We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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We’ve already killed all the dumb terrorists, so all that’s left are the smart ones.
– I heard an American voice saying that, in connection with the ongoing war in Afghanistan, while I was transferring a recording I had made of a show called The World’s Deadliest Arms Race (shown in the UK about a month ago on Channel 4 TV) from my TV hard disc onto a DVD.
One of the best things about recording TV shows, as opposed to merely watching them, is being able to wind back and find out exactly who said something of particular interest, and exactly what it consisted of. The above words, I quickly learned, were spoken by a big, tough guy in a black T-shirt by the name of Marine Staff Sergeant Jack Pierce. They come right near the end of the show, which lasts just over forty five minutes.
Ssgt. Pierce was reflecting on how he and the rest of the crew of the vehicle they were all in were subjected to attack with an I(mprovised) E(xplosive) D(evice). Six of the crew were badly wounded, including Ssgt. Pierce who is now paralysed from the chest downwards. The other two died instantly.
Earlier today, Remembrance Sunday and a rare sunny day after many grey ones, I walked to Westminster Abbey, to take photos of the commemorations outside the Abbey of our war dead:
As every year around this time, Britain remembers its war dead with smal wooden crosses, almost all with a poppy attached, and a small written message, of a name or a note of remembrance.
Not surprisingly, given how many died, there are a lot of crosses:
Some of the messages said that every one of the dead was a “hero”. Maybe. But there can be no doubting that these men, with “VC” after their names, definitely were, whatever you may think of the wars they were fighting:
As was this man:
There are not many individual commemorations of this sort, with a personal photo. More common were clutches of crosses, with the bigger lettering used only for the names of the regiments of the men commemorated.
I liked this regimental sign, embodying what tanks looked like on the very first occasions when they took to the battlefield:
And once I started noticing in particular these regimental signs, I particularly noticed this one:
Artists’ Rifles? Artists?
Yes, apparently these men were, to begin with anyway, painters who chose to swap their paintbrushes for rifles and their tubes of paint for bullets:
The first ‘Captain’ of the Regiment to be elected was Lord Bury (later the Earl of Albemarle) but he did not remain in office for very long. The first Commanding Officer in 1860 was Henry Wyndham Phillips, the painter and amongst the early distinguished ‘Artists’ were John Everett Millais, G F Watts, Val Prinsep, Frederick Leighton (later Lord Leighton, CO after Henry Wyndham Phillips and a future President of the Royal Academy), R W Edis (a future CO), Holman Hunt and William Morris.
However, the artistic influence somewhat declined:
The influence of the Pre-Raphaelite group, however, appears to have been more social than military! As years went by the composition of the Regiment was broadened to include many other professions. By 1893, for example, painters and sculptors represented less than 5 per cent. of the membership with architects 12 per cent., lawyers 12 per cent., doctors 10 per cent. and civil engineers 6 per cent.
Blog and learn.
Imagine that happening now.
According to a Jane’s newsletter, the UK is at least studying the idea of going to sea with a carrier more in line with its naval heritage than the little ones it has been living with for some decades:
UK launches carrier conversion studies. The UK’s Aircraft Carrier Alliance (ACA) – comprising BAE Systems, Babcock, Thales and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) – has commenced an incremental 18-month Conversion Development Phase (CDP) to explore options for the adaptation of at least one of its Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers to a ‘cats and traps’ configuration to enable the operation of the F-35C Carrier Variant (CV) of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). Seed funding of about GBP5 million (USD8 million) is covering activity through to the end of October, with further contracts to be let in the near future to the ACA and the MoD-led Naval Design Partnering (NDP) team
For those unfamiliar with fleet carriers, the UK and many other nations have been building ships with decks that tilt upward so the airplane has more time to gain speed as it falls off the end of the carrier in full afterburner. This avoids the need for the complex catapult operations but has the downside that it cannot launch heavier aircraft, something which severely limits its force projection capabilities.
I should also note that the UK invented the carrier aircraft catapult, along with many other features we consider synonymous with US super-carriers.
Today is Memorial Day, which although it is an American holiday, is relevant to anyone anywhere who has had friends or relatives serve their country and perhaps make the ultimate sacrifice.
The father of a woman friend personalizes it for me: he served with the Marines and went ashore on Iwo Jima. He was there when the flag went up. Some days later he was wounded and evacuated. He fortunately lived through the war despite serving in such terrible battles for otherwise someone very close to me would not have been born.
It is difficult to honor such people enough. They were the ordinary men who did extraordinary things when called upon to do so.
I look at this item over at Wired, the technology/culture publication, and think that this is all very geeky, very Sci Fi and very clever, but it also makes me think, as a commenter does on the article, that it is hardly surprising that defence procurement costs are so high, and getting higher. Which is possibly not very smart if government budgets are under so much strain.
I ran across this item in a Jane’s Newsletter this morning:
US, Japan agree to diversify rare earth minerals. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara agreed on 28 October that diversifying sources of rare earth minerals was a priority in the wake of China’s freeze on exports to Japan. These minerals are indispensible to modern defence systems and see commercial use in mobile phones, wind turbines, televisions and hybrid electric drives
Rare earth elements, with names like Yttrium, Scandium, Lanthanum and Praeseodymium, are critical to a modern industrial society. They appear in lasers, high tech alloys, superconductors, and much else. China is applying Mercantilist practices to corner a larger share of the global market in high end electronics. They are the largest producer of the strategic REE’s and see this as an advantage in a geopolitical sense as well.
It will not work however. They may well be the current largest producer, but these elements exist all over the world. In the short term they will gain an advantage. Over the medium to longer term they will accomplish the same thing ITAR regulations accomplished for the United States. They will create a thriving industry elsewhere and it will eventually ‘eat their lunch’.
To paraphrase an old saw: “You can’t fool Mother Market.”
Today’s Times has the headline:
Allies at odds over death of hostage in bungled rescue
The story is behind a paywall. It does not matter. I am only interested in the headline and whoever wrote it.
Do these people have any idea at all of what life-or-death fighting is actually like? I do not demand that they have actually done any before writing about it; little would ever be reported about war if that were the test. But they could at least have read a few memoirs, or talked to their grandfathers. Reading about the Dieppe Raid might put things in perspective.
Hint: it is not like planning a dinner party. With that sort of thing if you make a careful list of Things To Do and do them all in good time you generally can be reasonably confident that it will work out OK and if it does not work out OK, say the soufflé does not rise or the wine was too sweet, it probably was because someone bungled.
Military small group operations – by which I mean small group killings of people who can also kill you – are not like that. They always hang on a knife edge. The most skilled soldiers in the world frequently die young and frequently fail. A hand is a fraction of a second too slow on the trigger – a human mind is a fraction of a second slower than another, hostile, human mind to make sense of the confusion – and a comrade dies, or a hostage dies, and a lifetime of agonized mental replaying of that moment of failure begins.
Six hours later a headline writer in an office far away expresses his displeasure.
I have been thoroughly enjoying reading this book about how the Allies sought – very cleverly – to throw the Nazis off the scent ahead of the invasion of Italy, hence saving potentially thousands of Allied soldiers’ lives. An extraordinary cast of characters is involved, conjuring up the sort of plot-lines that would do credit to any writer of spy fiction. And indeed several of the protagonists on the Allied side were novelists with vivid imaginations.
A current controversy intrudes. Back in WW2, the Allies had the priceless knowledge via the code-breakers of Enigma about the enemy’s plans, and even more vitally, the fact of having cracked Enigma was kept a secret for many years under the various pieces of legislation controlling such matters both during the war and into the Cold War era. So when I read today about the latest moves by the Wikileaks website to publish all kinds of classified military information on the Web, I wonder about what would have happened if, say, a Wikileaks kind of outfit had been around during WW2 and had stumbled upon the kind of facts as described in the book I link to?
Of course, if we had had the internet back in 1939 or earlier, and had the ability to spread information and views around outside the conventional channels of the MSM that existed back then, maybe this would also have been used to weaken or undermine the enemy side as well. (Would a Hitler have prospered in the Information Age?). I remember that in David Friedman’s recent interesting book (also available in an online form) about various trends, he addresses both sides of this question: what happens to privacy in an age of good encryption and ever-increasing attempts by states and other groups to put folk under surveillance.
But even so, it should trouble anyone concerned with security to think that a Wikileaks outfit can put out this sort of material and seems to have no compunctions about doing so. And while Wikileaks may think it is performing a sort of public service, if we are in a war for national survival, say, and we use deception techniques to win, and some self-appointed characters decide to blow the lid on those techniques, then what should the response be? In my view, this is a treasonable act or at the very least an act of aiding and abetting enemy combatants. It goes beyond, I think, the sort of opposition and free speech, including the right to condemn what a government is doing, during wartime. (And by the way, even under anarchism, secrets might be of importance to certain people, so it is no answer to say that such issues are made redundant if we get rid of states).
And it is not just about issues of national security that I think this website is running amok on. Take the world of banking. Some time ago, for instance, Wikileaks published data on individuals who have accounts at an Icelandic bank. Now no doubt the website will claim that it was acting in the public interest, but there are perfectly honest reasons for why people have private bank accounts, such as not giving out valuable information to oppressive governments/criminals (but I repeat myself, Ed) trying to grab that money, or kidnap them for ransom, etc.
And perhaps the man who runs Wikileaks should be glad that some of the older punishments for treason no longer are used in this country. Very glad, in fact.
“It is typical of the spin era that the first serious “crisis” in relations between General McChrystal and President Obama occurs over a few disobliging words the General and his team spoke about the President and his team. The endless rounds of deaths and dangerous patrols, the delays in finding political settlements on the ground and the ubiquitous ability of the “insurgents” to reappear are not apparently worthy reasons to recall the General for talks, but a magazine article is.”
– John Redwood, MP and blogger.
David Friedman has a thought-provoking item up on whether politicians in the 1850s would have acted differently had they known of the carnage that was to be caused by the US Civil War of the following decade. He runs some interesting scenarios.
Counter-factual history is a genre in fiction, of course. I remember Philip Chaston wrote about this issue some time ago. Sean Gabb, one of the current leaders of the Libertarian Alliance, has thoughts related to this about the Second World War (as readers may recall, I find his revisionist perspective unconvincing, as does Patrick Crozier).
One of my little pleasures in life is finding interesting pictures to put on my personal blog which are vertically very thin, and which thus assist in the pursuit of blogging brevity. As here for instance, yesterday, when I displayed a wafer thin slice of a picture of the rings of Saturn.
And I was all set to put this picture up at my personal blog too, until I found myself asking technological questions of the sort that Samizdata’s commenters are the very people to answer.
That picture, severely cropped by me, I found here. It is the new unmanned Israeli bomber, the Heron TP. The Israelis have apparently just put a flock of them into service.
Two thoughts.
One, this is surely vivid evidence of the wisdom, from the purely defence point of view (never mind the wider economic arguments), of the Israelis contriving, with encouraging tax policies, their own version of Silicon Valley, said to be second only in the world to Silicon Valley itself. And who knows how long the original will last, given the current insanity of Californian fiscal policy. The surrounding enemies of Israel can only dream of being able to contrive such birds. But is this a purely Israeli achievement, or did Americans have a big input? And do Israelis now have quite a big input into American aircraft of a similar sort?
Two, I find it interesting that although there is no pilot on board, there is still a bulge at the front and on top, just as if there was. Why is that? It surely can’t just be that they are used to such bulges at the front of airplanes, so they stuck with it. Could it? I’m guessing it’s the logical spot to put lots of guidance kit, telling the bird where it is and where to fly next and how to aim its weapons. It’s the best place to put, that is to say, the various “pilots”. Or, is their some aerodynamic reason? Comments on that appreciated.
“Churchill, who was prone to the black dog of depression, went to bed on the night of the 5th of June 1944 with a heavy heart. Gloomily he told his wife, Clementine, that by the time they awoke in the morning many tens of thousands of young men he had sent across the Channel might lie dead on the beaches of Normandy. In Alanbrooke’s diaries (he was the finest of the WWII diarists) it is clear how heavily he felt the weight of responsibility throughout his time as a commander in France in 1940, and subsequently as CIGS. Yet neither Alanbrooke nor Churchill felt the need to go in front of the cameras and explain how troubled they were by all the pressure. Even long afterwards it wouldn’t have occurred to either for a split second that this would be a good idea or remotely appropriate.”
– Iain Martin, commenting on the recent performance of Mr Blair’s former spinmeister on the TV. He makes a good point, I think.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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