Evidence of romantic kissing in Mesopotamia 4,500 years ago. There is a lot of debate about kissing; not all societies practice it, and there have been multiple different theories positing that it was invented at some particular time and place. I am not impressed by any other them; seems too obvious to need inventing.
And now, "post-rationalism," the people disillusioned by the Rationalist movement and getting interested in religion or spiritual practices. The wheel keeps turning.
Uber suspends their diversity chief after she arranged a session focusing on white women and how offensive the word "Karen" is, which black employees thought was insensitive to them. (NY Times, Yahoo) There is this idea out there that the way to solve social problems is honest conversation, but, well, here we are.
Interesting article about the Bruderhof community, a Christian commune; they use technology in their work but are very intentional about which technologies to adopt. "We ought to approach technologies with the same skepticism we'd show an untrustworthy used car salesman."
Is "raiding" ever a really useful military activity?
The biggest goal of most Brexit supporters was to reduce immigration to Britain, but since Brexit immigration has remained at about the same level. Immigration from EU nations is indeed way down, to net zero, but there has been much more immigration from Africa and Asia. Some of this is due to the decision to welcome citizens of Hong Kong. British conservatives are starting to get angry about this, complaining that the government doesn't know any way to improve the economy other than welcoming migrants.
Boring report: an app that uses AI to strip all emotional words from the news.
The US surgeon general issues a report coming down hard against social media for young people: "There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents."
This 17-minute video will explain to you the "rotating detonation engine", which may power the missiles of the future.
Vox piece attempts to trace the rise of puritanical fandom on Tumblr and other online spaces. Many young people see pretty much all sex in media as harassment.
The unemployment rate for black American men falls to 5%, its lowest level ever. (NY Times, Biden administration press release)
From around 1900 to 2000, women tended to marry men with more education than themselves, and they still tell dating apps that they want a man with more education than themselves. But now that young women have, on average, more education, is this ruining women's chances of marrying? No, says Scott Siskind. What hurts people's marriage prospects is trying to do things that are weird, and once it became normal for the woman to have more education it stopped being a problem. As a general point, this is very much worth pondering.
Also this, from a detailed British study: "physical attraction cannot have been a very significant factor in marriages in any period 1837-2021." Which is something else I have often pondered; beauty feels so important to us, but so far as anyone can tell it makes no difference in whether people get married or any other important thing in life.
In naval wars, the side with the bigger fleet almost always wins. Advanced technology does not help much. Obviously this was written with an eye toward a possible US/China naval clash.
Very short primer on Charles II and his mistresses, actually includes two stories I did not know.
Lots of angst about book banning, but really very, very few people are trying to get books banned; one recent study found that a majority of requests to remove books from school libraries had been filed by 11 people.
Why rents are lower in DC than in other booming Metro areas: because DC and Arlington, VA decided decades ago to allow massive building of new apartments around transit hubs.
This week's random past post is Memories of China, 2008, in which I mused over the trip to China our whole family had made the year before to adopt our daughter. Who is, incidentally, about to graduate from high school. This post refers to her by the Chinese name she has very much left behind, at least for now. At that time I was very hopeful about China's ongoing transformation, which is one reason why recent events sadden me.
Ukraine Links
Reuters is reporting that "Vladimir Putin's chief envoy on Ukraine told the Russian leader as the war began that he had struck a provisional deal with Kyiv that would satisfy Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO, but Putin rejected it and pressed ahead with his military campaign."
Grim New Yorker story on conditions for Ukrainian soldiers in Bakhmut.
Long thread on the pluses and minuses of F-16s in Ukraine.
RUSI report on how the Russian army has changed its tactics in the second year of the war: "An overview of Russian adaptation reveals a force that is able to improve and evolve its employment of key systems."
Amazing little video of a Russian MT-LB vaporized in an explosion.
Russia finishes taking Bakhmut despite recent Ukrainian advances on the flanks of the city. A statement from Wagner is here (translated). The fighting in the city lasted (according to Wagner) 224 days. Thomas Theiner points out that Bakhmut is about the same size as Grande Prairie in Alberta, Canada, and just about as important, so it was quite stupid for the Russians to suffer 70,000 casualties taking it (100,000, according to Biden). Igor Girkin's friend Sergey Rusov calls this a Pyrrhic victory that really only shows the weakness of the Russian state. And Girkin himself here. Dmitri of War Translated notes that with Bakhmut taken we are looking at the first period in 15 months in which Russia is not advancing anywhere in Ukraine.
Apocalyptic video of what the city looks like after the battle.
Macron: "Peace cannot be turning the situation into a frozen conflict... experience teaches us that a frozen conflict will be a war for tomorrow...peace must...respect the UN charter."
British MOD says Russia seems to be creating an elite aviation unit to operate over Ukraine, offering bonus pay to experienced pilots.
Interesting that both Ukrainian and Russian soldiers constantly complain that the other side has much more artillery and fires many more shells.
Just a note that the "Freedom of Russia" guys who invaded Russia with Ukrainian backing include some famous neo-Nazis, including a guy who was arrested for handing out copies of the Christchurch shooter's manifesto. So maybe is the Ukrainian government thinking that by sending them to attack Russia they are both tweaking the Russians and getting rid of one of their own problems? Are they hoping a lot of these guys don't come back?
And another note that several people on Twitter have called this the first cross-border invasion carried out mainly for purposes of online trolling. See, e.g. this interview. this tweet, or this statement.
Prigozhin says that Putin's goal of "de-militarizing" Ukraine has failed utterly, since now Ukraine has one of the strongest armies in the world. (Better video with subtitles here: "Fuck knows how, but we've militarized Ukraine.")
Last week the FighterBomber Telegram said four Russian aircraft had been shot down by friendly fire after a failure of their Identify-Friend-or-Foe system; this week they say those aircraft were actually all shot down by Patriot missiles. People who know about these missiles say this means Ukraine's batteries must be using data from other types of radar because the shoot-downs were beyond range of their own radar. If it can be to linked to radar on planes or in remote ground locations a Patriot battery can defend an enormous area. And while Ukraine might run out of the PAC-3 missiles that are used to shoot down missiles NATO has an enormous supply of the PAC-2 missiles used against aircraft, easily enough to shoot down every Russian plane.
Thread on Wagner losses in Bakhmut, says a reasonable estimate might be 10,000 convicts killed plus around 6,000 regular Wagner mercenaries. Prigozhin said 20,000 KIA but he has reasons to exaggerate.
Defense spending in Europe: Germany has developed a new version of the Leopard II tank, dubbed A8. The first buyers are Germany, which is buying 18, and the Czech Republic, which is buying 70. Germany still has no real desire to defend itself.
"Is raiding ever useful in warfare?" is an intriguing and worthy question. But Young's article is at best a tendentious and somewhat chuckle-headed preface to something more serious. Surely, if a raid is anything, it's a military operation where the goal is to achieve some limited objective against the enemy and then return to base, and that fairly quickly. Ignoring this, Young labels as "raids" the huge Athenian expedition to conquer Syracuse and the likewise enormous British operation to capture and hold Cartagena de Indias in 1741. He does the same with Port-en-Bessin in 1944, essentially a bloody but successful conventional assault to capture and hold a fixed, fortified position. By this argument, one could cite Overlord and much of the US Pacific campaign in WWII as successful examples of "raids."
ReplyDeleteThen there's the rather pointless initial contrast between the foray in which Briseis is taken (and thus a success in that prizes were won, though Young calls it a failure since the Achaeans started fighting over her, a separate issue) and Odysseus' hollow-horse trick (a premier example of metis in Greek myth, but not a raid in any meaningful sense).
And no mention of hostage rescue, one of the most important issues for (actual) raiding in today's world? There, of course, the examples would range from spectacular successes like Entebbe and the German GSG9 in Mogadishu to spectacular failures like Desert One. Or, for that matter, terrorism itself, also a form of raiding?
For myself, I'm curious about what was and is the "utility" (in the broadest, including symbolic, sense) of raiding in the many societies (perhaps the majority) that have practiced raiding as their predominant or even sole form of warfare?
On the interesting suggesting you raise about the Ukrainians possibly hoping to get rid of some unwelcome Russian allies by sending them to attack Russia itself, it's been argued that Franco sent the "volunteer" Blue Division to join the Axis on the Eastern Front in WWII in order to get rid of a lot of turbulent, pain-in-the-ass Falangists (Franco was a murderous dictator and a basic right-winger, but no fascist ideologue; it is said that he admired Fidel Castro as a fellow poor boy from Galicia who made good).
I have read that there was debate during WW II about the value of "commandos," with some Americans (Patton, especially) scorning special forces as a waste of resources. If those soldiers are so great, Patton said, they should be made NCOs of regular infantry units and sent to fight real battles.
ReplyDeleteThat same theme shows up in the book "Black Hawk Down," where Mark Bowden argues that the Delta Force guys basically took over the leadership of the operation, elbowing Ranger officers out of the way. If you're going to put a lot of effort into training certain men, isn't maybe the best way to use them as leaders of less experienced soldiers?
Napoleon of course famously thought that all the soldiers should be in the main army to win the big battle, because if you won the battle you could then snap up all the resources at your leisure. His student Robert E. Lee felt the same way and spent the whole Civil War trying to force Confederate raiders like Mosby's men to join the regular army and help him win real battles.
Obviously counter-terrorism and hostage rescue are important activities for modern militaries that somewhat resemble "raiding," so much of the argument about "raiding" is going to turn on how you define the word. So in that sense it's not a very good article. But it is an interesting question.
To be fair to me, you've changed the question from, "is raiding ever really useful in warfare," to, is raiding by highly-trained commando-type specialists useful in modern warfare? To which, if one wanted to answer yes, one would only have to point back to your post on Clausewitz. Raiding's usefulness in modern warfare seems to be essentially political, as demonstrated by the thinking of Pitt and Churchill. One suspects Patton in particular lacked much political perspective, and perhaps it should be pointed out that massing all forces for big, decisive battles worked to win wars for Napoleon until it proved largely irrelevant in both Spain and Russia (once invaded), and never actually worked for Lee, who won many battles that failed to decide the war.
ReplyDeleteIf you want a raid from post-1700 war that has been argued to be politically crucial, consider Trenton (where, if my memory serves, Washington's mission had nothing to do with taking and holding the town, which was soon abandoned). Or the harrassment of Burgoyne on the march that was surely important to the victory at Saratoga.
In terms of WWII and later, surely all of raiding's main military functions (and some of the political and much of the morale effect) have been taken over by air power, not commando forces. In which case, the discussion would have to get into the endless and probably unresolvable debate about the effectiveness of air raids, tactical as well as strategic.
As for Young, I think his problems are deeper than how one happens to define raiding. If the Athenian expedition to Syracuse was a raid, then the concept of raid becomes virtually meaningless.
And we haven't even gotten into the more anthropological (and to me, in some ways more interesting) question of raiding's role in societies that have practiced it as their predominant form of warfare.
I wasn't trying to say that Patton and Lee were right, just that the argument about whether raiding was worthwhile is an old one. It occurs to me now that Patton, a deep student of the Civil War, may have had Lee and Mosby in mind when he ranted about stupid commando raids. Interesting that both Churchill and Jefferson Davis supported raiding for political reasons. I also remember now that one reason Sherman wanted to cast off from any supply line on his way to the sea was that he thought successful Confederate raids on his supply lines did a lot to keep up Southern morale.
ReplyDeleteYes, the question about deep time is the most interesting one. I can think off the top of my head of two important functions: obtaining "resources," which I put in quotes because I had in mind that it would include women, and making others fear you. According to Pekka Hämäläinen, horses moved from Mexico to the northern Plains largely by raiding. The Commanches stold them from the Mexicans and then traded them to nearby tribes, and then the Lakota and other northern tribes stole them from those tribes. So raiding could do a lot of the work of moving key resources around. And I think I recently linked to an article that made raiding for women out to be a central theme of early human history.
And, of course, if somebody raids you the way to make him think twice about doing it again is to raid him back.