Latest CJR -- Ricks

[Ken White]

But look at the bright side, Boyd didn't write a book...

Some say Sun Tzu's butler or son or somebody actually wrote his...

[Michael C]

Originally Posted by Ken White

Sniff. A long time ago. A LONG time ago. Hmmmph. I bought his book, first edition, in 1964 at the Smoke Bomb Hill bookstore as a 30-something Platoon Sergeant.

Long time ago indeed...

(Ken exits left to procure another refill mumbling something about "...young whippersnappers." : )

P.S.

On a serious note:

Most of what Galula wrote, as is true of Clausewitz and others, is poorly understood and very poorly applied. With good reason; times change and no two wars are alike. Galula in particular applies French practice and logic primarily to North Africans and to a lesser extent to Viet Namese. Those ideas are not universally applicable. Study them all but do so critically, try not to agree with them but to pick holes in their arguments. No one has all the answers...

All I can say is I apologize for making you feel old.

[Ken White]

However, truth be told, you didn't have much to do with making me feel old.

That started long, long ago when I was a Bn CSM (who did not worry about uniforms, haircuts or police call). I was counseling a SSG * who was born the day I landed in Korea. Been downhill ever since...

(His 'crime' was a noticeable AWOL rate; found out he was not letting people go on leave "because there was a CALFEX or a DRF layout or some other foolishness coming up." There's always something coming up -- no reason to refuse people leave)

[jmm99]

The French military in effect won in Algeria because the guerrilla forces were on the ropes. Some of the French generals felt they were stabbed in the back because of the political settlement. So, then, the generals' revolt, etc.

The reasons for the political settlement were (1) the Algerian rebels were not an existential threat to France itself, although they were a deadly nuisance; (2) continuance of the war was hurting France both diplomatically and economically; and (3) Algeria was not a prime factor in DeGaulle's plans for France's future. So, France "de-colonialized" Algeria, even though it was legally part of France proper.

The Galula monograph at Rand (free in the pdf download), Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958, is quite good because he gets down to the nuts and bolts of what he did as a company commander - and what worked and what didn't.

Putting the insurgent in the baker's oven (it worked) would not be within UCMJ bounds today.

Best

Mike

PS: And tis said that Caesar's scribe and ____ (we won't go there), wrote his Commentraries. Just some gossip to go with Ken's.

[Michael C]

Originally Posted by Ken White

That started long, long ago when I was a Bn CSM (who did not worry about uniforms, haircuts or police call). I was counseling a SSG * who was born the day I landed in Korea. Been downhill ever since...

I believe you put another post about heresy regarding PT at all hours of hte day. Not worrying about uniforms and haircuts, that is heresy! (A heresy and commonsense I wish we could all have.)

[Polarbear1605]

Putting the insurgent in the baker's oven (it worked) would not be within UCMJ bounds today.

Actually, I like the oven idea because it was a ruse. I also understand what the Field Manual says about detainees. So the questions then becomes; How does the Company Commander get the infomation he needs when fighting a counter insurgence? I really think we need a separate SOP for handling "detainees" in an insurgence. ruse = a wily subterfuge; sounds much better than "stick him in the oven" and should be authorized.

Pacification in Algeria should be manditory reading for Lts, Capts and especially, Generals

[William F. Owen]

Originally Posted by slapout9

Didn;t CvC die before he finished the book???? didn't his wife write a letter warning about the manuscript being nothing but "A Great Mass"?? just asking?

Very true and there is also the issue of the "revisions" he never carried out and the re-writes he never did - so as a work it is far from perfect. It is also strange in the more than the 150 years since his death, no one else has done better.

[slapout9]

Originally Posted by William F. Owen

Very true and there is also the issue of the "revisions" he never carried out and the re-writes he never did - so as a work it is far from perfect.

Wilf, this appears to be your mission in Life.....to finish it.....so where is the book or CD?

[William F. Owen]

Originally Posted by slapout9

Wilf, this appears to be your mission in Life.....to finish it.....so where is the book or CD?

No it's not. We have all the essential work and many good Scholars have made it very accessible - Smith, Gray, Echevarria. I merely want folks to read it.

More over, to sound like a stuck record, CvC should not be read in isolation or just taken at face value. His value is as part of a broad education - and not a "How to win wars" cookbook, which is how people try and use him.

My mission, if I had one... is to get soldiers and politicians to take Military Thought seriously. War is a serious subject and it requires study.

[slapout9]

Originally Posted by William F. Owen

My mission, if I had one... is to get soldiers and politicians to take Military Thought seriously. War is a serious subject and it requires study.

And could be helped along by some books and CD's

[Michael C]

It seems to me, and this is just my generalized thoughts on interactions with fellow officers, that the people who study war the most and take theory and strategy the most seriously are the most strident proponents of population-centric COIN. Take McChrystal and Petraues, they are frequently regarded for how intelligent they both are and their impressive amount of reading. Look at Kilcullen and Nagl, they are some of the smartest and deeply read in the field of contemporary historians.

[Steve the Planner]

I usually find Tom Ricks to be as mu8ch a provocateur as a journalist, but to the extent there is concern about him being a lackey of the military, his latest for Daily Beast is directly contrary.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-a...=hp:mainpromo2

In that article, he explains how FDR faced off against all the big boys on going to North Africa in 1943, instead of jumping ashore at Normandy.

The generals thought his goal in North Africa was just domestic grandstanding, but it accomplished a lot, including proving that the US military was not yet ready to take on Normandy in 1943, and needed an extra year of seasoning. His point, from that example, is that the generals are not always right.

The irony of all this is that we now know the generals were wrong in opposing Operation Torch—not just strategically but militarily. Roosevelt was right on both counts. It was important to Stalin that we get into the war, and doing so directly aided the Russians, by pulling German aircraft from the Eastern Front to the taxing task of supplying the Africa Corps across the Mediterranean by air. We also know now that the U.S. military was hardly prepared to fight a seasoned enemy on the ground in Europe and that it needed to take several small steps, such as amphibious landings in Africa, in order to learn how to get across the beach in Normandy much later. The defeat of the U.S. Army by the Germans at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia (remember the early scenes of the movie Patton?) provided a needed shock to the Army. Training was tightened up, and lackluster generals like Lloyd Fredendall were replaced by aggressive officers like Patton. Even then, the invasion of Sicily the following summer provided another needed shakedown, and gave American soldiers more valuable seasoning.

[Tom Odom]

Ricks and history is at best a lose connection. His analysis essentially boils it down to an FDR versus the US generals when that was hardly the case. The British wanted the US on the ground in the Mediterranean and would so argue successfully for the Italian Campaign with of course Anzio as a poster child event.

Simple statements like FDR was right and the generals were wrong make nice blog copy and poor history.

Tom

[William F. Owen]

Originally Posted by Tom Odom

Simple statements like FDR was right and the generals were wrong make nice blog copy and poor history.

Concur - thanks Tom, seeing this I can ditch my 300 + word rebuttal of that simplistic and highly inaccurate statement

[tequila]

I remember Eliot Cohen making a similar argument in 2002, just in time to dismiss "whinging" generals in the face of the invasion of Iraq. I didn't read the entirety of this, but his argument that Churchill was, in fact, a master military strategist made me laugh out loud several times (yes, please disregard the failed Norway intervention, the diversion of troops from North Africa to successive disaster in Greece and Crete, the decision to defend Singapore, etc) .

[Steve the Planner]

Tom's comment hits it:

Simple statements like FDR was right and the generals were wrong make nice blog copy and poor history.

As does Tequila's description of Churchill.

Tom Ricks: Part provocateur, and part journalist. Certainly, he would rather be at the center of a maelstrom than to quibble about the details, and, at least in my opinion, anybody willing to publicly drive a debate about highly-debatable issues is OK. Then comes the debate...

Steve

[Michael C]

But we can use the words, Ricks and History to describe his two books certainly? I mean, maybe his analogy in one daily beast article was poor, but that doesn't discount the entirety of his work does it?

[Tom Odom]

Originally Posted by Michael C

But we can use the words, Ricks and History to describe his two books certainly? I mean, maybe his analogy in one daily beast article was poor, but that doesn't discount the entirety of his work does it?

I would describe it more as historical journalism (a parallel to historical fiction) rather than military history. I say that because he seems to have a theme and then the history is melded to it rather than the reverse. He comes close but does not get to the center of the reality he describes.

As an indicator I would point to his comments that he was surprised that troops would say that Afghanistan was a harder fight physically than Iraq. He commented that he thought Kabul was much more comfortable than Baghdad. That is true from what I know of Afghanistan and what I have experienced here. But I also know that humping a combat load up a mountain in high altitudes can be a soul destroyer, even when no one is trying to kill you.

Tom