Hey folks! Apologies for the lack of a post this week – a mix of teaching, writing and family demands had to come first. Still, so that I don’t leave you with nothing to read, here are some things I’ve been reading and watching lately you may find interesting.
Over on YouTube, Tod Todeschini of Tod’s Workshop is doing some interesting experiments with fire arrows, trying to refine a design and formula that performs well, using just medieval materials. The results are impressive, though of course at best this sort of method can only yield a plausible ‘it could have worked like this’ conclusion (since the materials were available) rather than ‘this is how they did it.’ What I find most interesting, however, is how relatively modest his final fire arrows are: they burn hot and for a while, but it is hard to miss that he would have to get quite lucky with them to set his wooden target alight. I don’t think that’s a failure of Tod’s approach, but actually a success: he’s confirming the efficacy of these weapons, in that it takes a lot of fire arrows to get a settlement or camp burning, because each individual arrow is relatively unlikely on its own to light a fire. But of course an army in a siege context that can keep applying fire arrows can eventually cause a lot of little fires which may get out of control, thus making them a valuable siege tool.
Also on YouTube, I ran across an older video on ships biscuits, often known on land as hardtack, which goes through the process of creating them and the ways you might eat them. The Romans had a similar campaign food, called bucellatum which seems to have been a similar dense, dehydrated biscuit (Amm Mac. 18.7.2; HA Avid. Cass. 5.3, Pesc. Nig. 10.4; Cod. Iust. 12.37.1; cf. ‘prepared rations’ in older sources which may be the same, Livy 21.49.7-8, 34.12.6, 37.37.5; Front. Strat. 4.1.1). An army could prepare these in advance of a march in order to move through areas without supplies or move quickly for a short time without the need to forage, since they would keep – much the same way they were used in early modern warfare. By removing basically all of the water in the baking process, these sorts of hardtack can last a long time (decades) without spoiling and pack a lot of calories into a relatively small package. Of course, they’re not very appetizing, so being able to compel your soldiers to eat hardtack was itself an exertion of a form of discipline.
We also had reporting on an interesting archaeological find outside Vienna, Austria of a mass grave of what appears to be roughly 150 Roman soldiers from the late first century AD. We don’t have full publication yet just an initial press announcement, but from the description, the assessment, that this was a battlefield burial of a defeated unit by an enemy (probably the locals) makes a lot of sense. 150 is something of an odd number. We’d probably expect a large patrol in force like this to be done with a cohort (480 men), while 150 is too many for a single century (80 men). My initial guess might be that this was originally a cohort which got into a fight that it lost – perhaps an ambush – with most of the cohort fleeing or retreating (but obviously with heavy casualties), while the victors looted and swiftly buried the fallen (taking their own dead back for a more ordered, proper burial).
Also worth noting for your ancient new and updates, we’ve had a new Pasts Imperfect late in September, with an essay on monsters and monstrous peoples in ancient and medieval thought and the usual bevy of interesting links.
Finally, I’ve had more than a few people ask, given my discussion of American civil-military relations, what I thought of the recent general-officer all-call meeting in Quantico, which I have come to calling the Quantico Disgrace, which I suppose answers the question of what I think. I’m working up a piece of my own on this (not for the blog, for somewhere else) but in the meantime, I thought that both Kori Schake’s take at Foreign Policy (alas, paywalled) and Alan Elrod’s at Liberal Currents were both good at expressing why the content of that meeting was so troubling and dangerous and such a clear and open breach of two-and-a-half-centuries of successful civil-military tradition. I will also add that for a military which has, for at least the last 165 years, distinguished itself by winning its wars through relentlessly superior logistics and organizing, the emphasis on chasing the mirage of ultra-masculine ‘strong men’ super-soldiers (at the expense of logistics, organizers and bureaucrats) strikes as almost absurdly historically illiterate. The United States military has spent more than the last century and a half mopping the floor with manly-man armies, be they the Flower of Southern Chivalry1 or the Nazi Übermenschen. Where it has failed (Afghanistan, Vietnam) it has not been fighting armies of body-builders but scrappy, under-fed, foreign-supported forces willing to be tactically and politically flexible, like a smaller boxer waiting for a larger one to ‘punch himself out.’
Finally, a poem, Margaret Atwood’s, “The Loneliness of the Military Historian.” An excerpt (read the whole things):
My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.
[…]
But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.
And that’s all for now. Back next week for more on the labor of peasant women! Here’s a picture of some cats to close us out:
The whole “we lose wars because our army is too fat” narrative shows up more places than you’d expect. It was in last month’s Harper’s, in a piece which was pretty execrable even aside from that.
The classic essay Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny talks about this.
When a nation feels threatened, it gets swole. Germans and Norwegians became obsessed with individual self-improvement through physical fitness around the end of the Napoleonic Era. British citizens took up this Physical Culture as the 19th century—and their empire—began to wane. And yoga, in its current practice as a form of meditative strength training, came out of the Indian Independence movement of the 1920s and 30s.
The impetus of these movements isn’t fitness for the sake of pleasure, for the pure joys of strength and physical beauty. It’s competitive. It’s about getting strong enough to fight The Enemy, whoever that may be.
https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/
When a nation feels threatened, it gets swole.
This isn’t really relevant to wartime specifically, but maybe the way that Communist countries during the Cold War (and for that matter Cuba today) invests heavily in their national sports program and in the Olympic athletes specifically, might be another example?
They weren’t just invested in sports, but also in international competitions in general, for the prestige of beating the capitalists. The place the USSR was the most successful was not a physical sport but chess.
This essay seems to have a rather enormous blind spot. The horny went away for a very clear reason that has nothing to do with swoleness or puritan values, old movies were sexist and objectifying as hell. Heroes routinely acted as sex pests and frequently committed sex crimes. Audiences will overlook that in an old movie but they would be off-put if characters acted that way in a movie made today. Movies could in theory show horniness without those things but it takes a lot more screentime and finesse to be respectfully horny then lean into narratives about playing hard to get or a woman as an object of desire.
The essay cites quite a few examples and some of them seem like fairly obvious ways that a movie could be written to convey “this character has sex” without “this character is a sex criminal.”
For instance, filmmakers could do more to establish romantic chemistry between established couples the film is already telling us exist (e.g. married couples, characters who are specifically going to get together during the film, and so on).
The “this character has sex offscreen” vibes of yesteryear were relying on the film language established through sex pest behavior and objectification of women. You could establish a new film language but that is a laborious process and gets you relentlessly attacked by the social injustice warrior crowd.
I don’t think it would actually be that difficult to establish characters with active sexuality that wouldn’t get ‘attacked’ in such a way. But then, I think you may perceive certain movements such as MeToo as being more about being sex-negative than I see them as.
It’s interesting to compare action movies, in which characters are sexy without actually having sex, to rom-coms, in which the characters frequently have sex, but they aren’t necessarily glamorously sexy. It’s almost as if Hollywood has some sexual stereotypes regarding it’s *audiences*.
The US army cared more about physical fitness than the Wehrmacht, particularly for officers.
That’s not an indication that the US cared more, it’s an indication that the US was drafting a far smaller part of it’s population and could be a lot more selective.
No. US training emphasised physical fitness to a significantly greater extent than the German system, and this cannot be dismissed as part of an effort to weed out weaklings.
The Germans did not use a US-style system with a bootcamp in which recruits were supposed to be broken while getting yelled at and performing lots of physical tasks. Their training was more practical. Can the soldier march? Is the officer competent? Whereas the US collected extensive statistics on physical fitness and expected their soldiers to pass fitness benchmarks, Germans left such training to the discretion of individual officers. When reading on the difference between German and American training, one gets the impression that the German system was often smarter and defied the stereotype of Nazi soldiers as brutish robots.
The Germans had a substantial pre-World War One history of universal conscription, interrupted postwar only from 1918 to 1934 (so not long enough for the institutional knowledge to be entirely forgotten). The US, by contrast, did not have anywhere near the same depth of history on the subject of rapidly mobilizing a large army that did not have prior training plus reserve status.
What is noteworthy here is the gap between the Nazi propaganda machine- which was eager to present its own soldiers as violent robots out to fulfill brutal impulses of conquest, when you think about it- and the institutional realities of a German military that culturally predated the Nazi state and, while fine with war crimes, was at least pragmatic about how to put itself into a position to commit them.
Compare and contrast to imperial Japan during the same period, perhaps…
But then, the modern Trumpist ‘Hegsethian’ preoccupation with hard manly ‘ultimate warrior’ soldiers who do lots of PT and don’t have time for ’emasculating’ nonsense like “rules of engagement” or “acknowledging that brown people have a role other than cannon fodder” is also fairly superficial.
Under Trumpism, the army is almost certainly never seriously intended to be tested in battle against any enemy other than the American people itself. Specifically the center-left parts of the American people, which under Trumpist ideology is assumed to be disarmed and incapable of resistance.
The Nazis may have been evil, but no student of military history would characterize their soldiers as stupid or brutish.
Quite a lot of students of Holocaust history would, though by no means all.
“The Germans did not use a US-style system with a bootcamp in which recruits were supposed to be broken while getting yelled at and performing lots of physical tasks. Their training was more practical.”
I feel this would benefit from citations to sources other than “Full Metal Jacket”. No one in the US Army in WW2 went through anything called a “boot camp” because calling your new recruits “boots” is a Marine thing not an Army thing. The aim of US army initial training was not to break its recruits, though there was a good deal of yelling. Physical training is actually practical if you are training infantry to go and fight a war, and of course infantrymen would get a good deal of trade-specific practical training – 13 weeks of AIT and 11 weeks of combined arms training, followed by formation manoeuvres, after they finished initial training.
Meanwhile, you are wrong about the nature of German recruit training – it was pretty similar to the US version, with plenty of shouting, square-bashing, physical training and so on. Towards the end of the war, of course, training cycles got shorter and shorter as the Germans became more desperate.
@ey81 , I don’t really know what you’re replying to. My own point about ‘brutishness’ is not so much that the individual German soldier during World War Two was personally an ogre, as that the collective military machine was turned to ogrish ends.
After all, the underlying reality was that these men were being sent forth to crush, kill, and rob tens of millions of other people all over Europe and turn those other people’s things and land into German things and land.
Ultimately, the extreme ‘macho’ character we so often find in fascism and fascist-adjacent movements (and don’t take my word for it; Umberto Eco noted the same thing) comes from a simple source. It is one of the few ways, within a culture that still has some memory of Enlightenment philosophy and Christian theology and the Golden Rule, to really justify the fascist embrace of predatory violence and systematic cruelty. Under machismo, a bullying relationship is justified between almost any two men, and the concept readily scales up to nations preying on one another.
Humans like moral explanations for victory and defeat. Not worshiping the gods properly and moral decay (especially if it leads to a lack of masculine virtues) have been very popular explanations for setbacks, to a puzzling extent. Surely military men could have known better?
But this thinking is not limited to reactionaries. I will not write a political rant here, but there seem to me plenty of things the US military does for cultural reasons that could not possibly improve performance, or are irrelevant to it.
I am genuinely curious how drones will change the worth of special forces.
Healthier people can also indicate your society is more wealthy, and if you have successful public health policies you can achieve a greater recruiting pool. The latter fact was not just important for people with fashionable uniforms. Many European powers introduced public health and welfare measures specifically to improve their military potential, e.g. Britain after the Boer War.
The National School Lunch Program passed into law in the US in 1946. It was primarily done for national security reasons. Too many people were rejected for military service due to problems a healthier diet would have mitigated.
“150 is something of an odd number. We’d probably expect a large patrol in force like this to be done with a cohort (480 men), while 150 is too many for a single century (80 men).” It could be a task force (probably two centuries strong) operating independently of its parent cohort: we have that famous strength report from Vindolanda (https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/TabVindol154), where the 1st Cohort of Tungrians is broken into two large garrisons and several small detachments.
“The United States military has spent more than the last century and a half mopping the floor with manly-man armies, be they the Flower of Southern Chivalry1 or the Nazi Übermenschen”
AIUI, WW2 German propaganda mostly emphasised the strength of the Luftwaffe and Panzer arm, and perhaps the dedication of their soldiery. Not their PT regime. After all, they wanted to look fearsome, not ridiculous.
I wonder if the manly-man thing comes from Hollywood.
Ehm, famously Tom of Finland got his sense of the ideal male body from staring at German soldiers doing camp work, which included exercise drills.
Personally, I always think of a line from Storm of Steel: “Once again it was proved that brave weaklings are of more use than strong cowards”
I’ve seen American cartoons from the war that depict Nazis as both heavily muscled and ridiculous.
Yeah and between German and Soviets, I’d argue that German is the “nerd” side here, yet they lose all the same.
You can have fitness nerds; it’s pretty common actually. While the Soviets did have the “new soviet man” notions, they weren’t nearly as central to the culture as the german “ubermench” ideas. So the Germans might be more nerdy then the Soviets* that’s irrelevant to the question of who is more obsessed with the ideal male.
* but it’s probably a lot more ambiguous then you think, pop culture doesn’t reflect the parts of Nazi culture that were just weird and stupid even in ways that weren’t related to them being genocidal villains.
you know the strong men look is excessively silly in a time of greater and greater guns you know? like a bullet does not give a fuck about your abs. or the Artillery. or the tank. or the plane
also doing this when everyone just got a master class in Drones are actually wildly helpful and are more likely just going to continue to be even more so is a whole other issue.
growing closer and closer to just push a button everyone dies games silly people. humans are more and more useless on the battlefield.
The Age of the Clanker’s is coming people, it is almost here!!!! (joke.)
That poem is beautiful and brutal and depressing and …
“But of course an army in a siege context that can keep applying fire arrows can eventually cause a lot of little fires which may get out of control, thus making them a valuable siege tool.”
Even if they don’t they distract the defenders (potentially creating exploitable gaps), sap their resources (especially water), and just generally make life miserable for the defenders (sapping will). You don’t need the arrows to be super effective, you just need them to be effective enough to warrant immediate attention.
It’s like shooting arrows at soldiers. Armor is going to stop most arrows (not all, a few will find weak points). But walking through a hail of arrow fire, occasionally hearing a scream as someone gets hit, and needing to expend energy is going to drain you. And that makes the job of the spearman who will eventually kill you much easier. I’d MUCH rather face a tired opponent than a well-rested one.
As for hard tack, I find the idea that getting people to eat it requires extraordinary discipline to be a bit weird. It was demonstrably eaten in a variety of circumstances, including pretty much every navy (which by definition was going into areas where foraging was impossible) and by civilians in certain settings. Some of these situations are not situations where we would expect to see extreme discipline; often it’s just a matter of there not being better options, so you ate what you could. And it’s worth pointing out that food as entertainment is a modern thing. Don’t get me wrong, people like nice things so they wanted their food to taste good, but getting enough food was so often a problem that bland, tasteless, hard to eat foods were not uncommon in the past. (In the British Royal Navy in the 1700s/early 1800s the mess had a cook to try to make the boiled food appealing.)
Extreme discipline in the sense that even when you are not trapped on a ship or in a famine/trapped in a snowstorm, you can still have them eat it instead of dispersing to find other food, mutiny or desert.
Don’t think it requires extraordinary discipline? The claim is that requiring it is an “exertion of a form of discipline.” Which I think is right? You need the troops to go along with it and not either go foraging on their own, or demand delays that allow for more palatable food.
> no other option
The hard part is, there was never no other option. There’s always desertion, defection, or less extreme, foraging people they shouldn’t. Discipline makes people willing to eat hardtack despite those options.
“(If you want to know what cram is, I can only say that I don’t know the recipe; but it is biscuitish, keeps good indefinitely, is supposed to be sustaining, and is certainly not entertaining, being in fact very uninteresting except as a chewing exercise. It was made by the Lake-men for long journeys.)” – Not At Home, The Hobbit.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books have the equivalent in dwarf bread. It lets a traveler go for miles, because when the only food in your pack is dwarf bread, you’ll keep walking in hopes of finding something edible. For the same reason a single piece can last indefinitely, as it’ll never be eaten.
Worth noting that the Admiralty went to some lengths to ensure Royal Navy rations were of the highest possible standard with the technologies available, that it provided a very generous amount of calories compared to what was usual ashore (when you lived on bread and lard, with meat maybe once a week, boiled beef or pork three times a week, peas and oatmeal every day, cheese, lime juice, beer, rum and hard-tack look pretty good), and that the ration did not distinguish by rank – if an admiral wanted fancy food he paid for it himself.
A fair point. Food at that time was absolutely a concern of pretty much any military. I’ve read (but can’t personally confirm) that canning really became A Thing at this time, in part to provide better rations, because an army marches on its stomach and a diet of canned vegetables is FAR superior to one of hard tack and salt beef. I’ve experimented a bit with this myself, and….yeah, canned food may not impress modern Food Network chefs, but if you’re hiking 20 miles in a desert per day, canned food is so superior to other methods of preservation that there’s simply no contest.
Where this comes into play with ships is duration of trips. A ship that was on paper on a voyage of several months wasn’t at sea the whole time; it was expected that they would refit occasionally. And part of refitting was picking up fresh provisions. Yes, cabin stores and the wardroom mess and the like, but also a variety of foods for the folks before the mast. They may not have had a precise understanding of what caused scurvy, but they knew that bad diets killed.
That said, there was also a strong undercurrent of conservativism. You could shift the edges of what was acceptable in the diet, but the sailors expected their pound of biscuits and meant or peas or oatmeal (depending on day). There was a very strong bottom-up current as well as a top-down (which is what most discussions of ‘discipline” mean).
It actually reminds me of the churches around where I grew up. I grew up when air conditioning was really becoming ubiquitous, and there were a LOT of congregations that refused to get AC for their churches. Ostensibly this was to save money, but the real reason was that they considered enduring the heat during summer to be morally superior to having an air conditioned place of worship. The areas without AC looked down on those with it–there was an attitude of, those without AC were proving their devotion and were more honest about their faith. (A bit of Cult of the Bad-Ass, but the same men also bragged about their ornamental flowers, so it was somewhat tempered). Jack London called it “pride of trace and trail”. In every sailor’s diary I’ve read (not an expert certainly, but I’ve read a few), there was an attitude of pride in one’s ability to not merely endure the hardships, including diet, but of coming to enjoy them.
I’m not sure I’m explaining that well. I’m not sure this is something that can BE explained; it may be one of those “You had to be there” things.
To an extent, there’s a gap between the food supplies a ship will hopefully be able to take aboard at the ports it visits every few weeks most of the time, and the supplies a ship must have for the crew to not die in a reasonable worst-case scenario. If you are on the crew of a sailing ship that is going to cross the Atlantic, you will be at sea for several weeks, far past the point at which fresh provisions become inedible, and there is simply nothing to be done about it. Trips to other continents will usually include such a long ‘hop’ between ports for a sailing ship, where the direction of the wind makes it burdensome if not impossible to find a port capable of reliably feeding the crew of the ship.
Sailors expected a solid regular diet of this admittedly low-grade food because it was necessary for survival- they were going to be expected to perform hard labor, they had to eat something, and if that “something” was nearly anything other than hardtack and salt meat, there was a very real risk that it would all literally rot away within a week or two and leave them with nothing to complete the voyage.
As to the undercurrent of conservatism: I’ve heard an account of Captain Cook taking on wild plants as vegetables (since he had a botanist who could identify them as safe). Apparently he had sailors flogged, for refusing to eat these new foods alongside their usual boiled meat etc.
As a member of the clergy today, I absolutely read articles and have conversations with people who argue that we ought to embrace some discomfort or other because it will produce morally superior Christians. A recent one I read argued that hard wooden pews are better than cushioned ones because it reminds people that the church is more about God’s holiness than about their comfort. Historically, before the advent of A/C people had the same argument over indoor plumbing, musical accompaniment to hymns, and I’m sure a multitude of other things. One memorable line by a German immigrant who opposed the installation of a bathroom in the church basement: “Meine kirche ist nicht eine scheisshaus!”
In a way, this makes sense. One of the basic ways humans do moral training is they choose to endure hardships which they aren’t obliged to endure. The reason one takes pride in enjoying the hardships is because that’s a signal that the moral formation has penetrated to the person’s core. The person has also proved that they have “the right stuff” for that moral formation to succeed: lesser people would have succumbed to injury, death, or the temptation of comfort. A sailor who comes to enjoy ship’s biscuits has proven that he is a real, good, sailor, who can endure with the best of them.
Remember that the cult of the bad-ass isn’t an entirely silly thing. We attach moral value to all kinds of human virtues and activities, and usually that’s for the best. An example all might agree with: we want people to understand that developing a measure of resilience is part of being a good adult. Becoming capable of handling the ordinary misfortunes of life is an important part of living in any community. Being resilient means that in times of communal hardship, you won’t become an additional burden on your neighbors. It also means that you are competent to have and raise children (who themselves typically need to be taught a reasonable amount of resilience). And if we know a person who entirely lacks resilience, we probably would label them “whiny,” “entitled,” or “extra.”
The problem with the cult of the bad-ass is that it usually attaches moral value to something which doesn’t really provide the benefits it promises. A great warrior is probably not an equally great military leader because personal combat aptitude doesn’t translate to leadership & logistics. Personal strength and the ability to endure hardship often don’t translate to other moral virtues which we think are important: kindness, critical thinking, patience, etc.
But I get what you’re saying. And, I would argue, that hard pews don’t necessarily do a good job of developing our love for God and our neighbors 🙂
One notes that Dr. Devereaux’s exact words were: “…being able to compel your soldiers to eat hardtack was itself an exertion of a form of discipline.” This is not the same as “extraordinary’ discipline, merely “a form of” discipline. Hardtack is a food that has been called unappetizing and undesirable for as long as we have written records. Often it cannot be eaten normally and has to be crushed up and used in a stew.
A certain minimal baseline level of discipline is necessary to get a large group of people to willingly sit around in a camp eating hardtack as the basis of their diet rather than, say, dispersing to become the unwilling bandit guests of the surrounding population and forcing them to hand over more palatable bread at swordpoint. The level of discipline is by no means extraordinary by the standards of armies through history, but is nonetheless “a form of discipline.”
Having had a day to ponder, I think Trump’s meeting with the generals was actually a very good thing, possibly for surprising reasons.
First, it was a reminder that a great many military personnel, including their leaders, still honor their oath to the constitution — and not to the president. My understanding is that they’re trained to be apolitical, but the fact that they honored that training seems significant.
Second, because Trump’s advisors almost certainly knew this, they did not (as I feared they would do) ask the generals to swear their oath again, but this time to serve the president. (Basically what Hitler did.)
Third, the generals were essentially unanimous, at least in public: not a one of them applauded Trump. That startled me, frankly.
These things gives me hope that things won’t end as badly as they might have.
Since this blog is a pedantry-inclusive space, allow me to briefly point out that Tod’s first name is actually Danilo (source: his own comment on one of his YouTube videos from a few years back, can’t recall which one exactly). In other words, “Tod” (from Tod Cutler and Tod’s Workshop — still not as long a title as Jonathan Ferguson’s though) is his nickname, which he has come to use (at least in public) in place of his given name. The fact that it is likely derived from his surname contributes to the awkwardness of seeing him referred to as “Tod Todeschini” (which I assume raises an eyebrow even from those unaware of his actual first name).
I completely understand wanting to respect Tod (and maintain a professional style) by referring to him using a full name, yet given that he seems to prefer being known simply as “Tod”, perhaps it would be more appropriate to refer to him as such, as we usually do for creators or performers who are known to the public under an adopted name of their own choosing.
Oh hey, this touches on something I’ve been wondering for a while: given their caloric content, low perishability, and significant improvement in tastiness, why weren’t dried noodles a staple foodstuff for armies on the march? Seems like a no-brainer, but it doesn’t seem like anybody actually did this.
I read about an absurdly long and detailed board game named The Campaign for North Africa, in which Italian troops use more water because they have to cook pasta.
That whole game was in some ways a massive prank. The designer put in rules almost as jokes. He knew that the Italians cooked their pasta in the canned tomato sauce they ate it with but put in the water rule because the game design was built to make things more and more granular to the point of ridiculousness. It was designed to break wargamers with the level of detail. The designer admitted this:
“Is this game something you should sit down and play? No, there are plenty of good Africa games, unless you really want to get down to that level.”
The designer never finished a full game. When someone tried to point out a flaw in the rules he would insist they play the game again and see if it happened again. That reportedly solved the problem.
I find that game fascinating. Maybe it is just a joke, like you said, but it still gets at something very real. Wargames, by their nature, simplify a *lot* of details about warfare. The Campaign for North Africa forces you to realize just how insanly complicated a war is, even just the one specific campaign of it. It’s so complicated that it’s basically impossible for one person to run all of it, you need an entire staff of professionals to make it work. It makes me appreciate more the boring aspects of war, so less “he made a brilliant and daring tactical move” and more “he set up a very competant logicistics staff.”
Oh and apparently the Italians really did use pasta rations, but they came with a special pasta sauce so it could all be cooked without water. Sounds terrible, but there must have been someone in the Italian HQ who had thought of this problem in advance and then assigned a whole team of cooks and engineers to think of a solution. Just so much work involved for even the most mundane tasks.
Making hardtack is in some ways as easy as baking the sheet of dough multiple times. Dried noodles are not as simple to make because they need to retain the gluten chains which allow the noodles to stretch and get gathered up by a spoon and chopsticks/fork. So producing them requires either a controlled moisture reduction process, or a slow drying at lower temperatures.
On top of that, fresh noodles are easier to make in the field than fresh bread. You just need flour, salt, and water and you can produce basic noodles as long as you can boil water. And you can boil water on a campfire as long as you have a pot or pan that will hold up to the flame. (Don’t recommend it, though.) Eggs as a stickier binder or lye to alkalize the noodles are bonuses when you have them available. And even with dried noodles, you need water and fuel for boiling for them to be toothsome. Hardtack can be eaten dry in an emergency, and more practically, can be softened with cold water, small beer, sour wine, etc.
Industrial noodlemaking changes this, because it allows for regular batch production of dried noodles that will almost always last a full year without any issues. But it takes longer than you’d think- when instant noodles were invented in the 1950s, they were six times the price of fresh wheat ramen noodles. It took broader changes in the value of labor for dried and flash-fried noodles to push fresh and parboiled into second place.
Or to sum all this up: noodles are surprisingly complex.
100% agree that it’s feasible to make noodles from scratch on a campfire. If you have at least one experienced camp cook and a few helpers who know how to shut up and do what they’re told, you’ll be slurping pasta in no time.
As far as I understand, boiling food was extremely common in pre-modern contexts (definitely in Europe; probably everywhere else as well). In a military camp, a group of eight people or so can dig a fire pit and cut branches to make tripods in a matter of minutes. As long as you have a kettle and something to hang it off of, you can boil loads of water really quickly.
If you don’t have a kettle, you will probably have to steal one from the local population. We unfortunately have reason to believe that armies did that sort of thing all the time.
There seems to be at least anecodtes of people cooking in thier helmets in a pinch, too.
I believe you can eat hard tack just by making it damp with water. No cooking necessary. That’s not true with noodles till people invent instant noodles – you need a pot to boil some kind of liquid, which implies fuel and fire. If you need your army to operate in all kinds of conditions (including secrecy and at speed), it’s not the most convenient option.
Once you have instant noodles, that could change the game. (I suspect I’m not the only one who has eaten ramen straight out of the package. It drove my mom crazy.) Instant noodles that are cooked and then fried dry. They were invented in China a while ago (maybe Qing Dynasty), but didn’t be come common till Momofuku Ando market ramen noodles in the 1950. My guess is that before industrialization, instant noodles were too expensive to produce at military scale, given the oil needed for frying.
I am less than convinced by the hyperventilating here. Yes, wars are won by logistics, but there are reasons why PT standards exist. Until we move into all-robot warfare, soldiers are going to need to be able to lift heavy things and sometimes carry them for long periods of time without keeling over, and while Hegseth is a bit cringey about the whole thing, at the very least it is proper for commanders to at least *try* to set an example for their subordinates.
Also healthy (and more importantly, uniform) people makes easier logistics
It would be thoroughly interesting if they were to be the ones to introduce human cloning and artificial wombs (just incubators for really very preterm babies, really!), over the objections of the people who have been fighting tooth and nail against reproductive technologies for decades. (It would be entirely reasonable to observe that I’m looking way too hard for a silver lining. To which I say: “Look, Sam! The king has got a crown again! They cannot conquer for ever!”)
Considering that the US military also pays (fairly well, from what I heard) for its members’ and veterans’ medical care, they’d be foolish *not* to want their members to be as fit as possible, just for financial reasons. I’m sure other organizations do to, but the military has more power to set expectations than most other businesses would.
Higher PT standards for soldiers during their active service have relatively little to do with the costs of veterans’ medical care. Soldiers are overwhelmingly relatively young adults in their twenties and thirties; they’re not the ones who need expensive medications for obesity-related conditions. Veterans are far more likely to cost more to take care of because of physical problems they acquired while in service (such as blown-out knees caused by endless PT marches with heavy backpacks) than to cost less because they were, at one point in time, exceptionally fit.
If you want veterans to maintain physical fitness so as to reduce medical costs, you need to do more than just threaten to dishonorably discharge them from the service if they fail to literally jump through enough hoops. And that appears to be Hegseth’s plan.
The idea that troops should be fit is obvious–which is why the military requires it. The Cult of the Badass rhetoric, however, displays a dangerous failure of philosophy and priorities, hinting at very dangerous ideas (in the same way a mugger hints that truth want your wallet). Thee are multiple essays on this site on that topic. Start with the series on the Fremen Mirage (noting the obsession with manliness in the rhetoric of both).
America doesn’t win wars by being more He-man Manly Men than the enemy. We win wars by providing ice cream in the tropics and tactical Burger Kings. Or, put a different way: Amateurs talk tactics, pros talk logistics, and kids talk prowess, and talking physical prowess in a room full of professionals is rather stupid. Reminds me of discussions about sedimentology with You v Earth Creationists I have had.
Put yet another way: Ukraine is going to build 4,000,000 FPV drones and fail to meet their logistical needs, requiring supplies from the EU and USA. A speech bemoaning the lack of manliness in troops, when we are literally re-writing combat playbooks, is dangerously misguided. It represents a dangerous misalignment of priorities (remember, US troops are ALREADY held to high physical standards).
I read the series on the Fremen mirage, and thought it was good but missed a couple of things–specifically, that the hedonistic decadence the ancient writers talk about is essentially symbolic for “the ruling elites have become more interested in their privileges than their responsibilities.”
And, again–please explain to me what is wrong with saying “if we are going to insist that the troops should be physically fit, then the generals should also be physically fit.” That…kind of seems like Leadership 101 stuff.
On insisting generals being physically fit, the major problem is that it misunderstands the role of generals. They make plans and operations, they make timetables for when and where units should be for best effect to fulfill objectives, they do not lead men into battle generally to my knowledge. The soldier’s confidence is more predicated on whether or not the plan is good and the general having created relatively good results in the past rather than if the general is fit, for the general’s fitness will not save them from a bullet. The general’s duties of planning operations to fulfill strategy does not benefit from greater physical fitness necessarily, given it is mostly cerebral task they do which is minimally impacted by physical fitness. Thus, physical fitness for generals is a waste, given it does not enhance their primary role, which is planning operations, while eating into their time, whether it is their personal time or paid time, the latter of which is better spent planning than getting fit.
As for the potential leadership effects via the general setting an example, it is also a misunderstanding of the general’s role. They do not participate in such small-scale leadership as getting individual soldiers or even individual units to get into a fit state. The generals are, to my admittedly lacking knowledge, very insulated from the line soldiers, both in terms of distance, rank, and hierarchy. The generals are not the ones in a position of the kind of personal leadership that would benefit from the leader being an example, for they are separated from the regular soldier by at least three layers of increasing size, the the company, the battalion, and the brigade for a major general, with the most granular layer of the team, the squad, and the platoon being excluded. Leaders probably need to be immediately interacting with the grouping to have an impact with their physical presence, which is what is being enhanced by physical training, and for a military unit on any level but the immediate grouping in the command room, that is impractical. The army major general has, at the brigade level, 16,000 troops notionally. The marine major general has, at the brigade level, 6561 troops notionally.
Officers being fit inspiring others is not, right off the bat, implausible, but the generals are the entirely wrong place to be looking to do such a thing for the reasons mentioned above. The officers who are most likely to be inspiring and thus benefit from physical fitness’ inspirational effects are the sergeants and other non-commissioned officers, who are more likely to be out in the field than handling logistics, administrative duties, or other such things, and are generally the major authority of the army in the general soldier’s lives.
I agree with everything you say, but I think there’s another important consideration: age. My admittedly cursory research suggests that the average age of an American other-ranks soldier is under 30, while the average age at which an officer *reaches* general rank is over 50. In other words, generals are on average more than 20 years older than the actual fighting troops under their command. This is an inevitable consequence of the difference in roles, of course, not a flaw in the system.
The ability to attain and maintain a good physique for a sub-30-year-old is far superior to that of an over-50-year-old even before you factor in that the troops have an inherent physical component to their jobs which means that even if they were the same age as the generals, they’d have to devote less off-duty time to working out to reach the same fitness standards.
And the average general’s time is worth more than the average soldier’s. Insisting that they maintain the same standards of fitness as their troops when both physiology and profession makes it more challenging for them to do so is therefore inherently a waste of resources even before you factor in that it’s pointless anyway.
Obviously obese generals aren’t a great look, but I didn’t see any in that room, so it’s an invented problem.
“The officers who are most likely to be inspiring and thus benefit from physical fitness’ inspirational effects are the sergeants and other non-commissioned officers,”
Rot starts from the head. People low in the hierarchy take their cues from the people above them.
And yes, while generals who are in their fifties should not be expected to meet the same standards as privates in their twenties, the fact is that A. a sound mind in an unhealthy body is not going to be firing on as many cylinders as it would otherwise (forex, being overweight can lead to sleep issues) and B. being a general is an inherently stressful job in ways that can be tough on the body, not just the mind, and you don’t want that problem exacerbated by ill-health if it can be avoided.
Again, I think Hegseth is being cringey and weird about this whole thing, and the problems in the US military’s officer corps aren’t going to be solved by this push. But if–if–this is simply the precursor for dealing with a lot of the other nonsense that’s been going on for years in some cases and decades in others (like the fact that it is well understood that an officer evaluation that actually assesses his strengths and weaknesses rather than making him sound like the next Napoleon is a career killer), I’ll allow it.
This message is meant to be a reply to 60Guilder’s reply to my message, since for some reason I cannot reply to their message message directly, like the other reply by Tom.
I do not find the Rot Starts from the Head argument to be quite persuasive, at least for this situation, while leaders can indeed have an impact on those below them, the theoretical rot that comes from the General would have to penetrate at least three layers of separation, which seems far fetched to me. For it to work, the rot from the general would have to A) fully infect the brigade layer, which then have to B) fully infect the battalion layer from the brigade layer, more than likely without further infection from the general, which would then have to C) infect the company layer from the battalion layer, again more than likely without further infection from the general. At all transmission layers, the individuals would have the choice to take the infection or not, given they are not robots. Then you have the issue of other factors coming onto them, like horizontal peer pressure from others among their rank, or the cultural inoculation from the military culture, or the personal assessment of the pains of fitness now vs the potential pains of lack of fitness in the future.
To be frank, the Rot Starts from the Head argument reminds me of similar arguments for leaders being moral inherently causing those under them to be moral via the modelling of proper behavior, which stretches from the Romans to Confucius. It supposes that the people lower on the hierarchy, the “inferiors” to their “superiors” on the hierarchy would be easily influenced by their “superiors”. Such a model is refuted by looking at anywhere where there is a “high” and “low” culture, or any distinction from the ruling class and the ruled class, from Opera to Rap, from the lifestyles of the rich to that of the middle class, from the lives of nobles to the lives of peasants. Clearly, there is a point wherein the behaviors of the “superiors” stops permeating into the behaviors of the “inferiors”, even outside of enforced distinctions like the Spartans and the Helots or sumptuary laws.
I also find your A. argument that fitness could improve mental acuity, or as you say, a “sound mind”, to be a bit muddled. To my knowledge at least, the effects of fitness on mental acuity is indirect, as you have said, overweightness having a negative effect on sleep quality, which in turn is what has the effect on mental acuity. It does not flow that overweightness leads to lowered mental acuity, as it needs the additional chain, sleep quality, which links the two. The argument also assumes that exercise is free, even though it, like all other things in life, takes up time, thus costing everything else that can be done with it, given there are only twenty-four hours in a day with only 16 of those hours usable in the best case due to the human requirement for sleep. It also doesn’t take into account that creating a program to ensure that the generals are fit would also take up money, as people have to be assigned to watch the generals and check up on them to make sure they are meeting fitness standards.
Your second point, B., about stress being hard on the body, and thus the effects of stress should be mitigated, is valid. It would help the health of generals. I am not sure about devoting state resources to doing so would be a good use of those resources however, given that those state resources could be spent on administrative reform to weed out issues and nonsense.
On taking this talk about generals fitness to be a precursor to further administrative reform to simplify and solve inefficiencies and distortions in organizational information and other deficiencies in the military, it seems very premature to take this as a precursor. It is, as of now, talk, the cheapest and thus weakest of all signals and precursors. The desired message, “We will perform reforms of the military to root out corruption and distorting practices that reduces information” is perhaps one of the most expensive things to put into practice. In addition, the talk about physical fitness being a precursor, or a signal, for military administration reform, is quite disconnected, given it does not talk about administrative matters, or about those issues, instead talking about fitness and the generals. This signaling can also potentially be for other messages besides administrative reform for officer selection and other things, such as it potentially being a signal for “I will make our military strong in body”, or “Our military will be lead by physically strong men”, or “I like my generals to be fit”. Overall, I find taking it as a precursor, even a very distant one, to be rather unsubstantiated, given the very tenuous and indirect links between talking about the ideal of generals being fit and instituting military reform.
This is in reply to your reply to my reply (the reason you can’t reply to my reply is because of the blog’s programming limitations.)
Regarding your refutation of “rot starts from the head,” I understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t think your comparison works. The military is not a society like Greece, Rome, or China–it is an organization, where the people do tend to take their cues from the people at the top as to what is and isn’t acceptable behavior. I don’t know what your background is, but in my experience the behavior of the people at the top of the hierarchy in an organization definitely affects the behavior and morale of the people at the bottom, especially when they’re being hypocritical.
“Such a model is refuted by looking at anywhere where there is a “high” and “low” culture, or any distinction from the ruling class and the ruled class, from Opera to Rap, from the lifestyles of the rich to that of the middle class, from the lives of nobles to the lives of peasants.”
If the rich only listened to Rap, then there would be even less chance that the poor listen to Opera.
@60guilders, we have a current day example of this fitness from the top down in the military: Russia vs Ukraine.
Russian president Putin, legally head of the armed forces, has always portrayed himself as a fitness fanatic. He does martial arts, often photographed shirtless to show off his muscles. He even had himself filmed wrestling a bear to show how buff he is.
President Zelensky of Ukraine is a stand-up comedian.
But when the Russian armed forces ran into the Ukrainian, it was the Russian military that massively under-performed.
Perun’s YouTube channel has shown the difference this kind of thinking can make. The Russians unload 152mm shells one by one with a human bucket brigade, literally relying on manpower. The Ukrainians use crates and forklifts, having figured out that on the modern battlefield it’s better to get the maximum volume delivered in a minimum of time before the enemy ISR spots this concentration rather than counting reps in an exercise program.
I agree with you that top down examples matter, but for the head replacing brain tissue with muscles is not what I’d go for.
You are right and 60guilders is wrong. I have extensive direct first-hand experience of leading soldiers for whom maintaining physical fitness was a very important objective and it has never been the case that the soldiers I led have been discouraged from doing exercise by the fact that the Chief of the General Staff was a bit chubby or the divisional GOC had a mediocre run time, because soldiers are not idiots and they know what CGS’s job is. If their immediate superiors – their sergeants and junior officers, the ones they see every day – do not take fitness seriously, then the soldiers won’t either. But that is where the chain of example-setting stops, as far as physical fitness goes.
“President Zelensky of Ukraine is a stand-up comedian.”
It did occur to me, when the current Ukraine war began, that to stand up in full view of a thousand staring strangers, and tell them jokes, is probably an act that requires some courage.
@scifihugh: You’re not wrong. Like I said, I think Hegseth is being cringey and weird about this whole thing, and the only way this is actually good is if it’s the leading wedge for dealing with a whole lot of other things–which everyone seems to have missed, but hey, whatever.
Russia’s military has been having corruption, morale, discipline, and training problems for decades, and trying to paper it over by looking tough hasn’t worked. The Ukrainians, however, spent the eight years between 2014 and 2022 working on their corruption, morale, discipline, and training problems, and we’ve seen the results.
I know that “Perun” is quite biased*, but I really hope that the connection between the observable facts above and the behaviour of country’s leaders is your own speculation, rather than his, because it’s really ridiculous. Following this “logic”, are we also supposed to conclude that the reason why the Soviet tanks became the first in the world to have an autoloader is because the post-Stalin Soviet leaders were old, infirm and thus generally unmanly? But then, of course, the same reasoning would have had driven the implementation of these “crates and forklifts” for artillery back in the Soviet times, no? And if Putin’s supposed manliness extends all the way down to these decisions, wouldn’t we then also expect Armata, developed entirely on his watch, to totally do away with an autoloader like all the Western tanks (besides Leclerc.) Instead, it doubles down, supposedly sporting a fully automated turret which remotely controlled by crew from an “armoured capsule” in the hull.
Hopefully, this provides enough examples to debunk this train of thought. (For a cherry on top: In the early 2000s, I actually happened to see a “Letter to the Editor” of one of Russia’s most-read newspapers, which made the exact opposite claim: that is, the writer (a woman, I recall) was complaining that “even the American generals seen on TV are lean, while our colonels are already sporting round bellies.” I wonder if I can find it in the digital edition, but it’s probably not worth the time.) I would suggest the real reason is simple complacency: ever since Korea and Vietnam stopped providing ongoing testing grounds of (mostly) the latest Western vs. the latest Soviet equipment, the late-Soviet and then Russian ground forces generals have been remarkably bad at appreciating the rate of technological improvement outside of their own corner.
Thus, in this case, they have not mechanized the process of shell stack unloading (the guns themselves are semi-automatic by now) for the same reason they paid very little attention to developing a single standard for encrypted military communications**; they did not think it would matter. They thought the artillery was still going to be as potent as it was in Afghanistan, the technical improvements made since then (Msta (an improved SPG model) entering service, some units being supported by mobile counter-battery radars, etc.) would be more than enough to keep up. If they had taken a more clear-eyed appraisal, they would have tried implementing “crates and forklifts” for sure; but that would have been well behind replacing most of those systems in the first place!
As in, the bulk of Russian artillery in 2022 was still made up of *Akatsiya* (Acacia), an early-1970s SPG (similar age to, say, the Paladin, to be fair) with a barrel from a towed gun designed in…1947! That and *Gvozdika* (Dianthus flower), whose barrel is a bit newer, but its inferior caliber (chosen so that it would be light enough to remain amphibious – that capability was a key plank of the Soviet maneuver doctrine in spite of rarely working as intended) means that its range is even shorter – on par with early-WWII 15Xmm caliber guns! Needless to say, both of those fire at a distinctly shorter distance than the Paladins and Krabs (with the aforementioned Msta matching them), and are far behind the the long-barrelled Caesars, the occasional working PZH2000 and even Ukraine’s own Bohdanas.
This range disadvantage had been responsible for far more artillery casualties than rate of fire differences (particularly since the closer it has to be to the front, the easier it is for a drone to find it) and this is true on both sides (Ukraine had actually used more Gvozdiki than Russia, having received large quantities with ammunition from Poland almost immediately, and it also appears to have lost more of them than Russia by now. Likewise, observed Caesar losses are very small next to those of systems like the Paladin.) It’s not like the issue was unfixable; the “gold-plated” Koalitsiya gun with similarly high range had been in development for a while, using well-understood principles. Even a crash prewar program of simply replacing all the shortest-ranged models with Msta (which is also somewhat better armoured and has other advantages) would have made a significant difference – similar to what the aviation did across the same timeframe (having replaced all the significantly-dated MiG-29s and Su-27s in frontline service with rather-less-dated Su-34 / Su-35, while those same models remained Ukraine’s best jets until very recently.) But they didn’t care because they were complacent, and so this is what we have been seeing.
* i.e. I recall his video recommended by our host in one of the more recent Firesides, the one on wars and demographics. For all his effort, it seemed to focus almost entirely on Russia – even though the UN figures and projections indicate that the Ukrainian demographic challenges are far worse.) Just look at the graphic below, then compare it with Russia’s.
**for much of the war, the typical situation is high-end encrypted (but buggy) Azart systems for officers, less-advanced-yet-reliable Akveduk on vehicles made after 1990, older radios for older vehicles and cheap (usually Chinese) radio for everyone else. The consequences have been obvious.
“…that the hedonistic decadence the ancient writers talk about is essentially symbolic for “the ruling elites have become more interested in their privileges than their responsibilities.” ”
That’s reading modern sensibilities into ancient writings, not reading what they said. The ancient writers WERE THE HEDONISTIC ELITES. That point was made again and again throughout that series; you can’t possibly have missed it.
Second, the ancient authors writing about the “hedonistic decadence” causing the collapse of society often were writing centuries before the society fell. There’s actually a stronger correlation between demands for austerity and failure of nations than there is between soft men and the failure of nations. “Soft” men are specialized–like those drone operators in Ukraine.
Third, most of what those authors said is wrong. As in, objectively wrong–either they wildly misinterpret the situation (they didn’t know much about economic theory, among other things), based their interpretation off of wildly inappropriate standards, or got basic facts wrong.
“And, again–please explain to me what is wrong with saying “if we are going to insist that the troops should be physically fit, then the generals should also be physically fit.” ”
A few reasons.
First, cherry-picking quotes and ripping them out of context is not an argument. Even if I agreed that generals should be held to the same physical standards as front-line troops–which is stupid–you have to take the rest of the speech into account. The rest of the context necessarily impacts our interpretation of a statement, and ignoring that is either woefully ignorant or willfully dishonest. Look at the mysticism that arose around the Bible in the Middle Ages for some examples of both.
And the rest of the speech was, as far as I’ve seen, pure Cult of the Bad-Ass. Which is not good. Catastrophically not good, in terms of military effectiveness, civ-mil relations, etc. It’s also important to note that English–ESPECIALLY political speech–is a language of approximations, allusions, metaphors, and poetry. You simply cannot fully understand someone’s statements by reading them as if they were legal briefs (unless, obviously, you’re analyzing a legal brief). If someone repeatedly alludes to an argument, it’s a pretty good bet that they’re buying into that argument.
A major reason it’s stupid is time. A general doing his job does not have time to do the sort of PT training that a soldier preparing for the front line needs to engage in. I recently had someone step up into a managerial role, and they were astonished by just how hard this sort of work is. Logistics is even harder. And you want to take time away from that work.
Besides, you’ve inverted the burden of proof. We should assume generals–the experts in these fields–know what they’re doing. You think they should do their jobs another way. Okay: What precisely do you hope to accomplish? Espirit de corpse? Seeing a general doing pushups is going to have a negative effect when the doughboys run out of ammo. So the general can lug gear in a combat zone? That’s not their job–look at the loadout of squad and company commanders sometime. No, there are two justifications for this stupidity: First, to show that you’re the boss and can make them jump (which shows you’re not very good at being the boss), and second, to force the military to match some a priori ideal (which usually ends in the military getting slaughtered).
Ah yes, Plutarch and Seneca, two men well-known for their tendencies towards hedonism.
I won’t bother with the rest of this screed.
60guilders, this is a reply to you- you know how the comment thread mechanics work.
It seems to me that you are being very specific about which things you think are important. If one or two ancient writers (out of many) were supposedly austere in their lifestyles, it validates entire genres of “our society is losing because we are decadent” literature.
And you are completely bypassing and ignoring a wide variety of very valid arguments. It’s not a good debate showing, frankly. Dinwar is right on just about all counts here, I think.
To pile on to 60guilders, Plutarch was from the culture that lost so his austerity is hardly a point in it’s favor and Seneca was writing about how society was soft and doomed as the Pax Romana was getting underway.
There are quite a few generals who were famous for whipping armies into shape and then leading them effectively. Grant, Napoleon, Fredrick the Great and Gustavus Adolphus spring to mind. All of them were writing in the early modern or modern era so biographies about them have much easier access to source material. I am unaware of any of them talking about the need for generals to do personal training. Are there quotes from them or from similar figures that I am unaware of?
@AiryW: “Plutarch was from the culture that lost so his austerity is hardly a point in it’s favor”
No one with the good sense God gave a grasshopper would call first-century AD Greece “austere.”
>Gustavus Adolphus
Who himself should probably disprove the “generals need to be swole” thing.
@arilou,
Gustavus Adolphus probably also shows that some personal exercise would have been good. In his case, horsemanship: he was riding a new, very powerful steed to the battle, and lost the control of his mount, which led to his death in Lützen. As the loss of the king was a Swdish strategic defeat, even if the battle was won, you can make the argument that strategically, Gustavus Adolphus should have devoted more time to getting to know his war-horse.
We win wars by providing ice cream in the tropics and tactical Burger Kings
The providing ice cream in the tropics can absolutely cut both ways though, it can make your enemies (and more importantly, the neutral populace) dislike you more. I know Bret probably strongly dislikes the late Eric Hobsbawm’s politics, but I think he’s worth quoting here:
“It is not easy to convince people that their conditions are being improved while their wives and children are being drenched in burning oil, especially when the people doing the drenching live (by Vietnamese standards) like princes.”
” it can make your enemies (and more importantly, the neutral populace) dislike you more.”
It’s hard to imagine one’s enemies hating one more when those enemies engage in terror bombings, wide-spread torture, and egregious human rights violations on a Canadian scale. At a certain point, worrying about what one’s enemies think of you is rather futile. (Look into how we know how what percent of the human body is water sometime.)
As for the neutral populace, sure, it could. But that is so easily mitigated that it’s not really worth considering. GIs in WWII were far more likely to kill people via kindness than to lord their excess over the population (has to do with how the human body responds to starvation). And Americans are one of if not the most generous population on Earth (depends on time, based on private money donated to charity). We literally run into as much trouble GIVING PEOPLE THINGS as we do living like lords.
Please understand, I’m not saying you’re wrong. But your argument is rather incomplete.
Partially you’re illustrating why propaganda is so important. The moral value of an action–ie, whether it’s good or evil–depends as much on how you sell it as the action itself. An army that air-drops a Burger King is good if it’s doing so because it’s logistics are so impressive that they can provide previously-unknown luxuries to the population; it’s evil if the army is wasting valuable resources on frivolous luxury. Note that the action is the same in either case.
But more importantly, you’ve missed the entire point. A country that can bring fast food franchises to a combat zone is one that has the logistical infrastructure to bring ANYTHING to that combat zone–and “anything” includes things like ammo and tanks and machine guns and C4 and all the other implements of war. The USA historically has been good enough at logistics that we can be frivolous with them without sacrificing combat capability. If we can ensure our troops have flame-broiled hamburgers we can ensure they have artillery rounds, bullets, spar parts for tanks, scopes for guns, and all the rest. And in modern war, where battles are won and lost as much as, if not more than, one’s ability to bring supplies to the front (see Russia’s inability to bring armor to bear on Ukraine), that is not an insignificant factor.
@Dinwar,
In the context that Hobsbawm was referring to, all the great logistics in the world didn’t actually help America and its South Vietnamese allies win, in the end.
People have debated why America lost, and I’m sure they’ll continue doing so, but at least some would argue that it was precisely because they couldn’t win the allegiance of the neutral populace.
It seems like you are mixing and matching things. As I noted in another comment, the ability to “bring fast food franchises to a combat zone” post-dates WWII, and so it is not very relevant to the discussion of the (alleged) generosity of WWII G.I.s. On the other hand, I already noted that the WWII American logistics were…not stellar as far as the average nutrition levels went, and the K-ration was not the only thing where the “bring ANYTHING” and “without sacrificing combat capability” aspects were deeply in tension.
After all, the contemporary bazooka might have been (hyperbolically) present “in every other Jeep”, but contra the post-war myths, it was far inferior to Panzerfaust (and even, to a lesser extent, the British PIAT) and largely incapable of handling even the medium tanks and assault guns (let alone the Tigers) without forcing the soldiers to get to the rear or above the roof. Likewise, the reputation of M4 Medium “Sherman” has enjoyed quite a renaissance in the internet era, with countless videos praising its spaciousness and reliability and what not relative to its alternatives, but the fact remains that the Western Allied troops entered Normandy with virtually all their armoured support handled by vehicles that were getting shot straight through by all the post-1941 German anti-tank weapons, usually from >1 km distance. Some stats most people prefer to forget nowadays. (All numbers referenced to Steve Zaloga’s 2015 book.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Front_(World_War_II)
Since you have mentioned Ukraine; the Russian tank losses on Oryx after 3,5 years are slightly smaller than the losses of just the U.S. Shermans over those 11 months. Of course, the WWII Allied troops went through an incomparably larger territory over those 11 months, and in general, the US/Allied losses are dwarfedby the Soviet or Axis losses in that same war.
There are many other caveats; contemporary tanks are much heavier and many times more expensive; the sort of direct fire support done by a tank in WWII is often done by an armoured troop carrier vehicle instead; last but not least, the overall human losses on the Russian side are generally thought to have exceeded the Western Allies’ Normandy-Leipzig casualties by now. At the same time, I do think it deserves some reflection that the closest modern-day equivalent to the casualties and discomforts accepted by the generation which served in WWII is nowadays looked at with a mix of horror and mockery. Western people of military age not only struggle to imagine themselves serving in these conditions, but it seems like too often, they even struggle to imagine the forefathers they venerated served in comparable conditions and died at similar rates.
As the WWII itself is getting more distant, it seems that a few decontextualized facts (the US was the most motorized WWII force! Sherman was as good as its contemporaries or better! Troops in Normandy enjoyed air supremacy!) are gradually melding with the more recent memories of the disproportionate technological advantage which America had enjoyed in its Middle Eastern engagements, creating a distorted idea of what conditions could be expected on an individual level when fighting a major war. I think even our host is subjected to that, to an extent: I doubt one would have used expressions like “mopping the floor” while being fully cognizant of both the extent of WWII casualties and their contemporary parallels.
As I noted in another comment, the ability to “bring fast food franchises to a combat zone” post-dates WWII, and so it is not very relevant to the discussion of the (alleged) generosity of WWII G.I.s.
Right, i’m well aware of the “killing people with kindness” thing, which is actually true, but it does date from WWII. (I’m not sure what @Dinwar’s allusion to human body water was, but I *think* that’s a reference to WWII as well). Neither seem super relevant to America’s ability to win in Afghanistan or Southeast Asia. In both contexts, on the contrary, providing ice cream in the tropics seems like it would play ideally into the other side’s myths about “godless American decadecne” or “capitalist American decadence” respectively.
I mean, in decontextualized win-loss terms, more-or-less the only major war unambiguously won by the American military since the establishment of Burger King (which occurred a few months after the death of Stalin, if you want a bit of trivia) was the Gulf War. Even if you want to treat its follow-up as victory in pure military terms, our own host describes Afghanistan and Vietnam as failures.
Now, the ice cream barges in the tropics famously dated to the WWII Pacific Theater, and they are quite a fixture of rose-tinted glasses “YouTube history”. However, focusing on them is a bit like talking about Sparta from the POV of spartiates. Just like how the overwhelming majority of the Spartans were helots, the overwhelming majority of the victorious WWII G.I. ate was the K-ration. I don’t see a lot of discussion of what that was nowadays – presumably because the implications are rather uncomfortable for the liberal/centrist hagiography of “The Greatest Generation” which our host wants to keep alive, even as he gladly dispatches of the myths about the historical period/region he studies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-ration
Moreover, while I’m struggling to find a convenient one-page comparison of every force’s intended standard ration and their nutritional properties (if any other blogger-historians are reading this – you know what to do!), the scattered info I did find actually suggests that the intended rations for quite a few other contemporary militaries at the very least had larger calorie counts than those of the K-ration. (2,830 kcal.) I.e., a 1970 book Singapore: Too little Too late apparently states that the early-war Japanese daily rations were at 2,200 kcal (considerably lower than the K-ration), Indian colonial troops were at 2,700 kcal (almost the same) and the British and Australian were at 3,700 and 4,300 kcal (i.e. much higher).
Further, the few (non-academic) Russian sources I found which compared Soviet and German rations suggest that both had higher intended nutritional values. The Soviet daily ration, with its approx. 900g of bread, 250g of meat/fish, 400 grams of potatoes, 200 grams of porridge, 170g of cabbage, about 180g of other vegetables (carrots, beets, onions, etc.) and a few grams of sugar, butter, etc. apparently ranged from 2800 to 3600 kcal (the latter with things like 25 g of cheese and 250g of milk thrown in.) Either level was slightly lower than the WWI Imperial Russian one, for that matter – although that one was more meat-heavy and so more prone to cause vitamin deficiencies over time. The German one was at 4500 kcal – largely because of more meat (250 g + 120 fish/sausage, rather than the combined 250 kg) and a lot more animal and vegetable fats, with the rest vaguely similar.
Now, in fairness, the US military operated much further from home than any other WWII force. Further, the Lend-Lease included quite a lot of foodstuff shipments, to all of the Allies (lest we forget, the British Empire received 3X more Lend-Lease by dollar value than the USSR did.) It is completely justified to praise the WWII American logistics based on that alone (not to mention many other achievements, like being practically the only force to avoid horse logistics thanks to its own trucks.)
However, this should not be confused with the idea the WWII G.I.s consistently ate better than their peers – it seems that when both were on the offensive with well-planned operations, the reverse was true. (Obviously, any army which found itself retreating or surrounded and with scattered and bombed logistics was eating well below its optimal ration, and the U.S. armies found themselves in this situation less often than the rest – although it still happened, like at Bataan.) Contra the implication of the OOP, it seems that the WWII U.S. military quite literally was an underfed force on many occasions.
It think the “WWII G.I.s consistently ate better than their peers” idea is conflated with the “people in US occupied territories actually ate” idea. Italy was in shambles even before the American occupation (thanks of 2 decades of fascist rule based on propaganda and repression) so when Sherman tanks came they were bringing back in the menu “exotic” long lost foods like bacon and chocolate.
One of my grandparent surrendered in Algiers in 1942 and spent the rest of the war as a POW in Indiana; until his death he remembered the time his brig was allowed to enter the kitchens of the ship they were brought to the US as a repayment for having being skipped two days meals because of a clerical error. Even 40 years later he was brought to tears in the memory of tasting back sausages.
Right, this is another valuable point! In fact, this exact aspect even got depicted in C’è ancora domani (There’s Still Tomorrow) – one of the absolute best films of the past few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_Still_Tomorrow
Now, I suspect an Italian (speaker) on a history blog is already going to be well-aware of a black-and-white historical release which became the highest-grossing Italian film of that year and the 10th highest-grossing of all time, but for everyone else – it depicts Italy soon after the end of the war, with the G.I.s to still be stationed at checkpoints around town. These are rather popular because as said above, they can afford to think little of giving out chocolate bars, while it’s a veritable luxury for the locals.
However, when Delia, the main character, brings a couple of them home as a treat for the children, this reminder of national defeat (along with a justified suspicion a soldier might have developed amorous interest) sends their father, a veteran of both wars, into yet another of his fits of rage which inevitably lead to serious domestic violence. C’è ancora domani is a deeply feminist film, but one which does not shy away from just how backward its society used to be – and heretofore underlining how remarkable the progress of recent decades had actually been, and how foolish it is to take it for granted while deep in nostalgia (a point which rather overlaps with the most recent series here.) It has a lot more to say about other topics, of course, but I’m afraid I might have to be going into spoilers on that.
“Just like how the overwhelming majority of the Spartans were helots, the overwhelming majority of the victorious WWII G.I. ate was the K-ration. ”
Absolutely false. The overwhelming majority of WW2 GIs spent the overwhelming majority of their time in service eating cooked food, either fresh or tinned, from field kitchens or in cookhouses – A, B or C rations, or locally obtained food. It was extremely rare for any troops to eat K-rations for more than a week at a time. Marauders and Chindits and so on were very much the exception.
I know you know this, because it’s in the Wiki page you quoted. I just can’t work out why you’re lying about it. Could you enlighten us?
Apart from anything else it just isn’t mathematically possible. One man consumes one K-ration in one day, or 365 K-rations (god help him) in a year.
According to the US Army Quartermaster Museum (who should know) “The first million K rations were ordered in May 1942 and were followed by increasing millions. In 1944, the peak year of production, more than 105 million rations were procured.”
That sounds like a lot, but we are talking about an army that numbered in the millions. Eight million peak strength in March 1945. In 1944 the US army alone would have consumed well over a billion rations. No, they were not all eating K-rations – especially since there were plenty K-rats left over:
“Toward the end of the war, the usefulness of the K ration was coming to an end as a result of the emergence of a superior C ration. In postwar 1946, an Army Food Conference recommended that the K be discontinued and in 1948 the ration was declared obsolete by the Quartermaster Corps Technical Committee. It was then recommended that depot stocks be disposed of by utilization in the civilian feeding program overseas.”
I cannot argue with that. Having said that, the article I quoted does not actually include that kind of calculation, or explicitly specify which fraction of food supply accounted for. While it does note that the troops have rarely eaten it continuously, passages like
Seemed to imply to me that it was at the very least in the plurality, while the other rations had only replaced it every other day at best. This impression was reinforced when the same article noted that most troops were medically attested to have lost weight even in the Italian campaign, where the circumstances were much less exceptional than in the Pacific. Further, the other ration types have much shorter pages (for some just a handful of paragraphs) and which often focus more on their postwar iterations, which again gave me the impression the K-ration was the most important type at the time.
I’ll admit that altogether, I was too eager to draw an analogy with the most famous series ever written on this blog, and so I have not checked as thoroughly as I should have had. Nevertheless, I think the more valuable point is that however you look at it, a considerable fraction of the the US soldiers were in fact underfed (the Italian campaign alone involved >600,000 Allied troops – while not all of them were Americans, just the American dead and wounded numbered 29,560 and 82,180 wounded) and the K-ration was still a lot more representative of the WWII U.S. military food supplies than the ice cream barges were – not unless you can prove the latter had ever managed to provide over 100 million servings annually!
Finally, to follow up my earlier discussion of calorie counts, I should note that according to the “United States Army during World War II” wiki page, A and B rations provided about 4,300 calories per day and C rations about 3,300 calories a day. Unfortunately, there’s still no concrete estimation of the relative frequency distribution. In all, I reiterate that I would really like to see a detailed post devoted to WWII rations. I wonder if Michael Taylor, seemingly the only other historian to have written guest posts on here to date, would consider coming back for the sake of that, since 20th century conflict seems a lot closer to his specialty.
P.S. I have noted in the previous comment that the Wehrmacht ration apparently had the largest calorie count at 4,500, and this still appears to be true even though the A and B rations are very close. On second thoughts, I think it’s worth explicitly specifying that this was only achieved due to all the food redirected from the occupied territories on a literally genocidal scale.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34907689/
Unfortunately, to me it seems all of this is less well-known outside of the directly affected countries than it should be. In particular, many people “on the right” nowadays seem to draw a straight line from the Ancient Greeks and the Romans as the founders of the “Western Civilization” to the Nazis as its “defenders” (often including Crusaders and other expressions of militant Catholicism in between, but also often rejecting all of Christianity outright). I suspect someone like E. J. Anthony, the economist Trump once wanted to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics and who displays a prominent painting of the Bismarck battleship (“Hard not to love!”) on every video call, would be shocked to discover that the Greeks were meant to receive not just a third of what the Germans got, but less than half of what the Poles got.
“While it does note that the troops have rarely eaten it continuously, passages like
Nevertheless, one K-ration per man per day would remain the basis of issue, even for mountain troops fighting at high altitudes and infantrymen fighting in the thick jungles of Burma.[8] Military personnel also supplemented with various other rations throughout the war such as with the C-ration when needed.
Seemed to imply to me that it was at the very least in the plurality,”
You’ve misread that. When it says “one K-ration per man per day would remain the basis of issue” it means “when you were on K-rations, you got one per day, as opposed to, say, two or three K-rations per day”. That’s why it mentions mountain and jungle warfare – these are people burning two or three K-rations worth of calories every day. It emphatically does not mean “everyone in the army got one K-ration every day”.
And when it says “Military personnel also supplemented with various other rations throughout the war such as with the C-ration” that means that a soldier might eat a K-ration and some bits and pieces from a C-ration box on one day, because the K-ration alone wasn’t enough. It doesn’t mean that on most days you ate a K-ration and from time to time you might eat a C-ration instead.
And, again, most GIs spent most of their time during the war eating food prepared in field kitchens or cookhouses, and the food would very often be partly or wholly bulk food, just like a civilian kitchen would use, and often locally sourced. It was part of a commanding officer’s job to make sure his troops ate well, even when they were on operations and certainly when they were out of the front line. Read some memoirs! Watch “Band of Brothers”, at least! They are not all squatting down in the mud every evening at Toccoa Camp or Aldbourne and eating K-rations! Half the plot of the first episode centres around spaghetti!
“K-ration was still a lot more representative of the WWII U.S. military food supplies than the ice cream barges were not unless you can prove the latter had ever managed to provide over 100 million servings annually!”
GIs spent far more time eating hot, kitchen-prepared food than they spent eating K-rations – in that sense the ice-cream barge is more representative.
And the ice cream barge (there was only one of it) produced five tons of ice cream a day, which is roughly 70,000 servings. That’s 25 million servings a year. Set that against a peak production of 100 million K-rations a year in 1944 – much of that, remember, not consumed at all during the war, much of it consumed by civilians and allied troops, much of it consumed in theatres other than the Pacific – and yes, actually, I think it’s entirely conceivable that there were periods during the war in which more US servicemen in the Pacific theatre ate ice cream from an ice cream barge than ate a K-ration.
At any rate, it wasn’t far off.
Right, you have made your point. And now, I suppose I’ll have to finally get around to Band of Brothers as well. I wonder if nowadays I would find it more or less accurate/impressive than Saving Private Ryan: when the latter got brought up in the Eregion series threads, I rewatched its final battle sequence for the first time in years, and moments like main characters running right in front of Tigers, etc. and somehow not getting shot at by the bow machine gun which was mounted on all contemporary tanks for that exact purpose stick out a lot more now.
Still a tremendous work of cinema, but moments like this actually feel more contrived than that beautiful (and somewhat notorious) pistol shot/CAS blow sync-up. (Another example was when the Marder (?) is almost effortlessly Molotov-ed from above – I wish Spielberg and co. didn’t make it look so easy, considering all those things had a rifle-caliber “anti-air” machine gun installed, which wasn’t much good vs. 1944 war planes, but worked just fine for sweeping the rooftops.) On the other hand, I do recall hearing secondhand it (the series) actually depicts soldiers hiding in a trench with a bazooka in an attempt to fire it at floor armour of a heavy tank driving over that trench – which is apparently actually a realistic depiction of the tactics forced onto the users of original bazooka by its limited power.
I also wonder: given how many memoirs you seem to have read from this period, is there a chance you would have had also watched the much earlier forerunner show, Combat! ? It would be quite remarkable if you were in a position to compare the two: a cursory search didn’t turn up in the way of comparative analysis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat!
“We win wars by providing ice cream in the tropics and tactical Burger Kings”
However many people were eating ice cream in the Central Pacific, I would bet that none of them was among the people hanging on to an airfield on Guadalcanal by their fingertips. Wherever your forward troops are, they will not be easy to sustain there. If it were easy to sustain people there, your forward troops would almost certainly be further on.
Eighty years later, the forwards troops in Ukraine will not be eating ice cream, whatever their distance from civilization. The other side will make sure of that.
(None of which, needless to say, makes it sensible to demand hundreds of generals travel thousands of miles to hear a rant about PT standards.)
“However many people were eating ice cream in the Central Pacific, I would bet that none of them was among the people hanging on to an airfield on Guadalcanal by their fingertips”
Incorrect. They even had an established recipe for ice cream that would be made by flying the ingredients to high altitudes for use in locations where the ice cream ships could not reach.
https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/navyicecream
One of the characteristics of mistaking cynicism for hard nosed thinking is that people start confidently asserting facts that are incorrect without bothering to check.
No, actually, I’m afraid they’re right. I can absolutely guarantee that none of the people eating ice cream in the Central Pacific were among the people hanging on to an airfield on Guadalcanal by their fingertips, because Guadalcanal is not in the Central Pacific.
Here is a photo of a working ice plant on Guadalcanal during the campaign – no way of knowing whether ice cream was actually produced there but, you know, someone would almost certainly have given it a go https://www.ww2online.org/image/captured-japanese-ice-making-plant-laguna-point-guadalcanal
And here is an account of ice cream being produced during the Battle of Peleliu https://www.beachesofnormandy.com/didyouknow/Did_you_know_how_some_Marines_made_their_own_ice_cream_in_World_War_II/?id=1ab2292929
I wasn’t aware that it required a particular degree of cynicism to believe that it is harder to provide people with a given minor luxury in a secure base area than in a rifle pit on the front lines, especially when that minor luxury is famous for melting in the ambient conditions.
You have my curiosity. Can you provide your reference to the riflemen fighting for Henderson field being served ice cream while they were doing so, and how this feat was achieved?
“Can you provide your reference to the riflemen fighting for Henderson field being served ice cream while they were doing so, and how this feat was achieved?”
Robert Leckie, a rifleman with First Marine Division, was eating ice cream during operations in New Guinea (a special effort for Christmas dinner) according to his memoir “Helmet for my Pillow”. I would definitely not rule out ice cream being available at some point during the Guadalcanal campaign.
For that matter, here is a photo of a functioning ice plant on Guadalcanal during the campaign. https://www.ww2online.org/image/captured-japanese-ice-making-plant-laguna-point-guadalcanal
No way of knowing whether it was used to produce ice cream, true.
“I wasn’t aware that it required a particular degree of cynicism to believe that it is harder to provide people with a given minor luxury in a secure base area than in a rifle pit on the front lines, especially when that minor luxury is famous for melting in the ambient conditions.”
Your mistake is the “minor luxury” part. In fact, the military considered ice cream vital for maintaining moral and providing it to folks was a major priority. They built ships specifically to do this. Think about that for a moment: In an existential war the Navy devoted resources away from combat ships and to ice cream. That tends to indicate that they took the issue rather seriously. And as a general rule of thumb, I hold that we should accept the judgment of experts who were dealing with the issues at the time as valid, unless there’s reasons to believe they are not. And “I just personally don’t view it that way” doesn’t qualify.
Check out the “Tasting History” episode on WWII ice cream, which includes a number of primary sources showing that the top brass were very concerned about it (if you don’t like secondary sources, he cites the primary ones so go look them up yourself). This wasn’t a situation where one guy had a quirky view of things; this was a major, coordinated logistical effort on the part of the Navy.
I’m a field geologist–not military, but I’ve spent my share of time in conditions harsh enough to make most people run screaming, so you can use me as a sort of lower boundary for this sort of thing. And I can assure you these “minor luxuries” are critical. I once used ice cream to convince some folks to not have me buried in a foundation excavation (griping is one thing, but they had worked out who to bribe and how much it would take!). A cookie in an office is a minor annoyance; it tastes okay but goes straight to the hips. That same cookie eaten at 14,000 feet after several weeks of hiking in deserts, in every sort of weather Mother Nature can throw at you (including, in one rather memorable incident, a flash flood), being chased by predators and dodging bullets and whatnot, working 14-16 hours a day or more, is something else entirely. It’s a little spark of joy, something you can pleasurably look forward to all morning and savor after you’ve eaten (usually a meager) lunch. When you’re far from civilization and in conditions where everything is trying to kill you, those “minor luxuries” are not optional. They are psychological necessities.
“…I would bet that none of them was among the people hanging on to an airfield on Guadalcanal by their fingertips.”
This is the sort of shallow thinking that I’m talking about.
Sure, at the battle maybe those people weren’t eating ice cream (they may have, but let’s accept ad arguendo that they didn’t).
The people getting those men to the battle did. The people who cared for the weapons did. The people who maintained the ships and planes did. The people who did the recon did. The people in reserves did. The people who built all the equipment did. The people who loaded and unloaded the equipment did. The people who trained the soldiers did. The people who wrote the doctrine did. The troops at the battle did on the way to it and, if they survived, after it. The people who did EVERYTHING NECESSARY TO MAKE THAT BATTLE HAPPEN did.
In order to win a battle you need AT MINIMUM to have sufficient people willing to fight and obey orders, in the area, with the tools and equipment necessary to engage in combat. In industrial warfare this requires a tremendous logistical network. And that’s what tactical fast food and battlefield ice cream represent. They exist because the USA has logistical capacity to spare. By themselves no, these things obviously would not win wars; fire kills. But they represent a system that is capable of delivering quite literally anything, anywhere. A military that can deploy a Burger King to a forward operating base is one that is unlikely to allow its soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen to run out of bullets, bombs, shells, missiles, drones, spare parts, and the like. I’m not saying it never happens, to be clear, but these events are relatively isolated and represent a breakdown of the system. In general, the USA has sufficient logistical capacity to provide overwhelming firepower nearly anywhere in the world, which has been critical for our strategy for a long time.
“And that’s what tactical fast food and battlefield ice cream represent.”
Thank you for stating the argument so clearly, and returning us to its point. I should not have allowed myself to become distracted.
I feel I should point out that burgers and other fast foods are not particularly hard to cook. That is why they are *fast* foods. It is not, consequently, harder to provide people with burgers than with any other kind of cooked food, and doing so cannot demonstrate any particular logistic prowess.
Much the same applies to ice cream. The ingredients are commonplace – milk/cream and sugar. The only hard part is cooling it below freezing. That is going to require a refrigeration unit, which you are probably not going to have in a front line trench. And the need to keep it frozen means you are probably not supplying it the the front line from elsewhere, either.
Given that you are further back though, it is easy enough. It will be only marginally harder in hot, humid conditions than in cooler climates – and much more appreciated by the recipients. There was more reason to produce ice cream in PTO than in ETO – it wasn’t much harder.
So, again, producing ice cream in PTO doesn’t demonstrate any particular logistic prowess.
Conversely, sustaining the forward elements in their existing position is almost always hard. If it was easy to sustain your people in a given position, the forward elements would almost always be further on.
Another point: you know what else you can probably do, if you can reliably supply ice cream to mess tents near the front line? You can reliably supply other things that need constant refrigeration, like blood and plasma, to field hospitals near the front line. And that really is a battle-winning achievement.
Pete Giangreco in “Hell to Pay” has a fascinating digression that takes up half a chapter on the US military’s blood supply chain in the Pacific. (The guy clearly just got sucked down a rabbit hole on blood supplies, and I’m glad he did.) The US military could get blood from the veins of a benevolent civilian in Minneapolis to the veins of a wounded Marine in a field hospital on Okinawa in six days. They flew it out top priority in flying boats. They had specifically designated blood-storage ships.
(I’m not saying they used the same logistic chain for ice cream and whole blood. Of course I’m not. But both are evidence of a very sophisticated and capable logistic chain.)
“It is not, consequently, harder to provide people with burgers than with any other kind of cooked food, and doing so cannot demonstrate any particular logistic prowess.”
This represents not merely shallow thinking, but a gross misunderstanding of the topic under discussion.
The burgers are not hard to deal with, no. Such things were on military menus for a long time. You can cook a burger on a bucket with a fire under it if you want to, or on a flat rock (field geology teaches you all kinds of things).
The FRANCHISE is another issue. Remember, I didn’t say “The military provides burgers as part of their rations”. I said that they have a Burger King that they can deploy. That presents a slew of logistical challenges that you’re not considering. The franchise is going to have very strict standards for cooking methods, cleanliness, and the like. It’s not JUST burgers. It’s not even just food. It’s the soda machines and the frier oil and the cleaning supplies and all the rest that goes into making a store. You need power and lights and transportation capable of carrying it (both in terms of capacity, and in terms of availability). For that matter, you need people willing to do the work, which means incentives and pay and supplies and security for them (I’ve been offered work installing wells at forward operating bases [turned it down, I had a new baby at the time], so I’ve gotten an introduction to just how complex that all is).
If you don’t think THAT is a logistical headache and a half, you’ve never managed anything. I assure you, even in stationary stores in nice, same home territory these things present logistical problems. In a forward operating base the logistics are the stuff of nightmares. And the USA handles all of this routinely.
Your characterization of the logistics around ice cream is equally flawed. Sure, some of the ingredients are easy enough to manage–though many are not in tropical and subtropical environments. But such an overly-narrow focus on just the thing itself demonstrates a sever lack of understanding of the logistical networks necessary to deliver the stuff.
Your arguments remind me a lot of some field staff I work with. They think that because they know how to sample a well, they can manage a remedial action project. They only see the very small portion they’re involved with, and thus are blissfully unaware of the tremendous amount of effort that goes into getting to the point where they can put boots on the ground. When such people get into managerial positions they inevitably fail.
The point has NEVER been about the food. It’s easy to drop raw ingredients to someone. It’s always been about what it takes to get the food there. And the whole point is that however little you understand about the logistics involved (and you’ve yet to demonstrate the understanding of an assistant manager at a fast food joint), the point is that the USA has such a sophisticated logistical system that we have that capacity to spare.
I haven’t read that book, but just your summary makes me glad that he did cover it, as well! Frontline medicine (and medevac) are another aspect which gets overlooked by fools, yet is absolutely crucial. Even the Soviet Union had, for all the contemporary “we have reserves” stereotypes, made some effort there. I.e. a dedicated ambulance truck, with significantly softer suspension (to avoid the wounded dying outright if/when it is forced to travel back home over rough ground) had entered production in 1938, and literally over 9,000 were produced before the end of the war. Granted, even that number wasn’t close to fulfilling even the majority of what all the formations needed, but had the invasion began even a year later (and so subjected the Gorky plant to way fewer bombing attacks, as well as forced production line moves as so much else got pushed back into the rear of the country), a lot more would have undoubtedly been in service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZ-55
On the flip side, neglecting the medics was also one of the factors which turned the Feodosia marine landing in late 1941 from a triumph of special force skill and of air/land/sea integrations into a limited blow which came at a steep price. The planners were desperate to strike quickly (to be fair, they were hoping to break the literal Siege of Sevastopol) and it was decided not to wait for aspects like air defence or integrated medics – assuming they would find enough in the local hospitals, which ultimately wasn’t enough, at all.
P.S. The point about blood supplies even recurred some time ago in a rather different context – keen observers in late 2021 noted that if Russian troops were only being gathered at the Ukrainian borders to stage a massive exercise as an intimidation tactic, there would have been no need to set up blood banks of fairly substantial size. (though still insufficient, as it soon turned out.)
You’re falling for a rhetorical trick here, which is that the speaker pretends that something common-sense isn’t already true and therefore needs to be fixed with their policy, when in truth the common-sense consensus position is already in place and the policy proposal is just a smokescreen for their actual extremist goals.
Nobody denies that physical fitness is important for the army, which is why fitness test have been part of the army recruiting forever, and why the passing requirements are *already* gender-neutral: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8525w2v5wo
Again: Hegseth is demanding we “fix” something that isn’t broken in the way he says he is.
The US Army already has fitness standards for all ranks – including generals. In fact it’s had them for decades. All ranks in the Australian army have to pass the standard yearly (if they fail they have six months to shape up or be discharged).
Saying higher PT standards are being implemented could be sent to everyone without calling all the top generals to a meeting.
Hegseth called the meeting so among other thing, he could be shown on youtube addressing all the top military offices how the military needs to be returned to Spartan standards is way beyond concern for physical fitness.
And the military officers in attendance look at least as fit as Stormn’ Norman Schwarzkopf addressing the press during the gulf war.
I doubt that there are a significant amount of out of shape military officers and instead Hegseth”s is saying that for his public supporters.
The PT standards have to be considered in the broader context of the other changes Hegseth has made or is trying to make in the military.
Members of the armed forces who have technical expertise and long experience but who don’t fit Hegseth’s mental picture of what a good soldier looks like, say because they are trans, are out.
Eliminating reporting mechanisms for sexual assault or hazing, to protect the kind of ‘soldier’ who considers abusing their comrades as a perk of the job, is in.
Honoring historic service of women and minorities who served in the armed forces alongside white men is out.
Ranting about how rules of engagement are ‘weak’ and ‘get in the way of the mission’ which is ‘lethality’ and waging war against ‘internal enemies’ on American soil (a striking combination, that) is in.
…
Changes to the PT standards exist within this background. They do not represent Hegseth making a calculated decision to raise standards in order to solve a problem that neutral experts have thought about and decided was important to solve. They represent Hegseth’s desire to make the US military fit a pattern of his own choosing.
Hegseth’s own military career ended in a washout over fifteen years ago at a low rank. He is not familiar with, and has no expertise in understanding, the true problems facing the military. And this isn’t a problem for him, because he sincerely does not care which problems the US military’s own experts think it has. He’s not in the Pentagon to improve the military’s equipment, or to refine its tactical doctrine to reflect lessons from Afghanistan and Ukraine. He’s not in the Pentagon to make the military more attractive to the youth of Generation Alpha who will soon be making up its recruitment pool.
No, Hegseth is here to ‘solve’ the problem he thinks the US military has, which is that it fails to fit a certain pattern.
Hegseth has a very specific picture of a white nationalist army, all practicing Hegseth’s sort of distinctly American faux-Christian folk religion. consisting entirely of ruthless ‘hard’ hypermasculine men. Men so hypermasculine that they breathe nothing but violence, think nothing but violence, inflict nothing but violence on their own people and optionally on shadowy foreign enemies. This is not something Hegseth is subtle about except that he usually doesn’t say the ‘white’ part out loud, though you can see the signs if you’re looking and are aware that racists sometimes (surprise!) conceal their socially less acceptable opinions, a thing those with eyes to see already know.
The recruitment problems with Generation Alpha are going to be trivially solved by mass unemployment caused by the longterm economic damages from the Trump administration, with the military as the only option for stable job prospects outside the military-industrial-technological complex that Thiel et al are building up.
You don’t need to be swole to be able to control a swarm of flying killer robots with your joystick.
Does it require an “all hands” meeting of generals and admirals from around the globe, given all the other things they need to be attending to? Something fishy about all that.
In the 1980s or 1990s, I saw a piece of hardtack from the American Civil War (1860s). Some soldiers had signed their names on it because they knew it would last forever.
Even calling Hegseth a mediocre major is charitable. He was a platoon leader for a few months. He was then kicked around at at battalion (battalion S9- “civil military relations”, a position battalions rarely even have) and taught a COIN course he was unqualified for. He was never a company commander (most important captain position), never went to staff college, never was a battalion S3 (operations planning) or XO (most important line infantry major positions), and got promoted to major in the inactive ready reserve.
Ironically, for all his tough guy posturings, he never went to any of the hard (ranger, sapper) or not-hard but plenty of PT hazing (airborne, air assault) Army schools. It’s doubtful that this is because he never got the chance- fresh infantry lieutenants are at the front of the line for these.
Since this is the week for questions, I’m always curious about something. How many languages do you know? You seem to be comfortable recommending sources of French, Spanish, or Italian. Do you understand all of them? If so, is it just your skill or is it required to be a Mediterranean military historian? I guess you know Latin because it is required.
About hardtack, now I’m wondering whether there’s ever a “culture of badass” that claims that they only hardtack (or any other period-accurate MRE), and nothing else. Be it fictional or historical. I thought I’ve heard something about barbarians like that, but I forgot.
It’s a standard part of the Sparta mythos that they ate lots of “black soup” and that this was related to their toughness. As you may imagine, lots of people took this and ran with it in all kinds of weird directions; particularly the people who didn’t know that whenever ancient sources wrote of “spartan citizens”, they were referring to a definitionally wealthy aristocracy.
The most boring explanation is still fun, though. Just imagine a poor defense analyst writing up his report (while shaking with a cold sweat) that according to intelligence sources, the Aussies eat Vegemite and that, while the reports conflict, it cannot be ruled out that they like it.
Odd sentence from the article you link:
“The ancient sources provide contradictory accounts on whether the soup was a luxurious meal served only at banquets or a dish that could be afforded by all Spartiates.”
Given that all Spartiates were rich, this shouldn’t be an “either or”.
About hardtack, now I’m wondering whether there’s ever a “culture of badass” that claims that they only hardtack (or any other period-accurate MRE), and nothing else.
The thing about Mongol warriors surviving off milk and blood (and for that matter, I think people used to say the same thing about Masai raiders) might qualify? (No idea if it was actually true, in either case).
The blood was an emergency ration I believe, but they did eat meat.
This is broadly true actually, well not the blood thing but milk yes. There are accounts of Mongols making shallow cuts in their horses to drink blood from them, but this was a starvation thing. Steppe nomads had to eat what they could get and what they could get was herds of sheep, so their staple foodstuff was mutton. Vegetables would have been foraged or taken or traded for.
Mongolian cuisine even today is like this, heavy on meat and milk and light on vegetal accompaniments. They also have many different varieties of dumpling made with wheat flour, but this is also a legacy of nomadic life; the wheat would have come from agricultural communities in northern China as it was how they paid their tribute to prevent raids.
@WJ,
My instincts are to be skeptical of the “milk, meat and blood” thing just on nutritional grounds (as @YARD’s citation re: the K rations indicates, you can develop serious nutritional deficiencies even within the fairly short period you’re fighting a WWII-style campaign). But, maybe I shouldn’t be: after all, there are people today who eat what I (and most nutrition science people) would consider a wildly unbalanced diet, and seem to do fine, including sometimes being quite strong and/or athletic.
If I remember my facts correctly you can get *most* of stuff what you need from animals… it just oftne requiring eatings parts of the animals modern people don’t like to. (eg. traditional inuit diet involved stuff like eyeballs, fermented innards, etc.)
“If I remember my facts correctly you can get *most* of stuff what you need from animals… it just oftne requiring eatings parts of the animals modern people don’t like to.”
Basically, yes. You are an animal. All the things you need to build you are also present in other animals. You just need to eat all the bits. The most famous consequence of not doing so is “rabbit starvation” – if you only eat the nice cuts of lean meat, you will die of protein toxicity. Eat the fat. Eat the organs. Eat the liver (if it’s healthy). Eat the brain (lots of good fatty calories in brain).
So if I have a glass of milk with my black pudding, I can claim to eat the diet of a Mongol warrior?
Only if the milk is mare’s milk and the black pudding is mutton 🙂
I was inspired by the mention of the Sung a few weeks ago to read The Mongol Art of War by T May (2007). He thinks that the milk and blood thing was real, but only used for short bursts of a few days duration.
Once the Mongol armies increased in size and moved off the steppes they don’t seem to move a whole lot faster, on average, than other armies of the period. We even have orders from Chingis himself telling Jebe and Subotai to go easy on the horses, don’t let soldiers gallop on the march.
Even a few days would be enough to give the Mongols the massive operational advantage our pedantic host has mentioned earlier. The Mongol vanguard appearing “out of nowhere” and catching your army by surprise is much more noteworthy than the Mongol support train turning up three days later.
I’m not Brett, but I’ll answer you if it’s not a problem: I’m a mediaevalist and an Italian native speaker and, besides English, I’ve studied without much success French, Spanish and German (also a tiny bit of Japanese). I’m nowhere fluent in any of these languages, but I can still read most Romance languages without problems (i.e. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, both modern and medieval); German is much harder for me, and it strongly depends on the publication itself. It’s not exacly required, but it’s something that you pick up over the years (and should do it regardless).
Obviously I know Latin (though I find that Medieval latin is so much easier than Classical) and, in theory, ancient Greek; I say in theory because I haven’t really touched it since high school and it’s quite rusty.
“About hardtack, now I’m wondering whether there’s ever a “culture of badass” that claims that they only hardtack (or any other period-accurate MRE), and nothing else.”
It would be a horrible idea.
Throughout the past–up until as late as the 1800s–military leaders used meals to display their wealth and power. By providing sumptuous meals you displayed that you were powerful enough TO supply sumptuous meals. In other words, you were successful enough in war to become wealthy by it. Far from being soft and weak, providing food sent the signal to your enemies that you would defeat them, and to your allies that you would win. If you ate soldier’s rations, that signaled that you were losing, frequently very badly. Look at “Return of the King” (book), where Pippen eats a cup of wine and a few white cakes (bread) with Denethor; that’s signaling that the city is in an existential crisis and EVERYONE is paying for it. So by attempting to show how hard and manly you are, you’d in fact be showing that you’re a weak pushover that could be steam-rolled quite easily. You may as well ask your enemies to invade you.
(There were of course exceptions. There was the famous Roman emperor who ate soldier’s rations. But we’re talking politics and trends; an occasional deviation is to be expected. And when you have the full might of the most powerful army in that part of the world at your back, you don’t need to show how powerful you are.)
There’s also the nutritional aspect. You can survive on bread and water for a while, but not indefinitely. Potatoes provide longer-term survival, especially if you can get milk, but again, there are limits. An army that’s dealing with scurvy isn’t exactly going to be at the top of their game. An army who’s bones are brittle from lack of calcium is going to be easy to disable. Soldiers more interested in looting your camp than fighting your soldiers have lost battles before. So even if you wanted to be the army with the Manliest Manly-Men, you’re going to have to get your vegetables.
Then you have to consider HOW the army gets food. Even if they wanted to they couldn’t carry enough food to supply themselves. They had to forage. This presents two problems, one practical, one political/strategic/tactical (make up your own mind where to put this). On the practical side, if you want to survive on hard tack that means taking the time to make hard tack. I’ve done it; the drying process takes a while (my wife will only let me do it in winter, because we live in the South and it heats the whole house up). And all that time your army is eating food. You could easily run out of food while making the food. On the political/strategic/tactical side, foraging–especially in enemy territory–was an opportunity for a bit of plundering, which was part of how you encouraged the troops. I don’t care how much of a He-Man Burly McChesthair you are, after a week of dehydrated rations and hard labor those fruits and vegetables look REALLY good. And if you’re in enemy territory, leaving that food alone is either going to provide food for the enemy or reduce the amount of food you have, both of which are options your entire foraging system is designed to prevent. (And how are you going to stop them? Good food tastes good, and people like nice things, and foragers are going to be somewhat away from central command.) Even if you wanted to be the most Fremen of the Fremen and only eat harsh, nasty foods, the incentives would more or less force you to eat the fresh food while you made the preserved foods.
We don’t need to speculate about this, by the way. Shipwrecked sailors had these incentives and acted accordingly. They weren’t concerned about machismo since there was no one to impress; they wanted to live–but living meant preserving food for long voyages in exposed conditions, which meant salting, drying, and otherwise preserving the foods. Everything I’ve read states that they’d eat the fresh food, especially plants that didn’t preserve well and anything else that would go bad, while they were preserving everything that could be preserved, as a way to make the provisions last.
Since people are talking about fitness in the military, I found Military Realism’s article “My culture is not your fitness regime” to be interesting as a civilian with no family members or friends in the military, given it touches vaguely on what military fitness is like.
https://militaryrealism.blog/2025/05/01/my-culture-is-not-your-fitness-regime/
Instead of walking through the pro’s and con’s of expecting once army to reach certain fintness targets, could we instead look at the ridicoulesness of it all?
There was an audience of hundereds of fifity-somethings, mostly clean shaven, and from what you can see from the pictures far better physical condition than the average U.S. citizen (let alone the average fifty year old), being told to shave and get into shape.
Hegseth and co aren’t the type to let a little thing like “reality” get in the way of a bit of mendacious ideological posturing.
I can absolutely see him trying to get rid of age-classified PT standards and making everyone meet the 18-21 male standard.
…which sounds like a veiled method to shift your military brass population towards less experienced folks who would be less likely to stand their ground if asked to do something authoritarian…
I think we are safe in assuming that the entire performance was really about dominance and power. “I can make you come to me and listen to whatever I say, and you can’t do anything about it.”
It is kind of weird to see Hegseth making a big deal about fitness, considering how healthy eating habits have kind of become Democratic-coded (don’t ask me why, it’s too dumb for words). Remember Sarah Palin and the Big Gulp sodas?
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/03/sarah-palin-compares-obama-to-bernie-madoff-sips-from-a-big-gulp-and-jokes-about-her-gun-rack
Times have changed. Now we have articles like this:
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/pandemic-fitness-trends-have-gone-extreme-literally-n1292463
Oh, Townsends is an all-time YouTube channel. If you’re not familiar with historical FoodTube you’re missing out on some great stuff.
Max Miller is another excellent one. Combines historical recipes with general history. Almost always does his research very well, dispelling common myths and “just-so” origin stories. There’s also something charming and simply delightful about the presentation style.
This is the second time in as many years that Bret has a gap week the same day that a new Taylor Swift album comes out; coincidence?
I mean, I’ve never seen either of them in the same room at the same time…
To be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of them in a room at all, alone or otherwise. But that’s besides the point…
why are these fascist manly dweebs themselves so pathetic? (See Plump Trump…or Goebbels, Himmler, etc)
Looking at wikipedia:-
Goering was a WW1 fighter ace with 22 victories (I gather unusually solid ones), who won Germany’s highest award for bravery, the Pour le Mérite.
Hitler fought for four years on the Western Front and was awarded the Iron Cross twice (Second Class and First Class).
Rudolf Hess also fought for four years and was awarded the Iron Cross First and Second Class.
Himmler only turned 18 in 1918; he was still in training when the war ended.
Only Goebbels did not serve in WW1 – he was refused owing to a deformed right foot and consequent limp.
All volunteered for the army at the earliest opportunity; all who saw action won at least the Iron Cross.
I’d happily shoot them all, but I am not convinced that “pathetic dweeb” is quite accurate.
It’s hard not to think that 1930s Germany was taken over by a better class of fascist. I feel understanding of current American politics could be improved by looking at Latin America, rather than Central Europe. Chavez, not Hitler.
Himmler really was a bit of a dweeb (and it seems to have been a serious *thing* for him that he never got to serve in WWI unlike a lot of the other senior nazis)
Hugo Chavez and Donald Trump couldn’t be more different, ideologically.
On the face of it, they and their supporters hold very similar opinions about democracy.
On the face of it, they and their supporters hold very similar opinions about democracy.
Probably, but being opposed to the same thing doesn’t make them *similar*, especially when they’re opposed to it from two completely different (opposite?) ideological perspectives.
Chavez tried to mount a coup, failed, was imprisoned, and then got elected president. Trump skipped one of those bits.
Indeed. Anyone whose supporters storm the legislature with the avowed intent of keeping him in power must be anti-coup.
Out of the many notable differences between Trump and Chavez, I think the one I would really like to emphasize is that only one appears to have been truly consistent about his anti-elite rhetoric. After all, Trump’s rhetoric largely stayed rhetoric in his first term, and even now, as we got the rampage of first DOGE, then OMB under Vought, the people carrying it out are hard to describe as “non-elite” in any meaningful sense.
Moreover, his own chosen successor might have had (exaggerated his) humble beginnings, but he is still a man of Yale. For that matter, it’s kinda hard to describe an adult Pence, with his law school degrees and the like, as non-elite. Chavez, on the other hand, quite literally had himself succeeded by a bus driver revolutionary who never even finished high school. Ironically, for all of his other flaws, the former bus driver probably has a lot better understanding of evolution than the former attorney.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/11/13/mike-pence-evolution/
Regarding the “Quantico Disgrace” (great name), I predict future iterations of the same sort of thing will not feature solid blocks of (hostile) generals (and their SELs, no ones discussed the SELs), but selections of more carefully chosen, more junior — more reliably pro-Trumpy troops. Then they’ll be able to hold something more like the MAGA rally they want. You heard it here first.
“The United States military has spent more than the last century and a half mopping the floor with manly-man armies, be they the Flower of Southern Chivalry1 or the Nazi Übermenschen.”
That seems like wholly unjustified triumphalism. The US military has spent the past 60 years losing more wars than we have won. I don’t say that it’s because the Vietnamese, Afghans, etc. were more manly than we (though they probably think so), but let’s not pretend that our military has a record of considerable recent success.
The US military is more successful in peacetime than in war. This is not a criticism, it’s actually sophisticated praise. If it were up to the military, I have a feeling that we would never go to war, not simply because war is hell (though it is, and I think they know it), but because that would never be necessary…
(Background: I’m a citizen of Australia, a country which is a close ally of the USA and would rely heavily on US military support in any conflict. So dramatic changes to the US military culture matter to us.)
There’s another current-day military which is following the Hegseth model and which is in the news: Hamas. I did some searching (in a private/incognito browsing window!) for Hamas training videos, and they’re very physical fitness orientated. Lots of young men running and jumping and crawling under barbed wire, with guns. The Israeli Defence Force recruiting videos instead are more typically western, showing men and women; Jews but also Moslems and Christians; recruits learning various skills and trades beside shooting people.
Hamas also tick two other Hegseth boxes: 1. The Palestinians hate LGBT people, with a UN Human Rights Commission report in 2023 declaring that the Palestine territories are among the most dangerous places on Earth for LGBT people. And 2. Hamas don’t believe in Rules of Engagement (ROE), no limits on the targets for their violence.
On 7 October 2023 the ruthless manly straight men of Hamas started a large scale military conflict with the button pushing LGB friendly men and women of Israel. Here’s what the operational diary for a Hamas commander would look like:
Day 1: We (Hamas) are doing great! Our attack force has inflicted massive casualties given its size. We caught the Israelis by surprise, slaughtering their menfolk and raping their women. And some civilians from other countries too, but ROE are for wimps.
Days 2 – 7 (aprox): OK, not so great as day 1, but we’re still in the fight.
Days 8 – 730 (time of writing): Oh shit oh shit the Israelis are coming to kill us all. Hide! Hide!
The Israelis are raining death and destruction on Gaza whenever and wherever they like, and the hardened traditional values warriors of Hamas can’t do anything to stop them. The only remaining Palestinian tactic/strategy is to scream as loudly as possible in the hope that someone will step in and stop the soft latte-sipping civilised Israelis from genociding them out of existence.
Hegseth wants to make the US military less like the Israelis and more like Hamas? Or, less like the Ukrainians and more like Russia? That’s crazy.
The US rained death and destruction on both Vietnam and Afghanistan more or less at will, but we still didn’t win. Not saying that lack of physical fitness was our problem.
The IDF serves a polity with richer taxpayers and more influential friends. That is good for them. They get bought better weapons. The Hamas military arm has poorer taxpayers and less influential friends. That is bad for them. They don’t get such good weapons. But none of that would change if Hamas ran different recruitment adverts.
Nothing about changing the American military’s PT regime or rules of engagement will force it to rely on more downmarket weapon systems.
And 2. Hamas don’t believe in Rules of Engagement (ROE), no limits on the targets for their violence
This sounds a little….misplaced to me. Surely after the last couple of years, it’s hard to argue that the current Israeli establishment is all that big on Rules of Engagement either?
The Israeli Defence Force recruiting videos instead are more typically western, showing men and women; Jews but also Moslems and Christians; recruits learning various skills and trades beside shooting people.
I don’t really see any of that as particularly “western”, but more generally, i wouldn’t consider Israel to be a “western” country either, especially considering that a lot of their population immigrated from either the Middle East or from the other side of the Iron Curtain. (Needless to say, I don’t mean that as a criticism: I have other criticisms of Israel, not being ‘western’ isn’t one of them. I don’t consider myself ‘western’ either although i live in a western counrty, America).
The IDF does have Rules of Engagement. No armed force, no time, no place, has ever entirely followed their ROEs but we can see what happens when they’re broken. Hamas broadcast the videos of their attacks on civilians as widely as possible, “look how fearsome we are”. The IDF tries to cover them up, because under Israeli law they’re in the wrong, and they know it.
Israel is emphatically are not defined by the racial/ethnic ancestry of the population. It’s “the Jewish state”! (And yes that’s exaggerated.) The original 1948 conflict was between the Jewish and Moslem inhabitants of the same geographic area, whose ancestors had lived (and inter-married) in the same place for centuries if not millennia.
With an immigrant population defined by culture rather than ancestry, Israel has become very western. Intel design chips in Israel. Other western countries buy Israeli software and weapons. It has a Parliament, Supreme Court, most of the institutions that westerners expect – and not just on paper, they actually function. Israel also has western style political parties based on policy / ideology rather than ancestry, Pride marches, LGBT tolerance, etc.
Is Israel exactly the same as every western country? No, because no “western” country is exactly the same as all the others. But it is a member of the Status Quo Coalition, it usually sides with western countries, and I imagine that any Israeli ambassador or politician trying to build sympathy with people in the “Global South” by claiming that Israel wasn’t western would be laughed at.
Anyway, the point isn’t that Israel is western or not. The point is that a western like society / military is slaughtering a military that is doing all the things Hegseth wants the US military to do.
@scifihughf,
OK, we can set aside the question of whether Israel is “western” or not, since it’s tangential to your main point. As far as your main point goes though, while I’d probably agree that the current Israeli government is more careful about civilian casualties than Hamas is (or would be, if they had Israeli firepower), both of them are *way* more reckless about civilian lives than the US military historically has been*, so if Hegseth gets his way he’d be moving more in the direction of the Israeli establishment, not further away from it. I would bet Hegseth admires Israel a lot *precisely because* of their policy towards the WB / Gaza.
(not that I’m in any way a fan of the American state and its foreign policy, but i want to give credit where it’s due).
“both of them are *way* more reckless about civilian lives than the US military historically has been”
Best thing, I think, is if you just look up the wikipedia page for “Boeing B-29 Superfortress” and go from there.
What in the world is a “manly man” army? This doesn’t seem to correlate with anything in the real world. Is it some sort of mocking propaganda for historical & current factions you’re opposed to?
It’s branding, which is real and has real world consequences. How a community brands itself is part of it’s culture, and culture helps determine individual behavior.
Well, that makes sense at least. My objection is that it doesn’t really fit the examples given. It’s true that the Confederates had better generals, better cavalry, and arguably a greater will to fight, and were slowly crushed to death by the logistics, industry, and numbers of the Union (with immigration playing a role here). However, the Confederates didn’t choose this state of affairs, that’s just the hand they were dealt. Likewise, the Nazi Germans did not disregard logistics — their massive battle & defeat at Stalingrad & Kursk were because they were attempting to construct a corridor/pipeline to tap the oil in the Caucasus to obtain much-needed fuel for their war machine. So it’s not like they put showmanship above logistics, despite claims to the contrary (especially regarding Stalingrad).
Speaking of which, was the Soviet Red Army a bunch of “manly men”? Because if so, they won, and did the heavy lifting in slugging it out with the Third Reich. Sure, they had help from lend-lease, and from the Western front, but credit for victory in Europe still largely goes to Russia, however politically inconvenient that may be nowadays.
Sure, they had help from lend-lease, and from the Western front, but credit for victory in Europe still largely goes to Russia, however politically inconvenient that may be nowadays.
It shouldn’t be politically inconvenient, considering that today’s Russian government has nothing in common with the government that won WWII or with its successors. Putin’s big ideological inspiration was very much anti-Communist and pro-Nazi (at least until the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, and somewhat even afterwards).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Ilyin
I emphasize with your sentiment, but I think I would disagree with nearly all of the above.
Besides excluding the obvious fact that they had a choice to not fight, or at least to not fight over Fort Sumter of all things…on one hand it is true that the Union lost a lot at first, and even their best-known victories, Antietam and Gettysburg, were generally won with the Union possessing a hefty numerical advantage (i.e. a 5:3 ratio in their favour at Antietam). Altogether, the Union and Confederacy apparently suffered largely comparable casualties by the end of the war – and given that the Union had approximately 2.5X more of practically everything militarily relevant, (that is, 2.2X more soldiers, 2.5X railroad length, 3X GNP, 2X wheat and 4X corn harvest, 1.8X horses/mules, 1.5X total livestock) this clearly does not reflect well on the (early) Union Generals.
Having said, there certainly was at least one major example where the Confederates chose to behave specifically in line with the stereotype being mocked here – and got wrecked for it. By that, I mean when their “President” and some of his most senior military advisers decided it was a good idea to make a 33-year old Hood into a full General based on his “warrior ethos” fighting qualities. He proceeded to lose thousands of men in useless frontal attacks and got tricked by Grant into marching the bulk of Confederate forces into a secondary theater to get worn down by logistics, then besiege well-fortified Nashville, then lose nearly his entire army there in what is apparently described as the single worst defeat suffered by either side in that war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bell_Hood#Franklin%E2%80%93Nashville_Campaign
I have seen fair arguments that even Lee was ultimately just a more competent Hood; that both of them waged offensives their side could not afford when they needed to play defence and stretch the war into as many election cycles as possible. Quite obviously, those estimated 23k soldiers Hood’s lost for good would have done them a lot more good in defensive positions. Moreover, instead of marching onto Gettysburg, Lee could (and should) have had done the utmost to protect the citadel of Vicksburg, whose loss dramatically worsened CSA’s logistics. However, they were all too much of “manly men” to not take big risks and pursue big, sweeping offensives.
The thing is, while Stalingrad was a major railway node and a weapons manufacturing hub (one of the several cities where T-34 was getting welded, for one), it was well to the east of the key oil fields. After the Nazis had taken over the gateway city of Rostov (which was meant to be defended like Stalingrad was in Stavka’s plans, but General Kulik lost his nerve after news of the massive encirclement of Kharkov which made all the subsequent offensives possible in the first place and the city was abandoned without a fight), the army group was literally split, with only one half (“A”, the more important one on paper) marching towards the oil fields (eventually forced to stop by the city of Tuapse, before getting routed next year) and the other half, the “B” half, besieging Stalingrad. It was entirely possible to leave a much smaller blocking force to dig in at the Stalingrad-facing flank and concentrate the rest of the forces on the march across the Caucasus; luckily for the world, that did not happen.
Moreover, even with that plan to split forces into A and B groups in place, Stalingrad could well have been a footnote – if Hitler listened to all the generals and marshals who were practically begging him to order a withdrawal before the encirclement was completed. Instead, Hitler became convinced that since the Luftwaffe had managed to supply encircled troops entirely from the air in the first half of 1942 at Demyansk, ultimately snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, the same would be possible there – never mind that the forces at Stalingrad required far more daily supplies, let alone that the Soviet air force had markedly improved in the meantime and got much better at intercepting transports. Instead, the ace up Hitler’s sleeve was to promote von Paulus to Field Marshal – for no other reason than a belief that no German Field Marshal had ever surrendered before, so von Paulus could not lose once he became one either. If that’s not “showmanship above logistics”, what is?!
I’ll also add that Hitler was actually planning to capture Leningrad in a single assault around the same time as the Stalingrad fighting was at its most intense – in fact, the first-ever deployment of Tiger was at the Leningrad in 1942, not anywhere near Stalingrad or the oilfields. Nothing came of it because it crashed into the Soviet counteroffensive and the two armies stalemated – until the winter 1943 Soviet offensive finally lifted the Leningrad siege – only to get stuck in the local swamps. Given all of that, most of the Nazi forces could well have been pulled away to reinforce Stalingrad and Caucasus offensives, with little else changing besides countless civilians no longer being subjected to starvation genocide.
Finally, after Stalingrad and the rout at the Caucasus (throughout early 1943, the Axis troops there retreated almost all the way back to Crimea, being forced to dig in at the opposite side of the Kerch Strait at Taman), any notion that Germany could contest that oil again was total fiction. Guderian and Manstein (the one who came up with a plan which defeated France within two months) were again all-but-begging Hitler to dig in at the Dnieper and not to waste any troops on a major offensive with little chance of success for the sake of a city nobody in the West could tell you anything about. Hitler listened to them for days, but in the end, he really wanted to demonstrate the power of the latest German toys…and the rest is again history.
Well, until anybody here can supply us with a remotely objective way to rank the “manliness” of soldiers, one would be forced to conclude that the Red Army of Workers and Peasants was in fact the least manly fighting force of the war – purely because it had by far the largest fraction of women in its ranks. Throughout 1942, ~170,000 young women were conscripted; while the mobilization drives were for logistics roles like comms and truck driving, with the aim of sending freed-up men to the front, it nevertheless still resulted in a higher proportion of women compared to any other fighting force of the period. And of course, female snipers, two female air regiments (one of ~20 interceptors and another of ~45 night bombers – the relatively well-known Night Witches) and even a handful of female tankers – again more than basically any other army of the period.
@xcalibur,
I hope Bret doesn’t ban me for this, but I think yes, it’s dumb culture war talking points, but it’s responding to even dumber culture war talking points on the other side. American public discourse right now isn’t in a very elevated situation, as you may have noticed.
Yes, I’m well aware of the chaos of the past decade. There’s always a risk of anachronism when studying history, ie projecting current attitudes & conflicts onto the past, which becomes a far greater liability during tumultuous times like ours.