historianmike.bsky.social
Nevertheless, we Press On!
US Military Historian | Post-1973 | US, Germany, South Korea
UNC-Chapel Hill Postdoc | DPAA Partner Fellow
This profile does not reflect views of UNC, DPAA
462 posts
153 followers
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That is, it reinforces my belief that we won’t go to war with China under this admin.
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I don’t understand the upset? They don’t need any of this to wage COIN with cartels in northern Mexico? Does the Army have any other mission?
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I continue to maintain that the US will not go to war over Taiwan.
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Medieval 2
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That’s not fair! Some of them are surely reading warhammer novels.
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Put will continue until morale declines
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That was something told to me in a meeting a while ago. The value of historical thinking in PME.
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I reiterate that 8th Army should be reinforced to the same size as 7th was in the 1980s. Nothing less than 7 divisions will be accepted.
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Its still there and actually remains quite popular. Its just trapped in the academy, PME clings to the framework of intellectual lethality while pop-mil stuff like on youtube just doesn't care.
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Ultimately despite being smashed full of both great scholars/teachers AND many officers with a genuine desire to learn PME often falls into the exact same trap as generalist and pop history.
Or, again, is just teaching modern theory with the legitimizing veneer of history.
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Its just, like I said, either the people who should be reading this *dont* and the works are trapped in the ivory tower. Or it gets read in PME, eg. Citino, but the uncomfortable stuff is either removed or just ignored in favor of the battles and generals.
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There is a lot of professional stuff that does a good job at this! Shout out to Smesler's great book. And Robert Citino touches on a lot of this in his great histories of the Wehrmacht.
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Citing historical example isnt about capturing a moment of truth, but of showing the reader you know the secret code word of 'militaries we also like' to build your own credibility. Its a kind of virtue signaling to get traction for other ideas, not a pursuit in itself.
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I think this is really a core component of the intellectual decline of the US officer corps. There is less learning than their ought to be, and more intellectual weaponization. Its become more important to win institutional battles than it is to be right or learn from previous examples.
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Yet everything is Clausewitz this, Rommel that, Chir River battles.
Its not about learning from the past, the dangers of operational fetishization or political misinfluence. Its just using a historical example from a trusted, selected, canon to justify whatever bullshit you wanted to say anyway.
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You see the same thing about the German army, something I am working on right now (and which triggered this thought chain).
Like the infatuation with the Germans in WWII is weird. Army officers do remember that they *lost* WWII, quite badly actually.
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A lot of professional military historical writing is used not to capture the past, but to justify a conclusion about the contemporary. Its not about learning from the Spartans about an unchanging enlightment-style truth about warfare.
Its about giving your think-piece grounding in something old.
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This is particularly bad in the Army.
If you read professional writing, its painfully obvious the Army does not give a shit about historical truth, or what the past was actually like. They dont care about the success or failures of the Spartans. Rather history is a tool to tell a story.
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A core problem I think with the US military (Army in particular) is that, despite paying significant lip service to the value and necessity of history, actual historical thought is not valued in any serious way.
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Posted this as SPY goes green for the first time today. There is like an odd 'inverse r/WSB' thing going on here.
Im starting to suspect you actually are buying calls....
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Ive said it before, but the core problem with contemporary electoral politics is that it seems like voters (in the US and elsewhere) are just not willing to vote on policy anymore.
IDK how you fix that, and get people to adopt partisan affiliations which actually fit their policy desires.
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There are many pain points, many tools in the bat belt, many ways to ratchet up the pressure and inflict pain (or offer rewards) short of war.
The DPRK will be a big winner from Ukraine because they understand this. And that means that wrt Taiwan, ROK and the US find themselves even worse off
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But it is to say that the West and the US was vulnerable in many of the same ways as Russia, and ironically in the exact way Russia is itself rebelling against. We live in a globalized world in which events in Donetsk has tremendous consequences along the Han.
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This is not an argument to trade Kyiv for Seoul, that the US can’t do anything good ever and so shouldn’t try. Nor is it to say that the last admin were blameless lambs. That they mismanaged this conflict is painfully obvious in retrospect.
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Escalation isn’t just nukes landing on Paris. In the same way that Finland’s ascension to NATO was a massive blow to Russia, the revitalization of the DPRK is a major blow to the US, and it came because of Russias battlefield failures.
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And so when people litigate Biden’s escalation fears, I think about this a lot. Even in the 80s, Russia refused to give the DPRK nuclear tech. Now they’re helping them build SSNs, in exchange for T-62s, and shells, and a few thousand troops.
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As Russias war effort has struggled they’ve turned to unlikely partners, most notably North Korea, to sustain their effort. Much in the same way Ukraine has tapped into Europe, Russia has tapped into Asia.
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Some biologists disagree and believe that M1 Abrams are indigenous to the Americas and were introduced to the Middle East in an effort to control invasive T-72s. With this model it’s easy to see how further migration could occur.
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Regarding the short war thesis I don’t think Americans are quite as sensitive to the idea that Korea and Vietnam are actually quite vulnerable.
A war for Taiwan could quickly become a land war if the initial landings go the way of Ukraine.
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But as I've said before, I'm not sure this admin would go to war over Taiwan. I am sure that this admin would waste a ton of time trying to negotiate their way out of a Taiwan war, and could see them getting forced to accept a bad status quo in lieu of a 'deal'
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I mean, I think the outcome will be decided in the first weeks, much the same way that the outcome of WWI was decided in a month.
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This can work on the domestic side as well, and IMO is a reason why the US economy has traditionally been so robust. But thats another thread.
The SK econ. traditionally been export heavy and more vulnerable to slow growth and global econ shocks. These kinds of projects could possibly break that.
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You have number of Korean experts in Poland now, strong connections between Korean industries and the Polish gov. And so makes sense will see an increase in non-military economic activity between the two benefiting from, and further strengthening, the core foundation the military spending provides.
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Yet more evidence that LJM will destroy the Korean economy and is literally the devil. Or something.
m.koreaherald.com/article/1049...
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Still wild to me that the Thanksgiving day Cowboys halftime trailer which reveals Palps is cannon.
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But like instead Abram’s sorta kinda made DE issue one as his intro movie, Rian Johnson fucked it all up, and then Abram’s made the stitchbeast basement homunculus of a third movie to finish the original DE arc. Sorta kinda not really but what else can we do
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As much as I love Dark Empire, for what Disney was clearly wanting they really picked the wrong EU franchise to base their sequels on.
If you’d dropped Thrawn in for Snoke and hewed a bit closer to the Zahn trilogy it would have done fine. And set them up for a massive post-movie Nü-U
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He did literally the exact same thing to Star Trek, in that to create his alternate timeline he basically destroyed the old timeline’s post-DS9 trajectory. And, like, totally unnecessarily. None of that red matter Romulus stuff had to be in there. It’s a ST movie, you just invent it on the spot.
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Which is not to say that you cant build a better strategy brain from games. Its the modern replication of Mahan's mental laboratory. The rationale for why he thought officers should learn history. Its just games are a chimeric reflection of true strategy. And some (TW, imo) a very poor reflection.
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But for the player the dynamic does seem to hold true.
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Don't know that I agree with this. It has form, not function, of well built military state. But the AI cheats, and that is a strong limitation on any direct parallels.
Like the AI exists on VH/Legendary increasingly disconnected from the economics of force.