What Are You Currently Reading? 2012

[ganulv]

I have an observation and question about a little thing but I wonder nonetheless. When you mentioned "the makeshift gym" it reminded me. What do you, and anybody else, think of the whole "gym" and "workout" subculture and how it affects the way things are run over there? I mention this because it was my subjective observation that some of the people I worked with, some, seemed to be as interested in making sure they had their full allotment of gym time as they were interested in the conflict.

Sounds prison yardish to me.

[The Cuyahoga Kid]

The Chinese Army Today by Dennis Blasko 2nd Ed (2012)


Strategic Asia 2012-13: China’s Military Challenge. Ashley J. Tellis and Travis Tanner, eds. (2012)


The Chinese Air Force: Evolving Roles, Concepts and Capabilities. Richard Hallion, Roger Cliff, Phillip Saunders. (2012)

[parvati]

The Triple Agent by Joby Warrick

So far, so good.

[ganulv]

Checked out The Gun by C.J. Chivers from the library last week. Apart from the fact that I thought the book could have used a bit of editing as the topics did not seem always to stay on topic, I much enjoyed it. My knowledge of firearms is very basic, however, so I was not a very informed reader. Any informed readers of the book on the forum who would care to share their own opinions?

[carl]

Ganulv:

I am probably far less informed than I like to think I am but my opinion of the book is exactly the same as yours. Very good but it needed a tougher editor. It was as if the author and the editor knew little about firearms history before the project was started and found the whole of the subject so interesting they couldn't bear to leave anything out.

[carl]

artillery it needs; the American infantry needs all it can get."

That is what a French general said in WWI. I read it long ago and could never really understand why he said that. After reading this book, The School of Hard Knocks, Combat Leadership in the American Expeditionary Force (http://www.amazon.com/School-Hard-Kn...expeditionary+), I understand.

The book is about how American small unit leaders, Lts and NCOs were trained and how they performed in battle. They were very poorly trained and consequently performed poorly, the poor performance resulting in sluggish performance inordinately high casualties for the results gained.

The Army was faced with an almost impossible task, going from around 7,000 regular and Nat Guard officers to almost 200,000 in no time at all. So only so much could be done. But the book recounts how very much of what was done was a complete waste, large blocks of time spent on close order drill, bayonet fighting and wig wag flag signaling. The Army de-emphasized training available from Allied officers in order to further an 'American' way of fighting to a certain extent.

It was surprising to me that the NCO corps basically wasn''t. The training was almost non-existent and the results showed.

The many many faults were never really corrected. Divisions fed into the line in late 1918 were as bad as the first divisions to go in and those first divisions never got much better as far as small unit fighting went. Divisions and brigades got better at things like coordinating artillery and supports but the sharp end stayed dull.

It was very interesting how Army personnel policies were hugely important in getting in the way. Wholesale drafts from units that had worked together for a while destroyed cohesion. Filling school quotas with small unit leaders pulled directly out of battles was something they insisted on doing. The book seems to describe an AEF that was approaching a crisis with straggling possibly approaching 10% as the war ended.

Another interesting point the author made was that small unit leader training and accession practices in Vietnam resembled to some extent those of WWI.

The book was a little slow in the first few chapters, neccasarily (sic) so in order to detail the initial training but it all comes together in the last chapters describing how it all played out in France.

[Fuchs]

Sadly, actual small unit combat training was a quite novel idea in WW1.
The fragmentation of infantry combat into platoon or squad actions caused by the need to exploit micro terrain features (or the need for night actions) for survivability was not adequately foreseen. Pre-1914 literature is concerned with battalion-level tactics mostly.
They did actually understand the problems caused by firepower and some authors did understand the necessary individual movement techniques, but they simply did not understand that command and tactics would break down into parallel small unit actions.

Ironically, the otherwise relatively conservative cavalry was often leading in small unit tactics (especially raiding and scouting) because it was anticipated that cavalry in action would often be about small units.


Few select units, typically meant to spearhead offensives, received much small unit combat training in form of simulated assaults on dummy trenches and the like.
Leaders of line units on battalion level and below had to improvise training based on what they've seen happening in combat (which required to survive the same yourself in the first place).
NCOs were in many armies the ones who shouted commands so the officers would not need to do so and might even be absent from the most routine exercises.