Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
My Kursk book is back down to $171.80 on Amazon.com, which is below the list price of $195. For a week it was at $275. That was the only week that my book America’s Modern Wars was ranked higher in sales on Amazon.com than my Kursk book. I do consider America’s Modern Wars, being a theoretical analysis of the nature of insurgencies, to be a more significant piece of work than my Kursk book. Still, World War II sells better, even at six times the price.
Article in The National Interest by Michael Peck on Russia reconstituting the First Guards Tank Army: Next Stop Berlin
This appears to be in response to us sending a brigade to Europe: U.S. Brigade
We send a brigade…they raise a tank army.
Anyhow, the First Tank Army (later First Guards) commanded by Mikhail E. Katukov plays a prominent role in my book on Kursk. In July 1943 it consisted of the III Mechanized Corps (Krivoshein), VI Tank Corps (Getman…love that name) and XXXI Tank Corps (Cherniyenko). It was better handled that many of the other armored units at the Battle of Kursk.
On page 447 on the book I do have a story of a phone call on the morning of July 6 1943 between Stalin and Katukov drawn from “unpublished memoirs” provided to me by the late Col. Sverdlov. This may be the only published reference to that phone exchange. It stated:
Vatutin ordered that the First Tank Army, II and V Guards Tank Corps should counterattack Tomarovka. I was against this decision. Why would we move our dug-in tanks two kilometers forward exposing them to the 88mm guns that can destroy our T-34s? Our 76.2mm guns could not reach the German tanks even at the 1.5 kilometer distance! Luckily for me, I received a phone call from Stalin in the morning of 6 July. I told him that it would make more sense to fight German tanks from prepared positions. “Okay,” Stalin said, “You won’t counterattack. Vatutin will call you and tell you that.”
From the bio of Katukov (1900-1976) in my book (whose picture is at top of this post) is a story from Col. Sverdlov:
In 1990, the newspaper “The Red Star” asked me [Col. Sverdlov] to write an “unusual” article about Katukov (to commemorate his 90th birthday). I went to the apartment where he lived—an ordinary nine-story building on the Leningrad parkway by the “Sokol” metro [station] where many marshals and army generals used to live back in the days. His wife Ekaterina received me very kindly. She showed me right away all four spacious rooms of the apartment, which she transformed into a museum: pictures, photographs, Katukov’s things. “Our dacha (summer house) is also a museum now, except that it is only visited by combat friends, but that is very rarely,” she said. And then she dazed me with a phrase coming literally from an unknown person, “He did not have children either with his first wife or with me. He couldn’t. He followed treatments before, during and after the war, but with no results. I was, so that you understand, the “field and campaign wife” from as early as 1941 and loved him a lot. He divorced his first wife right after the war and we got married in 1946.” All of this was said in a burst.
The museum was marvelous, and apparently it was very expensive to set up. It revealed immediately that the woman Katukov spent all the war years with, loved him so dearly that it would make any real man jealous. “I even put a memorial granite plaque on the house at my expense; can one really wait for the government?” Ekaterina added.
It’s true that she said all that was already long ago and well known on Katukov’s combat journey. And there was not one single unrespectful word! When we parted, she gave me Katukov’s memoir “At the Edge of the Main Strike,” written by V. Titov based on archival documents and Katukov’s stories. The book had the inscription, “To F. Sverdlov—in hallowed memory of Mikhail Katukov,” and all this after 14 years after his death! That’s what you mean by the real love of a woman! I will take the liberty to suppose say that she inspired him in the war as well. Perhaps Freud was right?!
For the newspaper article, I only described the museum. I earned some praise and double royalties for the article.
Article in Newsweek today: Putin Presides over a Slide into Poverty
Nothing new here (if you have been reading the blog), but a few highlights:
2. “Currency devaluation (in 1998), generous state bailouts (in 2008) and a commodity prices rebound (in 2012) allowed the economy to bounce back quickly. None of these fixes are available now….to save the day.”
Oil today is at $39 a barrel for crude (Russia needs at least $50). I don’t think it is going significantly higher anytime soon, and some people are thinking that it is going to slide down some more.
Just to reinforce Shawn Woodford’s point below, let me quote from Chapter Twenty-Four, pages 294-295, of my book America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam:
Many years ago, I had the pleasure of having a series of meetings with Professor Ivo Feierabend. I was taking a graduate course in Econometrics at San Diego State University (SDSU). I decided that for my class paper, I would do something on the causes of revolution. The two leading efforts on this, both done in the 1960s, were by Ted Gurr and the husband and wife team of Feierabend and Feierabend. I reviewed their work, and for a variety of reasons, got interested in the measurements and analyses done by the Feierabends, vice the more known work by Ted Gurr. This eventually led me to Dr. Feierabend, who still happened to be at San Diego State University much to my surprise. This was some 20 years after he had done what I consider to be ground-breaking work on revolutions. I looked him up and had several useful and productive meetings with him.
In the 1960s, he had an entire team doing this work. Several professors were involved, and he had a large number of graduate students coding events of political violence. In addition, he had access to mainframe computers, offices, etc. The entire effort was shut down in the 1960s, and he had not done anything further on this in almost 20 years. I eventually asked him why he didn’t continue his work. His answer, short and succinct was, “I had no budget.”
This was a difficult answer for a college student to understand. But, it is entirely understood by me now. To do these types of analytical projects requires staff, resources, facilities, etc. They cannot be done by one person, and even if they could, that one person usually needs a paycheck. So, the only way one could conduct one of these large analytical projects is to be funded. In the case of the Feierabends, that funding came from the government, as did ours. Their funding ended after a few years, as has ours. Their work could be described as a good start, but there was so much more that needed to be done. Intellectually, one is mystified why someone would not make sure that this work was continued. Yet, in the cases of Ted Gurr and the Feierabends, it did not.
The problem lies in that the government (or at least the parts that I dealt with) sometimes has the attention span of a two-year-old. Not only that, it also has the need for instant gratification, very much like a two-year-old. Practically, what that means is that projects that can answer an immediate question get funding (like the Bosnia and Iraq casualty estimates). Larger research efforts that will produce an answer or a product in two to three years can also get funding. On the other hand, projects that produce a preliminary answer in two to three years and then need several more years of funding to refine, check, correct and develop that work, tend to die. This has happened repeatedly. The analytical community is littered with many clever, well thought-out reports that look to be good starts. What is missing is a complete body of analysis on a subject.
The New York Times published a very interesting article addressing the inability of government-sponsored scholars and researchers to provide policymakers with an analytical basis for identifying potential terrorists. For anyone who has worked with U.S. government patrons on basic research, much of this will sound familiar.
“After all this funding and this flurry of publications, with each new terrorist incident we realize that we are no closer to answering our original question about what leads people to turn to political violence,” Marc Sageman, a psychologist and a longtime government consultant, wrote in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence in 2014. “The same worn-out questions are raised over and over again, and we still have no compelling answers.”
Ample government resourcing and plenty of research attention appears to yield little in advanced knowledge and insight. Why is this? For some, the way the government responds to research findings is the problem.
When researchers do come up with possible answers, the government often disregards them. Not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for instance, Alan B. Krueger, the Princeton economist, tested the widespread assumption that poverty was a key factor in the making of a terrorist. Mr. Krueger’s analysis of economic figures, polls, and data on suicide bombers and hate groups found no link between economic distress and terrorism.
More than a decade later, law enforcement officials and government-funded community groups still regard money problems as an indicator of radicalization.
There is also the demand for simple, definitive answers to immediately pressing questions (also known as The Church of What’s Happening Now).
Researchers, too, say they have been frustrated by both the Bush and Obama administrations because of what they say is a preoccupation with research that can be distilled into simple checklists… “They want to be able to do things right now,” said Clark R. McCauley Jr., a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College who has conducted government-funded terrorism research for years. “Anybody who offers them something right now, like to go around with a checklist — right now — is going to have their attention.
“It’s demand driven,” he continued. “The people with guns and badges are so eager to have something. The fact that they could actually do harm? This doesn’t deter them.”
There is also the problem of research that leads to conclusions that are at odds with the prevailing political sentiment or run contrary to institutional interests.
Mr. McCauley said many of his colleagues and peers conducted smart research and drew narrow conclusions. The problem, he said, is that studies get the most attention when they suggest warning signs. Research linking terrorism to American policies, meanwhile, is ignored.
However, the more honest researchers also admit that their inability to develop effective modes of inquiry into what are certainly complicated problems plays a role as well.
In 2005, Jeff Victoroff, a University of Southern California psychologist, concluded that the leading terrorism research was mostly just political theory and anecdotes. “A lack of systematic scholarly investigation has left policy makers to design counterterrorism strategies without the benefit of facts,” he wrote in The Journal of Conflict Resolution.
This state of affairs would be problematic enough considering it has been a decade-and-a-half since the events of 11 September 2001 made understanding political violence a national imperative. But it is even more perplexing given that the U.S. government began sponsoring basic research on this topic in the 1950s and 60s. The pioneering work of scholars Ted Gurr and Ivo and Rosalind Feierabend started with U.S. government funding. Gurr published his seminal work Why Men Rebel in 1970. Nearly a half century later, why are we still asking the same questions?
Amazon.com is now charging $275 for my Kursk book. For some reason, they had always discounted it to below list price. Last week, the discounted ended and it now cost well above list price. We have no say in what Amazon.com does or does not do. We have watched the odd price fluctuations on the book prices there with considerable bemusement.
It is available from Aberdeen Bookstore at the list price of $195. If you click on the image of the book to the right of this post then it will lead you there.
The link is: Aberdeen Bookstore
Article from the Daily Beast. I don’t think I have anything to say about this.
An article in the History News Network got my attention
A few lines caught my attention:
Well, this is probably very interesting work and I probably need to scare up a copy. The “for the first time” claim caught my attention in light of the work by Ted Gurr and Feierabend & Feierabend in the 1960s, which I am familiar with. I have posted on their work before. Of course, what Gurr and the Feierabends’ work showed was that (and this is paraphrasing from my memory):
The sense I have from the Gurr and Feierabend’s work is that the least stable countries are those that were developing economically and then stalled or went into recession. This, of course, is the scenario with Russia (and others like Venezuela) and possibly may become the scenario in China.
[Photo deleted at the request of AFP]
An interesting article today in the Washington Post (photo from Huffington Post):
The Islamic State is in Retreat
A few lines caught my attention:
Of course, by establishing an “Islamic State,” a guerilla movement has now developed a conventional mission to hold territory. This allows us to develop a more conventional war against them. There may still be a guerilla movement to deal with after the Islamic State has been reduced.
