This week, Michael Taylor, Associate Professor of History at SUNY Albany, returns to offer a continuation of his look at the work of British military historian John Keegan. Last time, he discussed Keegan’s most famous work, The Face of Battle, while this week Michael turns to discuss what he argues is one of Keegan’s best works, The Mask of Command. We discussed in the past the non-universality of the battle experience, but as Keegan argued and Michael discusses here, command too was non-universal, shaped not only by what we might term ‘archtypes’ of command, but within those archetypes shaped by cultural expectations and technological realities.
And with that, over to Michael…
John Keegan achieved widespread prominence with his The Face of Battle, and he capitalized on his academic fame by publishing a series of books, aimed at a wide reading audience. The quality of these books was mixed. His History of Warfare fails in no small part because his personal breadth of knowledge fell short of the encyclopedic breadth that such a project required. His treatment of the American Civil War was so riddled with basic errors that it suffered a polite if subtly scathing review from James McPherson, a professed admirer of Keegan. Some of these failures stem from the hazards of Keegan’s scholarly profile as a general military historian, not embedded in any particular temporal specialization. The Face of Battle saunters over 400 years of history between Agincourt and the Somme. This formula worked well for him again with his Mask of Command, which ranks among Keegan’s best works. Keegan’s topic was military leadership, which was arguably the author’s vocation: he was until 1986 (at which point he retired to pursue a career as a writer and journalist) a professor at the British military academy at Sandhurst, teaching future UK military officers.
Even if few people actually serve in the army, and only a very small portion of these achieve positions of high command, many people find themselves in leadership positions of one sort or another. Far more people have aspirations to hold positions of authority. Consequently, books on military leadership are a dime a dozen, and most of them are terrible. This is particularly true for books that claim to mobilize historic leaders as models for the present, drek with titles like The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun (yes, this is a book you can actually buy). There is also a robust cottage industry specifically focused on “leadership lessons of Alexander the Great,” generally by authors who are not experts in ancient Greek, Macedonian and Achaemenid history.
Keegan’s book is a rare exception, profitably read by military historians and ambitious assistants to the regional manager. The key insight of Keegan’s work, however, is that the leadership lessons of great commanders are not easily replicated because leadership is highly contextual. The parameters of successful leadership are shaped not only by political, social and cultural expectations, but also by material ones: Keegan is very interested in the book about the technologies leaders have to process information and communicate their orders, as well as the lethality of of the battlefield that determines how worthwhile it is for them to make a personal appearance on the front line. One cannot just practice the leadership lessons of Alexander the Great unless your followers are fourth century BC Macedonians and you are operating in a fourth century BC battlespace.
(Editor’s Note: The mask itself has inspired doubts since its discovery. Schliemann was not the most scrupulous of archaeologists and the facial hair on the mask (particularly the mustache), while common among high society men in 1876, is quite rare in Mycenaean art (though the consensus seems to remain that the mask is genuine). If genuine, the mask is unlikely to have been Agamemnon’s or anyone’s involved in the Trojan war as we generally date the find substantially earlier.)
Keegan, as with The Face of Battle, was reacting against several intellectual trends in the field of military history and strategic studies, which he felt had decentered leadership. Firstly, he argued the social sciences, interested in macro-trends, devalued leadership in grand historical narratives. Indeed, by the late 20th century it was difficult to speak about a decisive or effective leader without being accused of falling into a discredited “Great Man” theory of history. But Keegan also believed that the field of strategic studies, one heavily informed by the social sciences, had discounted generalship in favor of viewing wars around the sterile deployment of societal resources, unmoored from the touch of human leaders. On such a theory, one should be able to simply tally up the resources of two powers and predict which would win the war, just as one might predict the outcome of a sports game by compiling the stats of the two teams. But sports fans know the decisions of coaches and quarterbacks count for a great deal, even if baseline prowess is far from meaningless. The United States had far more resources at every level than the rebellious Confederate States, in terms of demography, agriculture, and industrial output. But it is also impossible to think of these resources being deployed to their maximum effect without first the Presidential leadership of Abraham Lincoln; on the battlefield the Union war effort reached its devastating crescendo with the appointment of Grant as Lieutenant General.1
Focusing on the variable of personal courage and exposure to battlefield danger, Keegan produced four types: the heroic leader, the anti-heroic leader, the un-heroic leader and the false heroic leader. He then pigeon-holed each of the four profiles into this schema: Alexander the Great is the classic heroic case. The Duke of Wellington is presented as anti-heroic, whose exposure to danger, while sometimes quite stark, was incidental to the activities necessary to command and control. Ulysses S. Grant is presented as the un-heroic leader, a technocrat deliberately operating in the rear, whose exposure to fire was occasional and accidental. Finally, Keegan ends on a study in failure: Adolf Hitler as the false heroic leader, who presented himself as the fearless avatar of his people, even as he cowered in his bunker while leading his nation to utter ruin.
I first read Keegan’s book as an undergraduate in the early 2000s, when the 9/11 attacks had prompted a renewed interest in military history, and Keegan as one of the most respected established experts. Re-reading it since becoming a specialist in ancient history, it is fair to say his chapter on Alexander the Great is the weakest. Keegan has the rather annoying tendency to fill in many of the gaps in our knowledge with florid prose. He under-estimated the impact of Macedonian heavy cavalry due to the now widely discredited notion that they were ineffective without stirrups. These make lance wielding cavalry more effective, but it is clear from experimental archaeology that skilled riders on ancient saddles could wield cavalry lances (xystoi) to deadly effect.
Quibbles aside, the basic argument that Keegan makes about Alexander is correct. Alexander practiced “heroic” mode of leadership where after setting up a carefully considered battle plan, he then charged forward and spent most of the battle personally fighting and killing, and in many instances coming damn close to getting killed himself. This risky plan worked for Alexander because his personal combat fulfilled the social and cultural expectations of the Macedonians, especially Alexander’s elite hetairoi (Companions). The aristocrats, as their name implied, were close peers of the king. Many had been raised alongside Alexander, and drank, ate, slept, hunted alongside him, a relationship that was close and extremely competitive. The hetairoi themselves expected Alexander to lead by example at the point of maximum danger. If Alexander charged into the fray, he could expect his hetairoi to follow close behind, a fact that allowed Alexander to steer his broader army: his charge brought the hammer blow of the Macedonian cavalry down precisely where he wanted it to fall. Alexander to his credit did not pursue random combats, but rather plunged head first into the vulnerable point in the shifting Persian line, which he had a rather preternatural talent in identifying. As John Ma has noted, Alexander’s heroic leadership worked because of his ability to catalyze the complicated combined arms force that he led into a well-coordinated battle plan.2 Alexander charged; his hyper-elite bodyguards (somatophylakes) followed to try and keep him alive best they could; his hetairoi cavalry cavalry followed; the hypaspists (“shield bearers) tied the phalanx into the cavalry, and the phalanx fixed the main Persian force long enough for Alexander to identify a promising gap and plunge into it. Alexander’s personal verve and royal charisma focused the entire tactical system.
Keegan ultimately takes a dim view of Alexander, a destroyer with little political vision beyond his own aggrandizement. And Keegan notes that because Alexander’s heroic style of leadership worked well for him within a very specific social, cultural, and tactical context, it was widely imitated throughout history, but to far less effect. Indeed, while Keegan does not indulge in further discussion of Hellenistic history (that is, Greek history after Alexander), it is worth noting that attempts by Alexander’s successors to imitate Alexander’s heroics on the battlefield consistently proved disastrous. Demetrius Poliorcetes led an Alexander style cavalry charge at the battle of Ipsus (301 BC) and became over absorbed in the pursuit of the fleeing enemy. Behind him, his main phalanx was overwhelmed, and his own father, Antigonus One-Eyed, was killed. The Seleucid king Antiochus the Great made the same mistake twice in his career, once at the battle of Raphia (217) and again at the Battle of Magnesia (190); in both instances becoming so involved in his personally led cavalry charge that he was oblivious to the collapse of the rest of his line. Alexander’s heroic mask worked for him alone.3
Leaving behind the ancient world, Keegan hits his stride returning to a topic he knows very well, the Napoleonic Wars: the Battle of Waterloo had been the first case study in The Face of Battle. Keegan characterized Wellington’s leadership style as “anti-heroic.” Since Keegan wrote in 1986, the term “anti-hero,” thanks to the Golden Age of Television, has taken on the connotation of “sympathetic even fascinating character who nonetheless does very bad things,” as in Tony Soprano or Walter White. This is not what Keegan has in mind with the moniker. Rather, the terms points towards the notion that Wellington often took considerable risk on the battlefield, exposing himself to enemy fire, but did not do so out of any heroic performance, but rather because such risks and dangers were incidental to his role as a battle manager.4
In Keegan’s telling, Wellington was an effective battle manager largely because he was a micromanager. Keegan describes Wellington’s cognitive ability to quickly process information and generate plans and orders. Like Alexander, he had an excellent sense for the kairos, the right moment to attack when the enemy accidentally opened a gap in its line. Micromanaging might not work for every leader, but it worked well for Wellington. And it could be very dangerous, as he routinely conducted leader’s recons close to the enemy, and during the heat of battle moved from crisis point to crisis point, shoring up troops and deploying reserves. The nature of late-18th communications meant that Wellington often had to get close to the fighting indeed to control events and cut through the fog of war. Keegan rather deprecates the value of the telescope, as field telescopes only had a magnification of 3x or 4x, although throughout the chapter we find Wellington often staring through his. Keegan largely ignores another information technology available to Wellington that Alexander lacked: the map, such as the one he borrowed from his host when he learned of Napoleon’s approach before Waterloo.
But there was a key difference from Alexander: when the Macedonian king risked his life in combat, he lost control of events, and had to hope that his pre-arranged battle plan would function. Wellington risked his life in order to maintain control of events as contingencies arose. Keegan does not think Wellington was trying to show off, as Alexander undoubtedly was, and identifies a telling difference: Alexander’s reckless courage extended to sieges; he was nearly killed in India when the ladder broke behind him leaving him isolated inside the city’s battlements. Wellington abstained from personal involvement in sieges, where the general’s personal exposure made no difference in the brutal and chaotic combat involved in storming through a breach.
Keegan shifts forward some fifty years to Ulysses S. Grant, whose leadership style Keegan dubs the “Un-Heroic.” He does not imply Grant was a coward, but rather that circumstances had changed in a way that did not reward the exposed battle micromanagement Wellington had engaged in. The increased range and accuracy of the rifled musket made the front far more dangerous to generals, as the death of so many high ranking commanders in the conflict demonstrated. Furthermore, new technologies allowed war to be scaled up. The telegraph allowed for orders to be transmitted quickly over distances, while the railroad and steamboat opened both logistical possibilities but also required new echelons of strategic management.
Grant began the war as an operational commander in Tennessee. Here, like Wellington, he sometimes came under fire while managing his forces, including at the Battle of Shiloh, where he personally led regiments forward under fire. Throughout the war he was often close enough to the front that shells exploded dangerously close to him on several occasions, but by and large, Grant led from the rear.
Grant was effective at his task in part because he was adept at using a staff; he encouraged a casual atmosphere in his headquarters where his staff freely conversed with and around him: this allowed him to communicate his expectations in detail, but also allowed him to casually collect knowledge from his staff, both about operational elements as well as the mood of the army. Importantly, Grant knew his place: he served the President of the United States. The excellent working relationship Grant had with Abraham Lincoln was a critical aspect of the “Un-Heroic” mode. Grant knew that at the end of the day, he was a subordinate with a job to do.
Keegan ends on a note of horrific failure: Adolf Hitler, “the False Heroic” leader, who cowered in his bunker as the tide of war turned badly against him, all the while presenting himself as the intrepid personification of the German nation. The paradox of Hitler’s false-heroic mask was that Hitler had displayed very real personal courage during the First World War. He had been awarded the Iron Cross, suffered a shrapnel wound, and been gassed. Keegan cannot resist a bit of psychoanalysis on Hitler, noting that the Austrian outcast had briefly found social acceptance and belonging in a regiment mostly manned by members of the German upper middle class, before they were shot to pieces, reducing him after the war to a socially isolated survivor. Regardless, Hitler could claim real acts of valor in his youth, and in theory this could have given him permission to sit back and engage in strategic leadership of the unheroic sort. Hitler took the opposite track, parlaying his war-time heroism into a bizarre vision of himself as the mystic avatar of the German people.
(Ed.: I find I appreciate the GI’s contribution rather more than the original painting.)
For a while this worked for Hitler. German society, like much of Europe, had been profoundly militarized prior to World War I. A generation of young men were accustomed to positioning themselves within a martial hierarchy. Disastrous defeat in 1918 had discredited the traditional officer class, creating a void in which Hitler’s mystic avatar could metastasize. This was sufficient for Hitler to win a narrow plurality in 1932, to be seen as politically useful for the aging Hindenburg, and to seize absolute power after his death.
But a false heroic leader was ill suited for the new realities of maneuver warfare. Germany pioneered a form of mobile warfare, blitzkrieg, in which events happened very quickly and where the initiative of officers at every echelon was necessary. Such warfare required a combination of strategic vision at the very top combined with a willingness to leave a great number of operational details to others. But Hitler made the mistake of believing the ideological construct he had built around his leadership; he was, as the kids say, high on his own supply. The practical result was that Hitler ruthlessly indulged in micromanagement. Tactical micromanagement had worked well for Wellington, who could move across battlefields that spanned kilometers. But it was a very inefficient way to fight a global war. In 1938, Hitler had established himself as supreme commander of the armed forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht). His 1939-40 victories only escalated his own confidence in his own decision making. In 1941, he made two disastrous decisions: to invade the Soviet Union and to declare war on the United States. The deteriorating situation by 1942/43 only prompted him to further hamstring his subordinates and insert himself into low level tactical decisions: Keegan focuses on Hitler’s magical thinking during the closing phase of the Stalingrad campaign in which he insisted on holding positions even as it became clear the beleaguered Sixth Army would be destroyed. But Hitler micromanaged from a vast distance, as he had for his own security established himself in the first of several closeted bunker complexes in 1941; he ceased visits to the front in his armored train in that year as well. Hitler never made the sort of global diplomatic journeys that the Big Three undertook, and his protracted failure to “touch grass” took a toll on both his situational awareness and psychological well-being, producing by the bitter end the paranoid, delusional caricature of a leader who shot himself in his bunker in 1945.
A consistent theme for Keegan had been how technology transformed the possibilities of leadership. Alexander’s heroic form worked where the command and control technologies were sufficiently primitive that not too much was lost when Alexander indulged in heroic performance rather than battle management (although the most successful ancient commanders, including Alexander’s father Philip II, and later Romans like Scipio Africanus and Julius Caesar were very much battle managers more like Wellington than Alexander). Furthermore, weapons were not so ranged and lethal that Alexander was guaranteed a certain death if he led from the front, although the king’s close calls were famous. By the Napoleonic wars, Wellington’s gunpowder armies were still of a size that Wellington’s battle micromanagement might be profitable, but the increased lethality of ranged weapons dramatically increased the hazards of exposure. By the US Civil War, new technologies of communications in the telegraph and railroad opened new strategic horizons, even as the increased range of rifles made battlefield exposure all the more risky: 128 generals were killed during the US Civil War, more than 1 in 10 men who obtained the rank. Hitler’s false heroism was driven both by the possibility of ill conceived micromanagement on a grand scale through radio and telephones, while the dangers of aerial raids kept him penned up in fortified command posts.
Keegan was also aware of the politics behind the public persona of each general. Alexander’s theatrical style, often emotional to the point of histrionics, worked because Alexander himself was a monarch, always the center of royal pageantry. Wellington’s reticence was that of an English gentleman, quietly confident in his class status under a constitutional monarch. Grant was an appointed general serving under a democratically elected President. Keegan only tangentially considers Wellington and Grants’ post-war political trajectories, as Wellington would become Prime Minister and Grant President. Hitler’s callow narcissism was deeply rooted in both his fundamentally embittered persona, but enabled by the fact that he was a totalitarian dictator.
Keegan concludes with musing about the “post-heroic” leader. Writing in 1986, in the tail end of the Cold War, Keegan considered the need of a leader to not only abjure personal heroics, but even to find a way to reject the temptations of victory all together and pursue de-escalation in the face of the insane logic of nuclear mutually assured destruction. Keegan himself was hardly a peacenik: once the nuclear threat waned, Keegan proved major booster for the Iraq War (2003-2011), a war where George W. Bush flirted with the “False Heroic,” by landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit, declaring “mission accomplished” in a war that would last another eight years.
In the nearly four decades since Keegan wrote have given us iterations on his types. One is struck looking at the famous photograph of Barack Obama during the Bin Ladin raid; Obama as Commander in Chief in many ways encapsulated Keegan’s paradigm of “un-heroic” leadership. By 2011, technology had progressed to the point that the President and his national security team could monitor a few squads of elite troops in real time half-way across the globe. But it allowed monitoring without micromanaging: the photo captures a president who, having personally approved and authorized the raid, is now hunched in a corner as an observer to events he could no longer control.
Meanwhile, it is striking the extent that the False Heroic kitsch is still with us, especially among dictators and authoritarians: Vladimir Putin notoriously issues images of himself riding horses and engaging in other outdoor activities. While he avoided the Vietnam War due to bone spurs, Donald Trump’s most fanatic followers often depict him little differently from Hitler in The Standard Bearer.
We also have seen the closest thing to heroic leadership from Vodoymyr Zelensky. Unlike Alexander, Zelensky, an elected President in a fledgling democracy, does not fight in the trenches, although he often visits troops quite close to the front.5 But Zelensky in the early days of the war refused to flee Kyiv, even though the Russians would have certainly killed him had they captured the city. His flight would have likely triggered the collapse of the Ukrainian state, while his social media posts from the presidential office after air raids were an early indicator of Ukrainian resilience. Even in the 21st century, a heroic mode is possible.
- Today the rank of Lieutenant General (three stars) is now the second highest rank in the US Army, and there are currently 37 Lieutenant General billets. But Grant was appointed as the Lieutenant General, outranking all other generals and reporting directly to Lincoln.
- John Ma, 2013. “Alexander’s decision-making as a historical problem” Revue d’Études Militaires Anciennes 6, 113-125.
- Imitation of Alexander was not limited to his battlefield performance. Hellenisitic kings sought to mimic his haughty attitude, his pose with a slightly cocked head, and his purple robes (Plutarch Life of Pyrrhus 8.1; Life of Demetrius 18.3). For the most complete study of Alexander’s impact on the visual culture of the Hellenistic world, see the classic work by the late Andrew Stewart Faces of Power (Berkeley 1994).
- Ed.: The term ‘Battle Manager’ is one I’m fond of to describe the role of the general in a battle (particularly those who don’t take direct part in the fighting) and comes from E. Wheeler, “The General As Hoplite” in Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience (1993). The concept illustrates both the extent and the limits of the general’s ability to command: the battle is ‘managed’ not micro-managed nor orchestrated, a sort of barely-under-direction chaos over which the general’s control remains decidedly imperfect and yet wholly necessary.
- Ed.: And makes a point of dressing in what we might describe as ‘campaign dress’ to underscore the idea that he is as close to ‘in the trenches’ as he can be as a democratic leader. If that seems strange, it is worth noting that Churchill did the same thing from time to time during the Second World War. I find the effort to ridicule Zelensky’s olive-green mode of dress in some corners of the West a more than a bit odd: for one, it is obviously successful in its intended purpose. For another, it is hardly like Kyiv is safe as it faces regular cruise missile attacks.
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I’ve been watching The Time Ghost: World War II series on YouTube (strongly recommend: https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo ), and one of the things that strikes me is to the degree that Hitler & Stalin both had a problem of overriding their generals & ordering them to do stupid things. But ultimately, Stalin had more soldiers & more land to waste in that process!
Stalin also became less of a micromanager as the war went on, while Hitler became more of one. How much of that is cause and how much is effect (I can certainly understand the attempt to micromanage if things are going badly, which would probably make things worse, leading to a doom spiral) is hard to measure, but I think there’s more to it than Stalin simply having more bodies to throw into the front.
Totally fair; I just think it’s noteworthy that a smaller country couldn’t have bounced back from the kind of blunders Stalin ordered in 1941 & 1942
Stalin actually didn’t commit a lot of blunders in either 1941 or 1942.
Let’s look at the most common mistake that is usually ascribed to Stalin in that period:
1. Failure to recognize that German invasion was imminent until it was way too late. The issue with calling that ‘a blunder’ is rather simple: Soviet intelligence never actually uncovered German plans (even if they boasted that they did post-war and post-Stalin death for the sake of shitting blame around) and in fact made a serious mistake very early one that basically pre-ordained the whole mess.
Soviet intelligence both over-estimated total size of the German military by almost 50% (they thought that Germans had almost 300 divisions while in reality Germans had ~220) and determined that Germans had almost 70 divisions at the Soviet border as early as in November 1940 (in reality Germans had around 30). As the result they mostly failed to uncover German troop concentration during spring 1941 because they viewed deployment of 100 German divisions by May 1941 as modest 25% increase instead of real 300% increase.
And of course it was combined with the knowledge that Germans had 300 divisions in total and so there is no way that they will try to attack USSR with only one third of their military force.
All of that was reported to Stalin in addition to way more famous reports about various invasion dates (that constantly shifted).
And so Stalin had to made a choice on the basis of incomplete amount of unreliable information. He did a wrong one. But it doesn’t make it a blunder really. Because it was really a reasonable choice to make. German invasion force was indeed insufficient and underprepared. It simply didn’t stop Hitler from committing to it anyway.
You will recall Beria’s famous note of June 21: “My people and I, Joseph Vissarionovich, firmly remember your wise prediction: Hitler will not attack us in 1941!”
And I’m sure that sentence, at least, was perfectly true.
It is basically a myth at that point for both Stalin and Hitler cases. Yes, both tried to micromanage to some extent at times and latter did it much more often than the other. But the whole thing about ‘overriding generals’ is incorrect. Because in the most cases they were simply choosing to follow the advice of one set of generals over the other. And sometimes they chose wrong generals to agree with.
It is especially true in case of Hitler as his surviving generals made everuthing in their power to hang their own mistakes over Hitler’s head, as he was not in a position to object post-war. And this practice didn’t stop with Hitler either, as German generals were quite fond of blaming their former colleagues who didn’t survive the war too.
Very much so. Hitler’s (and Germany’s) problem was that the whole basis for the war was horrifically flawed. It was a continuation of World War I aims (subordinate France, conquest in the east) with slightly new methods and a psychopathic racial element, against stronger opponents. Once begun, the methods involved made it ‘do or die’ for the elites involved. That Germany achieved as much as it did militarily is impressive: that it lasted as long (6 years against World War I’s 4; with weaker allies) is again impressive. The generals argued after the war that Hitler should have stopped trying to hold out for victory – that is, they preferred an outcome, as in 1918, where they survived and he did not. That he had a different view is hardly surprising.
That seems to have been a particular character of nazi rule: Hitler rarely came up with plans himself, instead he had his subordinates come up with them and picked the ones he liked. (and as people got more familiar, the kind of options they offered became tailored to Hitler’s tastes)
I’d also characterize as a myth the notion that invading the Soviet Union was a blunder.
Wars are fought to achieve political goals, and arguably *the* central political goal of the Nazis was the conquest of Eastern Europe. That fundamentally required invading the Soviet Union. It might be the case that the goal was fundamentally impossible (on top of being horrifically evil), and I think we’d all agree that putting the Nazis in charge was a blunder on the part of everyone else involved in Weimar politics, but from the Nazi perspective, I don’t think “blunder” is quite the right term for the decision to invade the USSR.
Furthermore, based purely on the information available to the Nazis at the time, invading the Soviet Union seemed more reasonable that it seems in hindsight:
* Germany actually won the eastern front in WWI, forcing the Russian regime to collapse and sue for peace while being slowly ground down on the western front. Achieving this same goal seemed well within the realm of possibility.
* The sudden victory over France led to a very high opinion of the Wehrmacht’s capabilities. Prewar assumptions that the western front would once again be the more difficult one fed into this as well. To your point about Hitler choosing from among the options presented by his generals, attacking through the Ardennes was such an option, and seemed like a calculated risk at best and a bold gamble at worst. After choosing that option and seeing it work out as well as it did, it’s only natural that Hitler would be feeling lucky (or, more realistically, overestimate his ability to make calculated high-risk-high-reward decisions).
* The Red Army was still suffering the effects of a purged officer corps, and seemed rather feckless in their own mostly failed invasion of Finland. It turns out Finland was much closer to breaking than they let on, and were able to negotiate relatively good terms in the Winter War, but from the outside, the Winter War seemed like a total fiasco for Russia, and proof that they were ill-equipped and ill-prepared to face the Wehrmacht.
Of course, it might have been possible for Germany to delay the ultimate invasion of the Soviet Union until after Britain was defeated. But given that they were already committed to invading them eventually, 1941 still might have been the best opportunity. Had Germany waited, they would have allowed the Soviets time to become stronger.
In hindsight, it obviously didn’t work out and it’s hard to imagine how it could have worked out. But we have a lot of information that Hitler didn’t have. From Hitler’s perspective it was definitely a gamble, but not as futile as we now know it to have been.
I suppose this also gives some context to Hitler’s later blunders. After Stalingrad, maybe Kursk at the latest, the invasion of the Soviet Union had obviously failed. But at that point, he had the tiger by the tail, and the only chances of success were increasingly high-risk-high-reward long shots, which are obviously going to look like blunders when they don’t work out.
All of that. Plus waiting until he had defeated the British Empire was waiting forever (it did after all command a quarter of the globe, one large and four mid-size industrial economies, had command of the seas and an air force that was at least the equal of the Luftwaffe – and from 42 progressively superior – and was backed after May 41 by the financial and industrial muscle of the US). Thinking Germany could win a world war was the great mistake; the rest was epilogue.
Another aspect of this, which often gets underemphasized for obvious reasons, is that the project of transforming eastern Europe into a “Wild West” for German lebensraum (with the corollary of treating the peoples of eastern Europe as the United States treated indigenous North Americans) wasn’t invented out of whole cloth by a mustachioed Austrian art-school dropout: the “Drang nach Osten” was a practically universal staple of 19th-century German romantic nationalist ideology, and the brief 1917-18 interval between the Russian and German defeats in WWI saw the future of German-dominated eastern Europe being mapped out in ways that directly foreshadowed the “Generalplan Ost” of the early 1940s.
Along these lines, not a defense of the rationality (let alone the morality) of German war planning, but it’s also worth pointing out that some of the key determinants of the outcome on the Eastern Front — the enormous proportion of the Soviet population with military reservist training, the breakneck pace of Soviet industrialization, the central planning that enabled the Soviets to quickly relocate factories east of the Urals en masse, the cutting-edge development of Soviet armored warfare in both technology and doctrine — had radically transformative policies first introduced by the Soviets, and if anything, the assumption that the German conquest of eastern Europe would be a walk in the park stemmed from an insufficiently critical mindset toward longstanding German arrogance about Russia as an underdeveloped agricultural hinterland (all sickle and no hammer, if you will) whose only modernizing civilizational energy had allegedly come from the old German/Western-influenced tsarist aristocracy, as opposed to the allegedly backward and uncivilized Eastern/Asiatic/Mongoloid elements embodied in the Bolsheviks.
* had to do with
It would have worked out quite easily, actually, except for one thing.
But before getting to that, let’s start off with this: the Germans had VERY good reasons for assuming that Russia would collapse in the face of the Wehrmacht onslaught, and it was not all down to false assumptions about military and/or racial superiority.
Much has been made of Russia’s success in moving tank and airplane factories wholesale, beyond the Urals where they were safe from the reach of the Wehrmacht. Rarely mentioned is the equal importance of manufacturing capabilities which were actually lost because they could NOT be moved: chemicals (read: explosives, refined fuels), and raw metals (iron, copper, aluminum). You can pack a lathe on a train pretty easily. Bessemer furnace? Fuel cracking tower? Mmmm…. no. These were overrun by the Germans pretty early in the campaign, and they were on solid ground in the belief that the Russians would have no way to quickly reconstitute the ability to supply their army with these critical materials. That the German reading on this was sound, is borne out by the fact that Russia did NOT in fact manage to recover those capabilities quickly, or even recover some of them at, say, a moderate pace.
What happened instead: they received vast amounts of war consumables from the US/UK under cover of the lend/lease program. I say “under cover” because this wasn’t acknowledged widely (or indeed really at all) by anyone on either side. Not acknowledged on the US/UK side because, obviously, things like raw explosives are neither lendable nor leasable, and… this massive supply of consumables started well before America’s entry into the war in December 1941. Not acknowledged on the USSR side because it didn’t fit the heroic narrative of the Red Army holding out alone against the Wehrmacht by means of sheer will and heroic Russian blood sacrifice.
Consider the numbers. More than 30% of the explosives used by the Russian Army in all their bombs and shells, was supplied by the United States (and this was the total at war’s end, by which time Russia’s explosives manufacturing had mostly recovered. In the early years of the eastern front conflict the proportion was far higher). Almost 60% of the aviation fuel used by the Russian Air Force was supplied by the United States (which significantly understates its impact. The Russians were critically short in their ability to manufacture high octane aviation fuel. Absent the American supply the Russian Air Force would barely have flown at all, they mixed American fuel with their own to render their own stocks usable). More than 80% of the copper used by the Russian Army during the war… supplied by the US and UK. Without a steady supply of American steel, Russia’s ability to churn out T-34’s in the Urals would have been cut roughly in half…
Hitler’s understanding of the strategic significance of seaborn trade stopped at “let’s starve Britain into submission with our U-boats.” Neither he nor anyone else in Germany seems to have appreciated the impact that this trade would have on their war efforts in the East (of all places!). Also, the German’s were laboring under the misapprehension that the U-boats would keep America’s industrial output bottled up in America, and given the initial success of the Wolf Packs it’s hard to blame them. But the opening of the Eastern front changed the calculus completely. Even if the Germans had managed to sink every ship in the Atlantic, the lend lease tide would have rolled on. More than 50% of all lend lease reached Russia via the Pacific, all of it by way of Russian flagged vessels physically out of Germany’s reach, and politically / militarily out of Japan’s reach.
Germany radically over-estimated the success of U-boat warfare (around 90% of convoys crossed the Atlantic without being attacked, and Britain never fell below 6 months reserve of oil and other critical materials.
Aid to the USSR started very soon after Germany attacked. This should have been no surprise to Germany: its own alliance with Japan was a similar bit of realpolitik.
I would be extremely grateful if Z would cite a source for the statement about the proportion of explosives that the Soviets got from the United States. What I actually hope to find is an order of magnitude for Soviet air munitions expenditures, but a source giving their total explosives expenditures might also give me what I actually want, at least vaguely. Not being a specialist either on World War II or on the Soviet Union, I have had no idea where to look.
[ “Ulysses S. Grant is presented as the un-heroic leader, a technocrat deliberately operating in the rear, whose exposure to fire was occasional and accidental.” ]
Which is just WRONG.
Lee, with his love of trenching and etc., is the one who over here is presented as someone who understood technicalities. Though of course so did Grant, who like Napoleon, was very good at understanding the geometries not only of artillery, but of ground, and then marrying them.
I was shocked at how very bad Keegan’s book on the US War of the Rebellion was. There was so little he understood about either the country or the war. Slavery hardly even entered into it, if at all. So … public school blue blood.
It seems we have a lost causer here. Kinda surprising, wouldn’t think you’d enjoy this blog. Slavery was the fundamental reason for the rebellion. It’s in all the articles of secession as the primary cause and is specifically mentioned in the confederate constitution.
Don’t oversell that. The second-closest the US came to civil war was the Tariff of Abominations, which was very much independent of slavery – and it was really quite close. This does not tell us that slavery was irrelevant, but it tells us that something else was definitely very important. And it probably tells us that that ‘something else’ was exactly what the South *was saying* it was: state’s rights.
(Andrew Jackson’s toast, during the near-miss, 1832: “To the Union: it must be preserved!”
James Calhoun’s reply: “To the Union: after our liberty, most dear”.
People frequently _tell us_ what they care about, and we ought to consider believing them.)
It was probably inevitable that when civil war came in a dispute over state’s rights, slavery would be the flashpoint. Tariffs, while huge in disparate economic impact, did not have much social impact except to deepen the divide between the industrial north-east and the agricultural south. Slavery had equally huge economic impact and also enormous social significance. To the poor southerners who held themselves above slaves, to the planters whose class markers and generational wealth was tied up in slaves & plantations, and to the northern abolitionists who saw it as an ongoing moral outrage and frequently as an affront to God. In the 1830s it was far easier to get the factions to back down than in the 1860s, because not as much was at stake.
But that does not mean that state’s rights were not a truly important value to the South and the Confederacy. They thought it was, they told each other it was, and they **behaved** as though it was.
To make a modern analogy – we don’t say that January 6th was caused by vote-counting. That was just the trigger that day. The _cause_ was the claim of stolen and rigged elections and minimizing of the democratic process. If the current reforms were in place, it is very likely that something else would have been the trigger that caused an uprising, some other time between November 2020 and February 2021. Similarly, if by some act of Dog the North never objected to slavery or the expansion of slavery, odds are high a civil war would have resulted eventually anyway, with something else as the flashpoint.
You are right, we should believe people when they tell us what they cared about. And the traitors were quite clear that what they cared most about was preserving and exte ding slavery. Be it the rather centralized and authoritarian confederate constitution which explicitly forbade member states from abolishing slavery. Or the articles of secession that all explicitly mentioned slavery, often in the first line. There is also Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s speech in which he explicitly stated that the confederacy was founded on the rejection of the principle that all men are created equal. We can also look at the writings of prominent confederate politicians which referred to states rights as a once useful rhetorical tool which needed to be abandoned now that they had seceded. We can also look at such blatant violations of states rights as the fugitive slave acts and the Dred Scott ruling which forced northern states to participate in and enforce a practice they considered morally abhorrent. Lincoln’s election was in fact a direct response to these abuses of power by southern alliggned politicians. As to the issue of tariffs, the tariffs often pointed to were always blocked by the south, they only got passed after southern representatives left Wasbington. Had they not seceded the tariffs would not have been enacted.
The Fugitive Slave Act enforced a provision of the US constitution, namely Article Four, Section Two, Clause Three:
“No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”
So one cannot strictly call the Fugitive Slave Act a “blatant violation of states’ rights”, since by ratifying the constitution they had explicitly agreed to it. Granted however that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which replaced the older Act of 1793 was aggressively and intrusively slanted in the slave owners’ favor.
Pretty sure the reason support and opposition to tariffs was regional was precisely because some regions had economies that were deeply tied to slave-plantation agriculture while others had diversified into early manufacturing. So saying it is unrelated to slavery is frankly, a big fat lie.
Only to the extent that as a practical reality agriculture and slavery were largely synonymous in the antebellum South. Even if the South had never had slavery at all, tariffs were still going to favor industrial regions over agricultural regions.
Michael, buddy, dude.
The South remained largely agricultural with very little development precisely because of how slavery shaped the economic and social incentives of it’s society and especially the people (wealthy white men) within that society.
The north didn’t industrialize because northern latitudes favor industry. The north developed because it found favorable incentives to do so. Meanwhile the southern plantation culture suppressed those same incentives. We know this because we have writings from southern slaveowners (who had become disenchanted with their class) complaining about this exact issue.
Exactly. The south had to pay those tariffs on carriages and everything else they imported from the rest of the country and elsewhere because it did not make anything, just grew cotton and lived off the credit of possessing enslaved people, and selling them. They didn’t even have ships to carry goods, nor had any intention of building any, nor did they have much when it came to banking. Though many of the richest families already had members working up north in banks, down home — their states! — more and more of the land was in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals, who extended and withdrew credit to their neighbors as they chose. They even imported the food and ‘clothes’ with which they fed and clothed the enslaved. No wonder they howled about tariffs and import duties.
Satori, economic development typically is uneven. In the British Industrial Revolution, it was the Midlands and northern England that were the centres of economic activity, and the south east was left behind, with higher poverty rates.
In the case of southern USA, one alternative explanation is that this was before air-conditioning.
It is far from obvious why the heat of Georgia’s climate or the malaria of its swamps would make it impossible to build cotton mills, while making it easy to farm, when farm work involves massive amounts of back-breaking toil in the very heat in question.
I don’t think a just-so story about latitude is enough here. Latitude and climate explain why the slave plantations were founded where they were founded. But they don’t explain why no industrial base grew up in the same area. Not without also accepting the observation that the slavers were hostile to industrialization itself and sought to configure their economic order to keep it at arm’s reach.
Re air conditioning: a standard observation in economics is that given free migration, places with consumption amenities have lower incomes, because workers accept lower pay to live in them. For example, during the period of massive public health improvements in American cities raising urban life expectancy above rural levels, 1880-1940, the urban wage premium fell: https://www.nber.org/papers/w19041
So the air conditioning line can explain why there was mass migration to the South after WW2, but cannot explain why the South was poor until then and converged thereafter. To the contrary, that hypothesis should predict that the prewar South should have had high incomes, like Alaska today. In contrast, the institutional point that slavery was a massive drag on growth and so were Jim Crow and the overrepresentation of rural landholders in state legislatures until the one-person-one-vote rulings holds up well.
Note that it’s not just that the North was industrialized and the South wasn’t – the North also had higher agricultural labor productivity. This is the opposite of Britain, where Lancashire was one of the less productive farm areas, encouraging industry instead. This is in turn because freehold systems consistently produce more surplus than forced labor or sharecropping, which is then plugged into industrialization. Trying to explain why the South ended up occupied without reference to slavery is like trying to explain why the USSR collapsed without reference to communism.
Somewhat cynically, one explanation offered for the South’s late modernization is that it took the invention of the mechanical cotton harvesting machine to finally obviate the “need” to maintain an entire class of impoverished manual laborers.
A point of context: Virginia was settled by Cavaliers, that is, elements of a royalist gentry class who fled England after their loss to Cromwell and the parliamentarians in the English civil war. These people were not accustomed to working for a living back home, and they had no desire to start when they came here. Strangely enough they had no luck persuading people from the old country to come along and serve them here, in the manner to which they’d grown accustomed to back home. So… can anyone guess what solution they came up with?
But back to Cromwell for a moment. Interesting fact: at some point in his mid 40’s, and well before all this civil war business, he became a Puritan. In fact, he attempted to emigrate to New England in 1634 but was prevented (for reasons unclear).
Subsequent to the English civil war, emigration to New England mostly dried up because those people in England who were of Puritan leanings, now ran the country and thought, “Hey, now that things are going our way we might as well stay!”
Now as we all know, the Puritans had a reputation for egalitarianism, a belief in the redeeming value of industry and labor, and a strong, nay exceedingly stringent, moral code.
The Cavaliers, on the other hand, had a reputation for being, well… Cavalier (hey, to the manor born, baby, I make my own moral code!). They believed in the redeeming value of exploiting the labors of the classes born to serve them. For the Cavaliers, >industry< is something to be frowned upon. Industry is something that people born without class or lineage do. Industry is for people without manners, or manors (or, as they took to calling them here, "plantations")
So in the mid 1600's, two groups of people who mostly detest each other, with very different and fundamentally incompatible ideas about the proper moral ordering of the universe, end up fighting a civil war over in England.
In the mid 1800's, two groups of people who mostly detest each other, with very different and fundamentally incompatible ideas about the proper moral ordering of the universe, end up fighting a civil war over here in America.
Warp your minds around that for a moment…
Not the first time I’ve heard it called a continuation of the English Civil War.
A State’s right to what though?
The Southern States had no issues trampling over state rights or employing federal power to *preserve* power. In fact, they had (at the time of the Civil War) a *long* history of doing so. The fugitive slave act, the efforts to expand slavery into the west, etc all point to a group who was working – even before the civil war – to expand the insitution of slavery at the expense of the right of states to self-govern.
And this is hardly our only source of evidence that Slavery was far more important to the south than state’s rights.
For instance, the Constitution of the Confederacy was – by and large – a carbon copy of the constitution of the united states, save for one change: States could *not* outlaw slavery. If state’s right were really the point of contention, than you would think such a decision would be left up to individual states (and that individual states would have more constitutional freedom in general).
Or take the Cornerstone speech of the VP of the confederacy where “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Or the thousands of letters by people in the trench talking about how they are fighting *for* slavery.
Its tempting to think that the Southern States were fighting for State’s Rights, but they weren’t. They fought for *Slavery*, and were always willing to throw away the rights of states to preserve it.
“To make a modern analogy – we don’t say that January 6th was caused by vote-counting. That was just the trigger that day. The _cause_ was the claim of stolen and rigged elections and minimizing of the democratic process. If the current reforms were in place, it is very likely that something else would have been the trigger that caused an uprising, some other time between November 2020 and February 2021. Similarly, if by some act of Dog the North never objected to slavery or the expansion of slavery, odds are high a civil war would have resulted eventually anyway, with something else as the flashpoint.”
Well, no, the cause of the January 6th insurrection was not the claim of stolen and rigged elections – that was only the (patently false) excuse. The _cause_ was Trump’s and his followers’ refusal to accept the outcome of a democratic election that they lost, because they didn’t view the opposition as legitimate.
I suppose maybe the claim of “stolen and rigged elections” does kinda-sorta work as a modern analogy for the “states right” claim.
Well, no, the cause of the January 6th insurrection was not the claim of stolen and rigged elections – that was only the (patently false) excuse.
Why “patently false”? US election security is an absolute joke compared to basically every other first-world country. People here like to talk about the practical case for the humanities, but ignore basic and obvious lessons like how even the possibility of corruption reduces trust in a given process.
And yet apparently, US election security was sufficient to prevent every single one of the meaningful, significant-sized instances of voter fraud that supposedly are being waged against (R) candidates, leaving behind only the farcical laughed-out-of-court “instances” that get lawyers disbarred for even trying to sue over the claim that they happened, or isolated cases of a few private individuals here and there pulling off personal shenanigans.
So if the rest of the world has election security that makes us look laughable by comparison, maybe they’re overprepared for the challenge.
What reduces trust in the electoral process in America isn’t the weakness of election security. It’s the existence of a multi-billion dollar propaganda industry churning out constant 24/7 repetitions of the same lies about the validity of that process. As illustrated by Fox losing a $787 million dollar lawsuit over exactly that phenomenon.
What reduces trust in the electoral process in America isn’t the weakness of election security. It’s the existence of a multi-billion dollar propaganda industry churning out constant 24/7 repetitions of the same lies about the validity of that process.
You mean like how senior political figures spent most of 2016-2020 openly saying that the President of the United States was put in power by foreign interference? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jimmy-carter-says-president-trump-illegitimate-president-russian-interference-2019-06-28/
You don’t get to claim that the system is valid when it produces results you like, and invalid when it produces results you don’t. People will spot the hypocrisy and stop believing you. That’s another lesson of the humanities which people seem not to want to learn.
So to be clear, the question of whether the US has good-enough election security is settled (it does) and you agree that the real problem is when the media publicizes non-threats as if they were real threats?
Because then it just becomes a matter of scale, of who, at what level of power and influence, is doing what, and how comprehensively.
Dominion successfully proved in court that Fox News did 787 million dollars worth of damage just to that one, singular corporation’s reputation alone. And did it by saying things about election security that Fox News knew at the time were not true.
That’s a pretty high bar to clear. Several high bars, even.
1) Proving things in court is hard. That’s high bar number one.
2) It’s a colossal amount of money, the largest lawsuit loss ever involving a media corporation, I believe. It’s a lot of damages. Sure, it’s only about a quarter of Fox’s reported quarterly earnings according to a quick Google, but still, a lot. These are some very powerful damages.
3) It’s being inflicted on only one of the many, many parties who were in some way affected by the knowingly and deliberately spread lies about the 2020 election being significantly rigged in Biden’s favor by vote fraud. Most of those parties will probably never sue Fox (e.g. the Capitol Police, I’m guessing). But it is easy to demonstrate that they were damaged.
…
By contrast, to the best of my knowledge, on the subject of allegations that the Russians helped Trump in 2016, no lawsuits have successfully proven millions of dollars of reputational damage to reputations inflicted by deliberate, knowing lies that were known to be lies at the time that they were told. Since Donald Trump is not known for being shy or weak about suing people who have harmed him, this is an interesting observation.
I likewise observe that no riots have ripped into the seat of an active sitting legislature specifically in the belief that this happened. All subsequent riots of all kinds in the past seven years were caused by unrelated things.
But nonetheless if anyone is able to clear a similar set of high bars in the matter of Trump being accused of having Russian help winning the 2016 elections, I’ll definitely be shocked and amazed by the sheer scale of deliberate lying being done to distort our political system to the benefit of, well, whoever the beneficiary turns out to be. Just as I think we should all agree that a shocking and amazing amount of deliberate lying went on regarding allegations of election fraud in 2020.
Of course, the irony is that it is by this point clear that the Russians’ social media assets slanted significantly pro-Trump, regardless of whether Trump ever asked them for help or coordinated with them or not. Probably because it is entirely to the Russians’ benefit if a strongman politician who refuses to admit basic facts about whether he has won or lost an election throws American politics into chaos, as Trump has done whether he is in any way intentionally serving or coordinating with the Russians or not.
So to be clear, the question of whether the US has good-enough election security is settled (it does) and you agree that the real problem is when the media publicizes non-threats as if they were real threats?
No, US election security is still rubbish, and the US’ inability to count votes in a timely manner is still an absolute embarrassment.
Because then it just becomes a matter of scale, of who, at what level of power and influence, is doing what, and how comprehensively.
The FBI is quite powerful and influential, I believe.
“”Our investigation … revealed that senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor toward the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities,” Durham wrote in his report. “In particular, there was significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents. The Department did not adequately examine or question these materials and the motivations of those providing them before opening a full-scale investigation.”
In his final report, Durham alleges that the investigation into Trump in its early days was handled differently from how the FBI approached prior matters, including allegations of “foreign election interference plans” purportedly aimed at Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, which Durham’s team also examined.
“In short, it is the Office’s assessment that the FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia,” the report says. “An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.”
While Durham does not appear to say outright that the FBI’s Russia investigation should not have been launched, he strongly suggests that is the case — while using sharp language to admonish former FBI leadership and agents and describing his findings as “sobering.””
https://abcnews.go.com/US/after-4-year-probe-durham-report-slams-fbi/story?id=99338300
Ah yes. John Durham, the lawyer assigned by William Barr, the far right attorney general appointed by Trump, to ‘investigate’ the probe into Russian election interference spends many pages whinging about how mean the FBI is to trump, and says very little actionable at all.
John Durham is not a reliable source, he was literally appointed by the trump administration to discredit the investigation. And he did his job, for as much as anyone cares.
John Durham is not a reliable source, he was literally appointed by the trump administration to discredit the investigation. And he did his job, for as much as anyone cares.
Biden had plenty of time to replace him, if he doubted his impartiality.
Rational people would be able to agree readily that the conduct of the FBI in the collusion investigation (and that of the CIA more recently in suppressing reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop) was appalling, deplorable and subversive of democracy. And rational people would also readily agree that there is no even credible, much less convincing, evidence of significant fraud (where “significant” means “large enough to change the result”) in the 2020 election, that Trump’s claims of such fraud are despicable and also subversive of democracy, and that violent assaults on legislative assemblies are incompatible with rule of law. But for many people, including apparently Simon Jester and eba, it’s partisan politics all the way down, and there can be no truth that doesn’t advance their political agenda.
Rational people would be able to
agree readily that the conduct of
the FBI in the collusion investigation
(and that of the CIA more recently in
suppressing reporting of the Hunter
Biden laptop) was appalling, deplorable
and subversive of democracy.
Via Wikipedia’s source links (from the New York Times), the “Hunter Biden” laptop (with its exciting chain of custody) was investigated by two Republican Senate committees and a House committee, none of which seem to have turned up much of anything of consequence along the lines originally alleged against Hunter, his father, or the Biden campaign and administration as a whole.
I don’t know what the CIA did or did not do to ‘suppress’ the reporting, but if the House and Senate Republicans investigated three times, I have to question whether there was anything there for the CIA to suppress in the first place.
Some sources lie.
In regards to the FBI’s collusion investigation, I have not yet formed a firm opinion based on sources I am reasonably confident that I can trust of what the FBI’s conduct was.
I am assured by some that the FBI was engaged in a massive witchhunt, but the nature of the parties behind this assurance leaves me reminded of the famous quip by Mandy Rice-Davies: “Well he would, wouldn’t he?”
Finding trustworthy sources is difficult. Some people are willing to lie, either to exonerate their patron, or to grossly stretch the truth, to incriminate their patron’s enemies.
No, US election security is still rubbish,
and the US’ inability to count votes in a
timely manner is still an absolute embarrassment.
Those are unrelated subjects. Evidence of statistically significant election fraud in US elections remains laughably thin on the ground. But whether the election results are secure or insecure has nothing to do with whether they are counted quickly or slowly, and indeed speeding up the count might make things less secure.
I suspect that the big offender behind slow vote counts is a refusal to fund the infrastructure to count votes quickly in urban areas. Suburban precincts are often counted very fast indeed. Of course, addressing that would involve having many large polling sites in urban areas, resulting in faster lines and less congestion at the polls there…
Those are unrelated subjects. Evidence of statistically significant election fraud in US elections remains laughably thin on the ground. But whether the election results are secure or insecure has nothing to do with whether they are counted quickly or slowly, and indeed speeding up the count might make things less secure.
Slow counts make it easier for one party to conveniently “find” a load of hitherto-unnoticed ballots, which just so happen to put them in the lead.
You are quite right! Of course, in that case we would expect the solution to be to increase funding for polling locations, so that there are fewer people per polling place and so that mail-in ballots can be counted quickly.
You would also expect the solution to be lots of polling places in densely populated areas, for the same reason. By definition, a polling place that has a gigantic line wrapping around the block is a polling place that won’t be able to report its results at 7 p.m. on the dot.
So we can agree that the political side in favor of expanding the infrastructure to make the act of voting itself quick, easy, and reliable would tend to be the party in favor of honest elections.
Bottlenecking that infrastructure would tend to favor less honest elections, both by delaying resolution of the vote count and by making it more likely that the system artificially excludes or discourages legal voters from voting in the first place.
The usual trick I do with people who love to talk about states rights as a cause of the US Civil War is to ask these two questions:
1. Name three states’ rights that the South was fighting for.
2. Name one of those rights that the CSA constitution didn’t prohibit their own states from choosing.
If they were so adamant that these were decisions were to be left up to states to decide as they saw fit, then why did their constitution prohibit states from deciding these issues, instead deciding it for them the way they all wanted? Hell, they even prohibited their own states from seceding!
The invocation of states rights’–no matter who was doing it–has always been nothing more than a rhetorical attempt to justify shifting power to a level where the policy in question can be enacted without serious challenge.
It wasn’t so much that the South was fighting for states’ rights as it was that the North was fighting against them. Similarly, the North didn’t fight to free the slaves but the South did fight against abolition.
The states’ rights for which they launched this bloody war was to live off slavery and put that slave economy in place everywhere, and not only the northern states. The fantasy was to put in place throughout the hemisphere, and even further, into the Pacific. Fantasy. They were very good at fantasy.
Slave capitalism vs. manufacturing and mercantile capitalism were the two opposing forces here.
Baloney.
The secessionists wrote a lot about their justifications so we don’t have to read the tea leaves to discern their motivations. They explicitly said they were seceding over slavery which was, in the words of the Mississippi delegation, “the most important institution in the world,” apparently surpassing other institutions like the family, the church, The US government, and the State of Mississippi. The man elected vice president of the secessionists said in a public speech that “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [of racial equality[; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. ”
These people weren’t subtle about their racism, they proudly declared it for everyone to hear. And when they wrote their own constitution, they promptly banned states from outlawing slavery. These people loved federal supremacy, as long as it was breaking their way. When Pennsylvania asserted their state’s right to have nothing to do with slavery, the pro-slavery faction passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a crime to help an escaped slave. You’re personally anti-slavery? Too bad, now you’re required by federal law to participate in the maintenance of this abominable institution.
State’s rights was and remains a lie.
Michael Hutson – While Lincoln chose to stand on maintaining the union, a great many northerners did in fact fight to end slavery. It was one of the strongest motivators, as evident in soldiers letters and diaries.
The Dredd Scott decision was the biggest erosion of states’ rights to that point, yet southerners celebrated it. All of the other revisionist “causes” people like to trot out – states’ rights, economic differences, debt and credit, and so on – really boil down to the existence of a slave economy in the south.
If I’m understanding it correctly, the Dred Scott decision declared that African-Americans were inherently disqualified for national citizenship. While this was extremely pro-slavery, what right of a state did that explicitly infringe or curtail? Most free states did not automatically grant equal rights to free blacks.
@Michael: Dred Scott also declared that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories.
I should note that, contra Evan, it did not prevent states from prohibiting slavery; however, many at the time believed that it was the first step in a Southern plot to expand slavery by prohibiting states from prohibiting slavery.
I’m about as far from lost glorious cause as can be found. Reading comprehension?
You worded it poorly. Only now, after reading this comment, do I realize what you meant.
I don’t think she worded it poorly, her meaning was clear to me.
Yes, this. Since this is a blog about being pedantic:
The “it” in the sentence, “Slavery hardly even entered into it, if at all,” is ambiguous. It could’ve been read as referring to the book, meaning “the book hardly mentions slavery, if at all,” or as a comment about the war, meaning “the war was hardly about slavery, if at all.”
While I took it the way you apparently initially intended (as “Keegan doesn’t give enough mention to slavery”) it is definitely readable the other way.
Insofar as it was a war, slavery entered into only in the matter of contrabands. The technical aspects do not depend on the cause.
They depend on the system that produced the respective leaders, though. The North fought industrial warfare better than the South, with way better grasp of logistics, precisely because it was embedded in a modern-ish industrial society rather than in a slave society whose elites were idle.
For a similar reason, it’s not really possible to discuss the Cold War without pointing out that one side was communist and one was capitalist (it figured into their respective strategies, especially when fighting as insurgents), or even WW2 without pointing out that one side was expending resources on exterminating a double-digit number of million of the occupied people.
The fact that American slavery was a particularly brutal and evil variety, and was based around a whole ideology of racial inferiority, also probably prevented them from using slave-soldiers like a lot of premodern polities did.
Just out of curiosity, what are you thinking about in terms of how communism vs. capitalism affected their respective strategies? I’m sure that’s correct but I’d be intrigued to know the details.
Re capitalism vs. communism, it’s a few things over a long period:
1. Mao’s strategy of the people’s war, covered by Bret a while back. This is related to the fact that Chinese peasants were so impoverished in the 1930s that they sympathized with the CCP and its promises of overthrowing the landlords.
2. US counterinsurgency ideology. In a mirror image of Mao’s people’s war, the US assumed traditional authorities were the bulwark against communism. This, as transmitted to allies in Latin America, led to regimes that treated any kind of progressive or developmental social policy as equivalent to communism; this forestalled any land reform, which in Asia was done by the US in Japan and by both Koreas and both Chinas, and set up the Maoist style of insurgency that Che Guevara et al adapted.
3. Intelligence gathering methods. The USSR believed in the heroic ideological communist spy; even though soon enough it learned to distrust spies motivated by ideology rather than money or ego, it kept the mentality that HUMINT is the most prestigious form of intelligence. In the US, the highest prestige has been on SIGINT.
4. Also on intelligence, the profiles of the Soviet spies in different NATO countries. In the US, socialism was a black mark for life, and the people who were socialist were often anti-Soviet human rights advocates (e.g. the Forward was the first US paper to publicize the Holodomor); thus, Soviet spies like Aldrich Ames were motivated by money or ego. In Western Europe, there’s a view that communism is a youthful indiscretion, so some pro-Soviet ideologues did make it into places to spy for the USSR in the UK and West Germany; in West Germany, oddly enough, other big-time spies were former Nazis, who Reinhard Gehlen had excessively trusted to be reliable anti-communists.
5. Free media. The US and Western Europe had way more open criticism of the military, leading to a lot of reforms after Vietnam, like getting rid of the draft and making recruit training a lot less brutal than depicted in Full Metal Jacket. Russia, in contrast, still has heavy military hazing.
6. Also on the subject of free media, low public tolerance for mass casualties in expeditionary wars in democracies. This explains part of the divergence between NATO and Soviet tanks – NATO tanks are designed so that a mission kill doesn’t kill the crew, Soviet ones happily have an ammunition drum that explodes when hit. Israel takes this to an even more extreme level and designs the Merkava around crew survivability as a prime concern, to the point of putting the engine at the front in order to add more stuff between the crew and the likeliest direction of attack.
Irrelevant to a discussion of the battlefield and the generals involved. The things that influenced the war were legion. Trying to throw them all in would make it impossible to talk about the generals
No it isn’t. If only because slaves were a signifcant part of the south’s logistics. The US south was a slave society, not just “a society with slaves”, and that means slavery affects every part of said society, directly or indirectly. It influenced why they fought, how they fought, and who fought and who didn’t and how they paid for it.
You can discuss logistics without getting into the details of how the stuff was moved around. And there is no reason why you should not. It may be amusing to note that they used mules wherever they could but had to use horses whenever they came within sounds of the guns, but that does not affect the logistics to the extent it MUST always be mentioned. Especially when logistics are not relevant.
“-a slave society whose elites were idle.”
Which may well explain why the war was so popular among the southern elite: traditionally the primary occupation of slave/serf holders was warfare, in order to seize more land and more slaves. The southern “filibusters” who tried to invade Central America are one example and the constant agitation for war against Cuba is another. The South’s leaders no doubt planned a post-war course of expansionist conquest.
There are some fascinating parallels between Stalingrad and Bakhmut, though with Russia on the wrong side. However, Bakhmut is different in its use of the Wagner Group as both spearhead and sacrificial lamb (I seem to recall mercenary groups being used this way in the Thirty Years’ War, and it’s a pity that Prigozhin never read what happened to some of the mercenary leaders when they were no longer needed).
> it’s a pity that Prigozhin never read what happened to some of the mercenary leaders when they were no longer needed
As far as I can tell, Prigozhin is Putin’s ally, in terms of domestic politics. It’s the MoD that is Putin’s opponent. It’s notable that Prig never criticizes Putin. I also doubt that Prig has ambitions to become President; that’s a bed of tears. He’s a rich man; he wants to be free to go on mining gold in sub-Saharan Africa. His good troops are in Africa, not in Bakhmut. In Bakhmut, he’s using convicts.
Though being loyal to the emperor notably didn’t save Wallenstein.
> The paradox of Hitler’s false-heroic mask was that Hitler had displayed very real personal courage during the First World War. He had been awarded the Iron Cross, suffered a shrapnel wound, and been gassed.
Aren’t the details of Hitler’s military service very much disputed? Among other things, I don’t think we actually have his medical records from WWI.
“the lethality of of the battlefield” duplication
Piggybacking off of this, “his hetairoi cavalry cavalry followed” I assume it should be “hetairoi cavalry” or “hetairoi companion cavalry” or something.
It seems to me that the key difference between anti-heroic and un-heroic leadership, is whether the general gains or loses information and control by heading towards the decisive point. And there are probably a lot of factors that can influence the answer to that question.
(As a minor point: Zelensky is moving around to influential points a lot, but he is not personally and literally leading an attack at any of them. So by this typology, his would seem to be a case of anti-heroic leadership.)
Or a *successful* example of false-heroic leadership, perhaps?
I think it would be a mistake to assume that false-heroic leadership has to be a failure. There are plenty of example of war-leaders whose contribution is moral, rhetorical or simply iconic: Churchill, Elizabeth I, perhaps Edward III at Crecy etc. These are people playing a heroic role but without personally experiencing or influencing combat (unlike the true heroic). I think VZ fits this mould. Perhaps successful false-heroic leaders need good subordinates in the other categories (the un-heroic Alan Brooke, the anti-heroic Burghley, the heroic Black Prince). Unheroic Grant had successful false-heroic Lincoln as his boss, and the partnership worked.
But I don’t think that Lincoln really did false heroism. He wasn’t running around at the front very often and he didn’t pretend that he was. Nobody was presenting him as the guy who would personally crush the rebels, or (so far as I know) painting fanciful paintings of him as a hero about to slay the dragon of secessionism the way they did of HItler.
Exactly. As well, Lincoln backed Grant to the full, because, as Lincoln stated, “he won battles,” at the point when Lincoln desperately needed battle victories. The president’s attitude was to leave Grant alone and let him do it, and so he told the carpers and enemies of Grant.
Moreover, as history proved, Lincoln was more danger from the sesesh than from soldiers.
Just getting him to Washington for that first inauguration was nerve-wrackingly dangerous, as Ted Widmer’s history of that journey, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington, tells us in detail.
This may well be the case for Zelensky too.
A HUGE counter-factual is what would have happened if Lincoln had been murdered by a Maryland mob on the way to Washington D.C. Whether anyone else could have helmed the ship of state as adroitly as Lincoln did is problematic. Either the North might not have found the political will to fight the Civil War to a successful conclusion; or democracy as we know it might not have survived the war, with the USA becoming more or less an empire of conquered provinces ruled by an oligarchy.
The anti-heroic commander goes to influential points to gather information and give orders, even if he doesn’t personally charge ahead with the troops. Zelensky isn’t directly commanding his armed forces any more than Lincoln did. Zelensky goes to influential points just to be seen publicly exposing himself to risk and associated with the soldiers in a way that raises morale.
Honestly, this is probably the closest you can possibly get to heroic leadership in the Information Age without having superpowers to make you bulletproof and bombproof.
I’ve been thinking that whoever is in charge of Zelensky’s security team must have one of the most nerve-wracking jobs in the world.
True, but perversely, I bet the job’s probably more nerve-wracking in Kyiv (where assassins might come gunning for him at any time) than in a bomb shelter near the front lines (where the Russians probably don’t know he’s there until he’s already left, and where being a good bodyguard won’t help anyway because the threat is artillery rockets blowing him up from 30 km away).
Fidel Castro & Che Guevara were both active (guerrilla) fighters and political leaders, although not at the same time. (Guevara didn’t do very well as a political leader in peacetime, which is why he was eventually encouraged to return to his career as a guerrilla commander, where he eventually died a few years later). For both of them though, their experience as “heroic” guerrilla fighters was pretty core to their later political charisma, both at home and abroad.
I guess neither one is “modern” in the Information Age sense, but they’re certainly “modern” in the “post 1945” sense.
I think the form the war takes is to be taken in account – guerrila fighting is very different from a more “conventional” contemporary war, which is what we see in Ukraine. In guerrila operations, you need different types of leadership, command and planning than you do in a more typical war, which in turn influences how commanding officers *and* political leaders act. In fact, Zelensky most likely delegates most strategic decision to the officers of the army, whereas Guevara and Castro had to act both as leaders of the revolution and officers of the guerrila groups.
Zelensky and the Ukrainan army would gain nothing by him directly partecipating in battles, but his getting close to the lines to talk with the soldiers and be seen by them is useful for morale (and also probably allows him to get a clearer idea of what’s going on at the front). Does this style of leadership neatly fits into one of Keegan’s categories? I don’t think so – in general, trying to force complex situations into simple boxes tends to work poorly.
I think there’s a kind of difference between the type of civilian leadership that Zelensky does (even in a military context) and actual military command. (which doesen’t make it any less important) the calculations are slightly different than for Wellington or Grant because he doesen’t actually have to do manage things; He has other people to do that, and his behaviour is “only” a risk-vs-morale-boost factor. (which isn’t unimportant, but it’s less… complex)
I would agree that Zelensky’s job is not that of a general, but I think that Dr Taylor was trying to generalise from running a battle to running a war. And from Zelensky’s point of view, a diplomatic victory can be quite as decisive as any battlefield victory. He should visit Biden or Scholtz for the same reason Wellington would visit the site of an infantry attack.
Oh, I’m not arguing what he is doing isn’t important for the war effort, just that it is different than what an actual commander is doing. “Visiting the front” has been a thing for civilian leaders for a long time after all.
“…drek with titles like The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun…”
After reading this sentence, I amused myself with the notion of someone writing a book with a title like that, but as a blend of genre parody and actually sound history.
Like (to take a classic ACOUP example), “Leadership Secrets of Lycurgus, tip #1: Actually existing is for wimps.”
Alas, I know our host has too many better things to do.
I do recall in among all the management training courses I encountered, people advocating reading Sun Tsu’s “Art of War” and Mushashi’s “Book of Five Rings” not for military knowledge or historical insight, but because they would give you philosophical insight that would make you a better manager.
(I also encountered films from John Cleese or the Muppets intended to be shown at business meetings to illustrate important business principles.)
“Using a servant with coconuts is a great example of outside the box cost cutting in the transportation budget*”
“As Life of Brian’s haggling shows, flexibility in negotiating strategy provides opportunities for enhanced sales value that can by missed by fixed adherence ot procedure.”
“A Unique and memorable brand name, such as Biggus *not sure how family friendly the comments need to be* greatly enhances marketing efforts and product recognition.”
*Included because it apparently ended up an actual clever cost saving measure in movie production, in not having to pay for an animal, or learn how to handle one. Just ruining any possible joke. Got to keep my meanings clear.
I remember that stuff as well. I read both of those because I was a nerd into military strategy and swords, but both had those back-cover blurbs about their supposed applicability to business. It was very amusing to consider what the business relevance of “Attack by Fire” was supposed to be.
I read that book once, many years ago.
Frankly, it was a fairly generic overview of good leadership practices (cultivating discipline but in a constructive way, working with subordinates and peers, building morale, rebounding from defeats without blaming your subordinates or falling apart) which used a heavily fictionalized version of the Huns as a literary device to illustrate the advice.
If it used a heavily fictionalized version of the Huns as a literary device, does that make it an example of the Fremen Mirage?
If it was, it would be the first time I have heard of the Fremen being praised for their modern management techniques.
To an extent, perhaps, though if I recall correctly (and it’s been a LONG time), it’s missing a lot of elements of the Mirage. That is to say, the book could probably have been titled “Leadership Secrets of Julius Caesar” just as well and carried essentially the same content and messaging.
So basically a modern Cyropaedia?
The words “David Irving” do not appear in this post. It matters that Keegan thought highly of Irving and was even called as a prosecution witness in the trial and only became hostile while on the stand. A lot of the bad reputation of this kind of military history comes from the fact that it was full of Wehraboos who didn’t really want to hear about the Holocaust – same Wehraboos who translate every French term because France is a meme but leave German terms like Auftragstaktik untranslated.
? This is in reference to what?
I was wondering, too, so I went digging. The trial in question appears to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd, rather than the time that Irving was arrested in Austria on Holocaust denial charges.
The Wikipedia page says of the suit against Penguin, “Irving also subpoenaed the diplomatic historian Donald Cameron Watt and the military historian John Keegan to testify in his case against Lipstadt; both men had refused an earlier offer to testify for Irving on their own and appeared to be very reluctant on the stand.”
Clearly, Irving thought he could get them to say something supportive, but it seems like he should have guessed that they would not.
I suspect the assertion that Keegan was a fan of Irving is based on the former being impressed by how much the latter knew about certain details of Nazi Germany. For example, here is an article three years after the trial which quotes several scholars, including Keegan, saying anodyne positive things about Irving’s research and complaining about a lack of sources on the topic who aren’t themselves Nazis: https://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/skeptics.html
(My response didn’t thread – go a bit below, it accidentally responds directly to the OP instead of this, sorry.)
Remember, Keegan’s attitude toward Irving up until the trial was not “anodyne positive.” He said Irving was the most important historian of Nazi Germany. He was glowing about Hitler’s War. Look for what he said about Irving before the trial, not after (even a few days after the trial, he felt the need to say Irving > Lipstadt: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/apr/16/irving).
David Irving generally had a positive reputation in the field before the Holocaust Denial thing came out. If we’re cancelling John Keegan, we’d better be prepared to cancel a lot of other historians
The Holocaust denial came out in 1977; his reputation among military historians remained positive until around 2000, because they didn’t check his references the way Richard Evans did. And yes, it’s a black mark on the field, which is why I mention this in a blog post a) praising John Keegan b) in context of why military history matters.
It is above everything else a blog post about Keegan’s book Mask of Command and little else. It is therefore unremarkable that David Irving goes unmentioned.
Although I agree that Keegan’s post-trial comments about Irving and Lipstadt were wrong and showed poor judgement at best.
Apparently a bid to declare Keegan valueless/tainted because of his somewhat tepid opinions regarding David Irving, who Keegan thought had done some good work while also veering into “nonsense.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20040627233112/http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=%2Farchive%2F2000%2F04%2F12%2Fnirv512.html
“same Wehraboos who translate every French term because France is a meme but leave German terms like Auftragstaktik untranslated.”
They actually don’t–the French terms have just been around for so long that they’re considered part of English now. Get over yourself.
I have seen a couple of John Cleese films on business topics … but they were titled “Meetings, Bloody Meetings” and “More Bloody Meetings”. The films were about bad or ineffectual meeting practices, and they had been scripted to get across those points. Perhaps others have seen Monty Python films in a business context; I wouldn’t know. Just these were well-done training films.
The one I saw was about prioritizing work when you were overloaded. Divide tasks into four groups by if they are Important or Unimportant and Urgent or Not Urgent. Then do triage.
Post to subscribe.
Makes you wonder if being a dictator is even a full-time job if they have time left over to micromanage military operations. How many hours a day does being a dictator actually require?
The trick is that a dictator can usually have you shot for saying they’re not doing their job correctly, and can delegate nearly anything as long as they find someone they trust enough to do it. No one has the legal power to say ‘only the dictator can do this,’ and even suggesting the idea can get you killed.
It’s a tough combination.
A lot of managers would consider this living the dream. 🙂
Because modern business is run like a dictatorship. It is ironic that in a democratic state, the most common institution most people will interact with in their day to day live, their jobs, is dictatorial
It really depends on the dictator. Some were fairly hands off. Others (Louis XIV, Napoleon, Stalin) were famous for basically being able to basically work very long hours and not having to sleep much.
You could probably do some kind of managerial typology: “The micromanager”, “The passion-project guy”, “The delegator”, etc…
A few questions.
Is there an example of the False Heroic style actually being successful? Is it something doomed to fail? Or is it something that when successful doesn’t leave a lot of impressive evidence? Like how someone wins via bluffing they won’t have battles we can analyze after the fact, and propaganda is less impressive if you’re not the intended audience.
I’m thinking that even when you have an army large enough to have subordinate commanders (and people subordinate to those people in turn) you’ll have people lower on the chain that need different command styles. General Grant is Non-Heroic because of nascent telecommunications technology, impressive rifle fire, and the need to manage logistics for a large organization, but Sargent Whomever is going to actually need to lead a few people up a Confederate-held hill and a Heroic style might be more appropriate.
Attempting to compare Hitler to his friends Hideki Tojo and Benito Mussolini I seem to notice that Hitler is the big cheese to any conceivable audience and always has to portray himself as carrying the country on his back. Tojo and Mussolini were de facto totalitarian dictators in their prime but de jure were Prime Ministers serving under monarchs that might actually fire them (Which ended up happening to them both). Tojo and Mussolini having to wear the mask of regular politicians, heads of regular parties, normal servants of royal government, etc, on occasion may have kept them on a somewhat more even keel than Hitler who is always wearing the mask of superman.
That “need to use heroic style to lead people up a hill and kill the enemies there” thing was definitely a factor in Civil War leadership. Not just for sergeants, but for company captains, regimental colonels, and even the generals commanding whole brigades, divisions, and corps. It’s part of why, as the article notes, so many Civil War generals (strikingly many) were killed in battle.
Is there an example of the False Heroic style actually being successful? Is it something doomed to fail? Or is it something that when successful doesn’t leave a lot of impressive evidence? Like how someone wins via bluffing they won’t have battles we can analyze after the fact, and propaganda is less impressive if you’re not the intended audience.
Traditionally, European monarchs leant quite heavily into the whole commander-in-chief thing, being depicted in official portraits wearing military uniform, or (in a slightly earlier time) practising the martial arts and hosting jousting matches and similar tournaments. This was the case even with kings who rarely or never actually commanded their armies in the field. I think would count as False Heroic style being successful.
I thought about it and I think I now have a candidate for the False Heroic style actually working for somebody, at least temporarily. Yevgeny Prigozhin, Yes the Wagner group CEO.
He goes to the front and is exposed to significant personal danger like an Anti-Heroic commander, but he’s not there to get any info or conduct his orchestra. He’s there so that he can look like a Badass. And looking like a Badass is not just him living his best life, it’s providing him material benefits. He needs ammo and supplies from people who don’t like him very much, so he goes above their heads. Stunts like his jaunts to Bakhmut, executing people with sledgehammers, wolf-warrior diplomacy via sending a sledgehammer to the EU, etc make him look Hard. This makes him popular with Russian mil-bloggers, who put pressure on the government, who make the ministry of defense resupply him.
Of course the way he’s waging war is not without its strategic problems. There is the subordination of military objectives to PR objectives (Taking Bakhmut makes him look Strong so he has to take it, even if winning that fight is otherwise useless). He’s dependent on units holding flanks that aren’t Wagner units, aren’t particularly hard, and aren’t commanded by people who like him very much.
Finally, what might end up being the most fatal (To his reputation as a commander and perhaps also to his body) Is that unlike the military men described in the book there seems to be a lot of daylight between Prigozhin success and Russian success. The people beside him and above him on the org-chart are going to have to figure out how to turn Wagner battle victories into Russia winning the war. If that can’t be done, then the question has to be asked, How good is Yevgeny Prigozhin really?
“Is there an example of the False Heroic style actually being successful?”
Well, Trump was a lot more successful than Obama in defeating ISIS. However, he mostly doesn’t pose as the heroic scourge of Islamists, but of immigrants and woke Americans, so I don’t know if that counts. His success against ISIS is generally ascribed to extremely hands off management of a situation which Obama micromanaged while insisting on its insignificance.
Keegan’s book caused a 180° reversal in my opinion of U.S. Grant. But then, I learned US history in the Jim Crow South.
A False Heroic Meme widely circulated by supporters of Donald Trump. On January 6th, 2021 Trump launched an unsuccessful coup against the United States to stay in power after losing reelection.
Meanwhile, Democrats who do the same thing get invited to the White House:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/24/politics/biden-tennessee-lawmakers-white-house/index.html Though funnily enough this particular coup attempt didn’t produce any articles about the nature of tyranny. I wonder why that might be.
Because Biden is right and the Capitol insurrectionists were wrong and attempting to perform a weaponized coup, which the Tennessee people were NOT, while the fascists in the TN house are continuing the War of the Rebellion, which was indeed the war in which slavery was front and center. That’s why.
You could just say “It’s okay when my people do it.” It would save you time and be more honest.
Where exactly is the weaponized coup here? That’s a key difference.
There was no coup attempt in Tennessee. The three politicians argued strenuously for a particular goal as politicians generally do. The expulsion for doing this is far out of character for how governments function.
A crowd of protestors entered the state capitol in order to intimidate legislators into doing what they wanted. If we’re calling Jan 6 a “coup attempt”, then so was this.
Eh. In fairness, the Tennessee folks weren’t trying to prevent a transfer of power, unlike the January 6 rioters, so there’s at least a difference in degree.
Still, that some people seem to view January 6 as The Worst Day in American History and Tennessee as a nothingburger says more about them than it does about anything else.
Because…. the tennesssee protest didn’t involve trying to murder the sitting legislators of tennessee while the Jan 6 protest did? Jan 6 was incompetent, but their goals were clearly communicated.
But also, like, Tennessee is dramatically less important than the federal government.
Oh, and no one illegally broke into the tennessee capitol, no one was murdered, and the worst that happened was some people were annoyed and shouted at. This is important to not, this protest was a peaceful one. You know, in the way protests should be? Disruptive but non violent?
So yeah, a fairly important distinction.
If they were so “clearly communicated” quote them.
Then explain why, if it was so clear, they were not charged with attempted murder.
(My comment doesn’t seem to be posting, so I’ll try leaving out the links. If you want evidence, ninety seconds’ Googling should suffice.)
Oh, and no one illegally broke into the tennessee capitol, no one was murdered, and the worst that happened was some people were annoyed and shouted at. This is important to not, this protest was a peaceful one. You know, in the way protests should be? Disruptive but non violent?
Of the five people who died on Jan 6, three died of natural causes, and one died as a result of accident. The only deliberate homicide was when one of the protestors was shot by a police officer.
Their intentions were clearly communicated when they shouted “Hang Mike Pence!”
Trump, for his part, tried to get the Secret Service to remove the metal detectors that kept guns out of the rally crowd before his speech, saying “They’re not here to hurt me.” He also wanted to go with the rallygoers to the capitol, but was strenuously resisted by his security detail.
If the Secret Service had not defied the president’s orders, he would have led an armed mob to the capitol.
Note also what our host said about it last July:
“The emergency was severe enough and Trump maliciously AWOL enough that the military broke with the chain of command and started taking orders from someone with no authority to give orders.
Think about how you’d write this if it were any other country. ‘When the president directed a mob of his supporters against the legislature, the vice president *seized control of the military* and *directed security services to put down the coup.* Only when it became clear that he had lost control of state security forces which were in the process of putting down the putsch and thus that the coup had failed did the president make a statement.’
In any other country, we’d all know what that meant!
Probably a line about the president being prevented from joining the putsch by politically nervous elements of his palace guard. Seems like the kind of thing which should involve some fairly severe consequences for the putsch-organizer to me.”
So if the mob was so murderous, why didn’t they, y’know, actually murder anyone?
> So if the mob was so murderous, why didn’t they, y’know, actually murder anyone?
Because the people they wanted to murder were evacuated behind a curtain of heavily armed bodyguards when the mob breached the building, as anyone with a basic knowledge of events would know.
Because they had no firearms (against Trump’s wishes), and because they never reached their primary targets: the vice-president and the members of Congress.
You do realise you can kill people without firearms, right?
Also, most violent coup attempts aren’t so picky about whom they kill.
Your dishonest hairsplitting has already been refuted by the blog post that our host wrote after the attack, so I will not continue this argument any further.
You do realise you can kill people without firearms, right?
It seems that when it turned out that the forces of law and order were not axiomatically on the side of making Trump the president forever, the rioters didn’t have the belly to take heavy casualties in an all-out attempt to accomplish that same goal.
I can only infer that at first, fed by a diet of the right sort of media, they expected to be opposed only by ‘libs’ who would be too cowardly to fight back against a massacre. That, or they erected a gallows and called for its use for no reason.
Because for a mob to succeed in dragging Democratic congressmen and senators and also Mike Pence out to the gallows they’d set up, or beating them to death, or ripping them apart limb from limb, or doing any of the other things they might do to kill their self-proclaimed targets without guns…
They would have to get past a lot of heavily armed gunmen. Who would probably open fire, in self-defense if nothing else, inflicting a truly prodigious number of casualties on a mob armed only with whatever improvised weapons they could lay their hands on.
Even if the rioters had the numbers to accomplish the clearly announced intended murders… Well, the reaction of the rioters after Ashli Babbit was shot answers your question.
They ran away.
It seems that when it turned out that the forces of law and order were not axiomatically on the side of making Trump the president forever, the rioters didn’t have the belly to take heavy casualties in an all-out attempt to accomplish that same goal.
There was a police cordon outside the building which the protestors had to push through. If they expected the police to be on their side, they’d have been disabused of that notion before they even entered the Capitol.
They would have to get past a lot of heavily armed gunmen. Who would probably open fire, in self-defense if nothing else, inflicting a truly prodigious number of casualties on a mob armed only with whatever improvised weapons they could lay their hands on.
That narrative seems hard to square with footage of the police escorting protestors around the building.
There is an interesting conflict here. On the one hand, the rioters “had to push past” a security cordon to get into the building and so presumably knew before they even entered that law enforcement was not simply siding with them. On the other hand the rioters were being escorted around inside the building (where they weren’t supposed to be) by law enforcement personnel.
This reflects the broader contradiction within the rioters’ collective mindset. On the one hand, we see evidence of people wearing “Thin Blue Line” paraphernalia dragging down Capitol Police and beating them with their own nightsticks. On the other, we see evidence of some individuals from the Capitol Police and the broader DC city police actively assisting the rioters in their aims.
(Look up Shane Lamond as an example)
One can only conclude that there is a deeply conflicted relationship at work here. A conflicted relationship between the law, the ideological and professional positions of the men who make a career of enforcing the law, and the political ideology of those who would build a gallows outside the legislature and threaten to hang the vice president for failing to certify their leader as the ‘real’ president.
But as to why the legislators themselves were not attacked? Because they were guarded by a specific force who, in the event, would and did shoot to kill, and the rioters evidently did not value making Donald Trump the king of America enough to die for him in large numbers.
This is from 2000, after the trial. Before and at the start of the trial, Keegan spoke much more favorably of Irving; there’s a reason Irving’s team tapped him to be a witness on their side. He reviewed Hitler’s War positively, and called him an indispensable historian. Here, for example, are some quotes from Keegan on Irving from the 1990s:
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/26/arts/is-a-holocaust-skeptic-fit-to-be-a-historian.html
This is not “somewhat tepid.” This is “the British elite defends its own members no matter how fascist they are.”
And days after the judgment, Keegan still spoke far more positively about Irving than about Deborah Lipstadt, who he accused of political correctness. It’s also the same point Constance Sublette makes farther up in comments about the Civil War – that kind of historian is shockingly uninterested in slavery and genocide and thinks little of people who study those perspectives.
Yes, how dare someone have different research priorities than you do, and think that maybe it’s more important to find out how you stop people who do such things rather than to study the things themselves.
Calling a Holocaust denier an indispensable historian is not “having different research priorities” – you certainly don’t stop genocide by passing off the genocidaires’ propaganda as fact the way Irving did or by whitewashing people who do that the way Keegan did until the trial.
I don’t see it as contradictory that someone could otherwise be a first-rate historian and yet have a single point of failure: their views on Hitler’s personal responsibility for the Shoah. Academic research should stand or fall on its merits, and not be subject to ad hominen or genetic fallacy accusations.
Okay, but what came out of the trial is that Irving wasn’t at all a first-rate historian with one lapse. He repeatedly cited Nazi propaganda as if it was fact, on many different points, and not just Hitler’s personal responsibility for the Holocaust. There’s an entire compendium of gross errors on r/AskHistorians, by people who looked into him after the trial, and by people who testified during the trial; we’re talking random claims like “Jews were overrepresented among criminals” for which if you follow the chain of citations, they go to things written in Nazi publications contradicting what official statistics said.
And Keegan didn’t know and didn’t want to know about how shoddy this was. Even after the trial, he said things like “I hope he’s learned to be more careful in the future” and not “I’m sorry I ever recommended any piece of writing by this Nazi hack.”
“Academic research should stand or fall on its merits.” I agree, but Prof. Devereaux does not: he has stated that Peter Singer’s beliefs about infanticide invalidate his scholarship generally.
[ “Denial is a 2016 biographical film directed by Mick Jackson and written by David Hare, based on Deborah Lipstadt’s 2005 book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. It dramatises the Irving v Penguin Books Ltd case, in which Lipstadt, a Holocaust scholar, was sued by Holocaust denier David Irving for libel. It stars Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden, Caren Pistorius and Alex Jennings.
Denial premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2016.[4] It was theatrically released in the United States by Bleecker Street on 30 September 2016,[5] and in the United Kingdom by Entertainment One on 27 January 2017.” ]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_(2016_film)
Currently available streaming on Hulu or AP or NF — I don’t recall which service.
Btw, Lipstadt’s a holocaust and nazi historian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Lipstadt
“the British elite defends its own members no matter how fascist they are.”
That must be why Princess Diana’s lawyer defended Lipstadt for free, Irving was forced to pay for her publishers legal fees and he was driven into bankruptcy.
” that kind of historian is shockingly uninterested in slavery and genocide”
It is not shocking to me that someone writing a book about how battle have been fought, writes in his book about how battles have been fought, rather than what they have been fought over.
Your complaint about this book about how battles have been fought appears to be that it is not a book about slavery and the holocaust. Indeed not: most books aren’t. There are other subjects in the world.
Cry me a river. He sued her; what the fascists miss with their whining about their free speech is that in the trial, he was the plaintiff and demanded that her publisher pay him for damages to his reputation. Well, turns out she was right and he was a hack.
You’re switching arguments between “the British elite defends its own members no matter how fascist they are” and “David Irving got what he deserved”. Those two statements are logically independent; the second can be true whilst the first is false.
Alon, some people might think it contradictory to say both that the British elite defended Irving no matter what, and that they ruined him.
Personally, I think that Irving got what was coming to him; but almost everyone involved in giving it to him was a member of the British elite you claim “defended him no matter what”.
Not the mil history establishment, is the point – that group kept supporting him, and Keegan was called as a prosecution witness (though, again to be fair, he became hostile on the stand). In contrast, the star historian of the defense, Richard Evans, is a social historian and part of the trend of denigration of Great Man theories, having begun his career studying German feminism; the other stars, Peter Longerich and Christopher Browning, are Holocaust historians.
The military history establishment =/= the British elite.
Suffice to say that the British elite is not a hive mind. Parts of it might see it as important to defend Irving even if (or because) he is a Holocaust denier, even as other parts are perfectly comfortable attacking Irving or helping to attack him, or defending someone else that Irving attacks.
So, I don’t consider myself even an amateur military historian – so I apologize if I’m missing something obvious – but I’ve always been bothered by the frequently-stated idea that rifled barrels were a huge game-changer in warfare.
Because of accidentally befriending a few avid (US) Civil War re-enactors, (I thought we all just liked riding mountain bikes *shrug*) I’ve had the pleasure of shooting a ton of different black powder guns – both rifled, and not. The rifled guns were definitely more accurate, but the earliest ones were still muzzle-loaded. So, even with the best technology of the day in the form of waxed paper cartridges and brass primer caps, they still took just as long to reload as their un-rifled forbearers.
Also, while they were more accurate, the still weren’t “accurate” in the sense that we’d think of today. They were still firing round(ish) lead balls – which are not known for ideal aerodynamic performance – through a rifle bore made to 19th century tolerances, and deliberately slightly oversize to accommodate the mostly-still-handmade balls/bullets.
So, I imagine that you still wanted to be pretty close to the guys you were shooting at, so that your first shot would really count. I don’t see how this would force any big change in doctrine.
Rather, I think the big changes come with breech-loading guns and factory-made brass cartridges. The latter two greatly improved reload speed and accuracy, and made possible all kinds of more flexible infantry schemas.
> Also, while they were more accurate, the still weren’t “accurate” in the sense that we’d think of today. They were still firing round(ish) lead balls – which are not known for ideal aerodynamic performance
Funny that you should mention that. One of the major firearms innovations of the Civil War era was the “Minie ball”, which was much more “bullet-shaped” than the round balls you’re probably thinking of, and hence achieved better performance from rifled barrels.
Rather than pinpointing any single innovation as being the singular breakthrough, I tend to think of firearms technology as advancing fairly continuously for the past few centuries. We went from muzzle loading flintlocks at the start of the 19th century to percussion caps, rifled barrels, and the first repeating firearms in the first half of that century, eventually closing out the century with breech loaders, brass cases, smokeless powder, and the Maxim gun. In WWI and WWII semi-auto and full-auto firearms matured into wide adoption, followed by improvements in materials (e.g. the use of aircraft grade aluminum in Stoner’s AR-10 and AR-15), and around the turn of the 21st century, widespread adoption of optics as the primary combat sight. Some of these milestones were definitely bigger than others, but it’s a very continuous process of improvement.
Speaking to the Civil War in particular, my understanding is that both sides started the war using Napoleonic tactics, only to discover that their rifled muskets were far deadlier than those tactics accounted for. So as the war went on, you see more use of earthworks and trench warfare.
The Civil War also saw the use of lever action repeating rifles with cased ammunition, though not in enough quantity to replace the rifled musket as the primary weapon.
It doesen’t have to be that much more accurate if people are still used to the “old” levels of accuracy.
The increase in accuracy is more important than you take into account. Minié balls effectively quadrupled the range of muzzle loaders. This was not only a quantitative improvement but a qualitative one as well: former practice was to march in formation up to about the maximum effective range- perhaps 80 meters-, unload a volley, then charge with bayonets to close on the enemy line before they could reload. A bayonet charge over four times the distance was no longer a working tactic. And since horses could be hit even further- up to 800 yards-, field artillery had much more difficulty supporting an assault. So the big difference was that the new muskets had the range to obviate previous offensive tactics.
OTOH, artillery must also have marched on, since we have a Confederate general remarking with astonishment that half their casualties had been inflicted by artillery and with Confederate cavalry and Union artillery they could lick anyone in the world.
Artillery continued to be lethal as emplaced weapons; what was lost was the ability to move them while under fire. So if they could be put into place before a battle commenced they could secure a position so that a formation of infantry could not be flanked for example. And on the defense they could annihilate attacking infantry.
And it should be noted, this was a particularly narrow point, because we start getting modern long-range indirect fire artillery (as well as better direct fire artillery) pretty much just after the ACW.
While a Civil War rifle would have had about the same rate of fire as a musket from the same time, that was a massive improvement over previous rifles that fired about 2/3 as fast as a contemporary musket. Before Minie balls, rifle bullets had to be slightly larger than the bore, much harder to load.
Well not exactly, the US civil war was the large scale testing and implementaion ground for “modern bullets”.
https://www.civilwartimeline.net/civil-war-bullet-types-detailed.php
And specially the Minié Ball and variants of it :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini%C3%A9_ball
I am once again calling on Americans to study non-American history occasionally. Minie balls had already been amply tested by the French and British in the Crimea and in various colonial conflicts.
It has often been observed in books about the battles of the War of the Rebellion, that much of what had been learned in the Crimean War was incorporated — at times! in some places! by some officers! — while others continued with the bromide commonly spoken even by military historians that they were fighting on the Napoleonic era battlefield.
Part of the problem for both sides in the ACW was that as armies ballooned there just wasn’t enough people around who had any kind of officer education or experience: A large chunk of the officer corps had to learn on the job (and even those who had some experience or training often had to take on tasks or levels of command they were nowhere near trained for)
They learned, and they learned quickly. (and it was a problem the US had to deal with in both World Wars as well, and in both cases succeeded remarkably well at…. eventually): A massively undersized officer corps suddenly having to command an army way to big for it) but it’s not surprising there were uh… teething issues.
Something else I thought about. Different military branches seem to also call for different types of leadership. Navy people I imagine would tend towards Anti-Heroic until really high ranks. The commander is literally in the same boat as his men, but his individual prowess as a sailor probably doesn’t matter much if they’re sailing anything significant.
Air Force people on the other hand would probably never be Anti-Heroic. They’re either flying in formation with the men Heroically, where the commander’s skill as a pilot is as important as their leadership ability. or they’re on the ground planning sorties and logistics Non-heroically and nowhere near air battles at all.
Though that very much depends on timeframe: Navy captains ages were boarding was still reliable often were expected to take part in them.
I presume air force commanders are always heroic, since there’s no class system among pilots – all officers are expected to fly, and get promoted in part based on their record as aviators. (And in the US Navy, the captain of a carrier and I think also the rear admiral in charge of the entire strike group is a naval aviator rather than a promoted ship’s company officer.)
.Though where do drone operators fit in there? A new variant of false heroic?
Having checked the biographies of the ones currently commanding aircraft carriers, they appear to be naval aviators who then get streamed into a ship command track which (obviously) involves a lot of ship training. And I understand from another article that the carrier XO is someone on this same track. There doesn’t seem to be a way to do the reverse (though I suppose it’s theoretically possible).
Yep – by law, the captain of a carrier in the US must be a naval aviator. There was a discussion of this on Twitter after the Top Gun sequel came out, and some answers on Quora. And at least per Quora, the captain of the carrier will generally be promoted to flag rank and given command of the entire strike group.
Thank $DEITY, a comment that isn’t Jan 6 / ACW!
In the Anglophone airforces (don’t know about others) “all officers fly” is more about status than leadership role. When the air forces were being established early in the 20th C they were competing for recruits with the army and navy, and saying that pilots were officers added prestige and glamour. IIRC some historians have suggested it was also a way to discourage the “wrong type of people” from applying.
This “pilots are officers” stuck even though a lot of pilots fly single seat aircraft so are in command of no-one, and the pilot of a multicrew bomber is only commanding about as many people as an army sergeant. It has even backfired in modern air forces. “Officers” are expected to command others, so air forces had to send pilots into command track training to maintain the status. But there are lots of pilots who really like flying, and if you try to make them into real officers they’ll just resign and join an airline. So now the Australian air force and I believe others have a “Warrant Officer” rank reserved for people who have to be called officers on the paperwork but won’t be in command of anything more than the crew on one plane.
IIRC, during the Battle of Britain, and presumably before, pilots were often NCOs. And the problem was that this led to a line of social distinction being drawn between pilots in the same unit, as some would be in the officers, and some in the NCOs, mess. Much less trouble to make them all officers.
And note that pilots tended to be drawn from the better educated sectors of the population, leaving the air force recruiting them from the same sectors as the officer corps. So they have to be offered similar pay, conditions and respect, if you want recruits.
Which gets back to OGP’s stuff about how your military organization has to be compatible with your culture.
“Warrant Officer” is an NCO rank.
Yeah. The army has non-commissioned officers, lower case officer, such as sergeants. But their formal title is not “officer”, and anyone talking or writing about say respect between the officers and the rank and file/men is most likely counting the sergeants with the rank and file.
Warrant Officers generally don’t have more command responsibilities than sergeants, but for historical/prestige reasons the formal title has to include the word “Officer” somewhere.
(I should add that AFAIK “warrant officer” was first widely used by the air force for pilots, the increasing need for specialists in all branches of industrial era warfare has made them more common elsewhere.)
Warrant officers have been around a long time in the British system. They were so called because appointed by warrant, as opposed to being commissioned (a commission is from the Crown). They were subordinate to commissioned officers but could still wield considerable authority – bosun or master in the navy, for instance.
I think my biggest problems with Keegan is the negative characterization of ‘false heroism’. False heroism is pretty much just the modern way people who are important enough for the enemy political leadership to know them lead these days. The battlefield is too dangerous for them because they’d be targeted, but they know that being openly apprehensive would hurt the morale of the people under them. So they walk a balance of appearing heroic through propaganda and photo-ops with troops while sensibly shunning the battlefield.
Hitler, Bush, Obama, Trump, Putin, and Zelensky are all false-heroic leaders. Hitler was and Zelensky is excellent at this, deploying propaganda, inspiring speeches, and expertly-timed visits to the front to project images that resonate throughout their troops. Ukrainians stand and fight the Russian hordes, as the Nazis used to. Neither were ever bothered by the fact that their leader lived in a bunker. Zelensky is if anything even better at false heroism, considering you put his leadership in a category with Alexander the Great. If he were a heroic leader, he would be leading a specops team to make surgical strikes on the Russians. Can you blame him for not doing that? That would be ridiculous!
I’m a bit confused by the way the article (and the original book?) emphasises Hitler’s tendency to micromanage things. Wellington was likewise a micromanager, so apparently micromanaging isn’t sufficient to count as a “false heroic” leader, whilst Trump spent most of his time in office composing Tweets rather than actually running the government, so it doesn’t seem to be necessary, either.
Hitler was and Zelensky is excellent at this, deploying propaganda, inspiring speeches, and expertly-timed visits to the front to project images that resonate throughout their troops. Ukrainians stand and fight the Russian hordes, as the Nazis used to. Neither were ever bothered by the fact that their leader lived in a bunker. Zelensky is if anything even better at false heroism, considering you put his leadership in a category with Alexander the Great.
Hitler’s decision not to evacuate Berlin also parallels Zelensky’s decision not to evacuate Kiev.
Read more carefully, or even better read the book. A theme of the book is that different leadership styles worked in different eras due to different battlefield conditions. Wellington could micromanage near the front lines because at that time, with the type of troops on the battlefield, it was the most effective way to be a general. The problem with Hitler is that he was the civilian leader of a nation at war. At WW2 scale of operations and types of troops, Hitler micromanaging was not effective and frequently disastrous.
The book is also about military leadership in battle/war, not civilian leadership. So Trump micromanaging or tweeting is … nothing worth talking about. Trump was not leading the USA in a war, neither were Obama or Bush before him. The Iraqis and Afghans were at war, but the USA was never threatened.
As for comparing Hitler to Zelensky, bullshit. Zelensky, unlike Hitler or Stalin, is the civilian leader of a nation at war. He’s doing an excellent job as an Abraham Lincoln type, inspiring both civilians and military, taking care of foreign politics, and most importantly picking good generals and letting them run the military. Zelensky not evacuating Kiev is comparable to Churchill not evacuating London, showing confidence that the Ukrainian military will hold. Hitler not evacuating Berlin was pure fantasy that a miracle would occur.
Putin is, unhappily for Russia, doing a good imitation of Stalin in the 1930s and beginning of WW2. Putin’s corrupt government has destroyed the ability of the Russian military to actually fight, and Putin thought at the beginning that Russia wouldn’t have to fight at all. Let’s hope Putin does not manage to kill as many of his own people through stupidity as Stalin did.
Read more carefully, or even better read the book. A theme of the book is that different leadership styles worked in different eras due to different battlefield conditions. Wellington could micromanage near the front lines because at that time, with the type of troops on the battlefield, it was the most effective way to be a general. The problem with Hitler is that he was the civilian leader of a nation at war. At WW2 scale of operations and types of troops, Hitler micromanaging was not effective and frequently disastrous.
Try taking your own advice. I never said that Hitler was right to be a micromanager, I said that micromanaging wasn’t a distinctively false-heroic thing.
The book is also about military leadership in battle/war, not civilian leadership. So Trump micromanaging or tweeting is … nothing worth talking about. Trump was not leading the USA in a war, neither were Obama or Bush before him. The Iraqis and Afghans were at war, but the USA was never threatened.
Michael Taylor specifically used Trump as an example of a false heroic leader, so if you dispute the validity of this categorisation, I suggest you take it up with him.
As for comparing Hitler to Zelensky, bullshit. Zelensky, unlike Hitler or Stalin, is the civilian leader of a nation at war. He’s doing an excellent job as an Abraham Lincoln type, inspiring both civilians and military, taking care of foreign politics, and most importantly picking good generals and letting them run the military.
Abraham Lincoln wasn’t as hands-off as you suggest, and a lot of the generals he appointed didn’t perform terribly well.
Zelensky not evacuating Kiev is comparable to Churchill not evacuating London, showing confidence that the Ukrainian military will hold. Hitler not evacuating Berlin was pure fantasy that a miracle would occur.
So if the Russians had managed to take Kiev, would that make Zelensky a false heroic leader? Is the difference between a heroic leader and a false heroic one simply that the latter is unsuccessful?
Yes, I thought Keegan’s chapter on Hitler suffered from the Sesame Street problem (“one of these things is not like the others”). Hitler was not a battlefield commander like the others, he was a civilian political leader. He employed (to me rather laughable) heroic imagery, as have others, including Donald Trump. (Other civilian leaders employ messsianic imagery: both Obama and Carter come to mind.) Hitler was also something of a micromanager, like certain other civilian leaders: both LBJ and Obama come to mind. Finally, Hitler was unsuccessful militarily, a trait he shares with LBJ and Carter, though not with Trump or Obama. In short, I don’t see either a distinct style or a predictable result here.
Hitler was not a battlefield commander like the others, he was a civilian political leader.
That’s a good point. As it stands, the list isn’t just a list of military leadership styles (since Hitler wasn’t really a military leader), but nor is it a list of leadership styles in general (since there are various kinds of civilian leadership styles which aren’t included); depending on what we want to do with it, the list is either too long or too short.
And on the topic of heroic imagery — whilst the OP compares the picture of Trump to that of Hitler, I think it’s pretty obvious that the Trump image is trying to recall George Washington (who, incidentally, famously led a violent rebellion against his government).
Hitler’s micromanagement had a political dimension. From 42 on senior officers discussed ways of getting out of the war with the army’s political power (and their own skins) intact. After Kursk Hitler’s strategy was to prolong the war, hoping that something would turn up. The alternative – as he realised but the generals did not – was suicide or the gallows. So he watched their moves closely. The generals hoped to pull a 1918 – cut a deal and blame the Nazis. Those that ended up at Nuremburg were quite indignant (“we only murdered a few million Slavs and Jews. Is that now a crime?”).
Why did Keegan choose to focus on Wellington instead of Napoleon?
Because he was British? 😛
Don’t know. But perhaps it was because Wellington won at Waterloo, whereas Napoleon for all his military genius (for much (if not all) of his career he was undeniably amongst the world’s best generals) lost at Waterloo.
Napoleon strikes me as having been a lot less unwilling to be seen as a heroic figure.
I think the use of real people (especially living ones) and emotionally/morally charged language (who wants to be Unheroic?) is obfuscating more than it reveals.
If I’m reading this right, we have a few examples from LOTR that could help:
Heroic: This is Aragorn. Leading from the front, through valor and personal prowess. He’s the sort of leader that will stand on the wall and chat with the enemy, or lead a high-risk charge to buy time to re-enforce the walls. Rohan’s leaders tend towards this as well.
Anti-Heroic: I think this is Gandalf in a lot of ways. He’s leading from the front lines of battle, but mostly because that’s where he needs to be in order to be useful, not because that’s how he gains authority. Where he can he lets others do the work, like he does at the pass (he only lights the fires once everyone else had failed). This gets pointed out by Saruman, and while we can disagree with Saruman’s conclusions, there’s enough truth there to make people question. Frodo also fits here. His quest precludes physical confrontation, so while he’s often in tremendous danger his goal is to avoid it, rather than confront it.
Un-Heroic: We have two examples, very different in nature. On the one hand we have Elrond, who sets the Fellowship off on their adventure but doesn’t contribute much in the way of arms. His role is advisor and instigator; he’s not shown in the books to be a warrior in any way (though he was in his younger days). On the other (perhaps more accurate) we have Denethor. In the books he’s portrayed as a very wise ruler, but one who doesn’t put himself in harm’s way (leaving aside his mind-battles with Sauron, anyway). He plays a vital role in the defense of the Free Peoples, but avoids combat–properly, as his role is to direct, not to engage in, the fighting.
False Heroic: I think Saruman fits here. The key is the attempt at having the trappings of heroism without the heroics to back it up. Saruman has an army, and plays the role of general, but does so so ineptly that he ends up being held prisoner and murdered by his only remaining ally. I’m a bit uncertain here, though; he almost fits the Un-Heroic mold as well.
None of these are perfect, of course. I think most leaders are going to be a combination of several of these. And I think it’s unfortunate that the author only discusses one potential failure state for leadership.
False Heroic: I think Saruman fits here. The key is the attempt at having the trappings of heroism without the heroics to back it up. Saruman has an army, and plays the role of general, but does so so ineptly that he ends up being held prisoner and murdered by his only remaining ally. I’m a bit uncertain here, though; he almost fits the Un-Heroic mold as well.
A false-heroic Saruman, if I understand the term correctly, would be strapping on armour and generally acting like a heroic leader until it was time to actually go to war. As portrayed, I think he’s pretty clearly an un-heroic leader. In fact, I’m not sure there are any real examples of false-heroic leaders in LOTR — perhaps Middle Earth lacks a cultural script for that kind of leadership, so anybody who did act like that would simply be ridiculed as a cowardly wannabe-heroic leader rather than revered as a symbol of the nation.
“perhaps Middle Earth lacks a cultural script for that kind of leadership”
A very good point. Middle Earth is pretty clearly in a time where military aristocracy dominated, and marshal ability is pretty clearly a major component of rule outside the Shire and Bree. Anyone with pretenses at rule more or less needed to either have an army with some variant of heroic leader, or be one themselves; otherwise they’d get steamrolled by the real warriors.
Considering it further, it’s also worth pointing out (arguing against my own position) that Saruman DID lead armies, in the same way Sauron did. So if we don’t consider Sauron a False Heroic leader (which we clearly shouldn’t) we shouldn’t consider Saruman one.
When did Saruman lead armies? As I recall he stayed in Isengard when his army went out to invade Rohan, and then when the Ents attacked he barricaded himself in his tower. I don’t recall him leading the ruffians into battle in the Shire, either.
There are different ways to lead armies. Saruman’s style copied that of Denethor and Sauron: make the plans, delegate authority, and send them out. It’s not the Heroic model, certainly, but it’s a legitimate way to handle it, especially since in Saruman’s case there are other strategic/political issues to consider (namely Sauron and the Nazgul).
It’s a legitimate way of handling it, but it’s not at all “leading” the army.
It’s a legitimate way of handling it, but it’s not at all “leading” the army.
To expand on this a bit — the literal meaning of “lead” is “to go before”, and while we do employ a bit of leeway in how we use the term (a general doesn’t have to be literally on the front line for us to talk about him “leading” the army), it seems a stretch to use it about someone who stays at home and isn’t even in the general vicinity of the army.
“Directed” the army, then?
Sauron, Saruman, and Denethor all had the “un-heroic” mode of staying back and issuing orders. Leaders of their country/factions, if not the immediate leader of the troops on the ground (which would be Witch-king then Gothmog; Faramir and Imrahil and maybe others at smaller scale, and ???).
I suppose, given the range of operation, Sauron and Saruman could be said to not even be un-heroic generals, but rulers who told a general what they wanted done and had to wait far beyond the radius of command. OTOH the obscure but present telepathic element complicates that.
“A false-heroic Saruman, if I understand the term correctly, would be strapping on armour and generally acting like a heroic leader until it was time to actually go to war. ”
Well, I remember Denethor making a big point about how he sleeps in armour to prevent himself from going soft, despite being very much a ‘lead from the rear’ type general, so I suppose that he might fit the false-heroic category.
He secretly wears it to keep in shape. He showed it once to convince another character of something. Hiding it normally means it wasn’t a leadership thing
Yeah, I don’t think Tolkien has clear False Heroic examples. Though I can imagine Wormtongue being such, if he had ended up in charge of Rohan somehow. Or the old Master of Lake-town, in the right situation. Ar-Pharazon maybe, but he probably had something to back it up, so more like some mix of Heroic or Un-heroic, just evil.
Puleeeeeeze spare us from using Fantasy fiction, no matter how lovely and entertaining, as an argument about REAL WARS.
We’re not discussing “REAL WARS”. We’re discussing taxonomy–the classification of groups. This taxonomy happens to deal with military leadership, but that doesn’t change the fact that what we’re discussing is taxonomy.
The author of this book proposed a four-bin taxonomy for military leaders. It’s worth examining what those categories are, how they are defined, and how rigid the boundaries are. Anyone familiar with biological taxonomy can tell you that all of these issues get really complicated; there are entire scientific organizations that study these, in fact. It’s also worth examining whether this is a valid taxonomy. Remember, taxonomies aren’t made dispassionately; they are built for a purpose. Biological taxonomy originated, for example, to determine how to organize collections; modern taxonomy, in contrast, focuses on evolutionary relationships. Both are valid, they’re just used for different things.
I chose fiction because, as I stated, real people carry a great deal of emotional baggage. This is proven in this comments section–by even mentioning Trump a significant portion of the discussion has been diverted into people attacking and defending the man himself, rather than discussing the nature of the taxonomy. By examining how this taxonomy plays out in a fictional world we can bring the focus back to the taxonomy, not on the morality of the people involved. By removing the emotive elements we can examine the validity and limitations of this taxonomy more rigorously. Further, fiction often emphasizes specific aspects beyond what reality does. This allows easier analysis of case-studies. Think of fiction not as “fantasy fiction” (which I assume you intended as a pejorative), but rather as a series of thought-experiments. This is why I chose Tolkien: His thorough understanding of military operations means that he emphasized exactly those aspects of military leadership that this taxonomy focuses on.
In other words: By attempting to apply this taxonomy to a fictional realm, I am attempting to highlight the taxonomy, by dimming the people involved.
This isn’t new, by the way. When phylogeny first arose a researcher made some really funky looking fake critters (called Caminalcules) and challenged researchers to reconstruct their evolutionary tree. Because they were fake the researcher knew what that tree was (he built it). This allowed researchers to focus on the methods, not the critters. I’ve also seen people do this for other fictional animals. I’ve seen cladograms of My Little Pony models, and have several books on the taxonomy of dragons using Linnaean taxonomy. I’ve also seen a taxonomy of rocks based on smell and sound. It’s a fairly common way for certain types of researchers to play with ideas, both for entertainment and for edification.
Discussing fantasy fiction and REAL WARS in the same breath is a subject of blog posts in this blog.
I’m with Mary on this one; this is a truly bizarre criticism to make on this blog of all places.
I had also thought of applying the types to LotR, though with some different picks:
Heroic: Theoden and maybe the Witch King. These two have cultural contexts where brave and/or fearsome performance in battle is part of what defines their leadership role.
Anti-Heroic: Faramir, and this is where I put Aragorn. These two have somewhat different cultural contexts where battlefield heroics are not an inherent expectation of their leadership roles (Faramir’s legitimacy seems to rest more on being a competent manager and Aragorn’s on being a moral[e] standard-bearer), and neither one seems interested in the glory of combat as such. They will, however, put themselves in the thick of it to get the job done.
Unheroic: I had also thought of Denethor, and of LotR-era Sauron. These two command from their citadels and, in the books at least, do so quite effectively.
False Heroic: Also going with Saruman. Gets everyone fired up with his speeches about how invincible his troops are and what inferior life forms his enemies are, sets himself up as the charismatic leader who will put the world to rights, then sits in his tower while it all falls apart because of his own arrogant foolishness.
I’ll agree on Faramir, but disagree on Aragorn. Part of the issue is that we don’t see a lot of Aragorn’s activities in LOTR. We know he was profoundly brave and willing to put himself in danger from his discussion at the Council of Elrond, for example during his hunt for Gollum. I get the sense that while he was put in the position to rule the Rangers through birth, he acted as a heroic leader to them (he put on a very different face when dealing with others, obviously).
Then you have his actions from when he gets into Rohan onwards. He openly challenges Eomer while surrounded by spears, and wins his respect. He’s in the thick of battle at Helm’s Deep. And it’s his bravery and courage that make people listen to him in his race to Gondor. Theoden acknowledged him as a lord with a famous sword, but that alone wouldn’t get the people of Gondor to answer his call to war; his courage and ability to lead the charge, even in the face of literally overwhelming terror (see Gimli’s discussion of the Dead), are what made them follow him. This is more or less openly stated by several lords in the chapter The Last Debate.
That said, I can see your side as well…Gonna have to htink more.
Good points. It may just be hard to put Aragorn in a box!