Hand Grenade of the Week

John Kuehn Blog Post

All,  Still trying to get a handle on this medium, but decided we needed something that was better "truth in advertising" than "inaugural posting."   The next HGOTW, therefore will be posted as a response to this new blog thread.

John T. Kuehn, Ph.D., William A. Stofft Professor

U.S.  Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS

 

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Hand Grenade of the Month (April 2015)

Society of Military History (SMH) Conference time....where the military historians gather to hob nob like Oz and his Kansan wizards. Except one problem, many prominent military historians did not go to Alabama this week for the annual shin dig.

I cannot speak to anyone else's reasons for not going, but I CAN speak to my own anecdotal situation. I work for the U.S. Army as a military historian. So do a lot of the other military historians I know. So why did many of us not come? I did not come because of the incredible bureaucratic obstacles placed in my way by the Army CGSC leadership--which, along with the rest of the Federal Government, over-reacted to the exposes of the General Accounting Office conference abuses and misuses and then saw a drastic backlash against conferences at the very same time of the sequestration crisis of the last two years due to the Budget Control Act. The result was no money for SMH conference in New Orleans, which I paid for myself two years ago. Then last year the conference was in Kansas City, but even then the hoops we had to go through to get our NON-PROFIT foundation to fund even paying our conference fee were incredible, and some costs still came out of our own pockets.

This year one had to "bet on the come" that the Army or Foundation would pay for the conference attendance travel coast-- but the heat was on our organization at the command and general staff college (CGSC) because we had begun advertising ourselves as a "university" so it would look bad if the organization did not support its historians' attempts to do the things academics are supposed to do: write papers, present them, and serve on panels at conferences. However, the roadblocks still in place because of the insanity of the last two years and expedients that had somehow become policy meant that many of our folks at CGSC did not get the money until the last minute--which meant the taxpayers paid top dollar for the their airline tickets.

I decided I did not want to make a "bet" I might lose, and so did not apply for either Army or non-profit money to go. There were other reasons, too, but those were the primary ones--too much bureaucratic friction and a sense that the institution did not support our scholarship if it meant going anywhere more than 40 miles from Fort Leavenworth (and on our own dime).
The real killer here has been the CGSC Foundation's abrogation of its fiscal control to a bunch of active duty army officers who have somehow gained control over how a non-profit dispenses its funds. I fail to see why anyone in the active duty army would get a vote over a private non-profit institution's disbursement of funds...it is beyond me that such a situation exists.

Finally, I acknowledge that much of this sounds like whining, that many historians who are much worse off than we pay their own way and try to realize some benefits on their taxes. Acknowledged. However, they have tenure in most cases--we do not--we can be let go anytime with no right of review because we are title X employees. However, if the US Army wants to be taken seriously about its claims to support scholarship in its institutions, it needs to make its rhetoric match it bureaucratic actions. I suspect there are more than a few historians in Washington DC at the Center of Military History, West Point, and Carlisle Barracks, as well as other branch historians, who are not in Montgomery either because of these wrong-headed, parsimonious policies.

Note: weekly hand grenades may or may not resume as interest and time dictate.

r John T. Kuehn, Platte City, MO.
The views are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government

Will posted this to me and I repost it here with under the influence of Henry Adams who reputedly said:
"I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him."

Mr. O'Neil wrote:
As a mathematician and scientist I must start by saying that I believe that the notion of somehow opposing the "humanities" and "STEM" is absurd and anti-historical. May I remind everyone that the four subjects of the Quadrivium all were regarded by the Schoolmen as aspects of mathematics and science, and as essential for the development of critical thought? I submit that the problem is not of privileging one subject or another but of failure to develop critical thinking as a sound basis for broad and integrated understanding of our world.

Regarding John Kuehn's example, I would bet that the miscreants all had been exposed at one time or another to the term "junta" and the associated concept, but had not retained the information because, lacking a structure of critical thinking, they did not see how it related to their world and concerns. I have always felt that it was far more important to help my students and readers develop their critical intelligence than to impart any particular bit of factual information. And as a manager and leader it has long been apparent to me that the contributions that people made related far more strongly to their critical faculties than to their store of passive factual knowledge.

It's worth remembering that history was not a part of the classical liberal education — once the critical mindset had been acquired the student could be relied upon to develop a knowledge of history through independent reading, or so it was supposed. (The same was true of the body of accumulated scientific knowledge, as contrasted with the method of scientific thought.) As John Kuehn observes, never in human history has it been so easy for the student to acquire factual knowledge — if he or she knows how to ask the right questions and understand the meaning of the answers. I just typed "junta" into Google and got about 120 million results in 340 ms, the first page or so of which are all meaningful and relevant. Entering "Argentine junta" produced a similar wealth of responses, including many that appear quite informative. If the students who sit in class looking at their iPads and smartphones could be relied upon to be using them for such purposes we could all be well satisfied.

The person of truly critical intelligence is driven always to fill in the knowledge he or she needs to understand what it happening in the world. Historians do well to recognize that it is vastly more important and productive to prompt questions in the mind of the reader or student than to seek to answer questions he or she does not have and does not see the significance of. If I write a book or article and hear readers say that they don't know why they needed to learn what I was telling them I know I have failed.

Will O'Neil, Writer, fromer Vice President and chief scientist for the Center for Naval Analysis

Hand Grenade of the Month May 2015

Geography 101 (which leads to strategy 101)

I must be throwin' duds. I hear through my sources that some folks are reading these things, but I do not seem to be able to stir the pot enough to get folks to overcome the user processes of interaction since we switched to this new H-WAR format.

Whew, got that off my chest (on a rainy Saturday). ON to the main effort.

I continue to be amazed at how little we, and I used the collective "we," know about the history of our own hemisphere. Let me rewind. I was doing a class in my sea power course on the Falklands War of 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom. I always begin with a geopolitical discussion and was asking questions like:
"What national interests were involved for both Argentina and Great Britain?"
"What strategies were employed?"
"What was the larger strategic picture (hint Cold War)?"
"How did the governments involved set the stage and make their decisions?"

All Stop (a Navy term) on that last one (although to be honest my six students were having problems with the previous 3). When I got blank stares I asked about the government of Argentina in 1982, what was going on there, what were its security concerns?"
Nothing.
So I asked this question, "What is a Junta?"
Still nothing.
"Does anyone know what the word Junta means?"

None of them knew, but 20 years ago I posit that every single one of them (that is 30 years old in 1995), would have known. They would have known about the dirty wars in Chile and Argentina, that Argentina was run by a military Junta.

Okay, my point--first, education--how is it that the educated officers we have (outside those privileged elites in Washington and the East Coast, but maybe them too) know nothing about South American or even Central American history or political systems. At least they know about Che Guevara, but we teach them about him in one of our lessons, so other than the t-shirt I suspect most do not know who he is either.

The real problem here is an almost willful ignorance, supported by our education system about all our buddies here in Monroe-Doctrine land in the Western Hemisphere with us. America...er United States, wake up! There are teeming billions to the south of the Rio Grande and we should learn more about them...after all, we have to live with them, and not just figuratively, but these fellow Americans work all over our nation and interact with us in all sorts of subtle ways and we know next to nothing of their culture, politics, and history.

Boom (or thud)

John T. Kuehn, Ph.D.
Platte City, MO

Hand Grenade of the Month for June 2015
Trinitarian or Anti-Trinitarian?
Thanks to all for reinvigorating this esoteric little forum.

This month (albeit, a bit early, but I have to take some leave next week) we take a look at a recent claim that leads off a Martin Van Creveld article just out on the Fabius Maximus website entitled, "Why we lose so many wars, and how we can win." The "we," of course is the West, or more specifically the United States. Here is the website:
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2015/05/28/why-we-lose-wars-and-how-we-can-win-...

Okay, here is the claim that made me pull the pin and lob this sucker:
"Most of the West’s wars since WWII have been fight [sic] insurgencies in foreign lands. Although an ancient form of conflict, the odds shifted when Mao brought non-trinitarian (aka 4th generation) warfare to maturity. Not until the late 1950’s did many realize that war had evolved again."
Mr. Van Creveld is a noted anti-Clausewitzian (at least based on his understanding) and big fan of eastern ways and modes of warfare (Sunzi and, here, Mao). His approach is provocative (I recognize the type!), throwing stones at western thinkers, especially German or American ones, is something of a hobby of his and it contributes to a faux sense for novices that imagine they are reading something new when they pick up one of Van Creveld's many books.
However, Van Creveld seems unaware of (or deliberately ignores) Mao's "trinity," which pretty much means he has eschewed, or ignored, John Shy's famous essay in the second (1976/1984) edition of Makers of Modern Strategy.

In that essay, and others by Shy's one-time fellow traveler who wrote about counterinsurgency in the 1950s, Peter Paret, one sees the "triangularity" of people's war (also noted in Clausewitz's books 6 chapter 6 of ON War): the insurgent/guerilla, the counterinsurgent/regime, and the people. Too, calling it 4th gen war is odd because one sees it in warfare from ancient Rome to Scotland in the 14th Century to the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century to the American Revolution....I could go on, but I will stop. As for the American Revolution, that is Shy's area as well as others such as Wayne Lee and Joseph Fischer--they have done a good job of showing it to adhere generally to principles that Mao discussed, although Mao might call it North American People's Revolutionary War (he called his conflict Chinese People's Revolutionary War).

Okay, let us review the bidding on this claim. What Van Creveld refers to is trinitarian and it ain't new. When these sorts of errors occur up front in an article, it makes me highly suspicious of the rest.
[a second grenade of sorts] My take-away on the Kilkullen epigram from the article is this--if you don't want to fight "accidental guerillas," don't plop down in their lands, especially if those lands are across two, and sometimes three (remember the Indian) oceans. Or if you do plop down, be sure to plop up tout suite, tout court.
Seems simple* enough.
...two...three...this was rather a grenade launcher grenade, squeeze trigger.

vr, John
* "Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Carl might have added, "...especially in the United States after World War II, especially in the uber-friction environment of Washington DC." But, wait, dead-Carl has nothing to offer, right?

Hand Grenade of the Month July 2015

[[No trepidation after all the activity of last two months, at least not on the humble hand-grenade thrower’s part.]]

Working Title – Fireworks

Happy Birthday America (northern hemisphere branch). It time for this month’s provocative polemic.

First, I feel a bit like Howard Beal from the film “Network”—who threatened to kill himself on national TV and then had a huge audience the next broadcast.
This is my way of saying thanks to all who have participated in the many discussions and sidebars resulting from the last two hand grenades. However, the bad news is that I have no intention of killing myself—at least physically. Professionally may be another story.

My beef this month comes from our unique US-American chauvinism when it comes to coalition warfare. This had been percolating for awhile, but it came to a head recently in an interview I gave where the interviewer expected a self-congratulatory “run” by this humble author vis-à-vis the U.S. record at coalition warfare.
Context: What was really strange about the discussion is that it came from a talk about Napoleon’s ability versus that of his adversaries to conduct coalition warfare. I took the approach that Napoleon did considerably less well than his adversaries, especially by the time of 1813 and after, at coalition warfare, even though he had led one of the largest coalition armies to that point in history in his famous, albeit catastrophic, invasion of Russia in the Summer of 1812. His opponents only seemed to get better at it, although one of them was already quite good when he began flummoxing Nappy’s marshals and generals in Spain in 1808. I refer of course to Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, who also showed himself a very good orchestrator of what we call today the Foreign Internal Defense (FID) of building up the armies of allies and proxies. By the time of the Battle of Mont St. Jean (Waterloo ) Napoleon could find no allies, not even his in-laws, whereas his opponents were two of the finest coalition commanders alive—Field Marshals Blücher and Wellington.

The follow-on question went like this, “Well, what ramification does this have for the US today? Look at how well we did at coalition warfare in the 20th Century.”

I pitched right in with the point that the U.S. , like Napoleon—with the qualified exception of WW II and also, maybe, the Cold War—has tended to treat its allies and coalition partners as “second class citizens.” Ask any Brit, Frenchman, Korean…never mind these others, like Iraqis and Afghans, etc. The myth is that we play well with others in military coalitions. As a guy who has experience participating in several multi-national coalitions, I can say that it was mostly our way or the highway in DESERT SHIELD, DESERT STORM, DENY FLIGHT, SOUTHERN WATCH, SHARP GUARD, DELIBERATE FORCE, JOINT ENDEAVOR (and these are just the ones I was personally involved with).

I will end, as all good sailors must, with a sea story:

During DESERT SHIELD (the so-called First Gulf War, although it was really the second Gulf war since 1980) our Carrier Battle Force (3 aircraft carriers) in the Red Sea took aboard an Egyptian naval officer on the USS John F. Kennedy as a liaison in order to better coordinate with our Egyptian coalition partners who were convoying troops down the Red Sea to Jeddah for offload to join the land fight in Saudi Arabia to the east toward the Gulf. One of our officers complained during a US-Only staff meeting that this officer, speaking Arabic on the high frequency net with his headquarters in Alexandria, was giving away our locations to his superiors and that it was dangerous to do so, that it endangered the Battle Force. The admiral, a crusty old Vietnam A-7 pilot shot back, “Well, XXX, do you speak Egyptian?”
XXX, “No Admiral, I do not.”
“Then shut up. He’s staying.”

I think I told that story to the interviewer too, in an attempt to stroke my Navy audience, where sometimes we practice the coalition thing not quite as poorly as others historically have (and do) in the US national security-military complex.

What better way to celebrate the 4th of July than with fireworks, eh? (sorry for the Canadian usage, but hey, they are our allies, too!).

Happy 239th Birthday, in part due to our one-time and sometime allies the French

John T. Kuehn, Platte City Missouri

Hand Grenade of the Month for August 2015

Seventy Years -- The Moral Debate Continues

That’s right --70 years ago this month, the granddaddy, or as the late-Saddam Hussein might say, the mother of all hand grenades, went off at Hiroshima. (sorry for the contraction but blogs are exempt from formal writing requirements.) The moral debates continue but I will (not “would”) go on the record once and for all on this topic, a minor hand grenade in comparison.

First, the moral decision to drop the atomic bombs was made long before Leo Szilard stumbled on a London Street corner and realized that a chain reaction of neutrons could be generated using atomic fission and create an explosive bomb. This decision had been made intellectually by men like Billy Mitchell, Mason Patrick, Hugh Trenchard, Arthur “Bomber” Harris, and Giulio Douhet during the Great War and after in the 1920s with the codification of strategic bombing doctrine. They all came to it via different paths, some more directly-- Douhet and his notion of using weapons of mass destruction like incendiary bombs and gas bombs--some indirectly, such as Patrick and his intellectual heirs at the US Army Air Force school at Maxwell Field in Alabama. This indirect method led to the “slippery moral slope” of strategic bombing doctrine. We will bomb the enemies’ ability to wage war, his factories, especially his aircraft factories, make him prostrate in the air, and thus on the ground. This, of course, led American air planners to apply what they thought were precision weapons against specific targets, with the acceptance that some innocents, regrettably, would be killed in these attacks. More than some died.

As for Harris and his ilk, after realizing that precision night bombing was an oxymoron, they instead switched to a city-destruction approach, more in line with Douhet’s original visions of causing a breakdown in not only war production, but enemy morale on the dubious assumption that only the British had the moral fiber to survive such an approach. As for the Germans, their intellectual path to strategic bombing was less thoughtful, Goering and Hitler employed terror bombing from the outset because they employed terror as a matter of course in all things. They were not innovators, they were imitators when it came to strategic or terror bombing (Warsaw in 1939 and Rotterdam in 1940).

My point, as belabored and long as it took to get to it is that the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima was not at the beginning of a moral slide but at the end, its use by the nation that had initially eschewed sheer terror or city destruction in its interwar doctrine. The moral line had been crossed much earlier, both in thought and in deed, than August 6, 1945. Too, far too often we transpose what WE, today, know about these horrible (atomic) weapons rather than what the men in 1945 knew of them. From a moral standpoint the only real question to ask of the atomic bomb’s employment is the issue of why one would _keep_ using such an immoral approach. Most apologists (this word used in its explanatory sense), and I am one of them, argue that the reasons to keep using this approach looked far more appropriate in the later years of the war than its early years when the decision to cross the moral Rubicon had already been made. The war had lasted 6 years in Europe and nearly 8 in Asia (it started in 1937 in China), instigated by Germany and Japan, respectively. But let us be honest about it, the rationale always comes down to the ends justifying the means—“we must do horrible things to end this war, on our terms.” But that is war in a nutshell. To be selective in our moral judgments in an environment of amorality and immorality seems a bit, well, hypocritical. One cannot have it both ways. So I am on the side that sees the atomic bombs as a military necessity, a decision that was almost inevitable given all that had gone before and the attitude of the Japanese military-political coalition running things on August 5th; but also as one who sees it as a climax of an immorality. Unlike Harris’s bombing of Hamburg or the bombing of Dresden, it actually achieved a result that contributed (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the US severance of Japanese sea lines of communication and conquest of Okinawa) to a clear, sudden, some might say miraculous, end to such a terrible war.

Sadly, John T. Kuehn
"...it solves nothing, but may clear up the ideas of one or two people, a little." Henry Sidgwick commenting on his _The Methods of Ethics_