Evernote

Spending the morning learning something new.

I probably should run over to Barnes and Nobles and pick up a copy of Evernote for Dummies.

A friend of mine, a published author, told me about Evernote yesterday.  It's seems like a good way to keep track of research notes ... and lots of other things.

Keeps everything in "the cloud" so it can be accessed from any machine you happen to be working on.

So far, I'm just experimenting with the free side.  Of course, users can upgrade to the premium version ... for a small fee.

Saturday Morning

The view from my office

Started the day with a cup of coffee and Rick Atkinson's Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War at Starbucks.  Came back to the house about 0730 and within the hour the bottom fell out of the sky ... a big, loud thunderstorm.  

Rained for a couple of hours.  Filled the pool right up to the brim.

Great morning to get some work done ... or not!

Turning Point(s) of the Second World War

George C. Marshall. Was his appointment as Army 
chief of staff the turning point of World War II?

Fighting the Second World War was an immense operation.  Viewing the war as a single event, one must still be cognizant of its many parts and pieces.  These parts and pieces—the war’s battles and campaigns—were the subplots of the overall war.  Each had its own story, its own unique circumstances and challenges, its own turning points.  Like beauty, the construing of any single one of these as the point upon which the entire outcome of the war turned, depends much upon the eyes of the beholder.

A couple of years ago, historian Laurence Rees framed a question for a list of distinguished historians (he doesn’t say how many), asking each of them, “what was the turning point of World War II?”  What is probably not so surprising is that he got a range of answers.  One gentleman, writes Rees, thought the entire war turned upon the Germans’ victory in France in May of 1940.  His argument was that the French and the British had the advantage in terms of terrain and equipment, that attacking with such a disadvantage the Germans assumed a huge amount of risk, and that the outcome of the battle turned upon the superiority of German leadership.  “If the [Allies] had not performed so appallingly in this one fight,” argues this one historian, “then World War II would have ended by the summer of 1940 in an ignominious defeat for the Germans.”[1]

Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was the answer to Rees’s question by two historians, Conrad Crane and Akira Iriye. Crane, a former West Point history professor and current director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, chose Pearl Harbor because that is the point when the conflict became truly a world war.  Mr. Iriye, a Harvard University professor of Japanese descent, chose Pearly Harbor because it “turned out to be such a monumental mistake.”[2]

Six historians, including Robert Dallek and Max Hastings, chose Stalingrad.  "Stalingrad changes everything," said Hastings.  "Once the Germans have been thrown back from Stalingrad, once they've lost that battle, the war was never the same again."[3]  Winston Churchill is said to have exclaimed “we have won!” the minute he learned of what happened at Pearl Harbor.  But another historian, Richard Overy, argued that Stalingrad was “not a turning point necessarily in strategic terms, because a lot more has to be done before the Soviets can be certain of defeating Germany."  But what was made clear there, more than anything else, is that the Germans were vulnerable.[4]

Air Superiority: The Impact of the Allies' Strategic Bombing Campaigns in World War II

Bomber Harris

The Allies’ gaining of air superiority, in each of the major theaters of the war, essentially determined the conflict’s outcome in that theater. Superiority in the air meant two things. First, it meant that the Allies could capitalize on their vast advantage in terms of strategic bombing. Second, because of their advantage in strategic bombing capabilities, they soon achieved significant advantages in terms of battlefield maneuver. Superiority in the air enabled the Allies to mass firepower against the enemy in two domains, on land and from the air. Allied air superiority meant that the enemy was restricted to fighting only, or mainly, in the land domain. 

Virtually ever since the invention of the airplane, aviators have believed that wars could be decided by air power alone. Even today there are many who subscribe to this view, despite much evidence to the contrary, but the opinion was much more widely held during World War II, when air power was just coming into its own. In America, the name of Billy Mitchell attaches itself to many of the early theories touching upon the effectiveness of air power. Essentially, what Mitchell espoused as early as the 1920s was set forth in a concept written by Sir Charles Webster and Dr. Noble Frankland, entitled The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany part of which was cited in B. H. Liddel-Hart’s history of the Second World War— 

“The strategic air offensive is a means of direct attack on the enemy state with the object of depriving it of the means or will to continue the war. It may, in itself, be the instrument of victory or it may be the means by which victory can be won by other forces. It differs from all previous kinds of armed attack in that it alone can be brought to bear immediately, directly, and destructively against the heartland of the enemy Its sphere of activity is, therefore, not only above, but also beyond that of armies or navies.”

Against Germany. “The Army Air Forces (together with Britain’s Bomber Command) blasted German cities into rubble using mainly B-24 and B-17 heavy bomber aircraft, but the war in Europe ended only when Allied armies occupied Germany’s territory.”[1] Strategic bombing—by itself—was never the ‘be all, end all’ solution to the essential military problem of the war, which was to destroy the warfighting capabilities of the Axis nations. 

The Vietnam War explained as never before, in hard numbers and good facts

I am testing out the new Google Chrome app that lets you post articles from Reader straight to your blog. This one is from Tom Ricks' blog The Best Defense hosted by Foreign Policy.

The Vietnam War explained as never before, in hard numbers and good facts:

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on January 12, 2011.

Hey, how come no one ever mentioned to me Thomas Thayer's War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam? What do I pay the frequent friers for, anyway? (You know who you are.) I finished reading it over the weekend, while it snowed in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and I think it is one of the best books I've ever read on the war, with page after page of good, usable, dispassionate data, much of it counterintuitive.

Here are just some of the things that surprised me:

Doctrine 2015 Update

The 'Doctrine 2015' hierarchy

Recently, I was asked to review an author's draft of an emerging publication ... Army Techniques Publication 4-16 Movement Control.  The U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command (CASCOM) is the preparing activity responsible for this publication.  It's an update and republication of Field Manual (FM) 4-01.30 Movement Control as an ATP.  Under the guidance of the Army's Doctrine 2015 concept, there will only be 50 FMs.  Those that didn't make the cut, if the material in them is still relevant, are to be converted to ATPs.  That's what CASCOM is doing with FM 4-01.30, converting it to ATP 4-16, updating a thing or two in its content in the process.

Although I judged it a reasonably well written draft, and that it contained no language inconsistent with emerging signal doctrine, I had to submit a critical comment on it, because of the timing of this draft's staffing to an Army-wide audience.  We are a good year now into the concept of Doctrine 2015, the SAMS-developed, CSA-approved, doctrine refinement concept the purpose of which is to streamline the Army's inventory of doctrinal publications and put more relevant doctrine into the hands of Soldiers faster.  Still, there are a lot of people who don't understand the transformation.  I've used this blog to write about Doctrine 2015 before.  I still get questions, like "What's an ADP?"  Which is higher, and FM or an ADRP?  "Do we still have ATTPs? or just ATPs?"   

The Impact of Lessons Learned When Really Learned

World War II Soldier

In 1942, in the war in North Africa, the Americans were stung by a serious defeat at Kasserine Pass. In that defeat, their eyes were opening to the realities of war. They received a further sting from a British general’s biting criticism. General Alexander, the 18th Army Group Commander, called his American allies “soft, green, and quite untrained [lacking] the will to fight. My main anxiety,” he said— 

“is the poor fighting value of the Americans. They simply do not know their job as soldiers and this is the case from the highest to the lowest. Perhaps the weakest link of all is the junior leader, who just does not lead, with the result that their men don’t really fight.”[1]

But even as the U.S. soldier was licking his wounds, something was changing. Ruthlessly, Eisenhower began sacking incompetent commanders. Soldiers who could lead started doing so. The Brits, who had been fighting for almost two years, referred to the Americans’ experience as Kasserine as their “being blooded.” There is a line in Rick Atkinson’s history on the war in North Africa that succinctly describes this change. Atkinson’s line was this, that— 

“a great sorting out was under way: the competent from the incompetent, the courageous from the fearful, the lucky from the unlucky. It would happen faster in the American Army than it had in the British. Alexander was not wholly wrong, but he was wrong.”[2]

“The Battle of Kasserine Pass was humiliating.” That’s how one of General George C. Marshall’s biographers described it.[3] It had the effect, however, of galvanizing the American fighting spirit. Eisenhower himself spoke of “lessons learned,” and of how all his soldiers and commanders were actively “seeking from every possible source methods and means perfecting their own battlefield efficiency,” and of how good a teacher combat had been.[4] Kasserine Pass was to the Atlantic theater what Pearl Harbor had been in the Pacific. It was defeat, it didn’t taste very good, and it made GIs want to do something about it.