Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
Article in Yahoo: U.S. tanks have fallen far behind Russia in a key area
There are a couple of useful links in this article, including the one to a 27-page report by the Congressional Research Service on Army and Marine Corps Active Protection Systems: CRS Report on APS
There is a new movie being released this month called Denial. It is about the libel lawsuit pursued by controversial historian David Irving against U.S. academic historian Deborah Lipstadt. David Irving was a British historian who specialized in the military history of the Third Reich. His writings downplayed the Holocaust and made the claim that there was no evidence that Hitler knew about it. She took David Irving to task in her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust. David Irving took her to court in the UK, where their libel laws place the burden of proof on her. She had the legal requirement to prove that the Holocaust actually occurred and that Hitler ordered it.
Spoiler alert: He lost.
I did reference David Irving’s work twice in my book Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka. I was well aware of this controversy. On 4 May 1943 there was a meeting called by Adolf Hitler and attended by Colonel General Heinz Guderian, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, Colonel General Hans Jeschonnek and many others. This rather famous meeting, part of the German planning for the Battle of Kursk, has been discussed in most books on Kursk.
The problem is that there are only three accounts of the meeting. There is a detailed account of the meeting in Heinz Guderian’s book, Panzer Leader, which provides a three-page narrative of the meeting. There is only a brief discussion in Manstein’s book, Lost Victories, which mentions the meeting but provides no details. These are the two sources that most people have used. Many historians have just accepted the Guderian account. One Kursk book started with the narrative of this meeting based upon Guderian’s account.
But there is third source. This is an entry in Field Marshal Wolfram Baron von Richthofen’s diary based upon a conversation he had with General Jeschonnek, the Chief of Staff of the Luftwaffe. It stated:
“[On 27 April] General Model declared he was not strong enough and would probably get bogged down or take too long. The Fuehrer took the view that the attack must be punched through without fail in shortest time possible. [Early in May] General Guderian offered to furnish enough tank units within six weeks to guarantee this. The Fuehrer thus decided on a postponement of six weeks. To get the blessing of all sides on this decision, he called a conference [on 4 May] with Field Marshals von Kluge and von Manstein. At first they agreed on a postponement; but when they heard that the Fuehrer had already made his mind up to that effect, they spoke out for an immediate opening of the attack—apparently in order to avoid the odium of being blamed for the postponement themselves.”
This account directly contradicts the Guderian account. The problem is that this reference to the diary entry and its translation from German was done by David Irving in his controversial book, Hitler’s War, originally published in 1977. Wolfram von Richthofen was a cousin of the famous World War I ace Manfred von Richthofen, the highest scoring ace in World War I with 80 claimed kills. Wolfram Richthofen served with the German air unit, the Condor Legion, in the Spanish Civil War and planned the bombing of Guernica. He had led a number of German air formations throughout the war and in May 1943 was the commander of the VIII Air Corps which was to participate in the Battle of Kursk. The command of this air corps was to be taken over by General Jeschonnek for the upcoming battle (this never happened). Richthofen’s diary has been quoted from extensively by David Irving. To date, I do not know of anyone else that has translated it.
So, before I used the quote, I wrote to David Irving in 2002. I specifically asked him about the diary and where it was located. It noted this in the footnote to this passage:
“David Irving, page 514 (or pages 583–584 in his 2001 version of the book that is available on the web). According to emails received from David Irving in 2002 and 2008, this passage is a directly translated quote from the diary, and the diary was stored at the Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt at Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. A xerox of the page in question is stored in the Irving Collection at the Institut fur Zeitgeschechte in Munich, Germany. We have not checked these files and cannot confirm the translation.”
So, I could access the files. It was possible to see the diary and check the translation. This was considered. Of course, to do so would have required me to travel to Germany, with a translator, to examine the diary. This would have taken at least a week of my time and cost a few thousand dollars. For fairly obvious reasons, I choose not to do this. Instead, I stated in the footnote that we had not confirmed the translation.
As David Irving headed to trial, I continued to wonder about this passage. There was no reason to assume that it was faked, or deliberately grossly mistranslated. On the other hand, it was something I was not 100% sure of. But, there was also no reason to assume that Guderian’s or Manstein’s account was 100% correct either, and people had freely used them without much question. So, do I build my narrative on those two well-known first-person accounts and ignore the contradictory second-hand account from Richthofen’s dairy just because it came from David Irving? I decided that all accounts needed to be presented and I left it to the reader to decide which they believed.
As I noted in my book (on page 69):
As no stenogram exists of this conference, one is left only with the memoirs of two generals and the diary of a person who did not participate. There also are what appear to be the Inspector General of Armored Troops’ notes for the meeting for 3 May. These notes clearly show the beneficial effects on tank strength of a six-week delay in the offensive. Guderian’s memoirs are quite explicit as to what happened at the conference but appear to be confused as to attendees and dates. Manstein mentions the conference and the issues in a very general sense. The Richthofen entry contradicts the other two memoirs, claiming that Guderian was the source of the six-week delay and that Manstein and Kluge supported the delay. It is impossible to resolve these differences.
The problem is that both Guderian’s and Manstein’s memoirs were written after the war. It is hard to say what passages may have been self-serving or written with an eye towards future historians. The story by Jeschonnek was recorded at the time by Richthofen. Jeschonnek committed suicide in August 1943 and Richthofen died from a brain tumor in July 1945. Which account is more “real?”
We (they) will take Mosul in October, maybe: Fight for Iraqi city Mosul may begin soon
Williamson Murray, professor emeritus of history at Ohio State University, on the notion that military failures can be traced to an overemphasis on the lessons of the last war:
It is a myth that military organizations tend to do badly in each new war because they have studied too closely the last one; nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact is that military organizations, for the most part, study what makes them feel comfortable about themselves, not the uncongenial lessons of past conflicts. The result is that more often than not, militaries have to relearn in combat—and usually at a heavy cost—lessons that were readily apparent at the end of the last conflict.
[Williamson Murray, “Thinking About Innovation,” Naval War College Review, Spring 2001, 122-123. This passage was cited in a recent essay by LTG H.R. McMaster, “Continuity and Change: The Army Operating Concept and Clear Thinking About Future War,” Military Review, March-April 2015. I recommend reading both.]
Nice summary of the situation: IS loss of border area with Turkey sharply harms group
A few highlights:
It appears that the Army’s XM-25 Counter-Defilade Target Engagement System, a shoulder-fired 25mm grenade launcher, may not get the opportunity to fulfill its destiny as the Weapon That Will Change Infantry Warfare Forever after all.
Military.com reports that the Department of Defense’s Inspector General’s Office has recommended that the Assistant Secretary of the Army, Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, Katrina McFarland, “determine whether to proceed with or cancel the XM25 program after reviewing the results of the 2016 Governmental testing,” which will be completed this fall. The Army has indicated that it concurs with the recommendation.
The Army delayed acquisition funding and extended the XM-25’s development phase in 2014 in response to problems encountered during field testing and critiques of the weapon by the 75th Ranger Regiment and the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence. During a live-fire exercise in 2013, an XM-25 “experienced a double feed and an unintentional primer ignition of one of the 25mm high explosive rounds,” which fortunately, caused only minor injuries to the soldier testing it, but potentially could have been much worse.
More consequentially for the XM-25 program, the Rangers found that infantry squad soldiers assigned to wield it could not also carry a rifle due to the extra weight. This limited the ability of the XM-25 bearer to perform battle drills and deprived the squad of a rifle in close range combat. The XM-25 also quickly depleted all of its 36 rounds in action. As a result, the Rangers declined to use an XM-25 in an assault on a fortified compound in Afghanistan in 2013, on the grounds that the weapon’s limited utility did not justify leaving out an M4A1 carbine.
The DOD IG criticized the Army for not specifying the exact costs of the extended development and for declining to state how many XM-25s it is considering initially procuring. Stay tuned…
Over at Foreign Policy, Michael Kofman, a research scientist at CNA Corp. and fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, has analyzed recent Russian troop deployments on Ukraine’s border peripheries and what they imply about the strategic goals of the Russian government in the mid-term. He concludes that the Russians are not massing for a possible invasion in the short-term. Instead, the shifting of forces suggests sustainable, long-term deployments at strategically important locations along the border. The mid-term objective of this is to secure the current status-quo.
The Russian General Staff is not only repositioning these units back where they were before 2009, it’s also rebuilding a capable combat grouping on Crimea — albeit one that’s largely defensive in nature… It also secures the Russian vision for how this conflict ends: In a hypothetical future where the Minsk agreement is actually implemented, Russian forces may withdraw from the separatist enclaves in the Donbass. If the deal fails to hold or Kiev reneges on the terms, Russian divisions ringing the country from its north to very southeast (not including Crimea) would be poised to counter any Ukrainian moves by striking from several directions.
Kofman also sees this strategy as seeking to maintain Russia’s political dominance over Ukraine in the longer term.
The string of divisions, airbases, and brigades will be able to effect conventional deterrence or compellence for years to come… Russia will retain escalation dominance over Ukraine for the foreseeable future. By the end of 2017, its forces will be better positioned to conduct an incursion or threaten regime change in Kiev than they ever were in 2014.
Kofman recommends that the U.S. and its allies carefully think through the implications of this strategy. He believes it will take Ukraine five to 10 years to rebuild an effective military, but even if successful, the future correlation of forces and the aggressive positioning of Russian forces could make the situation more unstable rather than less so.
U.S. policymakers should think about the medium to long term — a timeline that is admittedly not our strong suit. If this conflict is not placed on stable footing by the time both countries feel themselves capable of engaging in a larger fight, it may well result in a conventional war that would dwarf the small set-piece battles we’ve seen so far. Beyond imposing a ceasefire on the current fighting, the West should think about what a rematch might look like several years from now.
!["The Ultimate Sand Castle" [Flickr, Jon]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ultimate_Sand_Castle.jpg)
Chris and I both have discussed previously the apparent waning interest on the part of the Department of Defense to sponsor empirical research studying the basic phenomena of modern warfare. The U.S. government’s boom-or-bust approach to this is long standing, extending back at least to the Vietnam War. Recent criticism of the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment (OSD/NA) is unlikely to help. Established in 1973 and led by the legendary Andrew “Yoda” Marshall until 2015, OSD/NA plays an important role in funding basic research on topics of crucial importance to the art of net assessment. Critics of the office appear to be unaware of just how thin the actual base of empirical knowledge is on the conduct of war. Marshall understood that the net result of a net assessment based mostly on guesswork was likely to be useless, or worse, misleadingly wrong.
This lack of attention to the actual conduct of war extends beyond government sponsored research. In 2004, Stephen Biddle, a professor of political science at George Washington University and a well-regarded defense and foreign policy analyst, published Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. The book focused on a very basic question: what causes victory and defeat in battle? Using a comparative approach that incorporated quantitative and qualitative methods, he effectively argued that success in contemporary combat was due to the mastery of what he called the “modern system.” (I won’t go into detail here, but I heartily recommend the book to anyone interested in the topic.)
Military Power was critically acclaimed and received multiple awards from academic, foreign policy, military, operations research, and strategic studies organizations. For all the accolades, however, Biddle was quite aware just how neglected the study of war has become in U.S. academic and professional communities. He concluded the book with a very straightforward assessment:
[F]or at least a generation, the study of war’s conduct has fallen between the stools of the institutional structure of modern academia and government. Political scientists often treat war itself as outside their subject matter; while its causes are seen as political and hence legitimate subjects of study, its conduct and outcomes are more often excluded. Since the 1970s, historians have turned away from the conduct of operations to focus on war’s effects on social, economic, and political structures. Military officers have deep subject matter knowledge but are rarely trained as theoreticians and have pressing operational demands on their professional attention. Policy analysts and operations researchers focus so tightly on short-deadline decision analysis (should the government buy the F22 or cancel it? Should the Army have 10 divisions or 8?) that underlying issues of cause and effect are often overlooked—even when the decisions under analysis turn on embedded assumptions about the causes of military outcomes. Operations research has also gradually lost much of its original empirical focus; modeling is now a chiefly deductive undertaking, with little systematic effort to test deductive claims against real world evidence. Over forty years ago, Thomas Schelling and Bernard Brodie argued that without an academic discipline of military science, the study of the conduct of war had languished; the passage of time has done little to overturn their assessment. Yet the subject is simply too important to treat by proxy and assumption on the margins of other questions In the absence of an institutional home for the study of warfare, it is all the more essential that analysts in existing disciplines recognize its importance and take up the business of investigating capability and its causes directly and rigorously. Few subjects are more important—or less studied by theoretical social scientists. With so much at stake, we surely must do better. [pp. 207-208]
Biddle published Military Power 12 years ago, in 2004. Has anything changed substantially? Have we done better?
During the Cold War Sweden and Finland were two nations that were democratic and independent but were neutral and not part of NATO. Norway and Denmark were a part of NATO since 1949 and the three Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) were part of the Soviet Union since 1940. Now the three Baltic states are part of NATO as of 2004 and Sweden and Finland are establishing ties to NATO.
An article on Finland from Michael Peck: Finland: America’s Next Top Ally?
Article on Lithuania: Ground Zero in the new Cold War
Entirely irrelevant article on Norway: More than 300 reindeer killed lightning in Norway
Just a little demographics: the population of Scandinavia is around 27 million people, that is 5 million in Norway (which has a per capita income higher than the U.S.), 10 million in Sweden, 5.5 million in Finland, over 5.5 million in Denmark, plus Iceland and the Faroe Islands. The population of the three Baltic states is around 6 million people (and includes four major languages, including Russian). The population of Russia is 144 million (with 5 million in St. Petersburg and less than a million in the Kaliningrad Oblast).
We have sold the rights to use our combat model, the TNDM (Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model) to Sweden and Finland. We have never the rights to use the combat model to a NATO member.
There is a new dimension in warfare: legal. For example: Ukraine taking Russia to Court
Ukraine is taking Russia to court in multiple venues. This includes the multiple cases in the International Court of Justice in the Hague and the European Court of Human Rights. Not sure how this all plays out, but in the end, there has to be some additional cost to Russia if the judgments go against it. It is not like the bad old days when one could march into the Rhineland, annex Austria and take the Sudetenland facing only international condemnation. Now one has to deal with law suits!!! I gather these things are going to drag on for years.