The Philippine Coast Guard released a photo of a Chinese warship off the coast of Philippine-claimed Pag-asa Island. The PCG issued a statement that read, in part, “The observed location of the Chinese vessels fall squarely within Pag-asa Island’s 12 [nautical miles] territorial sea. Their continuing unauthorized presence is clearly inconsistent with the right of innocent passage and a blatant violation of the Philippines’ territorial integrity.”
The Chinese military has not issued a statement denying or confirming the clams. The island is populated with 300-400 Philippinos. The move by the Chinese is considered an attempt to establish new territory by simply occupying it. This is the unofficial expansion police of the CCP, to claim any nearby territory that is unoccupied by occupying it, then daring the wronged nation to respond with force. India is long experienced in dealing with this aggressive expansionist policy, having had some territory taken and others protected from attempts by the Chinese to steal by occupation.
In human cultures, worlds and eras have a habit of disappearing. Sometimes, they disappear in a gentle fade-out; sometimes, they evolve, and sometimes, they die in fire. As one example, in mid-1914, Western society had reached a peak of culture, in literature, thought and technology that is hard to understand, some one hundred years later.
Of course, this culture was certainly not all roses: aside from “wealth disparity” and “social inequality,” both recent, and artificially moral, phrases of questionable utility, did have significant impacts on class relations, in the form of simmering anger among the urban poor and lower middle class, that frequently led to riots. Likewise, racism was rampant, despite some surprisingly modern views in many quarters; indeed, no sane person in the early 21st Century would attempt to defend the actions of Imperial Germany in Southwest Africa, of those of the Belgians in the Congo…or of the United States in its own West, against its Native American population.
A Rake’s Progress, Plate 4. William Hogarth, 1735. Public Domain.
But for all that, early 1914 in Europe was still the world of Renoir…And six years later, it was gone, never to return. The places still existed – mostly – and most of the people were still alive, but six years of all-out industrial warfare, revolutions, and a crushing pandemic had left the survivors numbed. The result was a long period of despair, economic depression, social and political strife, that resulted in a tawdry cynicism.
Of course, this was certainly not the first time: Two hundred and thirty-four years ago – and some 131 years before 1920 – a similar event happened, an event that would destroy the Europe of the day, leaving it a pale shadow of its former self.
While the “gory details” (and they were gory) of the French Revolution are not really the point of this article, the earth-shaking similarities between that event and the aftermath of World War 1 are important to understand, because they help inform our modern reality.
Nine émigrés are executed by guillotine, 1793. Unknown author. Public Domain.
Taking inspiration from the recent end of the American Colonies’ successful rebellion against Great Britain, the French population rose up against King Louis XVI and the Ancien Régime in 1789, and hammered France into a Frankenstein version of a republic. Surrounding European monarchies, rightly fearing for their own existence, and attempting to return the Ancien Régime to power, wasted little time in launching invasions of France on multiple fronts. These wars would last for some twenty-three years, only ending in with Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat in 1815 on the battlefield of Waterloo, in what is now Belgium.
But, even before Napoleon’s ultimate defeat, the ‘great powers’ of Europe had already gathered in Vienna, Austria, in what became the “Congress of Vienna”, to establish a new European system – the system, in fact, that would be destroyed less than a century later…But that is the “60,000 Foot View.”
More practically, the Congress of Vienna solidified the previous Treaty of Westphalia, which we touched on briefly last year. The impact of the Congress, however, failed to deal with the impact of one of the little understood results of Revolutionary France’s effort to deal with the invasions that began in 1792:
Before the French Revolution, military conscription in Europe was rather rare. Although used by some navies during this period, most nations found it highly distasteful, not to mention dangerous, as it greatly increased the chances of peasant uprisings, and in the middle of a war, that was last thing a nation needed (as the United States would discover in 1863).
While European states certainly preferred to recruit their regular soldiers from within their own nations after the Treaty of Westphalia, hiring professional officers that had been released by their native states (for any of a number of reasons) was considered perfectly normal and common. Although the word “mercenary” has developed a very negative connotation since the end of World War 2, in the 1790’s, it was considered a completely normal practice.
And the United States was certainly not immune – the Marquis de Lafayette(George Washington’s long-time aide), Baron von Steuben (who rebuilt the Continental Army at Valley Forge), the engineer Tadeusz Kościuszko and friends Casimir Pulaski (who would die at the Battle of Savannah) and Michael Kovats de Fabriczy (who would die defending Charleston, South Carolina) (together, known as the “Fathers of American Cavalry”), were quite common in the Continental Army. While many, like Lafayette and Fabriczy were certainly volunteers motivated by the American cause, most of the foreign officers certainly were not, following centuries-old common practice.
Kazimierz Pulaski. Jan Styka, c.1920-1925. Public Domain.
But, after the French Revolution, Nationalism began to take hold. Nationalism is the idea that the characteristics of “nation” and “state” are intertwined and inseparable. For example, in the United States, there are various “tribal nations” (such as the Navajo or Cherokee), or any of a number of ethnic “national people” groups from outside of North America, but those ethnic and cultural “nations” are a part of the “state”, in the form of the United States government.
This is not an insignificant point: After Revolutionary France instituted the levée en masse, serving in the military of a foreign state was often seen as something approaching treason. This view would eventually evolve into equating “foreignness” to “evil,” frequently resulting in little or no quarter being offered or given. Aside from some notable exceptions, it has only been in the first quarter of the 21st Century, in which “mercenaries” (now euphemistically termed “security contractors” or “private military contractors) are seen as an acceptable alternative to “regular” military forces, despite their unreliability.
Employees of PMC “FDG” in Al-Faluja, Anbar province (Iraq), 2007. CCA/3.0
Over time, nationalism began to take on its own negative connotations – for obvious reasons – and was replaced, very briefly, with “globalism,” and its associate term, “globalization”, doctrines that are now beginning to collapse after a bare thirty years of experimentation, despite attempts to couch the terminology.
This brings us to 2023.
With technological acceleration and the rise of the online job market, skilled workers can frequently work from home, managing offices and even factories on the other side of the planet via online conferencing. Meanwhile, industrial production has evolved to the point where only moderate levels of skill are required to perform maintenance and repair on plant equipment.
These points, along with other factors deriving from the acceleration of technological development, are causing people to increasingly question the utility of “nationalism,” as well their own, personal, “national identity.”
The issue? “Evil,” despite attempts to dismiss or consign the term to the passé in recent years, still exists. And “Evil” does not negotiate. The response to this is, and always has been, direct military confrontation; while myriad examples of individual failures – and successes – in “anti-Evil” warfare can be cited, those are not the point.
Massed military force is needed to fight Evil when it stops being metaphorical, and enters the physical realm, lest it get out of hand.
Bombed out streets of Mosul. Northern Iraq, Western Asia. 18 November, 2016. Photo: Mstyslav Chernov. CCA/4.0
But, militaries around the world (and especially in the West) are finding it increasingly difficult to fill their ranks without resorting to conscription, and in many countries – including the United States – even instituting conscription, while certainly legal, is politically impossible, and could easily lead to widespread revolts, possibly rising to the level of revolution.
U.S. Air Force Col. Becky Beers, administers the Oath of Enlistment to U.S. Air and Space Force recruits, Nov. 17, 2020. U.S. Space Force photo by Van Ha. Public Domain.
But – Evil is still out there, waiting, training and planning. And it still needs to be dealt with.
The reasons for this situation are not well understood: Is it a failure of nationalism? A failure of globalization? “Wokeness”? No studies seem to be taking a look at this phenomenon…But it is something that needs to be addressed urgently, because – as Thomas Sowell, PhD (Economics, U. of Chicago, 1968) says in his 1980 book “Knowledge and Decisions”
A committee obviously contaminated with anti-American seditionists recently concluded a study that purported to seek to solve ways to end the rising rates of suicide among our military veterans. The Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee “concluded” in a conclusion that was most likely baked in to the “study” from the start, that the answer lies to ending suicides is to create “policies that encourage (or require) secure firearm storage practices and slow firearm acquisition could prevent some military suicides.”
The report follows the tired and predictable pattern of DNC-CCP talking points of using a legitimate crisis to push for an authoritarian “solution,” even though the crisis mostly comes from those same authoritarians (in this case, the corrupt officers that were installed under Obama and Biden as American officers were removed under mostly trumped-up sex scandal charges under Obama, and being a Republican under Biden).
America has fallen, and this report is a bold assertion of that claim, even if its “Final Solution” is buried in the report in a small item listed on page 115.
Near the end of World War 2, the Soviet Union was searching for a new rifle. While the country was very happy with the venerable 7.62x54mmR (Rimmed)cartridge (dating from the 1880’s), its primary service rifle – the Mosin-Nagant – was long past its due date. The Mosin was, and is, a terrible rifle. Its one major positive, was that the Soviet state arms factories had been producing it for so long, they could (figuratively) make the rifles in their sleep. The 7.62x54R was, and remains, a fantastic cartridge for machineguns, as well as for sniper weapons, but as a general-issue cartridge for infantry weapons, there are serious issues that run against the cartridge, as the Soviets discovered to their regret.
SVT-40 Russian semi-automatic rifle (1940), without magazine. Caliber 7.62x54mmR. From the collections of Armémuseum (Swedish Army Museum), Stockholm, Sweden. CCA/4.0
The solution presented itself in the form of the M43 cartridge. The M43 – developed in 1943 – was formally adopted in 1945, for use in the SKS rifle. But the SKS, although a perfectly fine weapon, was on the tail end of technical developments, much like the Western FN-49 rifle. The Soviets had found that as war had changed, so too did tactics need to evolve as well. We touched on these tactical concerns recently, but a short review is warranted.
In their fight-back against Nazi Germany, the Soviets had learned that massed, fully automatic firepower from the infantry, assaulting alongside tanks, was one of the main keys to victory. This was especially true in assaulting into urban areas, where suppressive fire, delivered in close concert with the infantry, was vital to success. In these tight, fast-moving combat environments, long, cumbersome and slow-firing weapons like the Mosin (even in its shorter cavalry carbine version) were simply incapable of getting the tasks done.
The Soviet solution was deploying massive numbers (YouTube link) of submachine guns. This, however, was only a stopgap solution, as almost all SMG’s fire pistol caliber only. Even when using a longer barrel than a handgun, this significantly restricted the range of the weapons, forcing Soviet infantry to not fire until almost at point-blank range. And after that, if ranges suddenly opened back up, SMG-armed troops were immediately thrust back into a severe range disadvantage.
The solution to this problem was not a smaller weapon, but a carbine-class cartridge – and hence, the M43 was born. Fired from a 14- to 16-inch barrel, the M43 is accurate to 300-400 meters.
Home studio shot of the most common pistol and rifle cartridges. From left to right: 5.45×39mm, 5.56×45mm NATO, 7.62×39mm (the M43 cartridge), 7.62×51mm NATO and 7.62×54mmR. CC0/1.0
As noted above, although the SKS was – and is – an excellent carbine, it is severely limited by its fixed, 10-round magazine. A different weapon was required, a weapon that could feed its ammunition through a detachable magazine, similarly to an SMG, and with a similar ammunition capacity, of preferably in the range of thirty rounds. It needed to be selective-fire (capable of firing either single shots, for accurate fire, or emptying its contents in bursts, in the assault), and it needed to be compact, to fit in tight confines in vehicles, and when maneuvering through trenches and urban areas.
SKS Carabine, with charger strip of M43 ammunition inserted. CCA/4.0
The Soviets had faced the German StG-44 – the first true “assault rifle” – on the Eastern Front, and it fit the requirements for their new weapon. Although certain quarters still try to insist that what became the AK47 is a copy of the StG-44, nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from a superficial resemblance on the outside, the AK47 and the StG-44 are completely different weapons under the skin.
Although the story has almost certainly been embellished over the decades, Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919-2013) had grown up tinkering, as so many inventors do, with anything mechanical. But his “grease monkey” side was balanced with his love of poetry; he would go on to publish six books of poems over the years. In 1938, Kalashnikov was conscripted into the Red Army, where his engineering skills had him first assigned as a tank mechanic, and then a tank commander. When Nazi Germany turned on Stalinist Russia, Kalashnikov commanded his T-34 tank in several battles, before being seriously wounded at the Battle of Bryansk in October of 1941.
While recuperating in the hospital, Kalashnikov began designing small arms in earnest. His design for a submachine gun was rejected in 1942, but was seen as good enough to warrant assigning him to the Central Scientific-developmental Firing Range for Rifle Firearms of the Chief Artillery Directorate of the Red Army.
The original prototype of the Kalashnikov rifle. CCA/2.0
Over time, his design would evolve, eventually being adopted as the AK-47 (Avtomat Kalashnikova, model 1947).
English: AK-47 copies confiscated from Somali pirates by Finnish minelayer Pohjanmaa, during Operation Atalanta, c.2012. Public Domain.
Comparatively light in weight and relatively cheap (especially after a stamping process was developed for the receivers), the AK47 was also more reliable than most of its Western competitors, and was a very easy weapon to learn. If the stock version of the AK47 has a major fault, it is the rifle’s “iron” (or, “manual”) sights, which – while usable – need real improvement. In this regard, however, it is no worse than most of the rifles and carbines that preceded it.
Once the design was perfected, the Soviet Union began producing them on a gargantuan scale. Factoring in licensing to non-Soviet manufacturers, a 2007 study (pdf link) estimated that, of the c.500million firearms in circulation in the world, approximately 100million are AK-variant weapons, with some ~75million being AK47’s.
AK47s are, quite literally, everywhere: in every conflict zone in the world – actual or potential – a person is guaranteed to run across an AK-variant rifle. The weapon is so ubiquitous, it is a central feature on national flags and emblems from Mozambique and Zimbabwe, to East Timor, in the Pacific Ocean.
The only significant version to see widespread service to date is the AK74. Entering service in 1974, the AK74 is chambered for the 5.45x39mm cartridge. This caliber was chosen as a result of studies of infantry combat during the Vietnam War (1946-1975), where the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong guerillas battled with French and US forces, the latter of whom deployed the M-16, in 5.56x54mm. While sharing the simplicity and reliability of its older sibling, the –74 is merely different – “good different,” to be sure, but only that. The later Kalashnikov variants have never surpassed the older rifle in popularity, reinforcing the rubric, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”
For good or for ill, Kalashnikov rifles have battled across the globe for over 75 years, and are not likely to disappear within the lifetimes of the readers of this article. Anyone who thinks that they may encounter a Kalashnikov model at some point, would do well to find a manual – if not an actual weapon – and learn how to employ it.
One never knows when that kind of information might come in handy.
AK47 Manual, 2009. USMC. Public Domain.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
In the intelligence world, one of the key disciplines is communicating information securely. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is, albeit for different reasons. Since the invention of radio communication – or “wireless telegraphy,” if you prefer – has been the Numbers Station.
To understand what a numbers station (One-Way Voice Link, or OWVL), is the technical term) is, we briefly have to discuss cryptography.
In its simplest form, cryptography is the art of making and breaking codes. Over the course of human history, many states and leaders have come up with various, often ingenious, codes and ciphers, as well as the means to both break them and manipulate them. Sir Francis Walsingham, official spymaster for the first Queen Elizabeth, was responsible (among many other things) for the interception and breaking of the ciphers used by Mary, Queen of Scots – an intelligence operation that resulted in that monarch’s execution. Likewise, the “polyalphabetic substitution cipher”, invented by an Italian cryptographer named Giovan Battista Bellaso in 1553 (better known as the Vigenère cipher), was so strong, it remained unbroken until 1863. There are many other systems – ancient, new and unique – but all share the same fundamental flaw: Key Distribution.
Front matter of Cifra (1553), Bellaso. Public Domain.
In cryptography, encipherment and decipherment are relatively easy, but only if both sender and receiver share the code – and written codes, as proved by Walsingham – can be intercepted, opening messages’ secrets that could and did lead to war, death and betrayal.
Heavy stuff.
The goal of key distribution was only solved – for a time, at least – by the invention of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) in the 1990’s…but that’s for another time.
But the problem, ‘back in the day’, seemed insurmountable: in order to decipher a message, the receiver required a copy of the code, a serious problem if a considerable distance separated sender and receiver. The Vigenère cipher, however, significantly reduced that problem through what we would now call “keywords”. Still, as was proven in 1854 by English mathematician and scientist Charles Babbage, Prussian army Major Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski in 1863, and by American engineer William F. Friedman in the 1920’s, the Vigenère cipher model could, and was, breakable, via frequency analysis.
As early as World War 1, strange radio transmissions in the short-wave band began to be heard over the public airwaves. These stations transmitted signals in Morse Code, but the transmissions were not encoded. Instead, they were just strings of letters, numbers, and occasionally both. It quickly became apparent that these signals were almost certainly in a code of some kind, but no one – in public, at least – was able to decode the signals. They were resistant to frequency attacks, and seemed to be immune to proven forms of cryptanalytic attack.
An example of a one-time pad. Mysid, 2007. Public Domain.
First outlined in 1882 by the American banker Frank Miller, the OTP was reinvented in 1917, patented in the United States by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne (pdf link). In this coding system, random strings of letters or numbers (and sometimes both) were added or subtracted against a list of random numbers, to produce an enciphered message. The receiver – who would have a copy of the list of numbers – would, using their copy of the list – work in reverse, to reveal the message. Once received and decrypted, both sender and receiver would cross out the section of the numbers list they had used…and never use those exact sequences again.
And, up to this day, as long as the strict requirements of the system are followed, the messages are indecipherable, unless a decrypter has access to the key. (For a full discussion of the practical use of OTP’s, visit this PDF file).
What someone had realized was that an encoded signal did not have to go via telephone, telegraph or mail, all of which were open to interception. Instead, all a secret agent in the field needed, was a radio capable of picking up the Morse signals on the proper frequency, to receive a message. And, with the OTP, the agent’s “codebook” was shrunken to the size of a roll of postage stamps.
As time went on, wireless radio moved from Morse to verbal speech, helping to eliminate errors in transmission. National intelligence services constructed powerful shortwave transmission towers in areas they controlled around the world, and – in addition to the normal propaganda broadcasts and music they would play – would periodically pause, and transmit strings of letters and/or numbers at specific times of the day.
Three portable shortwave receivers. CCA/3.0
Counterintelligence officers found this highly frustrating, because there was no way to monitor who had a simple radio receiver. Capturing agents was usually through those agent’s mistakes, not through any kind of cunning technology.
And that is where things stand, to this day. Numbers stations transmit messages “in the clear,” and unless someone makes a mistake, there is no way to decipher the messages. No nation, incidentally, will openly admit to operating a numbers station, and will only rarely acknowledge their existence, as happened in the “Atención spy case”, where the bumbling of a group of agents from Fidel Castro’s Cuba rolled up a network of some twenty-seven agents, among many other operations.
…Just…please don’t get caught doing dumb things. If certain parties in government think you are up to no good, you won’t be able to catch our articles on time.
Priorities, you know.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
As the Cold War wound down in the early 1990’s, militaries around the world were being forced to prematurely “beat plowshares into swords.” Part of the so-called “peace dividend” was interpreted to mean that military forces had to take on more “civic” missions, in order to remain relevant. As a part of that shift in focus, certain quarters thought that “reinventing the wheel” was a good idea. In that regard, one of their less-than-bright ideas was to reinvent the concept of the submachine gun (SMG)…and, since reactionary-anything is regarded negatively, they had to slap a new logo onto the idea.
The idea was for something better than a handgun, but something not as powerful as an “assault rifle”. Readers may recall a recent article wherein we discussed this very concept. Without going into exhaustive detail, the results were less than spectacular…not least, since the PDW – then known as the “machine pistol” – had already been done some ninety-five years before, and had been done much better than the modern PDW.
Heavy and somewhat ungainly, the C-96 was a semiautomatic, that fed its ammunition from a ten round strip-clip; later models would use 20- and 40-round detachable box magazines. In a time long before neurotic and incoherent restrictions on firearms, the pistol’s grip was cut to accept a shoulder stock, allowing the shooter much more control over the weapon and increasing its accuracy considerably. Due to its compact size, even with a stock affixed, the weapon was easily wielded in very tight confines, making it one of the main choices for trench warfare when World War 1 settled into its slugfest phase, a role it would later play in China’s war against Japan.
Chinese soldier aiming Shansi Type 17 while wearing a gas mask, c.1937-1945. Public Domain.
As well, the pistol’s original cartridge, the 7.63x25mm Mauser cartridge, was no slouch: when the Royal Italian Navy tested what would become their 1899 Contract model, it was reliably punching 25mm-deep holes into 60mm-thick fir boards at a range of 1,000 meters (YouTube link).
C-96 with ammunition. 2010. CCA/2.0
The pistol was reliable enough, if having a problematic concept of a “safety” mechanism. Despite its clumsiness, however, Mauser quickly found itself with a hit to compliment its Gewehr 98 rifle, albeit not enjoying nearly as wide an acceptance. However, the steady stream of international orders for militaries quickly made the pistol a solid win for Mauser.
As World War 1 grew, the nations led by Germany needed more and more handguns, and Mauser greatly increased its production of the C-96, even changing its caliber to the more common 9x19mm; those pistols had a large, red-painted, numeral “9” engraved into their hand grips, to differentiate them from the originals.
Mauser C96 M1916 “Red 9” with holster-stock fixed. CCA/4.0
Post-WW1, Mauser continued the development of the C-96 for its foreign markets, eventually producing the Schnellfeuer (rapid fire) selective-fire pistol with detachable magazines in 1932, after the Spanish gun-makers Beistegui Hermanos and Astra had started making variants in the late 1920’s.
Mauser C-96 machine pistol, model 712, with detachable magazine. Public Domain.
Over the decades, attempts were made to put machine pistols into service, but weapons like the Vz-61 Škorpion and the VP-70 never really caught on like the C-96 had.
While the C-96 is long gone, its legacy has never really been equaled. The SMG came and went, displaced by the assault rifle for most functions, and after the painful silliness of the various PDW projects, militaries settled on just using a simple handgun for their ‘back-up’ weapon to a long arm…which is unfortunate, since there was once a complete package of weapon that fit the needs of the PDW precisely.
Unless a person has paid essentially no attention to any news for the last twenty years, strident complaints and warnings about the abysmal state of basic infrastructure in the United States is nearly impossible to avoid.
Highways, local roads, bridges, railroads – the arteries that carry both commerce and the work force, both inter- and intrastate – are in terrible condition. The situation has become critical enough, that it has noticeably slowed the velocity of the supply chain, compounding the impacts of both the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the grounding of the MV Ever Given container ship in 2021.
Critically, failures in the railroad network caused by favoring profiteering over operational efficiency – one of the few examples of actual failure in deregulation policies – are leading to staff cuts of up to twenty-nine percent, while the mileage of operating rail track has steadily decreased, even though per-mile profits rise.
An eastbound freight train at West Drive overpass in Brampton, Ontario. CCA/4.0
This is a toxic situation, as the imbalance between railroads and over-the-road (OTR) trucking continues to grow. Even given the inefficiencies inherent in OTR vs Rail (as freight trains commonly haul between 200 and 300 intermodal containers, or dedicated freight cars, allowing a crew of three or four to do the work of 200 or more people), slowdowns caused by poor infrastructure increasingly impact the economy…
All of this has been known for decades, although it is little remarked about in the mainstream press, unless there is some major newsworthy nugget to titillate the audience…That said – what does this have to do with a critical strategic threat to the United States? What does this have to do with security and defense, aside from the obvious logistics advantages?
A recent YouTube video by the channel “Real Life Lore” (YouTube link) pointed out that the Continental United States, i.e., the “Lower 48”, is uniquely blessed with a unique terrain that practically guarantees global economic dominance to anyone who can control this territory. This has, in fact, been the reason for the meteoric rise of the United States over the course of the last one hundred and thirty-odd years.
A map of the Mississippi River Basin, made using USGS data. CCA/4.0
The driving engine behind this geological and geographical system lays in the facts that, first, no major agricultural or manufacturing center in the Lower 48 is further than 150 miles (240km) from a navigable waterway. East of the Rocky Mountains, the majority of navigable waterways feed into the Mississippi River system (which is itself navigable all the way to Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota), which then flows south, to the port of New Orleans.
From there, the Intracoastal Waterway chain of barrier islands provides a near contiguous navigable seaway, for almost the entire length of the US coast, from Brownsville, Texas, to Virginia, and from there, to the Hudson River, which connects to the Great Lakes, all with little exposure to open sea conditions. No other continent has this precise mix of features. And, as water transport is anywhere from ten to thirty times more efficient than any other type of transport, the titanic economic advantages are obvious.
However – there is a catch: Vidalia, Louisiana.
Most readers will have never heard of Vidalia. This is not surprising, as it is a tiny town of barely 4,300 people, even though it is the seat of Concordia Parish. Vidalia, however, is home to perhaps the single-most critical point of physical security in the world:
Completed by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1963, the Old River Control Structure was built to prevent the Mississippi River from diverting its course into the Atchafalaya River. The Mississippi River’s tends to wander over time. For the entire existence of the United States as a nation, the Mississippi followed (more or less) its current course. As a result, the city of New Orleans – and its seaport – was built and expanded into the critical complex that it is today. Indeed, it was a pivotal point in the War of 1812, in a battle that launched the career of a future President, and later formed a cornerstone of Federal strategy in the Civil War.
The delta of the Atchafalaya River on the Gulf of Mexico. View is upriver to the northwest. 1999. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
In 1953, however, the Corps of Engineers concluded that the Mississippi was beginning to shift its course again, and that if left unchecked, it would divert into the Atchafalaya Basin by 1990. Thus, they launched the Old River Control Structure project at their predicted point of divergence at Vidalia, as the result of such a diversion would be catastrophic, as the Mississippi river would quickly and violently carve a new channel and river delta complex, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico some sixty miles to the west of New Orleans, an even that would leave both New Orleans and the Louisiana state capital of Baton Rouge not simply ‘high and dry’, but would leave both major cities without a source of fresh water.
Aside from the catastrophic environmental impact on the United States and major cities along the river’s route –as well as the significant impact on the strategic military system of the US in the Lower 48 – the impact on the economy of the United States would almost certainly lead to another “Great Depression”, virtually overnight, an economic contagion that would almost certainly crash the world’s economy, as the United States’ economic system is not designed to flow “upriver”.
The Corps of Engineers did a fantastic job on the control project; the only significant natural threat to the structure was the Mississippi flood of 1973, with damaged the structure to a degree.
Mississippi River inundating Morgan City, Louisiana, May, 1973. Environmental Protection Agency. Public Domain.
But now, we live in the world of the early 21st Century, and “lateral thinking” about security has to be taken into account…Specifically, the “Poor Man’s Nuclear Weapon”.
On April 16, 1947, an explosion in the port of Texas City, Texas mostly vaporized the SS Grandcamp, formerly, the SS Benjamin R. Curtis, a Liberty Ship built during World War 2 and later gifted to France to help rebuild that country’s merchant marine. The ship had been loaded with approximately 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate – used in fertilizer or explosives – as well as small mounts of other cargo. The explosion leveled nearly 1,000 buildings within 2,000 feet of the explosion, killing at least 560 people (including all but one of the town’s 28-man volunteer fire department) and injuring more than 5,000 people, almost 1,800 of whom were admitted to area hospitals. Some 63 people were unidentifiable, and were buried in a memorial cemetery; an additional 113 people were declared “missing”, because no identifiable parts could be found. The Grandcamp’s 2-ton anchor was hurled over 1.5 miles, digging itself into a 10-ft deep crater, while one of her propellers was thrown 2 miles inland. More than 1,100 vehicles, 360 rail freight cars and 500 homes were damaged; 10 miles away, in the city of Galveston, half the windows in town were shattered. All told, damages totaled between $1,000,000,000 and $4,500,000,000, in 2019 dollars.
Texas City disaster. Parking lot 1/4 of a mile away from the explosion, 1947. University of Houston Digital Library.
Then, on August 4, 2020, an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer – confiscated from an impounded ship nearly a decade before – detonated in a gargantuan explosion. The blast – estimated as equal to 1.1 kilotons of TNT – killed at least 218 people, injured over 7,000, and left nearly 300,000 people homeless.
Port of Beirut, Lebanon. Before (Left, 7/30/2020) and after (R) comparison showing blast damage from the August 4,2020 explosion (circled area). Google Earth Pro and Maxar Technologies.
Such a blast would critically damage the Old River Control Structure; two or three, should they happen simultaneously, would certainly destroy it outright. Neither ships, nor ammonium nitrate, are hard to come by. And they are not, comparatively, all that expensive. Both are within easy reach of many “extra-national hostile groups”. And the MV Rhosus, the ship at the center of the Beirut blast story, would have been capable of transiting for most of the Mississippi’s length…
…And yet, there are no real security measures in Vidalia that would prevent an American version of the St. Nazaire Raid.
Someone should really look into this.
Really.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
As strange as it may seem, the “Vietnam Generation” – meaning, those of age to have fought in that conflict – are in their very late 60’s, at best, and more likely in their early- to mid-70’s. In addition to the more “televisable” repositories of collective memory that have been lost, there are nuances within those repositories that fade into the background.
The MPC (pdf link) was a form of “occupation currency”, used by the Armed Forces of the United States from 1946 to 1973. The idea was to try and control inflation in occupied zones, as well as attempting to limit black market activity in the various occupied nations as close to the minimum as possible. The very first iteration of this practice, however, was the “HAWAII Overprint” note, issued from 1942 to 1944.
The Hawaii Overprint was an otherwise-valid US note that was printed by the US Mint in San Francisco, but that was stamped “H A W A I I” on the reverse. The rationale was that, in the event of the island chain’s invasion and capture by the Japanese Empire, all existing “HAWAII” stamped notes could be declared invalid, preventing Japan from trying to inflate the United States’ currency reserves by mass-dumping captured cash back into the US economy via Mexico. In fact, a version of this strategy was employed by the Nazi SS in their “Operation Bernhard”, which resulted in £15-20 million worth of nearly undetectable counterfeit notes being in circulation by the end of World War 2; adjusted for inflation, this amounted to approximately £493,146,000 – 657,528,000 (c.$611,052,280 – $814,736,370) in 2022 figures.
Hawaii overprint note issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco during World War II. National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History. Public Domain.
The United States’ MPC, along with various similar types of scrip from other occupying powers, accomplished this by paying Allied troops stationed “in country” in specifically made military scrip, instead of the normal national currency. In this way, the troops could spend their pay within the local economies, without injecting inflationary levels of hard currency – such as US dollars or British pound-sterling notes – that would trade at far higher levels of exchange on the local black markets, thus forcing the occupation governments, in turn, to print vast quantities of paper currency to compensate, devaluing the local currencies even further. In fact, such a resultant death spiral of currency hyperinflation in post-World War One Germany (albeit for different reasons) was one of the root causes that allowed the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.
An Operation Bernhard forgery of the Bank of England five pound note. UK-Public Domain.
The United States continued its use of the MPC throughout its occupation period in both Europe and various parts of the Pacific, into the 1960’s, when the war in Vietnam began to accelerate. In the same way as in the post-World War Two era, the South Vietnamese đồng (which had replaced the French colonial piastre in 1953, at their independence) was simply too weak to survive against the US dollar. MPCs were issued as pay for US troops posted in the country, to limit the arbitrage impact. The method the United States used to effect this was to arbitrarily convert to a new issue of MPC to US troops; US troops were never told when a “Conversion Day” (or, “C Day”) would happen, but would find themselves suddenly restricted to base, where they were informed that they had to exchange their old MPC issue for the new version, as the previous MPC issue would not be valid for exchange after that C Day. This, in turn, prevented the MPC from acting as a wholesale stand-in for the US dollar.
The MPC program was retired after the United States’ involvement in Vietnam ended. The MPC system was deemed unnecessary by then, as by the 1970’s, the nations occupied at the end of World War Two had been long ago released from their occupied status, and their economies were, in general, strong and flourishing. As a result, the circulation of US dollars paid out to US troops stationed there was not deemed to be destabilizing, and the United States went back to simply ferrying US dollars in cash to various bases for direct disbursements to troops stationed there.
In 1997, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the United States found itself deploying forces to semi-permanent stations for “peacekeeping” duties – occupation duties, in all but name – in portions of the former Yugoslavia, as the region exploded in a series of ethnic and sectarian wars.
The costs of transporting cash to troops stationed in the hostile areas quickly became very expensive. Given that the United States’ Department of Defense (DoD) had established a vast, world-girdling logistical network by then, and given that there was very little available for purchase in the war zones, the DoD expanded what had been a pilot program used in various military basic training facilities within the US, into the “EagleCash” system.
EagleCash functions in a manner similar to a gift card, in that it allows deployed troops to use an ATM-like kiosk to transfer money from their bank accounts in the US to the EagleCash card, then use that card to purchase various goods and services from on-post stores and exchanges.
There is, however, a catch: The EagleCash system, like so many other things in the 21st Century, is a great, streamlined system of finance that functions reliably to pay troops forward-deployed in hostile areas…as long as the backbone infrastructure the system relies upon works.
With the rise of cyber warfare, as well as the potential for a disruption of the satellite communications network – to say nothing of actual nuclear warfare – there is a very good chance that the United States and its allies may well need to return to an MPC-type system of finance for deployed troops. While there is a specific entry in the Code of Federal Regulations (pdf link) regarding MPC’s, it remains unclear if the US government is prepared to reissue paper MPC’s in the event of some major network disruption…
…And unpaid troops can become very unhappy and disgruntled troops, very, very quickly.
Food for thought.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
When people think of military actions, those thoughts are usually centered on frenetic Hollywood action sequences. There are the occasional meetings/briefings where the stock, lantern-jawed heroes get their orders from a grizzled, crusty-looking officer, who occasionally pushes their “knife hand” across what is probably a real enough map of…somewhere, but probably not the “somewhere” of the show.
The effect is even more divorced from reality when watching the average news broadcast: the tall, swarthy, lantern-jawed heroes are almost always either completely hidden by helmets and body armor, or are somewhat short, usually bald, and squinting through their sunburns and badly wind-dried skin. The vehicles and surrounding terrain are anonymous and dusty (or heavy with tropical foliage, or a blasted city-scape) – things are certainly happening, but the viewer has little context. The reporter delivering the story probably has even less.
The grizzled and lantern-jawed stock characters from Central Casting do occasionally appear – and are even frequently as heroic as Hollywood portrays them to be – but the above images (real and fictional) obscure the reality: the Grunts who have to carry out the mission have their tasks explained to them by sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated, and hyper-stressed troops suffering from ulcers, who have likely been awake for over 24 hours, straight, and have been monitoring units in combat with the enemy, while coordinating artillery fires, air support, medical evacuations, resupply, reinforcement and probably armored support, as well…and have to get creative on short notice when one, some or most of those things are not available, because of shipping delays, bad weather, enemy attacks on the supply lines and just plain bad-to-non-existent maintenance means that something else needs to be found to help the Grunts get the job done.
Those officers and troops, punchy from lack of sleep, are the Staff.
In the “old days”, military staff work was not overly taxing, by today’s standard. Literate officers and troops (read the letters of some officers on campaign in the old days – yikes) made the decisions and wrote the orders, trying to be as clear – yet couched and polite – as the writing conventions of the time allowed. Unit sizes were rarely above the Brigade level (c.3-5,000 troops), and the “optempo” (“operations tempo”, or, the pace of operations) was measured by how far a unit could march in a day. By modern standards, it was quite sedate. The only real “specialization” in the military staff were the Surgeon(for obvious reasons) and the Quartermaster, who handled the acquisition of supplies; this last position, while recognized as highly important, was not much sought after, as it was viewed as a rather menial task.
The railroad revolutionized warfare in a way not seen before in land warfare. In the past, like cargo, the fastest and most efficient way to move troops more than 100 miles was by water. By 1863, the United States Military Railroad (USMRR) was able to transfer some 25,000 troops a distance of 1,200 miles in just 12 days. The USMRR did this by creating a dispersed staff of railroad schedule planners who communicated via telegraph to coordinate their movement plans. In 1866, the Prussian Army – having sent observers to both sides of the American Civil War – calculated that they could concentrate 285,000 troops in twenty-five days, and used this ability to overwhelm Austrian forces. Four years later, Prussia would demonstrate the defensive advantage of the railroad, by using their internal rail system to rapidly shift their outnumbered troops around the country to first blunt, and then counterattack the French invasion, resulting in not simply the defeat of France, but the capture of an Emperor and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, specifically because they had established a “railway section” as a part of their ‘general staff’ system after the return of their observers from the American Civil War.
This is not, however, an article on the military use of railroads. Instead, it shows the first real expansion of the military staff system since the days of Napoleon, and going well beyond his reforms.
Napoleon Bonaparte created what we now refer to as the “Continental Staff System”, minutely categorizing and specializing roles that had previously been handled somewhat haphazardly. As armies began to grow in size and complexity after Napoleon, the old staff methods simply could not keep up. Even in the case of Napoleon’s own staff reforms, they could barely keep up with the demands of La Grande Armée. The US Army, first, then quickly followed by Germany, began to make significant reforms and expansions.
However, this was not a streamlined or consistent process. In fact, in Germany’s case, it became a decided negative, as the German General Staff took the statistical process too far, imparting a rigidity that more or less completely ignored the Clausewitzian warnings about “friction” and the “fog of war”. This rigidity contributed to the failure of the Schlieffen Plan and led directly to the hell of trench warfare on the Western Front of World War 1.
In the modern day, the staff system has evolved to the point where it can swiftly alter itself to account for new technologies. As radio replaced visual-sight signaling, dispatch riders, carrier pigeons and the telegraph, staffs were increasingly able to effectively control and support their subordinated commands in real-time. Today, that progression includes satellite communications and (theoretically) secure internet connections, as well as incorporating intelligence from ground- and air-based drones.
In order to better streamline the core functions of a staff, tasks and responsibilities are divided between departments led by specialized officers. Even in the last 30-odd years, there has been expansion and readjustment, as some of the current offices either did not exist in the 1980’s, or were considered to be part of a “Special Staff” section, created on an ‘as needed’ basis.
Currently, there are a total of nine departments recognized as part of the Continental Staff System. These nine offices scale upwards, as designated by a prefix letter code (see below), and generally only begin to appear as part of a battalion-level staff. The nine offices in general use are:
Manpower or Personnel. This office manages the more mundane, non-combat personnel-management tasks of a unit, such as record-keeping and handling pay for the troops.
Intelligence and Security. This is the office with the unenviable task of trying to predict what the enemy in a local area are planning. However, their ‘side functions’ are much more extensive, and include everything from weather monitoring and map making, to cultural and demographic surveys to refine information that was likely glossed over by their national-level counterparts.
Operations. This is the office that actually controls the troops in the field. The unit commander, their executive officer (i.e., the “second in command”) and the “-3” officer (who is effectively 3rd in command) direct operations, through the mechanism of the “command post” system.
Logistics. Logistics – what used to be called the “Quartermaster” office – is one of those dreary, ho-hum functions that people only get annoyed over when they either fail, or when someone points out that the military unit in question is incapable of functioning if they ignore the “4-Shop”. If your logistical plan is deficient in the civilian world, that is annoying and inconvenient. In the military world, bad logistics lose battles, campaigns and wars.
Plans. This is where you will find those grizzled old officers making knife-hands over a map. The Plans office has to take the commander’s ideas and vision, lay them out coherently on a map, then write the orders to the various sub-units to carry out those plans.
Signals (i.e., communications or IT). “Signals” are the people who run the radios, and make sure the computers are working right. They will also occasionally restore telephone service to a town or city…usually inside of 36 hours.
Military education and training. Exactly what it says – there are always new things coming out, that troops need to be trained on, which can also include seemingly non-military course like the dreaded “Personal Finance” course. In case anyone is wondering why distance-learning courses like that are offered, troops who badly manage their pay are frequently preoccupied, hyper-tense and distracted in the field; this leads to very unpleasant results for them, and likely everyone in their general vicinity.
Finance and Contracts. Also known as resource management. This is the department that handles buying tools, materials and food from the local area. In the “home country”, these kinds of contracts are normally handled at higher levels; when operating in a foreign country, however, the situation frequently dictates that a units needs to let contracts with the locals…which not only gets the unit supplies locally, easing the logistics burden of the higher commands, but also helps a local economy that may have been destroyed and needs more than simple hand-outs of cash.
As noted above, there are a variety of letter designators for these staff functions, depending on the size and/or function of the unit in question. The most commonly used designators are:
A, for air force headquarters.
C, for combined headquarters (multiple nations) headquarters.
F, for certain forward or deployable headquarters.
G, for army or marine general staff sections within headquarters of organizations commanded by a general officer and having a chief of staff to coordinate the actions of the general staff, such as divisions or equivalent organizations (e.g., USMC Marine Aircraft Wing and Marine Logistics Group) and separate (i.e., non-divisional) brigade level (USMC MEB) and above.
J, for joint (multiple services) headquarters, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff).
N, for navy headquarters.
S, for army or marines executive staff sections within headquarters of organizations commanded by a field grade officer (i.e., major through colonel) and having an executive officer to coordinate the actions of the executive staff (e.g., divisional brigades, regiments, groups, battalions, and squadrons; not used by all countries); S is also used in the Naval Mobile Construction Battalions (SeaBees) and in the Air Force Security Forces Squadron.
U, is used for United Nations military operations mission headquarters.
While there is certainly much more to military staff functions than this brief outline, the goal was to introduce the Reader to the idea behind the Military Staff, in a general way. If you would like more information on the subject from the source, check out the US military’s field manual on the subject, FM 6-0 – Commander and Staff Organization and Operations, in print here, or as a pdf download directly from the US Army, here. (Note that most military manuals in the United States are unclassified and publicly available for anyone to own – if it’s classified, you will definitely know, and you are definitely on your own, in that regard.)
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
Uniforms are odd. They are not “normal” clothing, in the sense that they are not worn as ‘casual’ or ‘formal’ wear, nor really for most jobs in the workplace. Whether a person works as a mechanic for a shop, a security officer, a store attendant, a delivery driver or what have you, the uniforms that those people wear for their daily jobs are rarely anything those people would wear when stepping out after work. In the civilian job world, a uniform may be practical, but most often functions as an advertisement for the employer.
In contrast, military uniforms are rarely given a second thought, as most people unconsciously associate a uniform with some sort of armed force. While military uniforms certainly do that, their rationale does not necessarily make sense, unless one looks at them more closely.
Representatives of foreign armies, 2007. CCA/5.2.
There are very few verifiable “uniforms”, as we would recognize the term, in antiquity. Most of the references that mention uniform-like garments in armies are very shaky, and are likely confusions with ethnic or tribal dress, which are not “uniforms”, per se. The first recognizable and unequivocal military uniform was that of the Roman state. Down through the centuries, Roman military attire remained remarkably stable, at least compared to modern norms. Until the very late period of the Western Roman Empire, what we think of today as the “classic” Roman uniform remained more or less the standard attire, for parade, general duty or combat.
After the fall of the Western Empire, “standardized” uniforms would not reappear in European armies until roughly the dawn of the 17th Century, during the “Dutch Revolt” against the Hapsburg dynasty of Spain. The Dutch needed a way to identify their own troops; short of money, they first tried long, colored sashes. Because of the problems of the sashes getting too dirty to recognize, the Dutch hit on the idea of wearing smaller versions of the sashes as scarves, and tying them in unique knots. Together with the Croatian mercenaries hired by France – wearing distinctive cravats (thus bringing the word ‘cravat’ into western Europe) – during this period, armies began to realize that some form of standardized uniform was a very useful item, despite the added expense.
Images of military uniforms from 1670 to 1865. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910. Public Domain.
To many people new to the subject, the military uniforms of the 17th to early 20th Centuries look bizarre. They are certainly highly distinctive, but to the modern mind, appear useless on a battlefield, as they are usually brightly colored and definitely stand out against the backdrop of natural foliage. The reason for the brightly colored uniforms – as with the combat tactic of the rigid firing line, in the open, with no real cover (meaning, protection from bullets) – was dictated by the combat technology of the time, as the smoothboreflintlock musket was notoriously slow to load and unreliable. Because of this, armies were forced to line up their troops, and have groups of them fire in sequence, like a giant shotgun. As should be obvious, this was a dangerous and terrifying experience, and it was felt that clothing the troops in distinct, flashy and (comparatively) expensive uniforms would help improve the morale of the troops.
Attack of Prussian Infantry, Battle of Hohenfriedeberg, June 4th, 1745. Carl Röchling (1913). Public Domain.
Whether troop morale was improved or not during this period is an open question, but the rapid pace of technological development in firearms technology during the 19th Century swiftly dictated that research was desperately needed to help the troops blend into their surroundings, the better to avoid fire from rifles and machine guns. While this trend was firmly established in the aftermath of World War 1, as that war had starkly demonstrated that modern weapons had fundamentally altered the battlefield, creating all the conditions necessary for staggering casualties, with France losing so many troops (well over one million), that large sections of the French Army mutinied in 1917, it had begun well before that war broke out.
World War 1 – Military Dress Uniforms. J.F. Campbell (1920). Public Domain.
US troops dressed in BDU’s during Exercise Peaceshield 2000. Yavoriv, Ukraine, July 16, 2000. US Air Force Photo.
While it should be obvious that a military uniform – whether for combat, day-to-day work or for formal parades – should be “distinctive”, that begs the question: What, exactly, constitutes a “military uniform”?
Remarkably, aside from generally practical notions of being distinctive, and comfortable to move in, there is no hard and fast definition of what constitutes a “military uniform”, aside from the admonishment of the 1949 Geneva Convention (pdf link) to not wear an enemy’s uniform for the purpose of deception.
Boer guerrillas during the Second Boer War, c.1900. Public Domain.
In the final analysis, then, a formally organized military force can essentially design any uniform they want, as long as it is distinct from common civilian attire, and will be protected under the Geneva Convention…
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