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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I actually can’t blame the whole two nights on Pearl Harbour. I must admit that the following had a bit to do with the lack of sleep as well:
- The excavation of the interior of the first submarine to sink an enemy ship (the second was a German boat in WWI), the Confederate CNS Hunley has been completed and conservation is in progress.
- The entire turret of the Union ironclad USS Monitor has been raised and is undergoing excavation. It is the very first such turret in naval history.
- A salvor company with rights to the Titanic is carefully recovering and conserving items for public display – but is under legal attack from statist minded sorts who are destroying its’ financial viability to do with private funds what would cost far more with public funds.
- The sinking of the Battleship Hiei at Guadalcanal in one of the more violent classical naval engagements of the war. This bit of historical writing uses logs and reports from both sides.
- The Scapa flow wrecks from the massive German fleet scuttling after Jutland; diving on the Prinz Eugen in the Pacific and information on many other wrecks is to be found here
With little effort you can find a lot more information on the many warship wrecks around the world. ones that can be dived on; ones that are being conserved for historical value and ones that are off limits war graves like HMS Royal Oak at Scapa Flow.
Go forth and lose thy sleep!
I’ve been unsure about this war in Iraq that hasn’t yet happened but which everyone says will, Real Soon Now. Am I a de Havillandite ‘Get In There And Liberate Everybody’ libertarian, or a Cato Institute/Rothbardian ‘Don’t Mess With Them And Then They Won’t Mess With Us’ libertarian? Both positions seem to me to have major merits.
But now here’s an argument that has really impinged upon the Micklethwait cranium. In yesterday’s Sunday Times (Aug 25 – no links but the thing summarises itself well), at the end of the leader article on Page 1.16 headed “It’s Iraq or the euro”, the ST says that Blair …
… could not unite the Labour party behind both a war and a referendum. He will have to choose between the two. Since there is no compelling reason for Britain to join the euro, it is clear where his priority should lie.
So go for it President George W. Drag Tony away from his hideous plan to turn Britain into a bunch of European provinces. Win the war, but give the British army things to do in it which are chaotic, embarrassing, trivial, ridiculous, which expose the sorry state of the kit they now have to make do with, but which, although daft, are nevertheless entirely safe. Don’t get them killed in any big numbers. That would be too solemn, not farcical enough, not silly enough. Keep them all alive, so that they can then come home and tell everyone what a twat Tony is, and make him unable to drag us into Europe, ever. I know you can do this.
This Europe business is horrible. The natural state of an intelligent Englishman is to be telling the world what it should be thinking and doing, with no thought for the mere narrow interests of England. These can be taken care of as the separate and smaller matter that they are. How else is the world to know what it should do, if not guided by intelligent Englishmen such as me? Yet now I find myself deciding the fate of the world entirely according to whether its plans will or will not suit England. Dreadful. Utterly, utterly dreadful.
August 20th 1940, and the fate of western civilisation hung in the balance. As the Battle of Britain was still being fought out between the Luftwaffe and RAF to determine if Nazi Germany would be the uncontested master of western Europe, Winston Churchill gave one of his most stirring of many memorable speeches in the House of Commons:
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few
There is a lengthy article on USS Clueless about why the US military is the best practitioner of high initiative warfare, tracing it to the empowering influence of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. I disagree on many levels starting with the fact I do not think the US military is the best (or even particularly remarkable) at ‘high initiative warfare’.
The US military does not achieve its results as Steven Den Beste suggests, by empowering individual soldiers and harnessing their brains and initiative more than any number of armies I could mention, but rather it achieves results by maximising its true advantages: firstly a huge economy and therefore sheer firepower (it can afford to shoot more bullets/drop more bombs) and secondly, its advanced technology (it can make its aeroplanes hard to shoot down and therefore safely drop smart bombs on people they don’t like from 20,000 feet). In simply wins by dumping large numbers of expensive smart bombs and cruise missiles on the enemy where it hurts most, followed by precise massed artillery if required. The job of America’s infantry and tank jockeys is to pick their way through the crater pocked remnants to what gets left over after the aerial (and maybe artillery) bombardment. Factor out the high tech long range bombardment capabilities, which is unique in the world at the moment, and whilst the US army is a fine one, it is not particularly exceptional in the way it fights compared to many other armies.
There are many armies in the world who are better than the US at the sort of small unit tactics that rely on ’empowered’ soldiers at low level (such as Israel, Britain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand). Frankly France’s 2eme REP is probably more optimised for what Steven thinks is a “new approach” to fighting than the much higher firepower US 82nd Airborne, precisely because it has less firepower and thus is forced to rely on élan et cran as well as to fight smart… and with very little help from 20,000 feet. It is in the ‘big stuff’ that no one can match the US, i.e. when it comes to the Godzilla-like ‘grid square removal’ that characterized the Gulf War.
This is not to denigrate the US military, far from it actually: that is a highly rational way to fight if you can afford it. But please realise that the way the USA fights is just the confluence of technology and economy, added to a particularly American political horror of friendly casualties, rather than some emerging ‘First Amendment Powered’ super soldiers. The German Fallschimjägers landing on Crete in 1941 displayed all the characteristics of low level high initiative fight smart upward info-flow empowerment yet it would be safe to say they were not benefiting from the First Amendment of the US Constitution or democracy.
At last, someone who understand the full range of libertarian thought on war… well, kinda 
Of course it threatens the man who pointed out that the security services protecting the Queen and government ministers are using insecure radio systems to communicate.
Making the equipment that can pick up those channels illegal in the UK will do nothing to prevent the IRA or any middle eastern terrorists who want to attack British targets from acquiring them overseas or just building it themselves (it is not exactly rocket science).
Solution? Buy encrypted communications systems and stop broadcasting in the clear. Duh.
Canada is treating its soldiers disgracefully. The fighting in Afghanistan is not a gentlemen’s game between sportsmen, it is a fight to the death with desperate terrorists. If some dead Al Qaeda/Taliban soldier was posed for a photograph with a cigarette and a placard around his neck saying ‘fuck terrorism’ then I say so what? It is okay to kill a man, to blow a hole in his body with a 50 cal slug, to shoot him dead, at the behest of your government… but not to disrespect the terrorist supporting son of a bitch’s corpse? Ludicrous.
I sometimes find myself agreeing with Steven Den Beste’s articles but sorry Steven, this is one of the dumbest pieces you have written in a while.
When he is right, he is sometimes very right and when he is wrong, he does tend to descend into crude history-by-Hollywood-stereotype. The picture he displays of two Royal Marines sparing with boxing gloves and an automatic weapon toting US soldier in the background is indeed symbolic… of the fact Steven does not know the slightest thing about modern British attitudes to war, British military culture or British military history.
The symbolism isn’t fair to the two Europeans [by which the ‘Canadian’ Den Beste means British] in the picture. They are members of the Royal Marines who just arrived there, and if they were to go into real combat they’d be armed similar to how the American is. But in a larger sense, it seems to epitomize the difference now in approaches that Europe and the United States want to take to the war: Europe is trying to fight it according to Marquis of Queensbury rules (i.e. “International law”, UN resolutions, and all the rest) because honor is the most important thing; the United States, on the other hand, is fighting to win.
People would think Britain had not won a war in the last 100 years if they got their history by reading what Steven writes, let alone in 1982. The Germans, Austrians, Argentines, Malays, Indonesians, Kenyans, Irish, Italians, French, Turks, Greeks, Japanese, Afghans etc. etc. etc. probably have a rather different take on British military culture. There is a reason Britain won in Malaya during The Emergency and the US lost in Vietnam under similar conditions. Marquis of Queensbury? Get real.
Here is a picture I think rather better sums up Britain’s ‘Red and Green War Machine’
Update:
Note to Steven: Britain, an island off the European coast, may be part of the European Union at the moment, but the EU is not a military alliance in any meaningful way. Any reading of British or European newspapers should make it obvious there is considerable acceptance of the British/European distinction, even by those who lament the fact. Thus your remarks are at best misleading. To describe the British troops in the picture as ‘European’, given that they are there under British, not ‘European’ auspices, does rather suggest you think there is no difference between the military or political cultures of mainland Europe and Britain. This is not just incorrect but pretty obviously so.
Finally I have found a way to mention a subject related to what I try to do for living, in a way relevant to libertarians and like-minded netwarriors. I have been interested in networks and their security for some time but only recently I have begun to notice articles and books attempting to analyse the implications of technology and information age on networks at a more strategic level. (I am not saying that they did not exist, simply that I haven’t been able to reach them despite my continuous searches). Perhaps it is a result of the very network effect that the topic is attracting more attention as it spreads into more industries, areas and levels of society.
And so I have come across a book titled Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy published by RAND (a contraction of the term Research and Development), the first organisation to be called a “think tank”. The authors take as a given that the fight for the future is not between the armies of leading states, nor are its weapons those of conventional armed forces. What today’s combatants – whether it be terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, drug smuggling cartels of Columbia and Mexico, or non-violent, civil-society activists for environment, human rights or liberty – have in common is that they operate in small, dispersed units that can deploy anytime, anywhere. They all feature network forms of organisation, doctrine, strategy and technology attuned to the information age. This gives rise to a new spectrum of conflict that has been termed netwars.
Netwar is the lower-intensity, society rather than state based counterpart to the mostly military concept of cyberwar and its distinguishing features are:
a) a dual nature – conflicts waged, on the one hand, by terrorists, criminals and ethno-nationalist extremists; and by civil-society activists on the other.
b) no leaders – networked groups without the obvious need for leadership
c) suppleness and flexibility – ability to come together quickly in swarming attacks
d) novelty – new practices triumph until an appropriate response is discovered
The framework for assessing such networks looks at five levels: the technological, social, narrative, organisational and doctrinal. All five must be right for the network to be fully effective. (Perry, I hope you are taking notes. )
The technological sophistication is not the only thing that matters. The other levels have as much, if not more, effect on the potential power of the group. The social basis for co-operation is important for establishing trust and identity, for example among the members of ethnically based terror and crime groups. Among civil-society netwarriors, in the absence of the ethnic or social ties the narrative level matters most as sharing and projecting a common story empowers them and attracts audiences. Finally, the defining level of a netwar actor is the kind of network and the sort of doctrine he uses.
To confront and cope with networked adversary, the same framework must be used to assess his strengths and weaknesses. The most serious opponents are highly networked and flexible, backed by social ties, secure communications and a common story about why they are together and what they need to do.
The network form of organisation is a serious challenge to nation states because it strains their ability to cope with the threats posed by such non-state actors, especially if used for criminal or terrorist objectives. Strategists and policy makers in Washington and elsewhere have already noted this dark side of the netwar phenomenon. The book recommends that whilst they continue to keep an eye on the perils posed by the ‘bad guys’, they must form coalitions between states and civil society’s networked actors. I imagine if they follow this suggestion, there will perhaps be a link, in the appropriate category, to the U.S. Department of Defense on the side bar. Or vice versa.
It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you have just bombed
– Unknown
I’ve just read this Opinion Journal review of a new Mel Gibson movie and it sounds like a “must see”.
I do find myself of two minds on the tenor of the article. It says some things which I fervently agree with:
“Black Hawk Down” is a true story. But it differs from “We Were Soldiers” in that nearly everyone admits the shootout in Somalia was the bad consequence of aimless foreign policy–many just don’t want to admit it was Bill Clinton who didn’t have a clear sense of what he was doing and thus his policy hung those men out to dry.
There is no reason why one cannot simultaneously respect the valour and ability of the men who fought in Somalia against incredible odds while simultaneously disagreeing they should have been sent there in the first place.
Where I part ways from the reviewer is on Vietnam. Where I see no difference betwixt the two – honourable men doing the best they can at the behest of dishonourable and incompetent politicians – the reviewer apparently believes Vietnam served some sort of purpose. I lived through the time. I saw no point to it then and 30 years on I still don’t.
This is a dichotomy never to be bridged in this life. But perhaps we can all make peace amongst ourselves by settling on something we can agree on. Those who fought in Vietnam were decent, brave and honourable men who deserved more respect than they received.
I was on the phone this afternoon with an old Manhattan customer of mine. As long time readers of Samizdata know, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time working in Midtown and lived in the Lower East Side while on the job. I even did jobs in the WTC, and in fact just heard today one of the hotel staff I dealt with on a cybercast was last seen making certain people were evacuated.
In any event… my consultancy customer base in New York went down the crapper along with the DotCrash so I’ve not had any jobs there since summer 2000.
The call lasted nearly an hour. We discussed the possibilities, some of which would require I once again spend considerable time on the left shore of the Atlantic. I suggested further negotiations go through my Financial Director – her family is from Cavan so she knows how to bargain. Afterwards I was in quite good form, thinking about getting back to my old haunts, looking up the friends in the trad scene there… and then I read this.
The 10kt weapon which the Drudge Report mentions is in the size range of the missing Russian ones I discussed earlier today. If al Qaeda do have one, and if they do use it… may Almighty God have mercy on their souls.
Because we will not.
The Drudge link looks rather generic, so if the content should change, this is the info to search for: Sun March 03, 2002 09:22:37 ET, October Bulletin Said Terrorists Thought To Have 10 Kiloton Nuclear Weapon To Be Smuggled Into New York City
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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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