Hey folks, Fireside this week! For the musing this week, I want to talk about, at least for a humanities field, what ‘research support’ from a university means and why it is valuable, but before we get to that, I just want to make a note going forward. In particular, there have been a few requests for me to revisit my “1933” post in light of the election; this I am not going to do. I set out my analysis there and I stand by it. Elections make presidents; they do not make bad ideas good. But this is a history blog and I have no intention of turning it into just another politics blog by belaboring the same point endlessly, so it is back to history-and-pop-culture we go. The next topic I expect to tackle is another ACOUP Senate vote winner on “the Problem with Sci-fi Body Armor,” particularly looking at rigid armors (‘hardsuits’) designed to resist projectile or contact weapons and how they compare to the history of attempts to rigidly armor the human body.
But on to this week’s musing I want to talk a bit about the role that universities fill in making research in the humanities possible. As I noted back with “How Your History Gets Made,” academic history research forms the foundation for basically all of the ‘history products,’ as it were, that you consume: it is the fundamental source of the knowledge school textbooks and curricula are based on and what popular history (be that books, podcasts, or videos) rely on – or at least in theory should rely on. And I’ve noted that with a few exceptions, the vast majority of that primary research happens within the institutional structure of the university.
Now one argument one hears is, “well, the past doesn’t change, so why do we need new historical research?” And there are two linked answers to that question. The first, of course, is that historical methods can improve over time. Regular blog readers will note that again and again we’ve come back in various ways to the archaeological turn in ancient history, for instance (the ‘revenge of the archaeologists’), because archaeology provides a new set of methods and new bodies of evidence with which to understand the past which, in many cases, has radically altered our understanding of it. The other answer is that as times change, the questions we ask of the past change too: we grow interesting in different aspects of the past, ones which older scholarship may not be well suited to answer. Fresh research is necessary to provide clear answers to those new questions.
But the question I really want to tackle is “why stick with the University as the institution for this work?” This question often comes up in the context of my own concerns about the priorities of many academic departments and my own struggles to find a permanent place within the academy. And the answer is fairly simple: there is really no other space in our society currently providing the resources for this kind of research can take place at any sort of scale.
This sometimes comes as a surprise to folks because they don’t generally think of historical research and publication as the kind of activity which requires resources. Unlike the sciences, we do not have large, visible laboratory buildings with expensive bespoke equipment and indeed it is the case that historical research is much cheaper than research in many other fields. But cheaper doesn’t mean free. So what are the major resources that universities, especially research universities, provide for historical investigation?
Well, the first is simply put, a steady job. Historical research is generally slow and painstaking. New primary research projects can often take years to complete, which means historians often need an institution which is willing to take a long view of their research work and accept, “this project will produce something in four or five years” as an answer. Of course in the university, the trade-off with this is teaching, but research-oriented institutions generally set much lower teaching loads than pure teaching institutions,1 which enables the long research times necessary to do original historical work. Research universities often provide research resources as part of the hiring package: often a mix of ‘startup’ funds, regular research and travel funds and sometimes teaching load reductions designed to allow for scholars to produce research; one simply doesn’t get those resources in most other sorts of jobs.
But that’s not the only think a university as an institution provides in order to make historical research possible. Most universities (again, especially research universities) also make research funds available. While historians don’t require labs (usually), a lot of the things we do cost money. Modern historians doing archive work generally need to travel physically to archives and do extended work there, which can be quite expensive. Presenting work at conferences likewise involves travel costs, lodging and conference fees; presenting a conference paper can pretty easily cost $1,000 or more once airfare (as cheap as possible), hotels and conference and professional association registration (often a few hundred dollars each) are accounted for.2 Research funds can also, of course, go to paying for research assistants, who might assist with things like sifting through large numbers of documents.
Publication can also be expensive. Humanities journals don’t charge fees to publish articles (as I am told some journals in the sciences do), but nor do they pay authors anything. That can become a complication is an article requires, for instance, diagrams or maps that need to be professionally produced or licensed images that need to be paid for: those costs are paid by the author, not the journal (under the assumption that the academic has a pool of research money they can access to handle those costs).3 The same is generally true for academic books: any images, maps or artwork will consume the generally very small ‘advance’ for a book almost instantly. The reason here is fairly simple: academic books have small audiences and small print runs (and thus, sadly, high costs), so the publisher simply isn’t making enough money to support the cost of acquiring the rights to lots of images or maps and so on.4 Consequently it is the university – through research funding – that supports those costs. Of course many universities also run university presses which specialize in publishing academic research, though one is not obliged (or even at all expected) to publish with their own university press.
But for a historian perhaps the most important component of the university’s research support and the least replaceable is the university library. Facilitating humanities research requires libraries to have massive collections, far beyond what any local library would stock. I currently have access to two university library systems (UNC and NCSU). The NCSU library is a solid, middle-tier research library with 4.4 million volumes; the UNC library is the 17th largest research library in the United States with just shy of ten million volumes. That huge sweep is necessary because academics of all kind build their research on the research that has gone before and without access to that sort of material it becomes difficult or even impossible to really do cutting edge research. Beyond the huge volume counts, university libraries generally run remarkably thorough inter-library borrowing (ILB or ILL) systems, so that even if they don’t have a book or volume, they can get it.
By way of example, one of my chapters in this book project is on Gallic (La Tène) weapons. But to be able to push our knowledge of these weapons, one really needs access to the publications of the largest collections of them, which are not going to be in most libraries in the United States, for the simple reason that they’re not in English (nearly all of them are in French). Many of those works were very limited run publications for a small number of specialists and are thus hard to find; so far as I know, for instance, T. Lejars’ La Tène: La Collection Schwab (Bienne, Suisse) (2013), what I’d argue is the best and most up-to-date publication on La Tène weapons, has exactly one library copy in the United States. So a historian working on this topic needs either a library willing to track down and buy a copy (expensive), a research budget which will allow them to go to the Library of Congress (where the copy lives) to look at it, or a library that can ILB the copy from the Library of Congress (which is what I did) so that they can look at it.5 Simply put, your local library doesn’t have those resources.
Now you might ask, why not buy copies of these books yourself? Part of the answer, of course, is that I do; in any given year I spend around a thousand dollars or so on books. I can do that, of course, entirely due to the support of my fine amici over at Patreon; my adjunct teaching pay wouldn’t cover my basic cost of living, much less my book-buying. But even a low-four-digit book budget isn’t enough to cover all of the research needs of a large project. The running bibliography for my current book project is, at present, about 6-700 works long.6 Many of those works are out of print, some are ruinously expensive (hundreds of dollars) and of course many of them exist as articles in journals with subscription fees also in the hundreds of dollars (or behind online subscriptions to things like JSTOR which also cost hundreds of dollars while being less comprehensive than the subscriptions a university library would have).7
And that doesn’t touch on the sorts of specialized resources university libraries might also have: collections of local documents and archives, access to huge repositories of old newspapers (often on microfilm, which of course requires specialized equipment to view), potentially rare books and manuscripts, or other specialized resources. UNC’s Davis Library, for instance, has a epigraphy room which not only has a bunch of important (and very expensive) multi-volume epigraphic series, it also has collections of ‘squeezes’ – paper impressions of inscribed stone surfaces which are both an important way to examine epigraphic texts but also an essential teaching tool for teaching the art of epigraphy.
There simply isn’t a comparable set of institutions that have these sorts of resources or the incentive to develop them. Now that’s not to say that this means all good history research happens inside of a university (though if you look, you will find many of your favorite independent scholars do in fact have some sort of university affiliation that gives them some access to at least library resources). But without that structure, it is hard to see more than a tiny fraction of historical work being done, which is part of why the decline of academic history is so concerning.
I suppose there is a bit of irony in me writing all of this because my own research, while by no means fully independent is mostly ‘self-funded.’ I have sometimes had access to small amounts of travel funds (almost never enough to pay even for a single conference trip, much less a research trip), but never research funds, nor any kind of supported research time since leaving grad school.8 Though of course I must note that this project would have been utterly impossible without the continued access to the UNC library system, kindly extended by the history department there.9 But I think this is a case where not having the thing brings home how important that thing is: self-funding research through online writing for the public is simply not an option for most academics. Indeed, the number of even minimally self-supporting public-facing history projects is extremely small (as in, this is the only self-supporting public ancient history project I know of). So if we want to keep the study of the past alive in a rigorous way, there aren’t currently any good alternatives to keeping history alive in the university.
On to recommendations:
First, some updates on the War in Ukraine. War on the Rocks has another pair of podcasts in their The Russia Contingency series (alas, behind the paywall!) where Michael Kofman, Rob Lee and Dara Massicot discuss the current state of the war, having just come back from a research trip to Ukraine. A shorter update between Kofman and Ryan Evans is outside of the WotR paywall. I’ll be frank, its grim listening: Russia is taking high losses but also slowly – very slowly – grinding forward. The Ukrainian front isn’t collapsing, but the Ukrainian Armed Forces are under a lot of pressure.
Meanwhile, at Foreign Policy, Marc R. Dovore and Alexander Mertens lay out an analysis of Russia’s ability to continue the war and conclude that Putin is rapidly approaching some hard limits in his ability to continue fighting. This is one of those cases where no matter which army you look at in the war, you are left thinking, “they can’t keep this up.” In Russia’s case, Putin’s tremendous war-spending is building up bills in the form of inflation and sky-high interest rates that will come due, while at the same time his war economy cannot replace the equipment or men he’s losing; it is unclear when the last of the old Soviet inheritance in vehicles, barrels, shells and so on will be spent, but it seems pretty clear that it will be some time in 2025 at the current rate. Likewise, a country putting 10,000 North Korean troops on its front lines is not one that is in a good manpower situation.10 At the same time British intelligence is estimating Russia’s offensives are costing them something on the order of 1,500 losses (KIA and WIA) per day, which is 50% higher than the Ministry of Defense’s reported recruitment rate and that recruitment rate is unsustainable.
Personally, my view is that Putin’s aggression here is both an effort to try to diminish support for Ukraine by convincing NATO the war is unwinnable and to set conditions in terms of territory held for negotiations if/when Ukraine is forced to negotiate. Instead, I think NATO ought to make clear to Putin that the aid that keeps Ukraine in the fight can outlast him by expanding aid, so that when negotiations come – and they are, I think, coming (slowly) – Putin is forced to bargain from a position of weakness to end a war he can no longer afford, rather than from a position of strength. Russia isn’t losing 1,500 men a day and putting North Koreans in the front line because they’re winning, but because they are not winning (albeit also not losing) and hoping to bluff their way to a favorable conclusion. Call the bluff, finish the job.
Via this month’s Pasts Imperfect newsletter, I also want to note the release of an open access translation of the Enuma Elish by J. Haubold, S. Helle, E. Jiménez and S. Wisnom. If you are unfamiliar, the Enuma Elish is the Babylonian creation myth, dating to the Bronze Age (scholars debate as to when in the Bronze Age, probably in the late second millennium) which narrates both the creation of the earth and humans and also the rise of the Babylonian god Marduk to be king of the gods. It’s a pretty classic text and some of its literary motifs (creation understood as a succession of gods, challenged by monsters, for instance) make it into later Hittite11 and Greek mythology. And now you can read a complete translation (it also has the original text, for those readers of Akkadian), with a bunch of scholarly apparatus in chapters afterwards, for yourself, for free.
Finally, for this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend Kathryn H. Milne’s recent Inside the Roman Legions: The Soldier’s Experience 264 – 107 BCE (2024). This is a book I had greatly anticipated and had dearly hoped would realize its promise…and it did! Inside the Roman Legions presents pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: a conscription-to-dismissal portrait of what it was like to serve in a Roman legion during the Middle Republic. The chronological focus alone is valuable, because books on the Roman army for popular audiences tend to focus, when they treat the soldier’s experience at all, on the imperial period, but this is a book about what it was like to serve during the period of Rome’s great wars with Carthage, Macedon and the Seleucids, the periods of rapid Roman conquest.
Milne anchors this narrative around a single figure in Livy’s history, Spurius Ligustinus, who in the context of Livy’s narrative gives a fairly complete rundown of his military career (Livy 42.34). Ligustinus could be a literary invention (as, indeed, Milne notes), but he could well have been a real person and in any case Livy finds his career plausible. And precisely because his career, stretching from 200 to 167, sits in the period where we have Livy basically complete, we can match up all of his campaigns and enlistments with known campaigns and commanders. That in turn provides the foundation for a narrative that essentially walks through the experience of being in the Roman legions: pre-conscription social militarism, conscription, assembling the army, marching, training, discipline, three chapters on pitched battle and finally a chapter on dismissal. There’s even a conclusion which gives a good, nuanced discussion of how the Roman army changed in the first century, pushing back on the debunked notion of a single moment of ‘Marian reforms.’ In a sense, Milne moves beyond a mere ‘Face of Battle‘ treatment of the Roman army to something larger, a ‘Face of Campaign’ treatment and the book is richer for the expanded scope.
I have some quibbles with a few of Milne’s assessments – these will be more detailed in a Journal of Military History review of the book I have coming out – but they are quibbles and the quibbles are really few. This is a strong book I’d feel confident recommending to students or enthusiasts without reservation. I will note that while the book provides a really helpful table of Ligustinus’ career showing each campaign, it could have really used some maps and pictures (although the period-accurate Middle Republican legionary on the cover made me happy).12 The book is well furnished with notes and a strong bibliography too which reflect the solid expertise and research that went into producing it – a book produced by a real expert rather than a well-intentioned but blundering enthusiast.13 Overall, I think alongside Soldiers & Ghosts, Milne’s Inside the Roman Legions is going to be one of the standard books I recommend first to students looking to get a handle on the army of the Roman Republic.
- Academic teaching loads are generally expressed as a sequence of numbers indicating courses-per-semester (or whatever the academic period is, some universities run on trimesters or quarters). So a 2-2 load is 2 courses in Fall and Spring respectively (four total). Top Research universities (classified as ‘R1’s), for history at least, generally demand a 2-2 load, with R2s at 2-3 or 3-3. Many ‘Masters Universities’ (a sort of halfway house between a research university and a teaching college) are also 3-3 or 3-4. Teaching colleges, by contrast, often have 4-4, 5-5 or even heavier loads, but don’t expect their professors to do much, if any, research.
- If you are asking, “why are the registrations so expensive!?” Well, most professional associations have to both pay venue fees for conferences, which is quite expensive and many also publish journals, which can also cost money (especially print journals). Despite the often painful fees, professional associations in History, at least, are not generally flush as organizations.
- I, of course, as an adjunct do not have such access, so I am out of pocket for these sorts of things.
- Heck, they often can’t support the cost of simply printing them – images and maps significantly raise the cost to print a book and so authors generally face sharp limits on both.
- In that latter case, in a reading room in the library in question, Library of Congress ILB copies cannot, so far as I know, be removed from the library they’re sent to, same as if you were at the LoC itself.
- Across 7.5 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek and Modern Greek.
- And archives like JSTOR often lack the most recent issues of journals, which a library will have in their print form, essential for recent scholarship.
- I had one semester of non-teaching, supported research time in grad school; while I applied for more, this project did not, for whatever reason, excite the folks at the College who decided who got what.
- My access to the NCSU library is contingent on my teaching there, which is a ‘when they need me’ sort of arrangement, whereas UNC History was willing to extend a longer term unpaid research affiliation which provided the stability necessary for a project of this scale. They weren’t under any obligation to do that, and I am grateful for it.
- If you are wondering how a country as big as Russia can be ‘running out’ of manpower, the answer is that the front lines are competing for labor with the factories and Putin doesn’t have enough to run both. That’s resulted in wage competition – war factories drawing labor by paying out larger salaries than the civilian economy – which combined with Putin printing money to pay the bills is why Russian inflation is at 8+% despite massive double-digit interest rates (which would normally crush inflation).
- Or contemporary, depending on your view on its dating
- Honestly, if I was frustrated by one thing about this book, it is that Pen&Sword didn’t seem to have put much support behind it – that’s usually the cause when a book is missing maps and pictures it ought to have – and that strikes me as unfortunate, since the core prose is strong.
- Albeit in Pen & Sword’s somewhat irritating end notes format style.
One typo: “Ligustinus could be a literary *intention*”
You are really intriguing me about that Milne book. But I have so many other books I still haven’t finished reading, it’s going to have to go on the pile and very likely be forgotten about 🙁
For a deep academic dive into how archaeology in particular changes history, and the narrative of history, of particularly times and locations — sometimes not for the better — the example of France, Northern Africa and the legacy of the Roman empire, is very good. Not an easy read, particularly at the beginning, while the author expends not efficient effort to describe the purpose of this study. Once he believes he has done this, his narrative of how France used archaeology to justify its right to occupy, colonize and possess the Amazigh (these are the multiple tribes that Europeans refer to as Berbers, rolling them all together — even Ibn Khaldun gets there) regions of what we call Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, picks up a great deal of interest.
The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East (2021) by Abdelmajid Hannoum
Ultimately the argument is that Gaul – France was part of the Roman Empire and inheritor of the Empire in the west. The Empire occupied and left so many ‘traces’ — which archeology uncovers – thus North Africa belonged to Rome, and thus to France now. In this French argument Egypt didn’t ‘t exist, , the Amazigh people don’t exist — i.e. the indigenous, who call themselves the People Before History, as well as the Free People*, of all this region including Mali, Chad, Niger and great parts of what was called Sudan at the time of the first French incursions under Napoleon — these peoples include the Tuareg, by the way — the Phoenicans and Carthaginians didn’t exist, the Byzantines didn’t exist, the Arabs didn’t exist. Only western Rome and France are North Africa’s history.
The author’s great pains to uncover these arguments made by France over the 19th and 20th centuries are worth discovering.
* The more time one spend among the Amazigh and their culture(s), the more one learns how much this is the model for the Freemen of Arakis — even to the practice of making settlements underground in The Desert, which is how they all refer to the Sahara — the Desert, not the Sahara.
The Tamazight word for the French sounds like “Romi”, so they’ll agree with the idea of inheriting the Roman Empire.
As a physicist, I can’t help but be a bit baffled by the idea of an important scholarly work being published in 2013 both *in French* and *with no freely available online version*. Very different fields!
Ditto! I’ll add that “freely available” generally means “the university is paying the enormous subscription cost to all those journals”. Although arXiv makes that almost redundant now.
Brett mentioned publication feels for some journal: it’s worth clarifying that those (AFAIK) are only for journals that are open access, or who will make that paper open access. The idea is that it’s author who pays or the reader, but never both. The fees range from ~$5000 for Nature to ~$200 for non-profit academic-led online-only journals. Obviously the higher fees are predatory, but the low ones are really the bare minimum to cover costs, yet don’t even cover: type setting, proof reading, or anything like that. Keeping servers and a minimal staff going is expensive, even if the editors and reviewers don’t get paid. Still, with multiple high profile funding agencies in STEM requiring all work they fund to be published in open access, the tide is turning. Slowly…
Without being an academic of any sort: perhaps the average number of authors per paper is massively different between the two fields? If large author sets are common in physics, it can be expected that their internal communications will tend to happen in English; whereas if history has a preponderance of single-author works, those will largely be written in whatever language that single author is most comfortable keeping their notes in.
There’s also the question of audience; people tend to be more interested in their own history. A book on Gallic weapons is mostly going to appeal to French readers.
It is also likely that the majority of the surviving samples of the weapons in question are in France. As such, French historians have a natural advantage that makes them likely to become the authorities on the subject. An American wishing to publish a similar book would have to pay for a LOT of plane tickets over a period of decades, or live as an expatriate for a few years while touring the museums of Europe.
The transition to English-only science has happened in many different fields, not just physics, and predates large author lists as well. Science is now so internationalized that most conferences only have talks and posters in English, visiting speakers at institutes and universities give their talks in English, and in some non-English-speaking countries the graduate-level teaching in science is done in English. (You are correct that everyone being able to speak English does make international collaborations, large or small, easier; one of my current projects has an American [me], a Maltese, a Brit, and a Romanian, and we’ll be adding some Italians soon.)
In my field (astronomy), the disappearance of significant non-English papers probably happened in the 1960s and 1970s. During my PhD in the late 1990s, I did end up struggling through one important paper from the 1960s that was in French, but everything else I needed to read was in English. (When several of the main European astronomical journals merged in the late 1960s to form Astronomy & Astrophysics — now one of the four main astronomical journals — they allowed submissions in English, French, or German; but English quickly became the preferred, and eventually the only, language. I’ve seen a claim that people noted early on that papers in English were cited twice as often as papers in French or German….)
As a minor example, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan is a moderately important second-tier journal. A peek at its current table of contents (https://academic.oup.com/pasj/issue) — based at Oxford University Press — shows that most of the authors are Japanese, but all of the papers are in English.
When it comes to history, I’d say the main factors are 1) most historians will have to learn several languages anyway just to read their source materials, and 2) lots of historical research might have mainly local interest; i.e. I imagine that a paper analysing folk culture in 19th century Norway will mostly interest people who can read Norwegian.
One could add that this fosters a different kind of internationalism than the one-lingua-franca approach of the natural sciences, where instead more people are able to make contributions to scholarship in the language they are most comfortable with.
I’m in grad school for a STEM field (nuclear engineering!) and my experience in this regard is very different to Dr. Devereaux’s, yeah.
Off the top of my head, in my research to date there had only really been two incidents where I came across material that wasn’t in English. There was a conference paper (can’t remember off the top of my head exactly which conference, but somewhere in the pre-1989 Eastern Bloc at any rate) on design features on the VVER in Russian and a couple of related journal papers (more recent; one 2006 paper and a 2007 paper building on it) defining a reference reactor problem in Japanese. All of *my* publications to date have been in English, too, despite the fact that I’m not a native English speaker and am studying in a country where English isn’t the dominant local language.
The vast majority of the things I need to know about prior research and the state-of-the-art in my field is published, in English, not in books but in things like journal papers and conference proceedings,. My degree-awarding institution (legally distinct from a university in ways that were never properly explained to me) has an online subscription to all the relevant ones, so this just hasn’t been an issue for me.
There’s plenty of non-English material, but since there’s also such a huge amount of English material, it’s not such a big problem. Also helps that it’s not a group of fields based that much on evidence, so unless you’re looking for a specific experiment, there’s enough redundancy that you’ll find something. Later history fields should have a similar relative advantage.
Ironically, the very new (several decades) field of machine learning has an opposite problem – it needs so much data that it’s hard to get. The solution we have is a bunch of standardised datasets stored long-term, but sometimes a more specific problem needs a more specific collection of labelled data and that’s a lot of storage space! So many times I’ve found dead links or no links at all, only descriptions in paper.
Mathematics and physics could launch the arXiv because they already had dedicated IT staff and web servers and markup skills in the 1990s and 2000s. Although ancient world studies was very early in moving online, most departments don’t have similar resources, so every project has to be funded individually (and institutions are very reluctant to commit to fund a project forever). This is one of the many ways in which staying small and thrifty, rather than bloated and expensive, hurts the historical sciences at universities today.
Unfortunately, right on the cusp of exhausting the Russians, we will likely abandon Ukraine to fate.
Very unfortunate in my humble opininion.
Not to be cynical, but how often has the United States actually tried to defeat Russia, rather than limit the scope of its victory? The only example I can really think of is Afghanistan. (I’m not saying there were no other instances, just that I personally cannot think of them.) Even when the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse, it’s not obvious the US wanted it to do so.
Well… not sure that a total collapse would be good given the current state of the work. I would think more leverage for an eventual end to the war and to keep Russia from eyeing Poland, the Baltic Republica, and other former Warsaw Pact members. I’d prefer no wars at all…
Eh, those are NATO members. That should be sufficient deterrent even if the US were to decide on maximal isolationism and exit NATO.
In fact, Russia-apologists frequently mention that preliminary talks about Ukraine’s potential membership “forced” Russia to do the invasion while it still could. Because Ukraine — and the Baltics, and ex-WarsawPact members — becoming NATO members is somehow threatening to Russia. (I haven’t yet understood how their argument hangs together, thus I cannot reproduce it, but these items are commonly included.)
The ‘threat to Russia’ happens in a severe right-wing Russian nationalist viewpoint; in that perspective, Russian satellitization of those countries is an inevitable future, a matter of not-if-but-when. If you believe that all clear-thinking people can see that as a fundamental truth, people placing a nuclear-war tripline in that inevitable path are either fully insane or fully committed to annihilatory conflict with Russia.
The argument seems rather obvious given the number of nations around the world since the fall of the USSR as a balancing power that the NATO nations have invaded. Even if we only count full-scale invasions, not just bombing campaigns, coups, or drone assassination campaigns. Makes sense for anyone sane to avoid neighbours like these, especially given that the US has been betraying one foundational disarmament agreement after the other for years now.
Not that ‘NATO had provoked Russia into attacking Ukraine’ falsehood again!
To show just how contrary to reality that is: before Russia escalated the conflict into a full on invasion in 2022 those idiots in France and Germany had even refused Ukrainian offers to purchase weapons from them ‘out of fear of provoking Russia’!
It is clear nonsense no matter from whichever perspective you look at it:
– Analysis of rhetoric: In his speeches Putin made it extremely clear he believes that ‘Ukraine is a fake nation created by Lenin’ and that this war is waged in the name of ‘deukrainization’; how is NATO supposed to have given him those beliefs? Sure they go on about ‘NATO provocations’ in their propaganda aimed at the rest of the world; however, we have scarcely any more reasons to believe that this is honest than we have about their claims about imaginary ‘biolabs making biological weapons designed to attack Russians in Ukraine’.
– Security perspective: If Putin feared NATO so much he would not have previously invaded Georgia, stolen the Crimea from Ukraine*, nor intervened in the Syrian Civil War. In fact to show how much the Kremlin sees NATO as a security threat, during this war they had reduced forces on their borders with NATO countries so they had more to send into the war in Ukraine.
– Ukrainian internal situation perspective: before Russia had seized the Crimea, as indicated by polls, more of the Ukrainian population even saw NATO as a threat than wanted to join it. So, if they feared Ukraine becoming pro-NATO they would not have done that in the first place.
Unless you are now claiming that Putin was an idiot?
* This despite previous Russian promises to respect the integrity of Ukraine’s borders, showcasing who really is the one betraying ‘foundational agreements’.
Do you even believe that yourself?
I do like the wording of “NATO nations”–this rather conveniently elides the fact that the NATO alliance has militarily intervened in two countries since the fall of the USSR–Serbia and Afghanistan. Almost all of the other interventions have been either the US (Iraq) or a coalition of former great powers (Libya) messing about.
Not to mention that Bush Jr’s stupid invasion of Iraq had been vetoed by France in the UNSC. Whilst the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which imposed a no-fly zone over Libya, had been supported by South-Africa, but not by Germany.
Moreover, that also elides that the hostility between Iraq and the USA which later led to Bush Jr’s illegal invasion had in large part been caused by Saddam Hussein himself doing such things as invading Kuwait and even after his defeat then continuing to support terrorists and so on. Thus one would expect that if Putin feared NATO so much that would make him less belligerent instead of more belligerent.
“The argument seems rather obvious given the number of nations around the world since the fall of the USSR as a balancing power that the NATO nations have invaded.”
That number is … two. Afghanistan in 2001; Iraq in 2003.
Coincidentally, that is the same as the number of nations around the world that Russia has invaded over the same period; Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. (Both of them, of course, it continues to occupy.)
People have mentioned Serbia, but Danvol specifically said ‘full-scale invasions’. NATO didn’t invade Serbia. NATO didn’t invade Libya.
We could of course broaden it out to “bombing campaigns, coups and assassination attempts”, as Danvol says, and that would add a lot more names to both lists. Since the fall of the USSR “as a balancing power”, using this as a criterion, Russia has attacked (from a quick google):
the UK
Germany
Czechia
France
Moldova
Estonia
Lithuania
Latvia
France
Poland
Spain
Bulgaria
Armenia
Ukraine
Georgia
Austria
Turkey
I’m actually quite surprised there are some European nations there that Russia *hasn’t* attacked. You’ve missed Portugal, lads! Surely there must be something worth setting on fire in Portugal? What about Monaco, Andorra, Luxembourg, or San Marino? I know Ukraine is proving a bit too much for the Russian armed forces, but I think even you’d have a chance of conquering Monaco.
During the Cold War US foreign policy perspective (the popular perspective, that is; actual experts sometimes thought differently but democracies have limited steering) was that the Comintern never really went away, and thus every party anywhere in the world that aligned itself with Communism (except sometimes Yugoslavia or China) was just Russia. Russia with plausible deniability, but the denials, even the ones we now know to be true, were just seen as necessary lies to prevent nuclear escalation.
Permanent war in Korea? For victory over Russia! Arming an invasion force of Cuban exiles? For victory over Russia! Quagmire in Vietnam? For victory over Russia! Death squads in Central America? Victory over Russia! Support for Apartheid and white supremacist counterinsurgency in southern Africa? Victory over Russia. Helping some freaks assassinate a poet during a coup? Victory over Russia.
Permanent war, as Orwell observed, cannot mean defeat of the enemy. In Korea, or anywhere else.
The Reagan administration tried to stop the Russians from overrunning Central America; it did not try to drive the Russians out of Cuba in the Caribbean.
And I don’t seem to remember any American attempt to drive Russia out of North Vietnam, just attempts to stop it conquering South Vietnam.
The problem with actually beating the enemy is now what do you do with the territory?
We saw that in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Americans are now really quite bad at occupation.
About the last time they did anything you could call a successful occupation would have been Germany after WW2. And that involved a lot of things that would actually be illegal today.
Of course, American policymakers might have been thinking “Rollback is a nice idea, but the last time we tried it was a debacle, so let’s defeat the expansion efforts until it collapses of its own weight.”
When you look at the internal deliberations of the National Security Council, the idea that they were trying to maintain some kind of state of permanent war becomes utterly ludicrous.
Maybe we’re just speaking different languages. Whether or not the Russian Air Force was operation in Vietnam, there was a very real and very serious effort to defeat the Russian Air Force in Vietnam, for example.
“The Americans are now really quite bad at occupation.” Yes, we are. This is a question where military historians might have something useful to say. Why are we so bad at occupation? Other historical empires have done so much better.
“[The Americans are quite bad at occupation.] This is a question where military historians might have something useful to say. Why are we so bad at occupation? Other historical empires have done so much better.”
*Are* the Americas quite bad at occupation? Or is the problem simply a lack of potential targets that would be worth the effort to really properly occupy?
Economic development, as well as the *ideological* development of things like liberalism and human rights, means that as a purely pragmatic matter the cost of American blood has gone up over time.
Oh, the assertion we’re bad at occupation is nonsense. At least of you consider things from a technical standpoint. America is objectively the best at occupation in history; we occupy precisely enough territory throughout the world to effectively control everything we want to. We maintain a network of military bases and strike capabilities that can reach any theatre in days to weeks. Our trade empire extracts unfathomable amounts of wealth and material with minimal collateral from every nation on the planet.
In terms of economic or security goals Americas military occupations generally work great.
What we’re bad at is spreading ideology to people completely disinterested in it on the other side of the planet. No one is *good* at that, and a lot of our failures have to do with the idealogy besides. Populist rhetoric works. American liberalism isn’t populist so getting buy in *among it’s own citizenship* is hard, let alone a foreign population. The only ideologies that have really been successfully exported in the past century are socialism and fascism, and both utilize populist messaging.
It doesn’t help that it is extremely easy to delude yourself into thinking that the cultural aspects of occupation are somehow the primary goal; that the purpose of occupying another nation is to plant your flag and tell the world how great your way of doing things is, a sentiment which hits all the biases of the observer.
This tends to lead to people saying things like “Russia is good at occupation” when every single component of the Russian empire that isn’t currently controlled by Moscow and most that are *hate them with a genetic vitriol*. Polish and Finnish children are weaned on stories of patriots bleeding Russia dry. It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive failure than instilling generational hate and impoverishing your modern country. But the Soviets exported their weird nationalistic/fascistic/authoritarian version of socialism, and had lots of military parades, and was very big, so its easy to say they accomplished something.
Ignoring the humiliation of failed cultural conversion projects in the middle east the vast majority of Americas military bases are, again, extremely effective at increasing security and prosperity.
The idea that “Russians” were ever on the verge of “overrunning” Central America seems totally delusional to me, although I’ll credit that Reagan and his administration were either dumb enough or ideologically extreme enough to believe it. Unless you think that oligarchic right wing governments is the natural state of affairs and so any disruption of that has to reflect “Russians”.
The civil wars in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua were all homegrown, uh, civil wars, between left and right, and American aid to the right wing side vastly outweighed Soviet support for the left. (In the case of Nicaragua, as far as I know, they only really started receiving Soviet support *after* they were in power).
We saw that in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Americans are now really quite bad at occupation
I wouldn’t really say the US occupation of Afghanistan was unsuccessful- it did succeed in carrying out significant social change in Afghanistan, including in gender relations, which you can see from (among other things) the fertility rate, which stayed stable for decades right up until 2001 and then declined 40% over the next 20 years.
https://www.google.com/search?q=afghanistan+fertility+rate&sca_esv=0c814c2424608e41&sxsrf=ADLYWIJu-FCzK97aF-Attx_PGhthkvqrng%3A1732331360163&source=hp&ei=YEdBZ4TUB7GJ0PEPrabMsQk&iflsig=AL9hbdgAAAAAZ0FVcGfck-Q9Oh_C4bIEYzDToaM-8ClX&oq=afghanistan+fert&gs_lp=Egdnd3Mtd2l6GgIYAiIQYWZnaGFuaXN0YW4gZmVydCoCCAAyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIFEAAYgAQyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIFEAAYgAQyBhAAGBYYHjIGEAAYFhgeMgYQABgWGB4yBhAAGBYYHkj3JlAAWIAfcAF4AJABAJgBZKABtAuqAQQxNi4xuAEDyAEA-AEBmAISoAK8DMICBBAjGCfCAgoQLhiABBgnGIoFwgILEAAYgAQYkQIYigXCAhEQLhiABBixAxjRAxiDARjHAcICCxAAGIAEGLEDGIMBwgILEC4YgAQY0QMYxwHCAg4QLhiABBixAxjRAxjHAcICChAjGIAEGCcYigXCAg0QABiABBhDGIoFGIsDwgIREC4YgAQYkQIY0QMYxwEYigXCAhMQLhiABBhDGKMDGKgDGIoFGIsDwgIWEC4YgAQYsQMYQxioAxiKBRiLAxidA8ICFhAAGIAEGEMYpgMY-AUYqAMYigUYiwPCAg4QLhiABBiRAhixAxiKBcICChAAGIAEGEMYigXCAhQQLhiABBixAxiDARioAxiLAxieA8ICEBAAGIAEGEMY-AUYigUYiwPCAhMQLhiABBhDGKgDGIoFGIsDGJ0DwgIIEAAYgAQYsQPCAggQABiABBiLA8ICEBAAGIAEGLEDGEMYigUYiwPCAggQLhiABBixA8ICFxAuGIAEGJECGLEDGKgDGIoFGIsDGJ0DwgIOEAAYgAQYkQIYsQMYigXCAg4QABiABBiRAhiKBRiLA8ICDRAAGIAEGLEDGEMYigXCAhEQABiABBiRAhixAxiKBRiLA8ICBRAuGIAEmAMAkgcEMTQuNKAH4J8B&sclient=gws-wiz
Like every other social order, the US imposed social order in Afghanistan has costs as well as benefits (to both America and Afghanistan), and most Americans eventually decided the costs weren’t worth it, but I don’t think that’s evidence of *failure* in itself.
Not unsuccessful?
After the USSR retreated from Afghanistan, ending its intervention, the Communist Afghan government held out for years; even after the USSR collapsed and all Soviet support was cut off they had survived for some extra months in the north west. And this same Communist Government had its President killed by Soviet forces at the start of the USSR’s intervention in Afghanistan.
Compare that with how long the government had held out after NATO forces left Afghanistan; also keep in mind that unlike the Communists this government had not tried to force atheistic communism down the Afghans throats and their foreign supporters had not killed many hundreds of thousands innocent civilians.
I can not see how one could come to any other conclusion than the USA being ‘super incompetent’ at ‘nation-building’.
And how much has that to do with increases in female education and decreases in child mortality*? IIRC, those two factors are seen as the best predictors of a decreasing Total Fertility Rate by social scientists.
Also, those ‘social changes’ were rolled back anyway as soon as the Taliban took over the country; so even from that perspective it was a clear failure.
* Presumably resulting from all the enormous amounts of ‘developmental assistance’ which had been thrown on Afghanistan. Also, here are some graphs of them if anybody is interested: ( https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertility-vs-child-mortality?time=2000..latest&country=~AFG https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility?time=2000..latest&country=~AFG )
The Intervention during the Russian civil war, perhaps?
Hardly; that was in support of the government of Russia against a foreign backed coup.
I wonder how likely that actually is.
As Trump isn’t the absolute autocrat of the Republican Party; and there are plenty of pro-Ukraine Republicans, for example, Evangelicals who hate Putin because he is deliberately destroying Protestant Churches in Ukraine.
That also does not take into account that the USA is not the only country supporting Ukraine; for example, the EU has given more support than the USA to Ukraine* and there are still other supporters outside those two, like the UK and Canada.
* As measured by the Ukraine Support Tracker of the Kiel Institute ( https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/ ).
The question essentially boils down to three parts.
The first part is whether the elements of the Republican Party hostile to Ukraine and/or controlled from Moscow via, say, blackmail information can undermine US aid to Ukraine faster and more effectively than Ukraine-sympathizing Republicans can shore up the attempt.
The second part is whether Trump is willing to bypass normal channels (which are easier for people in his own party to control) in order to cut aid to Ukraine if he thinks he has a reason. It seems likely that he will be willing to do so, because he did it before, as shown during his first round of impeachment proceedings.
The third part is whether pro-Ukraine Republicans will actually be willing to risk a public breach with Trump over the issue of Ukraine, or whether they will simply fall in line and accede to his wishes when he starts Doing Stuff. Based on the behavior of the Republican Party around Donald Trump for the past nine years, I suspect the answer to this question is “yes, yes they will fall in line.”
> The first part is whether the elements of the Republican Party hostile to Ukraine
a tiny number
>and/or controlled from Moscow via, say, blackmail information
there are none of these
>can undermine US aid to Ukraine faster and more effectively than Ukraine-sympathizing Republicans can shore up the attempt.
> It seems likely that he will be willing to do so, because he did it before, as shown during his first round of impeachment proceedings.
you mean when he increased aid to ukraine substantially?
> Based on the behavior of the Republican Party around Donald Trump for the past nine years, I suspect the answer to this question is “yes, yes they will fall in line.”
what republican party are you watching? much of the party is openly hostile to trump, and always has been.
Oh, you’re an irrational maladjusted prick who picks fights over nothing because you’re a fascist, got it.
@Dan: Because, as we all know, disagreeing with someone about the degree of control a person has over an institution is a sure sign that they hold to an evil ideology of some sort.
I can only agree.
I myself already had a low opinion of the Republican party before 2016*; however, that seems like an enormous non sequitur to me. Based on the information available the person Dan attacked could maybe even possibly have been a left Democrat who just happened to know a lot anti-Trump Republicans, for all I know.
* For example, from the other side of the Atlantic I have noticed that a recurring pattern with the Republican Party is to first say they think something is very bad but from how they behave when in power it turns that they actually don’t believe it is that important after all. Like how that they go on about how bad government debt is, but when in power immediately give the rich enormous tax cuts, growing the debt much more than the Democratic Party would have done in their place; or their attitudes on abortion and contraceptives, one would think that if they disliked abortions as much they claim they do they would support increasing access to contraceptives to prevent unwanted pregnancies which could lead to abortions in the first place, but they also oppose that.
That reminds me of the Green Party here.
@tus3
in 1979, the richest 1/5 made 45% of (before tax) income and paid 55% of taxes. that’s all federal taxes, including cap gains, ss, medicare, corporate, etc.
In 2021,they made 59% of income and paid a whopping 83% of federal taxes. now, 21 is a strange year, but in 2019, the numbers are 55/70.
If republicans are trying to cut taxes on the rich, they’re doing an absolutely terrible job, because the share of taxes paid by the rich is going up faster than their share of income. and the same is also true for the top1%. the tax code is only getting more progressive over time, and tax revenue as a share of GDP is either flat or growing, depending on which years you choose to end your time series. Definitely growing if you include tax expenditures.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60342
“in 1979, the richest 1/5 made 45% of (before tax) income and paid 55% of taxes. that’s all federal taxes, including cap gains, ss, medicare, corporate, etc.
In 2021,they made 59% of income and paid a whopping 83% of federal taxes. now, 21 is a strange year, but in 2019, the numbers are 55/70.
If republicans are trying to cut taxes on the rich, they’re doing an absolutely terrible job”
How does the picture change if you don’t limit it to federal taxes, I wonder? Include those state sales taxes and things as well (because, of course, there are Republicans in government at state level too!) and I bet it looks a bit less impressive.
And I bet I could find those numbers in about ten seconds of googling.
But, if I did that, and if they proved me right… that would mean you were only citing the limited subset of figures that back your argument, and concealing the full picture.
Oh, look.
https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/
The share of all taxes (including federal, state, and local taxes) paid by the rich only slightly exceeds the share of total income they receive. In 2024, the share of all taxes paid by the richest 1 percent of Americans (23.9 percent) will be slightly higher than the share of all income going to this group (20.1 percent).
The share of all taxes paid by the poor is just slightly less than the share of income received by the poor. The poorest fifth of Americans will pay 1.5 percent of their income in taxes, a slightly lower share than their share of all income (2.6 percent).
The tax system would appear even less progressive if this analysis included asset appreciation (unrealized capital gains), which mostly flows to the wealthy. Economists consider unrealized capital gains to be income, but the tax code does not.
Hardly the fault of Trump or any other Republican in the federal government.
Also, even with your analysis, you admit they are paying a greater percentage than they are earning.
Not much more, but still, one does have to factor in New Jersey’s experience, where ONE man relocated from the state and the budget went into a crisis. There’s only so much you can do to exploit the rich before the rich decide not to be exploited.
What happened to Russian military production? During world war 2, the Soviet Union was producing 30,000 tanks per year. Now it’s a strain to make 3000 in a year, per the numbers in the linked article. Is this a difference between modern and ww2 era equipment? I could believe this. Is modern Russian industrial capacity just significantly lower than it was in 1943? That would be very surprising. Or is this a difference between full mobilization survival-of-the-country production vs sustaining a civilian economy? Maybe that’s it.
Russia is not the Soviet Union. Many of the factories that churned out the tanks for the Cold War are now in Ukraine and more are now rubble in the Donbas.
But in WW2, much of Ukraine was occupied by the Germans, and hence unavailable for Soviet tank production. So perhaps the issue is mobilization again.
Persian Empire vs Greece, round umpteen.
Except that the King-of-kings in Moscow has an end-the-world button. If corruption hasn’t eaten it.
In WWII, the Soviets had Lend-Lease. They still built most of their own tanks, but there was a lot of other manufacturing they didn’t have to do then which they do now.
Precisely.
There’s a lot of alt-history that could be written where England and the US decide that the USSR was not worth shipping aid to when they were attacked. It’s not all that fantastic an idea – Stalin was, even by what they knew at the time, at least as bad a dictator as Hitler.
But the USSR was not an imminent threat to England, while Germany was. So they said “the enemy of my enemy is worth aiding”.
To briefly foray into that, The Soviets didn’t need lend lease to survive (the time table doesn’t work out for stopping the push east anyway) but they did need it to overrun Germany by 1934. A lot of what The Soviets received was logistics support for mechanized counterattack, which was key to enveloping German positions on the offensive.
It’s not impossible that WW2 grinds into a horrifying WW1 style quagmire without lend lease-one needs only look at the Chinese Japanese war to see how that could happen. It’s not a pleasant timeline.
@dan
that’s absolute nonsense. the Soviet Union went extremely hungry even with lend lease aid, they would have starved without it.
lend lease also provided a bunch of goods that the USSR was simply unable to make on its own, like virtually all its high test gasoline, reliable radios, trucks and rolling stock, and something like half of their aluminium.
the soviet union almost certainly does not survive, at least not as more than a rump state beyond the urals, without lend lease.
Again, timing doesn’t work out. The Battle of Moscow was over by January 1942 and by then less than 2% of lend lease had arrived or even been sent. The 1942 campaigns culminating in Stalingrad are somewhat debatable, 14% of Lend Lease arrived in this time, but the German theory of victory post-Stalingrad was irrational, relying on the ability of Germany to extract oil from the region that was pretty clearly bupkis in hindsight-Stalin would have had everything burnt or destroyed and Germany could not have rebuilt it all in time.
On the food front, famine would stretch throughout the Soviet Union, which creates political and social instability, but the numbers there don’t work out to *require* the Soviets to surrender, and it’s hard to imagine that they choose to surrender after merely a few million more dead given how horrific the conditions already were.
So we’re back to a situation where without lend lease Germany stalls out in 1943, having failed to defeat the Soviets by 1942 and almost certainly having failed to change it’s logistical situation by 1943. What is crippled is the Soviet ability to *counterattack*.
This leads to several possible timelines.
A. The Wehrmacht dig in on the eastern front circa 1942. Even without American aid they are likely eventually dislodged and encircled, but it takes longer-and millions more die during the occupation and famine. Eastern Europe is basically depopulated.
B. The Wehrmacht are allowed to retreat in 1942-1943, and without American petrol and food the Soviets watch them leave. All that depopulation happens, but in the wake of the damage the Wehrmacht has a real chance to turn some more defensible stretch of land into a fortress.
B1. This line in the sand turns the eastern front into a trench warfare hellscape, probably using some of the major rivers like the Oder to stall. Germany almost certainly eventually loses, if nothing else when America enters (if it does), but in the meantime events like the holocaust proceed to completion.
B2. This line in the sand eventually falls to mobile warfare due to Germanies industrial capacity being exceeded by a drawn out war. Events like the Holocaust are merely more horrific.
None of these end in German victory, although it’s vaguely possible there is a settlement somewhere, but they are all objectively worse for humanity.
> Again, timing doesn’t work out. The Battle of Moscow was over by January 1942 and by then less than 2% of lend lease had arrived or even been sent.
(A) the battle of moscow is not the war.
(B) citing lend lease figures ignores british aid and pre-lend lease aid.
> The 1942 campaigns culminating in Stalingrad are somewhat debatable,
you are myopically focussing on battles. the soviet population as whole was on starvation rations for the entire war. they, measurably, did not get enough to eat because the germans conquered their biggest sources of food. various ambassadors to the USSR noted the widespread hunger, even in the capital. Without lend lease food they would have starved. They DID starve in 1946, after lend lease food stopped.
> On the food front, famine would stretch throughout the Soviet Union, which creates political and social instability, but the numbers there don’t work out to *require* the Soviets to surrender,
You don’t have to surrender when you’re dead. the 46 famine happened AFTER the USSR reconquered all the agricultural land they had lost. if they hadn’t gotten the food in 42, they simply couldn’t have gone on. Soldiers need food to fight, lots of it, and they didn’t have it. It’s not a question of the government choosing to surrender, it’s a question of genuine collapse.
And that’s before we get to the more high profile forms of aid, like the fact that virtually all of the trucks and rolling stock the USSR had during the war were gifted by the west. these things do not merely enable the offensive, they allow armies to function at all. the germans wiped out a huge share of pre-war stocks, and the russians had little ability to replace them. the west also supplied something like half their aluminium, 1/3 of their explosives and copper. These things were essential to the soviet war effort, they are what allowed those t-34 factories to churn out so many tanks. they could route around production difficulties by doing what they were good at and importing things they were bad at or couldn’t get. this was a huge advantage, even before you get into the fact that soviet production numbers are certainly inflated from the reality, as were virtually all economic numbers in the USSR.
> (A) the battle of moscow is not the war.
(B) citing lend lease figures ignores british aid and pre-lend lease aid.
The battle of Moscow was the last time the German theory of victory made sense.
> you are myopically focussing on battles. the soviet population as whole was on starvation rations for the entire war. they, measurably, did not get enough to eat because the germans conquered their biggest sources of food. various ambassadors to the USSR noted the widespread hunger, even in the capital. Without lend lease food they would have starved. They DID starve in 1946, after lend lease food stopped.
“Battle” refers to a months long operational theatre. These battles determined if the front was moving.
You’re freely zooming in on singular accounts out to entire fronts and ignoring everything in between as suits you. This is bad logic.
> You don’t have to surrender when you’re dead. the 46 famine happened AFTER the USSR reconquered all the agricultural land they had lost. if they hadn’t gotten the food in 42, they simply couldn’t have gone on. Soldiers need food to fight, lots of it, and they didn’t have it. It’s not a question of the government choosing to surrender, it’s a question of genuine collapse.
They didn’t receive enough food in 42 for those numbers to work out. Again, the numbers don’t work out. You’re also ignoring that many starvation deaths occurred in what was occupied territory in 42.
> And that’s before we get to the more high profile forms of aid, like the fact that virtually all of the trucks and rolling stock the USSR had during the war were gifted by the west. these things do not merely enable the offensive, they allow armies to function at all. the germans wiped out a huge share of pre-war stocks, and the russians had little ability to replace them. the west also supplied something like half their aluminium, 1/3 of their explosives and copper. These things were essential to the soviet war effort, they are what allowed those t-34 factories to churn out so many tanks. they could route around production difficulties by doing what they were good at and importing things they were bad at or couldn’t get. this was a huge advantage, even before you get into the fact that soviet production numbers are certainly inflated from the reality, as were virtually all economic numbers in the USSR.
Again, the Soviets didn’t need trucks and other lend lease to defend, they needed it for rapid advance. The Soviet army could and did operate without trucks via rail lines and low quality transport, that was enough to stabilize the front.
And obviously tank production is part of offensive operations, you’d be better off arguing about shells. You’d be wrong, but it’d be defensible.
You obviously irrationally care about this and are deeply ignorant of any and all contradictory data, but your willingness to just argue that the data is wrong is particularly troubling. Why believe lend lease even happened then?
>The battle of Moscow was the last time the German theory of victory made sense.
Irrelevant.
> You’re freely zooming in on singular accounts out to entire fronts and ignoring everything in between as suits you. This is bad logic.
What? I’m not talking about fronts, you are. I’m talking crucial resource constraints you’re ignoring.
> They didn’t receive enough food in 42 for those numbers to work out. Again, the numbers don’t work out.
This is false.
https://www.amazon.com/Taste-War-World-Battle-Food/dp/0143123017
do your homework
> Again, the Soviets didn’t need trucks and other lend lease to defend, they needed it for rapid advance. The Soviet army could and did operate without trucks via rail lines and low quality transport, that was enough to stabilize the front.
This is simply ignorant.
> And obviously tank production is part of offensive operations, you’d be better off arguing about shells. You’d be wrong, but it’d be defensible.
I mentioned the copper and explosives. That’s what’s used to make shells. you just ignored it.
> You obviously irrationally care about this and are deeply ignorant of any and all contradictory data,
Pot, this is kettle. You’re black…
This debate doesn’t even matter and you resort to insults? I see my assertion on your ignorance was wrong; you can know you’re acting the fool yet still pantomime it out of arrogance.
@Dan: Let me get this straight: “You obviously irrationally care about this and are deeply ignorant of contradictory data” isn’t an insult? Please, tell me more.
There was a substantial pro-Soviet constituency in the UK – and a much more favourable view of the Soviet Union than Germany in both the UK and the US. Plus the Soviet Union was not in the same league as Nazi Germany when it came to honouring international agreements. It was definitely a case of backing the lesser evil against the greater.
There are no, and there never have been, armour factories in the Donbass. The major Soviet tank production centres were Leningrad, Kharkov, Tagil and Omsk. The former two are dead, the latter two are mass-producing tanks.
The major Soviet tank production centres were Leningrad, Kharkov, Tagil and Omsk. The former two are dead
No, this isn’t true. The Kharkiv tank production centre is still producing tanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malyshev_Factory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Morozov_Machine_Building_Design_Bureau
Unlike Stalin’s Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia does not face an existential threat. Equally unlike Stalin’s Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia has a civilian sector that must be kept mollified to a certain degree. And last but not least, the economies of the two nations are in no way comparable.
And keep in mind that Soviet production in WWII was buoyed by what Putin doesn’t not have access to – Lend Lease and other forms of Allied war assistance. This provided significant amounts of materiel and material aid to the Soviet Union.
Putin’s Russia does not face an existential threat. Russia’s Putin does. The war is existential for Vlad himself, and Russia will behave accordingly.
Lots of rulers have lost a war and not been overthrown. If Putin fears overthrow he should put money into the FSB, not the army.
Indeed, everyone thought Saddam Hussein would lose power after the first Gulf war, and of course no such thing happened.
The same thing that happened to America’s military production. We, too, produced tens of thousands of tanks a year during WWII. Right now, we’re producing dozens of tanks a year, though we have the capacity to produce hundreds.
The answer is a combination of increased equipment sophistication, which translates into both higher per-unit cost and increased difficulty of production, de-industrialization, and the fact that we’re not in an existential war.
Also, nukes. Why would anyone make hundreds of tanks when any existential war ends in three hours and destroys all equipment larger or more sophisticated than a civilian truck? Just build enough ICBMs to make any invasion and act of madness. A hundred will do.
There *are* reasons to maintain a military now but all of them emphasize either assymetry or efficiency, and tanks are firmly supporting equipment on both fronts. Putins war is *irrational* and that shows in what rational budgets and procurement systems can’t easily do to support it.
“Why would anyone make hundreds of tanks when any existential war ends in three hours and destroys all equipment larger or more sophisticated than a civilian truck? ”
Rhetorical question, obviously, but the answer is “because nations, including nuclear powers, exist in states other than ‘perfect peace with everyone’ and ‘fighting a last-ditch war of national survival’. They have policy objectives other than simple survival, and WAR IS THE CONTINUATION OF POLICY WITH THE ADMIXTURE OF OTHER MEANS.”
And in those states the US military has emphasized different production, namely airplanes. Lots of airplanes. A truly absurd amount of airplanes.
Again, in wars other than existential threats asymmetry and efficiency are favored. US air supremacy exploits both of those by creating a situation where a highly asymmetrical capability leads to extremely efficient cost to kill ratios. The thousands of US aircraft we can deploy can effectively destroy tens of thousands of ground vehicles with low double digit or single digit casualties. We’ve seen that in our lifetime. Multiple times.
We’ve avoided turning Ukraine into US airspace because of escalation, but the number of tanks we build is a product of non-existential threats being better solved by different, less costly means. And in a war with a near-peer that might actually be able to contest airspace, which means we’re basically operating *over Russia or China*, we’re back to talking about why we’re worrying about tanks when nukes are likely to start flying.
Dan: I understand and quite agree – I think I was misreading your use of “asymmetric”.
No, the US is not producing MBTs, and it hasn’t been for a while. It is modernising its M1 fleet, and even that it has issues keeping in fighting order due to the shortage of AGT1500 engines.
In comparison, the UVZ has been supplying hundreds of T-90ies a year abroad for years, making it the XXI century’s most successfully exported tank, even before we count the domestic sales.
“In comparison, the UVZ has been supplying hundreds of T-90ies a year abroad for years, making it the XXI century’s most successfully exported tank”
This isn’t entirely true. UVZ has been building T-90s since 1992, and has built a total of 2600 (another 1400 built in India under licence). That’s an average of eighty a year, not “hundreds” – and of course a lot of those have stayed in Russia. (Maybe there have been a few years in which production has gone over 200? Seems unlikely.)
At present the factory is managing to build about forty of the latest model, the T-90M, each year, of which thirty are refitted T-90A, not new-build tanks
https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/military-balance/2024/06/russian-t-90m-production-less-than-meets-the-eye
This is an interesting question and there are probably many answers.
– A modern tank is a lot more complicated than a T-34. The early model T-34s, if I remember correctly, didn’t have any electronics on board at all, not even a radio. Some of them even went into action without gun sights (admittedly in extremis). So modern tanks take five times as many man-hours to build, and cost (adjusting for inflation) many times as much.
– A modern tank, at least a Russian one, includes a lot of imported components, which can’t be easily substituted. It also includes a lot of components and subsystems full stop, so stepping up production is more complicated and slower because you have to increase output in a lot of areas.
– Modern Russia is not the USSR. For a start, its population is much smaller and considerably older. The Russian government is frantically bidding against itself for the services of its small cohort of military-aged men, who are needed as soldiers, as manufacturing workers in the military-industrial sector, and as workers in the export sector.
– Modern Russia is not the USSR and much of the Soviet military-industrial complex is in Ukraine.
– Modern Russia is not the USSR. The USSR in the 1930s committed serious effort to planning for economic mobilisation. Russia said it was, but in fact senior government officials just lied and stole the resources.
These are US tanks, not Soviet/Russian (because I couldn’t find remotely reliable figures for the actual cost of Soviet/Russian tanks), but I think it’s still a valuable comparison: a Sherman tank cost around $50,000 in 1945 dollars. An M1A1 Abrams tank cost around $4.3 million in 1989 dollars. That equates to $876,000 in 2024 dollars for a Sherman and $10.9 million for an Abrams.
The other side of that, though, is that the US economy has also grown a lot since 1945. And in fact a single tank seems to cost roughly the same as a share of GDP now as then.
I have a vague memory of doing the same rough calculation for capital ships of the Royal Navy – HMS Victory, HMS Dreadnought, HMS Nelson and the new carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth – and finding something very similar (I mean, huge uncertainty around UK GDP in 1760, but still.) Whether it’s significant or not I leave to others.
Reported prices for new military equipment include a share of the R&D costs, making them arbitrary random numbers for comparison purposes. What you need is to take the current price for a mature piece of hardware and inflation-adjust it to the year it was introduced to get even an estimate of what the actual manufacturing costs were.
Please, be my guest. Let me know what you find, I’d be interested!
By this point, the original R&D costs for the Abrams are pretty far in the past, with redesign projects being relatively minor. And of course the Sherman was one of the most mass-produced tanks in history, so its R&D costs were about as fully amortized across a long production run as it is possible to imagine.
It’s a reasonably fair comparison.
There were still about five times more Sherman’s made, so it’s a nontrivial difference. The majority of the cost is both capacity and efficiency though; the Abrahms is both more complex and bigger, while the Sherman lacks a lot of capabilities but is smaller.
These decisions make a lot of sense for the assymetry of US warfare; the Abrahms isn’t fighting attrition combat, it’s overwhelming the enemy and achieving efficiency not per unit cost but by destroying the enemies capacity to fight before the fleet can take real casualties, which has been a winning strategy. The Sherman, made for a different war, had to be lighter and capable of surviving and sustaining attrition (and an at times shoddy logistics base) in comparison. It also needed to be built fast and in bulk irrespective of it that was cost efficient.
A better comparison of a similarly sized vehicle is actually the Bradley, which also has somewhat compatible defenses, albeit by virtue of composite armors versus thicker steel (which is objectively better on the modern battlefield per weight). The Bradley has a pretty bad procurement process and still comes to about a million per, which is within shooting distance accounting for the end costs.
(My numbers of Bradley unit cost might be wrong, feel free to shift through the conflicting reports and counterdict me.
My point is that if the US decided they needed a cheap, mass production chassis we still know how. The result would probably be a mix between the Bradley and Abrahms but dumber, slightly more armor, no troop storage and less expensive optics and auxiliary weapons. That might be optimal for the kind of start and stop warfare in Ukraine where artillery kills everything that’s too expensive and drones somewhat replace the optical package of the modern vehicles, but we likely won’t ever fight that war directly.
The Abrahms is just very specifically not that.
Most of those answers break down when you think about them in detail though. Especially when you bring up the USA (or any other country) as a point of comparison.
-Modern cars are much more complex than WW2 era cars, but we produce many more cars now than we did back then.
-their tank production was limited even before the war when they weren’t under sactions. they’re producing many more now, despite the sanctions. The USA has no such sanctions but still struggles to produce military equipment in large quantities.
-Modern Russia has much more advanced manufacturing technology than WW2 USSR (which was extremely primitive even by 1940s standards). The US does too, and has no such manpower shortages, but still can’t produce nearly as much as we did in WW2.
-Modern Russia is, in fact, trying very hard to produce war equipment. No doubt there’s some corruption and waste, but there was a lot of that in WW2 also. But it still can’t get anywhere close to 1940s levels of military production.
Sometimes the past is just different. We would also find it very difficult to produce a fleet of fully crewed 1800s-era wooden ships of the line, or a Roman style legion of 5000 men who can march long distances carrying equipment and then assault a fort by hand. Those things come from a long process of societal evolution. The 1940s were a mechanized, industrial, nationalistic era which is just very different from our current era where everything is digital and decentralized.
All good points, but I think the weakness is that you’re looking at what the US is doing and asserting that this is the same as what the US can do – not the same.
Also, you’re right that modern cars are far more complex, and the US is still producing far more of them. But it’s doing so with far fewer man-hours; employment in the US auto industry is way down from the 50s, mainly because of automation. Therefore each car takes far fewer man-hours to build.
The same isn’t true of tank manufacturing, as I said; modern tanks aren’t just more complicated, they really do take longer in man-hours to build.
And if, like Russia, you are labour-constrained, that’s a real problem.
It’s also complexity of product that makes economic mobilisation more difficult. In 1940 you could take an auto factory, or even a big empty field at Willow Run, and in a year it would be churning out state-of-the-art military vehicles, because there wasn’t much difference between a car or an excavator or a tractor, and a jeep or a 6×6 truck or a tank. It’d take longer to do that now.
Finally I think there is a bit of a contradiction between this
Modern cars are much more complex than WW2 era cars, but we produce many more cars now than we did back then.
and this
The 1940s were a mechanized, industrial, nationalistic era which is just very different from our current era where everything is digital and decentralized.
Having a car industry that produces ten million units a year sounds quite mechanised and industrial to me. It’s true in terms of employment – not necessarily in terms of output.
Do you think that if the US “really wanted to,” we could bring back military production to WW2 levels? I don’t. Or at least, not without a multidecade effort to train a generation of new workers. We’re already struggling with our very modest goals (100 fighters and 1 big ship per year, 100,000 artillery shells per month). Spending more money doesn’t necessarily increase production, because we’re still bottlenecked by the lack of skilled workers and highly specialized production.
I agree with you that cars are different from tanks in the sense of man hours. Modern cars are made in highly automated factories, almost like those small plastic things you see rolling off the conveyer belt. But tanks and other military equipment still require highly skilled individual piece work, like a custom bespoke suit. That’s just a rare skill that not many people in the modern world posess. It might have been more common in the past, where everyone needed basical mechanical skills to keep their tools working. Now we just buy a new one when it breaks, or take it to a specialist shop to fix it.
During WWII, many industrial workers were former share-croppers whose wages were the first time they had seen American money rather than planation script.
More Taylorization might be needed, but it would be simpler than making workers highly skilled.
“Modern cars are made in highly automated factories, almost like those small plastic things you see rolling off the conveyer belt. But tanks and other military equipment still require highly skilled individual piece work, like a custom bespoke suit. That’s just a rare skill that not many people in the modern world possess.”
Well, I’m not an expert on manufacturing so this is just guesswork, but I would say there is nothing inherent about a modern tank that means you can’t make it in a highly automated factory. It’s complicated but it isn’t a work of art. You compare it to a bespoke suit but an individual tank isn’t custom-fitted to the user – you can make a thousand all identical and that’s fine.
I would hazard a guess that the real situation is the other way round.
You say “we can only build a hundred tanks a year because tanks are hand-made by individual skilled workers”.
I say “maybe tanks are hand-made by individual skilled workers because we only build a hundred a year, so it isn’t worth setting up huge expensive automated production lines.”
There are places in the world that still hand-build individual cars, after all. McLaren handbuilds its F1 cars. But they do that because they’re building tiny numbers; if McLaren got a contract for fifty thousand identical F1 cars it would set up an automated production line.
“During WWII, many industrial workers were former share-croppers whose wages were the first time they had seen American money rather than planation script.”
Very good point. You don’t always need a skilled electronics worker with ten years’ experience to build a military drone – you can give that job to any teenager with a few weeks of training.
Including Marilyn Monroe! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioplane_Company#/media/File:MarilynMonroe_-_YankArmyWeekly.jpg
With a lot of modern technology, whether you can give the job to teenagers depends heavily on whether you want the stuff to work reliably. A teenager with minimal training can learn to put together laptops out of premade components and a significant fraction of them will work. If you want them to ALL or nearly all work, even after they’ve been battered a bit or the soldering’s been through a few hot/cold cycles, you will probably want someone with more experience.
In World War Two, a lot of machinery got by with low reliability and a lot of field maintenance (e.g. “file the replacement part to fit because otherwise it won’t.”) Doing that with modern electronics, with composite materials, and so on is much more difficult if not impossible.
So you don’t hire teenagers.
And you Taylorize the work. Breaking it down in as many steps as possible enables you to minimize training and still get it right.
I doubt there will be a massive increase in production unless the government orders Ford and GM to cease car and truck production and switch the factory lines to making Bradleys. Modern arms production is inherently commercial enterprises and they can’t handle the kind of production surge wartime would require, they are much better at handling stable demand.
A tank manufacturer could be producing hundred tanks a year and if they tried to increase to thousand a year they would probably go bankrupt. The surge would require a massive investment in new factories and workers, and after couple years when the war and surge is over they are left with massive debts they haven’t had time to pay of, huge excess and factories and employees they need to get rid off. And now their production need will be 20 tanks per year because of all the surplus tanks floating around the markets.
For something like artillery shells and missiles the wartime surge seems to be even higher, but there may be more options to expand. Most practical scenario is probably that an artillery shell manufacturer produces ten times as much that is the peacetime need and the rest is stockpiled. The country then needs to have a large war every twenty years to whittle down the stockpiles before the shells start expiring. Or maybe they would only produce stockpiles of the metal components that can easily last 50-100 years properly stored. Then the manufacturer only needs to prepare excess capacity for the chemical components and that hopefully have more options for automation.
Another scenario is a manufacturer that produces the peacetime use and stockpiles for half the world. Then when one of their customers goes to war all the production will be directed to them, and at the same time the other customers who are least likely to end up in war can help with their own stockpiles. Hopefully none of their other customers end up in a war at the same time. This would require quite solid military alliances.
If a nation would want stay out of such alliances and prepare enough domestic production capacity to handle a war, then the option would probably be to pay for the domestic manufacturer to build ten times as many factories than they need. For workers maybe unemployment benefits would require the recipient to spend a week few times a year and one of these extra factories training in shell production. During war all these people could then be hired, while the workers from the main factory as their day job would become supervisors for them. But there would probably still need to be other businesses that would wind down during war. Maybe a civilian car manufacturer would cease their normal production and their management and employees would be dispersed to the ammunition factories.
The only imported components in a modern-day Russian tank are the Belorussian thermal sights, which do not require substitution. There was a time French thermal matrices were used, but that was years ago.
None of the Soviet military-industrial complex is in the Ukraine. There used to be, say, Antonov design bureau, or the Nikolaev shipyards, or the Kharkov tank works, or Yuzhnoe design bureau. None of these mass-produce weapons now, and none of these were without an alternative in Russia which is still functional.
The only major military factories still functional in the Ukraine are Luch Design Bureau in Kiev (makes ATGMs and other missiles), Motor Sich in Zaporozhye (aircraft engines), and Zorya-Mashproekt (naval turbines).
Again, I don’t know what your source is – you’re right about the Mykolaiv yards, but as far as I can tell Kharkiv is still producing tanks. Antonov isn’t producing weapons but it never did – it specialised in transport aircraft. Yuzhnoe is still around as Pivdenne in Dnipro and is producing missiles.
“The only imported components in a modern-day Russian tank are the Belorussian thermal sights, which do not require substitution. There was a time French thermal matrices were used, but that was years ago.”
Russia has indeed reduced its use of imported components. And why is that? Because the Russian arms industry has been under sanctions for the last decade, since they invaded Ukraine! Naturally, they’ve had to start using inferior components produced inside the empire, rather than the superior foreign components they used before – the result is a simpler and less capable vehicle https://fmso.tradoc.army.mil/2024/russian-import-substitution-impacts-armored-vehicle-production/
But they have not managed to eliminate them completely, as this report makes clear – foreign electronics in particular is still very important, much of it illegally imported from the US and Europe: https://kse.ua/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Russian-import-of-critical-components.pdf
As a (public) librarian, I find it amusing that people often overlook the sheer scale of what a modern library system can offer to a researcher. It is no mistake that in nearly every notable non-fiction work the author list a bunch of libraries and librarians who helped make the book possible.
Glad you are getting good use out of yours!
My city’s public library system includes a general research library, and other targeted research libraries as for African American history, the Performing Arts, which are free to use by all, though without the convenience of taking out the materials, etc. Unfortunately these resources are constantly targeted for cost-cutting in the city’s budget, though the entire amount has never been more than a .01 fraction of the agency under which libraries are funded, which includes parks, etc.
It sounds like you’re talking about NYC, in which case I would suggest that the dire warnings which the NYPL sends to its patrons every year about impending cutbacks should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
“a country as big as Russia can be ‘running out’ of manpower”
The quick answer is Russia is running out of people. It is a situation that affects most of the first world.* Fertility rates — number of children born to each woman during her lifetime — are the key statistic. It is commonly said that a rate of 2.1 is necessary to maintain a steady state population. rates much under 2 lead to decline. Japan which has been under 2 for a while is suffering a decline.
The story on Russia is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union fertility rates dropped under 2. Fewer babies in the 1990s mean fewer draft age men now. Add in expatriation to avoid the draft, and the chronically poor health of Russian men due to, inter alia, alcoholism. And you have too few conscripts to maintain a war when your strategy is to send waves of poorly trained and poorly led men into combat meat grinders.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033851/fertility-rate-russia-1840-2020/
Clearly the North Koreans are mercenaries. Whether that miserable land can supply enough bodies to solve Russia’s problem is very unclear.
*Only Israel among first world countries is well above 2.
*Note here Soviet and even contemporary Russian statistics are to be taken cum grano salis. Autocracies seldom publish accurate statistics. See the work of Feshbach and Eberstadt which is mostly paywalled. But by viewing Soviet statistics with a skeptical eye, they were the first to point ou how bad conditions were there in the 1980s. A fact that only became clear when the whole thing came apart like a cheap suit in the 90s.
Can’t spell my own pseudonym
Ukraine also has the same problem.
I believe that what is also important are political factors.
In Russia mobilisation disproportionately affects ethnic minorities, the poor, and rural regions as the KGB kleptocrats are afraid of angering wealthy Muscovites and Saint Petersburgers.
Not to mention corruption, if I recall correctly, Tom Cooper on SubStack* had mentioned that in Russia one can avoid being drafted by paying a bribe of *forgot the exact amount* Roubles and if one already is in the army the same amount can get one out of it; and afterwards the army and recruiters won’t bother one again. According to Tom Cooper, Putin knows this and is perfectly fine with this; because it means that nobody important will get angry at him because one of their friends or family members had been forced into the military against their will, as all important people have the money to pay the needed bribes to prevent that.
* It had been many months ago since I last read anything from him so I have forgotten the exact phrasing.
It is rather amusing how you discuss Russians avoiding being drafted, given that the first and the last mobilisation that sent the mobilised to the front was in September 2022.
There is a difference in English between “being drafted” and “being mobilised” which maybe doesn’t carry over into your language. Being drafted is being forced to join the armed forces – also called being conscripted. “Mobilised” implies being sent to war; we talk about reservist soldiers being mobilised, as happened in autumn 2022, but it also covers things like recruiting more volunteers, conscripts and criminals, as this report discusses. https://www.cna.org/reports/2024/10/Russian-Military-Mobilization-During-the-Ukraine-War.pdf
I don’t know what your source is for the assertion that the only mobilisation that sent soldiers to the front was in September 2022, but it isn’t true. Conscripted Russian soldiers are often forced to “volunteer” for the front even though it isn’t legal to send conscripts outside Russia. And since Russia claims that Crimea is Russian territory, it can send its ill-trained, ill-equipped conscripts there as well.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/10/01/russias-autumn-conscription-how-many-of-the-133000-draftees-will-end-up-in-ukraine
You are omitting to mention that the Russian army is compelling conscripts to sign contracts “volunteering” for service in Ukraine. There has only been one “mobilisation” for Ukraine in the sense of a mobilisation of reservists, but in English the word “mobilisation” covers a broader area than it does in your language, referring to any process of increasing military numbers or strength by drawing on a broader section of society’s resources. Russian efforts to illegally compel draftees to serve in combat, increased use of illegal mercenaries, and enlistment of criminals and convicts are all examples of “mobilisation” in this sense.
While on the topic of books, research, and libraries, can I rudely make use of the wisdom the crowd as my own librarian? I’ve been looking for books on the history of ranged weapons. Specifically one for bows: covering Neolithic, composite, recurve, long, (maybe even crossbow); and one for early firearms: arquebus, matchlock, wheel lock, flint lock, bayonnets, rifles, cartridges. I’m mostly interested in the technological progression, but am also curious in how changes in these weapons were linked to changes in society or doctrine. I’m also not afraid of it getting technical and explaining the physics in great mathematical details.
Normally I can do a decent job at searching for stuff, but here I must be hitting the wrong key words because I can only find superficial stuff aimed people without any historical knowledge, or hyper specific research papers. Thanks in advance 🙂
“Firearms: A Global History to 1700” by Chase, Kenneth. Recommended by Bret on this blog some time ago. More on the history and society / doctrine than technology, but still lots of detail and references for finding out more.
“War Bows” by Loades, Mike. Published by Osprey. Compilation of four shorter books covering longbow, composite bow, crossbow, Japanese longbow.
Perfect, thank you very much. I can’t like your post for some reason, but my thanks nonetheless.
Thanks again! I’ve had time to do some reading, and I very much enjoyed “War Bows”. The chapters on crossbow and composite bow were exactly what I was looking for, although the one on longbow is disappointingly focused on the 14th Century English campaigns told from an overly romantic viewpoint.
Kenneth Chases’ book (and the earlier one by Geoffrey Parker it is a rebuttal to) are great, but they’re not really what I’m looking for. I’ve only read the introductions, but they’re mostly attempts to explain what the military revolution entailed and why it appeared in Western Europe but not elsewhere. Very interesting stuff, but it only touches on the technological changes I’m trying to understand.
In short: what’s the difference between an arquebus in 1400 and a Brown Bess in 1800, and what were the incremental steps that led from one to the other were? If anyone has any reading suggestions for that, please do share.
Do you mean “in any case Milne [not Livy] finds his career plausible.”? Since Livy was the one who wrote about Ligustinus in the first place, I’d think the fact Livy found his career plausible would be a given…
Livy was writing in the last few decades BC, more than a century after Ligustinus’s time, so he’s writing as a historian, not a biographer. My memory is that there are plenty of places where Livy relates a tale that he expresses skepticism about the literal truth of. (Which doesn’t mean the sentence was supposed to say Livy, just either reading seems possible.)
Notably in the beginning of his history he expresses some doubt about the legends of Rome’s founding, specifically if Rhea Silvia really was assaulted by Mars and if the twins really were nursed by a she-wolf
If I could add two additional answers to “well, the past doesn’t change, so why do we need new historical research?”
First, even if there’s no new history and if there were no new methods and no new questions, doing historical research produces new analysis. And analysis is one of the inputs to doing good historical research. So it’s like turning the crank and getting better and better output.
Second, there is in fact new history happening all the time at an ever increasing rate. We need to study that, and even if you are only looking at “old” history, new events can still inform your understanding.
A couple questions, for Bret or anyone else who knows:
Is library access really that hard to obtain? My own almae matres offer access to alumni (though of course you have to live in the area) and Yale gives me online free access to JSTOR. Also, the New York Public Library can give you a pass to the Columbia and NYU libraries for anything they don’t have themselves. They also have just as much access to ILL as any university library, so far as I know. And in some rural areas, like Hanover, NH, the local university is pretty generous about allowing locals access to university facilities. (A cheap way to maintain good town/gown relationships, given how few rural New Hampshirites are actually interested in using the Dartmouth library.)
Why is Prof. Milne’s book published by Pen & Sword, which I mostly know as a publisher of UK genealogy and local history, rather than a university press?
Pen & Sword does *far* more than UK genealogy and local history. A quick look at that catalogue will show that. They do, however, publish a lot of amateurs and provide very little in terms of additional quality. Some stuff in P&S is excellent scholarship, but a substantial minority is of very low quality. I’m talking barely above ancient alien stuff, or heavily plagiarised from other authors. As a publishing label, it sadly carries no weight.
So why does a tenured professor publish there? Would no academic press take her book?
I don’t know. They don’t only do amateurs, so its not unique. Maybe no academic publisher wanted it, or were too controlling, or offered a bad deal moneywise?
So, I want to be clear at the front that I don’t know Kathryn Milne (we’ve talked but only briefly), so I can only speculate, but there are a few reasons academics doing military history might drop a book with Pen & Sword. The most obvious is simply ease: it is a lot easier to get a book through P&S than a university press and you won’t have to shop a work around to multiple publishers to find one who will take it. They are also unlikely to demand large-scale alterations to a manuscript. There may also be a concern about accessibility: a small-run book through a university press may come out the other end costing $80-100, but P&S will cut corners so the final volume is $30-50, making it actually affordable to readers.
I know quite a few academics who have in particular adopted to drop books to Pen & Sword specifically because they did not need a book with a prestigious publisher to make tenure or get hired – either because they already had tenure or because their institution did not care where a book was published, only that it was. In those situations P&S – low hassle, wide distribution, low cost to the reader – makes a lot of sense.
As a result, I can think of a number of volumes by very solid academics that published with Pen & Sword: D. Hoyos, Carthage’s Other Wars; M. Taylor, Antiochus the Great; P. Johstono, The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt all jump to mind. There are quite a few more but that’s what I have off of the top of my head. That’s the tricky thing with Pen & Sword: 85% of what they publish is pure rubbish, but there are real gems in the remaining 15%, but few non-academic readers will be able to tell one from the other.
Sounds like the situation with Peter Lang in literary studies. I once bought a book from them by a big name scholar that had an index with no page numbers and used author-date citation style in-text but author-title in the bibliography. Talk about cutting corners….
Aha. I guess I was thinking sort of backwards: a tenured professor might want to influence or enlighten the broader public, a untenured professor is of necessity primarily concerned with impressing the academic powers that be.
For myself, in deciding whether to read a scholarly (broadly defined) book, I usually look at (i) the publisher, (ii) the author’s academic affiliation, (iii) the author’s educational credentials, (iv) reviews, and (v) (if applicable) my prior experience with the author. Prof. Milne’s book fails on (i) and (ii), qualifies on (iii) and (iv), and (v) does not apply. If I were interested enough in the topic to read a whole book, I would probably read this one.
Funny @ey81, my method is almost exactly backwards from yours! When looking for something to read on a topic I first go to authors I know I like (if any have something relevant), or go from personal recommendations, and only use a search engine as a last resort. Out of this shortlist I’ll then whittle it down using reviews. Only if there are no reviews (or only unverified amazon ones) will I use the authors credentials to see if the book is likely to be trustworthy. The publisher doesn’t feature in my selection process at all, except that if I don’t know what topic to read about, I might look through the Blackwells or Routledge or similar catalogues to see what’s come out recently.
Even as an amateur researcher and reader, ILL is a godsend. I’ve gotten any number of books that it would never carry via ILL through my local (small city) library system. It’s astonishing what shows up sometimes (a very rare first edition of a haiku book from 1949) and from where (a rare book on the X-15 from the Edwards AFB tech library).
The excellent County Library System here does the same thing, and I agree that’s wild where it can come from. I remember getting a book through ILL that came from Fairbanks, Alaska.
What percentage of those volumes are available in electronic form? I imagine it would be a licensing nightmare (plus really onerous to scan all the old books into digital archives), but it seems so useful that most university libraries would do it if it’s legal.
Nuclear proliferation came up in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War, and I read some good pushback from folks on that. It’s no easy thing to separate useful Plutonium-239 from nuclear waste, even if you have reactors producing it – and actually getting it processed is also unlikely given the controls on it (North Korea got a lucky break with A.Q. Khan, although I wonder if they’d sell highly enriched uranium to Ukraine under the table for the right price).
Most of the states with nuclear weapons or well developed nuclear fuel processing capabilities don’t want more nukes in the world. The three “rogue” states I can think of as potential suppliers are Israel, North Korea, and Iran.
Israel doesn’t want to annoy the United States too much since they buy so many US weapons, and Israel also generally doesn’t try to offend the Russians. (eg in Syria Israel, like the US, has informal arrangements with Russia to avoid casualties when they’re attacking hostile factions.)
Iran and North Korea, as far as I know, are happily overcharging Russia for artillery ammo, missiles, and drones; and generally also happy to take every opportunity to piss off western countries such as those backing Ukraine. So I doubt they’d sell weapons grade material to Ukraine, too much risk of Russian retaliation if (when) word got out.
My guess is that it comes down to the state of the Ukrainian nuclear industry and how fast they could refine weapons grade uranium or plutonium. If the Ukrainians had quietly started doing so when Russia invaded, they might be surprisingly close.
I’d bet good money the US cares more about stopping a Ukrainian bomb than about stopping the Russian invasion. They would have had to hide the program from the US, and therefore from all its current allies.
I’d bet good money there’s no such thing as coherent us foreign policy in three months, so who knows.
Very possibly. But the current nuclear readiness of Ukraine will depend on what has happened in the last few years, not what is yet to happen in the next few.
on digitization, read this piece on how Google Books *almost* worked with the world’s libraries to digitize everything. Now we have to use shadow libraries…. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/
Weapons grade nuclear reprocessing is more impractical than impossible; if you can operate a start to finish power program you need the tools to isolate and enrich uranium already, and isolating and enriching plutonium from waste isn’t prohibitively hard. Just annoying. Very annoying. And slow
The thing is that if you can do that you can also build a “research” or breeder reactor that maximizes production of enriched plutonium anyway, and if you just want a terror weapon enriched uranium is needed to build a dirt simple gun type weapon, so both the lowest profile and highest profile weapon production methods are easier. If you’re stupid but have a low bar you buy enriched uranium somehow or go about accumulating it painstakingly, if you’re serious and smart you make a special reactor that produces only weapons grade material. Reprocessing generic waste or converting a power plant into a breeder are impractical in both cases
Hence the bigger proliferation concern remains either rogue enriched uranium or a rogue industrial state building specialized reactors.
In context building breeder reactors is limited by cost and international politics, not knowledge. Ukraine would probably go that route. Or they wouldn’t attempt it.
The guy named “Spurius” *might* be a literary invention? 😉
‘Spurius’ in Latin is a polite way to say someone is of illegitimate birth and is not an entirely uncommon praenomen. Interestingly, Spurius Ligustinus is clear he inherited his father’s farm, so if he was born out of wedlock he must have been legitimated, presumably by adoption (which certainly could have been done).
So was this then a kind of stereotypical name for the sons of longer-serving veterans? Did it have connotations beyond it’s clear meaning that Livy would have been invoking?
Interesting. Benoni (son of sorrow) was popular in 17th century New England for illegitimate boys.
“well, the past doesn’t change, so why do we need new historical research?”
The laws of physics don’t change either, but no one argues against scientific research on that account.
They do though? All branches of learning are under threat, we just tend to focus on the threat to history in the comments of this history blog.
They do argue against spending money on physics research; they don’t justify that by pointing out that the laws of physics don’t change.
How many languages can you read by now? Sounds like you’re forced to at least master Ancient Latin and Greek while in undergraduate studies but do you also know French, Spanish, or other (ancient) Mesopotamian languages?
English is my native language, of course. I read Latin and ancient Greek. I also have some training in and can read (not as well as I’d like) German and French. Between French, Latin, a dictionary and a bit of translation software, I can manage Spanish and Italian, but only very slowly. On just a couple of occasions I have had to slog through modern Greek using a dictionary and what I know of ancient Greek, but I make no claims to ‘know’ modern Greek.
Some clarifications on the inner workings of academic societies, because that’s my job:
Typically societies will look to their journals publishing programs to *generate* money for the society, not cost them money. And for small- or medium-sized academic societies, they likely aren’t running the journal directly — that will have been outsourced to a larger publisher. Economies of scale mean that a large publisher can deliver online platforms, submission systems, peer review systems, etc. more efficiently than a small society can manage, so for example the Journal of American History is “published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians”. (These economies of scale are only going to grow: every publisher I know is trying to figure out how to use AI to make their processes more efficient, but that only works if you have a backfile with hundreds of thousands of papers in it. Cambridge University Press has that; the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies does not.)
There are journals in science that charge authors for publishing — these are the “open access” journals that do *not* charge subscription fees for readers, so the author fees are the sole way for the journal to make money. It used to be common practice in the sciences for journals to charge both “page fees” to authors *and* subscription fees to readers, but that hasn’t been the case for decades now. Open Access is a complicated issue, but suffice to say it has not made much inroads in the humanities
Conferences put on by an academic society generally do *not* make money. The total registration fees will just cover the cost of running the conference, with maybe a bit left over to put forward to next year’s conference. The conference has to pay the venue, of course, and there will also typically be money spent covering at least some of the travel expenses for keynote speakers. (Fun fact, every conference I’m familiar with works on a reimbursement model — the invited speakers buy their plane tickets and pay for their hotels and meals, then after the conference they submit receipts and the Society will reimburse them in however many months it takes to process their claims. If you’re thinking “wow that sounds like it would exclude anyone who doesn’t have the means to put up a couple thousand dollars and then wait several months to get it back,” you are absolutely correct.) Then there will be money for staff travel, and all sorts of miscellaneous expenses like putting the conference logo on tablecloths or printing programmes or whatever.
Membership dues are becoming increasingly difficult. There’s lots of ways to build professional networks these days without relying on a society membership, and without that social networking piece the value proposition for many researchers is simply not there. The pitch becomes, “pay us hundreds of dollars each year, and we’ll give you a subscription to our journal (which you have through your university already) plus a discount on conference registration (but a smaller discount than the amount the membership dues comes to)”. It’s a hard sell, and it has many societies struggling to define what the benefits of membership are in the 21st century.
Anyway, point of all this is, small academic societies are increasingly being squeezed in all directions, and many of them are now utterly dependent on being part of a larger publishing house’s portfolio for the bulk of their operating revenue. So why don’t journals pay authors or reviewers or at least foot the bill for producing figures? Because then they would stop generating a net income, and that net income is the only thing keeping the society afloat in many cases.
I realize this post has gotten a little long but “unmitigated” is right there is blog title.
For a more objective analysis of the Ukraine war, see “The Russo-Ukrainian War and the End of Illusions” by Philippe Lemoine.
That post was complete nonsense. The entirety of the argument seems to be that Ukraine will give up because war is hard but Russia won’t because the people are isolated from the consequences of the war. The issue is that the assertion that Russia isn’t suffering is nonsense and the claims that Ukrainian people don’t care but Russians do is unprovable; it’s also advocating for irrational policy. For instance of Putin had escalation dominance in 2015 the solution was to change the situation that led to that dominance, which *happened* as evidenced by the failure of Putins escalation. In essence it’s combining analysis from a decade ago with unproven assertions about will and counterfactual assertions.
The only valid part is that the author points out that Ukraine might negotiate with Russia for territorial concessions based on public sentiment, but no one has ever claimed otherwise and their assertion that Ukraine will do so is poorly defended.
No, they’re going to give up because they’re rapidly running out of manpower. Which is the same as what the podcast linked in the top post said. Ukraine’s men are getting killed off faster than new ones can be found even with a mass draft. The same is *not* the case for Russia, which has been able to recruit new volunteers without even resorting to conscripts. Russia also has something like a 10:1 advantage in artillery, with North Korea alone providing more shells than all of NATO, so they can afford to back a bit on artillery if necessary.
There seems to a be a tendency from the American left to think that Ukraine is currently winning. I guess the idea is that the good guys always win, and American weapons are so high-tech that they make anyone invincible? But neither of those things is true. People really need to come to terms with the fact that Ukraine is currently losing, and it’s only going to get worse unless something changes (ie, NATO countries start sending volunteers to fight directly).
You can make a post about the material advantages of Russia, and it’s possible to have a debate over the numbers and their significance. You’re using an unusually cheery picture for Russia, but there’s room for discussion.
What’s irrational is using this to post-facto rationalize a post that was about precisely none of that and was instead a vibes based assertion. The post that was referenced isn’t *about* that.
Also, there’s a lot of open questions about what giving up would even look like. A ceasefire? A territorial settlement? The stated Russian goal is effectively a disarmament and unilateral control of Ukrainian treaties, but Ukraine has no rational incentive to surrender its capability to resist even if it ends the war, because then Russia (which already violated a treaty that disarmed Ukraine) will just declare war again.
The assertion about will to fight attempts to sidestep this by asserting *irrational* motives will cause the conflict to end, but there’s no evidence that’s going to happen and the assertion is rooted primarily in the biases of the beholder.
Nice try, Bret, but I’m sorry to say that deleting comments which clash with your foreign policy narratives isn’t going to bring your wishes any closer to reality.
For those curious to know, the reference in question is a recent article by Philippe Lemoine on Ukraine.
I don’t know why you would describe a completely unsourced blogpost by someone with as far as I can tell no foreign policy credentials, as any more “objective” than that of our host.
Meh, that’s a bit of a thumbsucker. The war will drag on for a while, and eventually end in a settlement, unless one side or the other collapses before then, which is unlikely. He says. You don’t need to know Russian or Ukrainian, or have any expertise in foreign policy or military affairs, or any privileged access to policymakers or intelligence information–none of which the author manifests–to write that.
People who actually know something about a subject can certainly get tired of dealing with the vast quantity of bullshit produced by hacks as if it contains anything worth reading. Given your past trolling on this blog, I’m guessing that’s what happened.
Lemoine was a decent read, thanks. I too am very pessimistic about the prospects of Ukraine, and fully expect the Russians to overrun them and win via attrition in a year or two. That said, you must’ve been rather extreme to get deleted; I’ve been rather impressed with Dr. Devereaux’s willingness to accept the sort of dissenting views I’ve posted here. Maybe it’s because Ukraine is ultimately the vanguard of Liberalism, which leads to a passionate response to that conflict.
The “extreme” comment consisted of a single sentence mentioning Lemoine’s article by name.
The comment is still there. I can read it.
DanGer has a sporadic but longtime presence here as a Putin fanboy, which probably predisposes our host to exclude him.
How is that supposed to happen?
In the worst case scenario I can see the Ukrainian army could still retreat into the cities to bog down the Russian army with urban combat.
IIRC, Bret had originally predicted the war would have gone that way. As he had thought that the Ukrainian military could not defeat the Russians in the field, so instead he had assumed that was instead their path to victory, urban combat. It turned out that he had overestimated the Russian army*.
* Which is rather understandable considering that before the start of the war Russia had a military budget over ten times as large as Ukraine.
Simply put, how could the Russians hemorrhage losses for 2 1/2 years & counting, and then still be in the field, advancing, and containing counter-offensives? It doesn’t add up. My theory is that there’s alot of propaganda and deception in the information sphere regarding Ukraine, and that the Russians are faring much better than we’re led to believe. Given that they’ve made it this far in a proxy war against NATO, and also assuming that Ukraine, despite its valor, is in worse shape than portrayed, then it’s only a matter of time until there’s a collapse from attrition, thus my original estimate.
If my theory is correct, this will be a massive shock to many, and will have various ripple effects, which include aggravating the current Culture War, and emboldening Iran & China. Of course, it all remains to be seen, but this is a note of caution.
That’s irrational. You can confirm the Russian losses in broad scope from open source data. And if Russia was doing better than it’d have shown it in territory by now.
All that’s required to believe that Russia is suffering from extreme attrition yet still fighting is to say it has more reserves and that it’s population is politically disenfranchised. We’ve known both those for decades.
And note you still didn’t address the point, that Ukraine could fight a guerilla war.
There’s a lot of deception in the information sphere. You’ve fallen for it.
Not to mention those leaked Pentagon documents from last year. IIRC, it turned out that the USA had estimated that Russia had suffered around double as much casualties, both killed and wounded, than Ukraine.
That reminds me, sanctions did not only lead to problems with components but also with machine tools.
For example, I had read the claim that one of the reasons that the T-14 Armata tank had never reached the mass production stage was that the sanction regime created by Russia’s annexation of the Crimea made it no longer possible to import the machine tools needed for the assembly line.
https://wavellroom.com/2023/02/10/armata-the-story-is-over/
By that logic, Germany must have been doing much better at the end of WWI.
I’m not surprised by the backlash, but since it’s far down in the comment chain, I’ll reply one level higher. Anyway:
Open source data: that’s the thing, how do you know what’s real? It’s not implausible that this data is skewed and flooded by propaganda. After all, warfare is based on deception, as a famous strategist once said.
Territory: It could be that Russia is fighting a war of attrition, and is willing to advance slowly and methodically.
More reserves/disenfranchised: Maybe, but why is Russian morale still high? They seem a bit too motivated for cannon fodder. And there are yet other points, such as their economy still chugging along despite the sanctions, and despite predictions of collapse. Granted, they’re trading with China, India, and the rest of BRICS, which helps compensate, but still.
The overall indicators are not consistent with the imminent collapse that’s been promised throughout this conflict. If my impressions are correct, then the Russo-Ukrainian War could end very differently than expected, and I’m just providing a fair warning of this.
The general tone of your answers is along the line of “arguments for X cannot be proved with 100% certainty, what if not-X instead?” I have read you follow the same rhetoric with “what if fascist governments are good at war, actually” or “what if diversity is bad for rome, actually” even as Bret made that last point as a cornerstone of his phd thesis, so arguably one of the best argumentation one could think of.
What’s more, these comments always go in the same direction (what if stuff liberals like is bad and the opposite is good). The problem isn’t the direction itself, it’s the general predictability of the tone along with the emptiness of the content (it is trivial to make the assertion that an argument isn’t 100% perfect outside spheres like mathematics, just like it’s trivial to note that not-X has a nonzero probability of being true). I don’t know if it is a kind of concern trolling or if you have this emotional reaction typical of too-much-online people to never ever let a viewpoint you dislike go unchallenged on the internet, but it makes for unpleasant reading. There are quite a few commenters on this blog that I mostly skip because of that syndrome.
And do we have any real reasons to assume that OSINT is ‘skewed and flooded by propaganda’ in the first place?
Many months ago I had followed the war in the AH.com internet forum on those threads about the Ukraine War in PolChat and as far as I am aware nobody had made the argument there that the likes of ‘Oryxspioenkop’ would be propaganda deliberately distorting their data
There not even those guys who go on about how that ‘the US government is just as bad as the CCP; because whilst the PRC is genociding Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the USA is genociding Blacks in Flint’, ‘it is racist of the Ukrainians to call the Russians orcs’, or ‘India had been justified in not condemning the Russian invasion because the UK had supported Pakistan in 1971*’, who flood that sub-forum, had made such claims.
So, let’s just say I am sceptical of that; if not even those above mentioned people claim such things.
* Unsurprisingly, when I had that looked up on Wikipedia it had turned out that not only had the UK done absolutely nothing to support Pakistan in that war; but that the then Prime Minister of Britain had even later received an award from the Bangladeshi government instead.
Well, the claims I myself have encountered more often are in the vein of ‘it will take Ukraine years to reconquer most of the lost territory’ than ‘Russia will immediately collapse’. So, now I find myself wondering which of our two experiences was more representative.
* Unsurprisingly, when I had that looked up on Wikipedia it had turned out that not only had the UK done absolutely nothing to support Pakistan in that war; but that the then Prime Minister of Britain had even later received an award from the Bangladeshi government instead.
The US under Nixon and Kissinger really did support Pakistan in the war, at least to some degree (and more broadly supported Pakistan during the Cold War since India leaned towards the Soviet Union), but I don’t know if England ever did the same.
Whoops, it looks like I had made a formatting error in my reply by forgetting to place a ‘/’ before the second ‘blockquote’.
or ‘India had been justified in not condemning the Russian invasion because the UK had supported Pakistan in 1971*’, who flood that sub-forum, had made such claims.
The better argument here, in my opinion, is that Putin’s regime isn’t the soviet union of 1971. Putin and his regime are broadly “of the Right”, take their ideological inspiration from the Whites and before that the Czarist regime, not from the Red side (look up his public pronouncements if you don’t believe me), and don’t have any of the features of the communist regime (central planning, state ownership, exaltation of the industrial worker etc.) that made it attractive to lots of South Asians in the 1970s. Ukraine and Belarus have as much legitimate claim to be Soviet successor states as Putin’s Russia does, probably much better if you ask me, so there’s no consistent ideological reason why the sympathy for the Soviet state of the 1970s should translate into sympathy for the Putin regime.
Though it still indicates Russia being closer to India’s archenemy than India itself.
I can’t speak for the Indian security / defense / foreign policy establishment (nor do I have any real interest in trying to figure out what they may be thinking), but I don’t *think* they really perceive China as an “arch-enemy”. I think the whole concept of India having an arch enemy at all is really too dumb for words (not criticizing you, i’m much more criticizing defense hawks in India who might think in these terms)- India in its current borders is effectively unconquerable because of its population size, and even any of the mid-size states, were they an independent country, has enough people that it would be very difficult for anyone to conquer, and as has been pointed out many times on this blog before, conquest is a negative-sum proposition in the modern era anyway. But, to the extent that anyone in the Indian political establishment, on the center or right of the political spectrum, does think in terms of arch enemies, I would bet they’re much more likely to see Pakistan (an important US ally, even today) as the arch enemy rather than China.
China and India, in the last analysis, have some border disputes but they’re also very important trade partners of each other, and in my experience there’s also a lot of envy and admiration of China’s development successes in India. Pakistan on the other hand, is an actual *ideological* rival for both the center and right of the Indian political establishment, for different reasons, in a way that China isn’t, and of course has an important territorial dispute with India as well (involving areas that are both more populous and more “core” to India than the areas disputed with China are).
uchi: I appreciate your critique, and I’m sorry you find my thoughts to be unpalatable. However, I’d like to correct a few points:
I’m not a concern troll, and I don’t reflexively argue with things I disagree with. There are lots of things I pass over entirely, like our host’s thesis on the Spartans, for example. Moreover, when I do engage, as in those examples you cited (fascism & war, diversity & Rome), I tend to have good reasons for doing so. Also, such controversy doesn’t describe my entire history here, only some of it.
In this case (Ukraine), I kept my response brief, and only elaborated when challenged.
Tus 3: come to think of it, both of those claims have been made (sudden collapse vs gradual reconquista).
back to uchi; you are correct in that I have a tendency to consider both sides, and at times play devil’s advocate. However, I’m just encouraging others to see issues from other angles instead of one favored perspective; it’s not meant to be the logician game or sophistry you portray it as. For the record, I thought that WWII was getting mischaracterized, and I think that Roman history just doesn’t neatly align with either liberal or anti-liberal conceptions of diversity and its effects.
As for Ukraine… you can’t say I didn’t warn you.
That new
That new Enuma Elish translation and commentary is such a gift. It makes me wonder, for academic works that are rarely released for profit anyway – why wouldn’t such open-access publications become the preferred medium? Or conversely, did the authors of this new work commit some career-destroying faux-pas by foregoing a hardcopy publication? I’m guessing they didn’t, so is there some secret sauce that makes some open-access ok while most are hitched to the hardcopy-book grinder?
I suggest you read the excellent comment by Eric above. Open access is not free. Journals require a publishing fee. This is a non-trivial amount of money. For example Oxford University Press’ journal “Bioinformatics” charges around 4000 dollars for publishing a journal article.
In my country, The Netherlands, many research grants (at least for the field I am active in) require the work to be published open-access. But that means the money is available.
My guess is that the translation was also grant-funded which allowed the researcher to publish it open access.
This blog has been such a balm to the soul since I found it and every new entry is appointment reading for me. I really appreciate all the perspective provided on history including the very real insights about how and why it matters in the present day – the human condition is Also now I’m gonna spend my Saturday reading Enuma Elish.
What specifically would you do with an unexpected grant of $1000?
Same question for $10,000?
Nudge
So I guess you don’t have a specific use for an unexpected $1000 or $10,000 grant?
Milne book ordered! A bargain price on Amazon today.
I have seen many people compare Trump to roman figure or another (sulla, Ceasar, Nero, etc). Who do you think is closer? I find the comparison to Caligula interesting, but someone remarqued funnily that it was unfair to Caligula because his horse wasn’t a parthian asset. Someone on an obscure blog even compared him to Attila as a Barbarian plundering a decaying structure. What is your opinion and do you still think he will be America’s mussolini?
Not to disagree with you on anything of substance, but the horse analogy spot already belongs to Scaramucci.
On an internet forum I had once encountered somebody who had compared Trump with Gracchus. Poorly enough, I have forgotten the reasoning behind that.
In the commentaries on Enuma Elish, Marc van de Mieroop’s exposition of the thinking behind Marduk’s names reminds me of A Wizard of Earthsea. Did LeGuin know off the Mesopotamian theology of names?
I don’t know specifically, but a belief in the power of names is found in a lot of cultures (e.g., pretty much the entire ancient Near East, not just Mesopotamia). LeGuin’s parents were anthropologists, and she herself was well-read in mythology and psychology, so she could have been inspired by the general pattern rather than by any specific example.
Her father in fact studied a Native American man who refused to say his own name for such reasons, and is thus known as Ishi (which means ‘man’ in his language).
Speaking of this, I’d love to see our host analyse Le Guin’s fiction like he has done with Tolkien and Martin
There is a lot more magic (or in some cases, science so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic) in LeGuin than in either Tolkien or Martin. So it may be less susceptible to historical analysis. But maybe Bret should give it a try.
For a military historian, there’s basically nothing to analyse in Le Guin.
IIRC, the nearest thing to a battle in the entire Earthsea trilogy is the Viking-equivalent raid on Ged’s home village where he discovers he has magical ability. The only fight with more than single digit number of participants that I can remember in her Hainish cycle science fiction stories is in The Word for World is Forest. Sure, there are battles in some of the other books, but they happen “off screen”
Fair points both of you (ey81 and scifihugh) though I was thinking more of his analysis of societal & cultural elements like Rohirric leadership or Westerosi feudalism.
That said I seem to remember a siege being a main part of one of her other Hainish books; should be Planet of Exile I think
It seems to be incredibly widespread as a belief – across Europe, the Middle East and Egypt, if this is anything to go by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name
And it makes sense: if you believe in magic spells (spiel=spell) then you believe that speaking words can affect the world. Getting the words right would obviously be an important part of that. Just like you can curse something by using a part of that thing – hair or fingernails, or a likeness – you should be able to enspell something using its name.
Babylonian belief seems to be a bit different: the written name encapsulates the thing, so if you can ‘unpack’ the cuneiform you can get at the essence of the thing. It may have parallels in similar scripts (Japanese?)
Did you mean “literary invention” for Mr Spurious? If not, “intention” might work too but I’ve never heard the phrase before.