Got the following e-mail request from LTC Ike Wilson and would appreciate any assisstance our Council members can provide.

I am wondering if any of you could help me and a research colleague of mine in our effort to answer a couple of reviewer questions we are trying to address for an article we are trying to publish currently under review.

To summarize, our research concentrates on the question of what I call the "paradox within the American ('modern' Western) Way of War and Peace," that is, the propensity to 'fall short of victory" in our wars of insurgency/counterinsurgency ("small wars"; type-3 wars) in spite of an unparalleled prowess at winning all the military battles on behalf of winning our wars/peace. I have partnered with a statistician at Princeton University and for the past two-years we have been conducting a mixed-method collaborative research program, studying this phenomenon (to include testing for its true presence versus 'mythology') through qualitative case study analysis mixed with large-N longitudinal analysis. We have designed a new database that records and analyzes the determinants of 'victory' in 278 "small wars" between the period 1800 to 2005.

Our preliminary observations show that this "paradox" is more real than modern-mythology (it persists) and more intriguingly, that the trend defies some of the traditional explanations, such as that non-democratic regimes do not suffer this phenomenon as do democratic ones.

Our database is unique in the fields of conflict studies and strategic studies in that we have incorporated modern (western) military doctrinal concepts and indices into the models -- oddly, something that is not done or present in most if not all of the "seminal" correlates of war-type data bases out there. Perhaps most importantly, we have partitioned the so-called "modern period" into five epochs, incorporating military history and conflict studies measures of periods of evolution/revolution in military-tech-political affairs. It is in regard to this last issue that my questions to you lie.

One of our reviewers is questioning the relevance of the WWI period (and specifically, our dating of c.1917) as a demarcation between the foraging/magazine-based system of warfare and the rise/dawn of the "machine" era of warfare (advanced industrial mechanized). There are basically two questions here, and any suggestions for books, articles, whatever, that address this distinction would be great. First, the reviewer wants to know why we choose 1917 (or WWI more generally) as the cutoff point between foraging and machine war. We have cast a response that notes that a majority of military scholars and practitioners recognizes that WWI was a watershed, and that the battle of Cambrai is generally considered the birth of the modern system (first time large number of tanks, aircraft, and artillery are working together as combined arms; and later, the Allied counteroffensive at Amiens, in August, 1918, recognized as the true genesis of combined arms--500 tanks, 13 infantry divisions, 2 cavalry divisions, 2000 artillery pieces, 800 aircraft). Second, the reviewer does not ``get'' why the foraging era needs to be divided into foraging and early industrialization (with foraging still key). The "paradox" trend line for wins dips down around 1880 or so, and we attributed this decline to the introduction of railways, magazine-based logistics, rather than ``pure'' foraging like earlier in the 19th Cent.

So, any suggestions for work that tackles the logistics of these eras, or the importance of the railway (in addition to works by Showalter and van Creveld), would be great.

Again, any thoughts you have on this, and specifically any works you might have that emphasize the "relevance" of differentiating between the period of forage-based warfare from magazine-based to mech-based (distributed logistics) would help us immensely.

Ideally, if you could send me an email (SWJ: post responses here) with some thoughts and a short list of relevant works to reference/cite within the next couple of days, that would be great.

Thanks.

Ike.