billion
  2. Iraq: $893 million
  3. Australia: $869 million
  4. UAE: $773 million
  5. Qatar: $595 million
  6. Israel: $526 million
  7. Italy: $511 million
  8. South Korea: $501 million
  9. Japan: $307 million
  10. Mexico: $280 million
  11. Morocco: $244 million
  12. Egypt: $238 million
  13. United Kingdom: $217 million

Army Creates Security Force Assistance Brigades and Training Academy

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Brandon Blanton, center, a trainer with Company A, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, Task Force Strike, assists Iraqi army ranger students during a room-clearing drill at Camp Taji, Iraq, July 18, 2016. The new Security Force Assistance Brigades will assume these types of missions in the future. (Photo Credit: 1st Lt. Daniel Johnson)

With much of the focus of the defense and national security communities shifting to peer and near-peer challenges, the Department of the Army’s recent announcement that the first Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB) will begin standing up in October 2017 comes as an interesting bit of news. The Army will also establish a new Military Advisor Training Academy at Ft. Benning, Georgia to train officers and non-commissioned officers to staff what are projected to a total of six SFABs with 500 personnel each.

The Strategic Role of Security Force Assistance

Security Force Assistance (SFA) is the umbrella term for U.S. whole-of-government support provided to develop the capability and capacity of foreign security forces and institutions. SFA is intended to help defend host nations from external and internal threats, and encompasses foreign internal defense (FID), counterterrorism (CT), counterinsurgency (COIN), and stability operations.

The use of military aid to bolster allies is a time-old strategic expedient; it was one of the primary weapons with which the U.S.waged the Cold War. SFA has assumed a similar role in U.S. policy for countering global terrorism, as a cost-effective alternative to direct involvement in destroying or deterring the development of terrorist sanctuaries. The efficacy of this approach is a hot topic for debate in foreign policy and national security circles these days.

Organizing, training, equipping, building, advising, and assisting foreign security forces is a time and resource-intensive task and the best way of doing it has been long debated. One of the Army’s justifications for creating the SFAB’s was the need to free line units from SFA taskings to focus on preparing for combat operations. The Army is also highlighting the SFABs dual capability as cadres upon which combat-ready U.S. Army Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) can be quickly created in a national emergency with the addition of junior personnel.

Advise and Assist: SOF vs. General Purpose Forces?

The Army believes that dedicated SFABs will be more effective at providing SFA than has been the case with recent efforts. This is an important consideration in light of the decidedly mixed combat performance of U.S.-trained and equipped Afghan and Iraqi security forces. The dramatic collapse of Iraqi Army units defending Mosul in 2014 that had been trained by conventional U.S. forces contrasts with the current dependence on U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF)-trained Iraqi Counterrorism Service (CTS) forces to lead the effort to retake the city.

This apparent disparity in success between the SOF advise and assist model and the more generic conventional force SFA template is causing some angst in the U.S. Army Special Forces (ARSOF) community, some of whom see training foreign security forces as its traditional institutional role. Part of the reason conventional forces are assigned SFA tasks is because there will never be enough ARSOF to meet the massive demand, and ARSOF units are needed for other specialized taskings as well. But the ultimate success of the SFABs will likely be gauged against the historical accomplishments of their SOF colleagues.

1979 to present

We try to stay away from politics in this blog, which is hard to do when discussing national security policy. Still, there are enough political and opinion piece websites and blogs out there, that we do not wish to add to the noise! This article by Major Danny Sjursen borders on the edge of being overtly political but I found it very interesting regardless: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165261

I have not read his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge but I did invest parts of two chapters in my book, America’s Modern Wars, discussing the surge in Iraq and its later adaptation to Afghanistan. His book will also be added to my growing reading list (right now I am struggling with getting the final edits to War by Numbers completed on time…and should not be blogging at all).

Anyhow, I do like his theme that U.S. involvement and policies in the Middle East fundamentally started shifted with the events on 1979. I think it is a useful timeline.