"The unofficial custodian of the Navy's professional hopes and fears"

A look at the Naval Review and its history:

The Naval Review – Encouraging Debate Inside the Royal Navy Since 1913

In October 1912, a small group of Royal Navy and Royal Marine officers got together in Alverstoke to set about the formation of a Naval Society whose purpose was simple, ‘to promote the advancement and spreading, within the Service, of knowledge relevant to the higher aspects of the naval profession’. There were early ideas for meetings and formal debates, but the dispersed reality of naval service rapidly brought acceptance that the best medium for exchanging ideas would be through a regular journal.

Since 1913, with an interruption from 1915 to 1918 that was corrected in retrospect, a quarterly issue of the Naval Review has been distributed to subscribing members and to privileged libraries and naval authorities. There are over half a million pages of text in 106 volumes.

The Review, from its beginning, allowed officers to publish anonymously:

From the first, the new navies of the Commonwealth were included and the Editor’s license to admit any person with a legitimate interest in the naval service was always judiciously employed. In 2019, eligibility extends to serving and retired officers and ratings of all the British, Commonwealth and NATO armed forces, members of the RFA and RMAS and to civil servants whose work has involved the navy. Many academics, politicians, think tankers and maritime experts have been readily accepted over the years and admission for those with ‘demonstrable interest in the Royal Navy’ continues. It was no coincidence that the donors to the Review’s centenary appeal included ten distinguished academics, many of whom have contributed to the journal.

The ideas that circulation would be confined solely to members and that contributions could be anonymous were integral to the concept from the start. The leading founder, the then-Captain Herbert Richmond, and the first editor, Admiral William Henderson, were convinced that anonymity allowed greater freedom of discussion, but it had and has other benefits. Firstly, whether the author was junior or senior, it forced readers to judge articles on their inherent quality, not the status of their originator. This meant that senior officers could ‘fly kites’ to test the reaction to potential initiatives without it being influenced by their rank. Conversely, very junior officers could express opinions with a reduced risk of being patronised or ignored outright and without being accused of self-advertising. Finally, at a time of deep divisions within a service dominated by ‘Jacky’ Fisher and Lord Charles Beresford, anonymity would help avoid factionalism. Although far fewer articles are anonymous in the present day and allowing pen names has been questioned at intervals, would-be authors continue to have the right to anonymity. As they should, because most of the original justifications for concealing identity remain valid.

Revolutionary technology and unintended consequences

On 12 July 1871 the Royal Navy launched HMS Devastation, a warship which marked a decisive break from centuries of naval design.

The ship marked the beginning of the new era of mastless steamship in the Royal Navy, ships whose decks allowed better positioned guns, making warships far more formidable in battle. It is not surprising therefore that HMS Devastation has an iconic status in naval history, marking a watershed moment in ship design. Described by contemporaries as ‘by far the most formidable of its kind yet constructed’, with ‘exceptionally heavy armour and armament’, its mastless design gave the impression of something rather otherworldly.

Coal and steam gave Devastation significant tactical advantages over older ships. With better firepower and more freedom of movement in battle she was the wave of the future. After 1875, every new warship in the Royal Navy was powered solely by steam.

Paradoxically, this new technology created a new set of strategic, logistical, and geopolitical risks and challenges for Great Britain

This new generation of warships made coal and its supply, an issue of the highest importance to navies the world over. ...Supplying this coal was beset with a myriad of problems, and would have global ramifications.
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As Britain had huge global oceanic interests to defend, places to store fuel were needed worldwide, close enough together to allow ships to travel between on one load. There was, moreover, little point in spending huge sums on state of the art warships if the fuel fed to their engines was below par. Thus, the coal available at each station not only had to be sufficient for those ships that called in, but also of the highest quality to ensure maximum performance from the fleet. The shift from sail to steam also led to geostrategic weakness.

The ability of a rival to take, or destroy supplies, and thus leave British ships impotent, meant that these key infrastructural nodes would in themselves need to become a key part of global defence strategy.

The snipers and the media

The Beltway Sniper was the biggest story of 2002. Cable news channels devoted hours each day to their coverage of the spree. Journalists flooded DC as every media outlet sought a piece of the action. As Jack Censer notes in his book On the Trail of the D. C. Sniper: Fear and the Media (2010) “more news reporters than police were assigned to the sniper case.”

Censer’s book is a fascinating case study of the media in action on a big, evolving story. It is unsparing in its analysis of the motives and mores of journalism and the business of cable news. It asks penetrating questions about the consequences for the public of the feverish quest for eyeballs in a crowded media landscape.

Cable news, to keep its viewers, had to make its fare constantly newsworthy. This encouraged more scoops, as people in the news business call the situation when one reporter or news outlet has a story before others do. But the situation also led to more hyping of the available news when what legitimately might be called a scoop was not available. Together, these tendencies raised the tempo and tenor of reporting.
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Stations came on the air with a loud fanfare heralding important and significant developments in the sniper case. The logic or teleology of the initial announcement was that something big had happened. Staying on the air suggested that something else was going to occur liveat the least, new information, but ideally, a resolution to the case. On the whole, however, these outcomes proved elusive. In any case, new information remained scarce.

“Monkey see, monkey do” prevailed. When one outlet went “wall to wall” with coverage, its competitors followed suit. With little actual news to report, time was filled by rehashed old news and speculation. Profilers and retired law enforcement officers filled airtime guessing about who the sniper was, his motives, law enforcement tactics, etc., etc.

Censer is shrewd about the incentive system for talking heads:

Profilers in general spoke without compensation to media, in order to publicize their skills to private, paying clients. Such a system might well give incentive to say something splashy and memorable.

For producers the best guest was not the most knowledgeable scholar or the most insightful expert. The best guest was the one who could go on camera and fill airtime with memorable soundbites.

For three weeks the Beltway Snipers were the biggest story in the country. Yet, the consequences of all that media attention was to make the public less knowledgeable. The trickle of information was overwhelmed by the deluge of misinformation and pointless, wrong-headed speculation. The more one watched CNN or read the Washington Post, the less one actually knew.

Related:

Hunting the Beltway Snipers

Hunting the Beltway Snipers

On 2 October 2002, James Martin was shot in a grocery store parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland. His murder marked the beginning of a three-week killing spree by two terrorists who became known as the Beltway Snipers.

Last year retired Maryland state trooper David Reichenbaugh published In Pursuit: The Hunt for the Beltway Snipers. It is a fascinating account from a unique perspective. Reichenbaugh was originally assigned to the task force headquarters and was in charge of the unit that had to turn the flood of tips, police records, and criminal profiles into useful intelligence. As luck would have it, he was the senior officer nearby when the blue Caprice was spotted at the I-70 rest stop. He took charge of securing the scene until the SWAT team arrived and took down the killers.

In Pursuit gives us critical insights into the hunt for the sniper. First, he shows us the overwhelming challenge faced by law enforcement as they built an IT infrastructure to handle a flood of bytes and paper that came pouring in. The pressure was immense as the clock kept ticking and the number of victims kept climbing. This is the view of the hunt far removed from press conferences and media interviews. It was invisible to the daily journalists who wrote the first draft of history.

Reichenbaugh has more than a little disdain for the media and the bureaucrats and politicians who sought to curry favor with them. Watching the media in action he was moved to wonder

Does the press care how many innocent people get killed? Is there a bloodlust on the part of the press?*

At one point during the killing spree, Gov. Paris Glendinning sought to calm fears by reassuring the public that their children were in no danger. The police knew this was fool hardy:

We were stunned. Governor Glendinning had unwittingly just put a bulls-eye on the forehead of every child in Maryland.

The snipers then went out and shot a student at a middle school.

Early on in the manhunt police had reports of a blue Caprice at the scene of several shootings. This information was lost in the deluge of tips and reports about white men in a white van.

Was it because we had programmed the public into looking for white vans and that was all they noticed? It has been proven time and again that the observations of witnesses can be influenced by predisposed ideas and beliefs.

It also did not help matters that FBI profilers told the task force that they were looking for a white man or men. (This information was quickly leaked to the press.) Cable news experts repeated and elaborated on the Angry White Male profile. Even if a by-stander noticed a blue Caprice, they would not connect it to the shootings. WHITE MEN IN A WHITE VAN was John Muhammad’s invisibility cloak.

Our federal agencies performed as they usually do. When the task force finally identified the suspects and their car, ATF and FBI brought matters to a standstill as they fought over who would make the public announcement.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Two federal agents, who oversaw their respective agencies (FBI and ATF), were arguing over who was going to release the information or BOLO..... How could we have come so far so well and now be arguing over who gets to appear before the sea of media waiting outside the joint operations center.

Reichenbaugh’s account of the arrest is a highlight of the book. As the man on the spot he had to cordon off the rest area without alerting Muhammad and Malvo. At the same time he had civilians near the blue Caprice whose safety was of paramount concern. Finally, he had to coordinate with the SWAT team for the final arrest. All of this was improvised by a scratch team of patrol officers without the benefit of planning or even a briefing.

In the meantime, back at task force HQ, political jockeying threatened to upend Reichenbaugh’s best efforts.

That it all came off without any casualties or even a single shot fired was an amazing achievement.

Sometime after Muhammad was arrested the idea began to circulate that the killing spree was just an elaborate plan to allow him to kill his ex-wife and regain custody of his children. Reichenbaugh is scathingly dismissive of this idea:

They planned to kill and they killed based on their plan. This wasn't about a desperate man seeking revenge against an ex-wife over child custody, as had been portrayed. Maybe that was what set Muhammad off, but this much planning and premeditation suggested terrorism -- the desire to kill.

Muhammad did not even know his ex-wife was living in Maryland at the time he began his spree. Moreover, the snipers were out of money and down to their last bullet when they were captured. So when did Muhammad intend to put the final step of his plan in action?

*"Between lawmen and reporters on the whole it is impossible, however, not to notice this difference: Most lawmen seem to hate criminals, and most reporters couldn't care less." David Gelernter, Drawing Life

Related:

The snipers and the media

The Charles Manson series we deserve

This could be a great Netflix series

In the course of reviewing Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Steve Sailer pulls back the curtains a bit:

Tarantino Punches the Damn Dirty Hippies

Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was much appreciated within the entertainment industry for portraying Manson as an LSD-crazed apocalyptic avenger. Bugliosi’s masterful job of making Manson seem like the ultimate outsider sidetracked the question of why a lowlife jailbird like Manson had become something of an insider at the best parties in the Hollywood Hills.

Why exactly did Manson know so many important people in showbiz? The answer was the same as for why Jeffrey Epstein knew so many important people in politics: He had access to jailbait girls.

Without all the Helter Skelter stuff, Manson would seem less like the Antichrist and more like an ambitious pimp, an ex-con who was adept at chatting up runaway girls fresh off the Greyhound bus.

Worth noting that the image of Manson as the acid-drenched Anti-Christ has persisted for half a century. Such is the power of the Narrative when self-interest, laziness, and ideological commitment coincide.

Here’s a throw-away passage that should be the premise for an epic revisionist streaming series:

In Philip Marlowe detective novels, murder investigations tend to turn over a lot of rocks and shine embarrassing lights on what’s underneath. The Manson case could similarly have dented the reputations of numerous celebrities who had nothing to do with the killings, but who had plenty of other secrets they didn’t want exposed.

For example, Tate’s husband Roman Polanski, Hollywood’s hottest director, fingered John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas as a possible killer because Polanski, like much of the entertainment industry, had been sleeping with Phillips’ wife Michelle.

And we all know that Polanski and Phillips had other dark secrets separate from the murder of Sharon Tate.

A Raymond Chandler story set in the Age of Aquarius. Mean streets and the mansions of New Hollywood. In the hands of a good director and with the right cast, this would be an instant classic.

Related:

Breaking news without excuses

Intense media scrutiny is reserved for Enemies of the Party

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Orwell the prophet

He wrote this over half a century before Harry Potter destroyed a generation of intellectual-manques.

To what extent people draw their ideas from fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that most people are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth, and that from this point of view the worst books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life.

"Boys' Weeklies" (1939)

Two remarkable lives

William and Elizebeth Friedman would be great subjects for a movie or Netflix mini-series. The cinematic potential of husband and wife code-breakers pitting their brains against the Nazis and Imperial Japan seems obvious.

The Friedmans were not just gifted codebreakers they were pioneers in cryptanalysis (William Friedman is credited with coining that term) and were instrumental in establishing the field as a scientific discipline in America. The National Security Agency named its main auditorium in their honor. Elizebeth has another hall named for her at the DOJ where she is remembered as a PIONEER OF INTELLIGENCE-LED POLICING.

They were married for nearly 52 years -- through two world wars and the Great Depression. They remained devoted to each other despite the added burden that working in the secret world imposed.

They never discussed their work with each other during the war which takes Need to Know and compartmentalization to unfathomable levels. How do you have work/life balance when work entails the fate of the Free World?

Before the first American set foot inside Bletchley Park, Elizebeth Freidman and her tiny unit in the Treasury Department had broken ciphers produced by several early versions of the Enigma machine.

While William worked for Army intelligence, his wife began her government career helping track down boot-leggers and rum-runners. Smugglers, like spies, need secure secret communications. Prohibition agents needed code-breakers to catch the law-breakers. In the 1920s and 1930s, Elizebeth Smith Friedman was the T-Men’s secret weapon.

When War came, she segued into tracking Nazi spies operating in South America.

In both her counterintelligence and law enforcement work, Friedman collaborated with the FBI. As is usually the case, “collaboration” meant that the work was shared while the vast majority of the publicity and glory went to the FBI and its director. The Bureau was quite willing to reveal sensitive code-breaking secrets to the public if it burnished the FBI’s image. That this would make future code-breaking difficult was of little concern to Hoover.

How social media stole our soul

 A short but brilliant piece from Nicholas Carr

From public intellectual to public influencer

Marketing, after all, has displaced thinking as our primary culture-shaping activity, the source of what we perceive ourselves to be. The public square having moved from the metaphorical marketplace of ideas to the literal marketplace of goods, it’s only natural that we should look to a new kind of guru to guide us.
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When the public intellectual was ascendant, cultural ideals revolved around the public good. Today, they revolve around the consumer good. The idea that the self emerges from the construction of a set of values and beliefs has faded. What the public influencer understands more sharply than most is that the path of self-definition now winds through the aisles of a cultural supermarket. We shop for our identity as we shop for our toothpaste.

George Orwell:

People worship power in the form they are able to understand it. A twelve-year old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield,. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin. There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook.

Why Twitter and cable news make us stupid

From Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the popular Mind

The violence of the feelings of crowds is also increased, especially in heterogeneous crowds, by the absence of all sense of responsibility. The certainty of impunity, a certainty the stronger as the crowd is more numerous, and the notion of considerable momentary force due to number, make possible in the case of crowds sentiments and acts impossible for the isolated individual. In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness, and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength.

Given to exaggerations in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. An orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusive use of violent affirmations. To exaggerate, to affirm, to resort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known to speakers at public meetings.

An odd take on Monica Lewinsky and the Clinton scandals

From the Washington Examiner magazine:

Monica Lewinsky gets the last laugh
Lewinsky was the first victim of the internet’s public shaming ritual. That she has come out on the other side of this is an important counter punch to the online world’s increasing degradation of public discourse.

The writer (following Lewinsky’s lead) consistently confuses the issue by merging the actions of the Democrat/Clinton/Media complex with the public at large.

The public was “fickle,” indeed, but also bloodthirsty, feeding on the humiliation of an already-battered young woman like crows picking at a body.

Late-night talk show hosts delighted in Lewinsky’s ruination. They buried her in an avalanche of jokes about blow jobs and the blue dress that was a central piece of evidence in the case. They castigated her for her body, her sexuality, and the way she sounded on the now-infamous Linda Tripp tapes. Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno, David Letterman, and so many others routinely degraded her as a homewrecker and a bimbo. Watching network TV monologues from the ’90s, it’s clear that the pinnacle of late-night humor at the time was misogynistic, lazy cheap shots at a woman still in her 20s, living out the most horrifying experience of her life in the public eye. She was the target du jour, and they never seemed to run out of ammunition.

Note--the public is bloodthirsty, but her examples are media types.

The author also refuses to acknowledge that Lewinsky, her family, and her advisors helped create the firestorm that engulfed her. First, by having an affair with a married, high-profile man. Second by playing coy with prosecutors and trying to protect the “Big He”. In so doing, she gave the Clinton Machine time to put their “nuts and sluts” game plan into action. “We” didn’t try to destroy Monica Lewinsky, the Clintons did. So why is the Washington Examiner trying to confuse and deflect the issue with talk of “public shaming rituals” and “social media” toxicity?

Let us also not forget that this scandal grew out of an attempt to deny Paula Jones her chance for justice. Lewinsky, for whatever reasons, was working to deny her that chance.

This is bizarre

She’s a powerhouse, and possibly the best living example of bouncing back, better than ever.

I can think of a host of people who have suffered worse and also bounced back.

Hitler knew who his real enemies were

In fact, if ever Stalin fell into German hands, Hitler told his propaganda genius, as Führer he would out of respect spare the Russian premier, perhaps banishing him to some beach resort. Churchill and Roosevelt, by contrast, would be hanged for having started the war “without showing the least statesmanship or military ability.”
Nigel Hamilton, The Mantle of Command

The limits of intelligence

Christopher Andrew notes that, thanks to ULTRA and Bletchley Park, Winston Churchill was "best-informed war leader in British history."

Despite this, the first two years of his tenure as PM saw an unending string of defeats. Greece, Crete, North Africa, Malaya, Singapore, Burma. Time and again superior intelligence could not overcome British deficiencies in numbers, doctrine, equipment, and leadership.

For good reason Sir John Keegan wrote

It has become part of the conventional wisdom that intelligence is the necessary key to success in military operations. A wise opinion would be that intelligence, while necessary, is not a sufficient means to victory. Decision in war is always the result of a fight, and in combat willpower always counts for more than foreknowledge.

2 September 1945: V-J Day

Tokyo Bay. Japan formally surrenders. The Second World War is over. Germany and Japan lie crushed and in ruins. Hitler is dead by his own hand. His ally Tojo tried to follow suit but he botched that job as badly as he he botched nearly everything he touched during the war. The putative samurai would meet his end, not by seppuku, but at the end of a hangman’s rope.

Moral righteousness alone does not win battles. Evil causes do not necessarily carry the seeds of their own destruction. Once engaged, even just wars have to be won-- or lost-- on the battlefield.
Murray and Millett, A War to Be Won

Japan went to war because she had contempt for her adversaries. China was backward and primitive, Britain was a paper lion, the Americans were a lazy people with no appetite for hard struggle.

Japan was defeated because she completely underestimated her victims. She could defeat Chinese armies but she could not conquer China. Britain refused to accept the ‘inevitable’ and turned the tide in every theater: the greatest defeat the Japanese army ever suffered came at the hands of the Slim’s 14th Army in Burma. Americans, it turned out, did not quit when faced with adverse odds nor did they collapse when faced with adversity.

The United States Navy is a social organization of golfers and bridge players.
Admiral . Isoroku Yamamoto

Long before his death in 1943 Yamamoto must have realized that he had badly misjudged his main opponent. The Navy and the Marines had disrupted and thwarted his plans at nearly every turn. They had bombed the sacred soil of Japan. They had destroyed his proud Kido Butai at Midway. They had held on at Guadalcanal despite Yamamoto’s every effort to drive them off the island.

The admiral’s successors had no greater success; nothing could slow down the inexorable advance. Tarawa was the tipping point. If Japan’s leaders were correct, the high cost in blood for a tiny atoll thousands of miles from Tokyo would have convinced the “nation of merchants” to negotiate. Instead, the American advance continued at an even more rapid pace.

On the eve of Midway Lt. Commander John C Waldron spoke to his men of Torpedo 8 on board the USS Hornet.

The approaching battle will be the biggest of the war and may well be the turning point also. It is to be known as the battle of Midway. It will be a historical, and I hope, a glorious event."

My greatest hope is that we encounter a favorable tactical situation, but if we don't and worse comes to worst, I want each one of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies.

On the morning of battle, Waldron’s men did not find a favorable tactical situation. They did however do their utmost to destroy their enemies. They pressed their attack with courage and determination. Every plane was shot down. Only one man survived the battle. Their sacrifices helped deliver a decisive victory.

It was the courage of such men that brought the USS Missouri to Tokyo Bay.

Innovation: The limits of vision

In journalism and media portrayals innovation is all about visionaries and technology (think Steve Jobs). Like David with his sling, a company with a visionary will create cool technology and slay Goliath (think Apple).

Books like Paul Kennedy’s Engineers of Victory challenge those popular preconceptions. Take for example, the experience of Italy in World War Two.

Giulio Douhet was one of the earliest and most influential theorists of airpower and strategic bombing. Italy designed and developed some of the most advanced aircraft in the world in the 1920s and 1930s. Her pilots won international competitions and set world records.

So the Regia Aeronautica had visionaries and the cool technology. Yet Italy lost campaign after campaign between 1940 and 1943.

A key reason, as Kennedy points out, is that Italy lacked the natural resources, economic capacity, and industrial technology to support a modern war against a European Great Power. Vision and a few good ideas could not make up for this systemic weakness.

Resources aren’t everything but they do weigh heavily in the strategic and competitive balance. Vision and advanced technology if used in an astute manner can offset some inferiority in material resources. For Italy between 1940 and 1943, the gap was too great and her strategy too inept. Catastrophic defeat was almost inevitable.

Williamson Murray reminds us that cool technology is often useful but is rarely the decisive factor in victory or defeat:

But technological superiority by itself has never guaranteed success. The Germans had technologically inferior tanks and artillery in 1940; nevertheless, they won one of the greatest operational victories in the history of the twentieth century. In the 1944-1945 campaigns, the Germans possessed by far and away the most sophisticated fighter aircraft, the most sophisticated heavy tank, the most sophisticated medium tank, the most sophisticated submarine, and the best machine gun. And they went down to catastrophic defeat.

Britain’s crushing defeats in Malaya and Burma in 1942 are a reminder that strategic context matters when it comes to the value of cutting edge technology. The British built the first fully motorized army. It pioneered tank warfare and tank development. Japan’s Army moved on foot and on bicycles. By European standards, their tanks were a joke--- little more than toys.

In the jungles of Asia (strategic context) Japan’s “primitive” army enjoyed superior tactical and operation mobility versus the “advanced” British. They were able to outflank British positions and routed the road-bound British time and again.

“Cutting edge technology” ended up hamstringing British commanders.

West Wing chaos

"Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!"

This sounds like no way to organize a government. OTOH, they did win World War Two so it must have worked.

Jontathan Jordan, American Warlords:

A curious feature of Rooseveltian government was that individuals meant everything and titles meant nothing.
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To keep what he said hidden, even from his own military, FDR sent most outgoing messages through Navy channels and received incoming messages through the Army, ensuring that the White House maintained the only complete set of his correspondence with key leaders.
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The extraordinary fact was that the second most important individual in the United States Government during the most critical period of the world's greatest war had no legitimate official position nor even a desk of his own except a card table in his bedroom. However , the bedroom was in the White House.

Understanding innovation

Paul Kennedy’s Engineers of Victory is one of the best books on innovation I’ve ever read. Which is extraordinary, really, given that it is a book about World War Two and was written 70 years after the critical events it narrates.

The book grew out of an insight by Kennedy a historian who has devoted his career to the study of grand strategy and geopolitics:

Grand strategists, leaders and professors alike, take a lot of things for granted

When the subject is WWII, what they usually take for granted is the back-story of many of the key technologies that contributed to the Allied victory. To cite one example:

Where did this centimetric radar come from? In many accounts of the war, it simply 'pops up'.

These sorts of blind spots create a bias in our narratives and our historical understanding. They tempt us to over-emphasize command decisions in strategic affairs and to understate the role of organizational culture.

Closing the air gap did not happen because some great person decreed it

[And]

The improvements did not arrive according to a grand incremental plan from Max Horton's office; rather, they entered the Royal Navy's tool kit episodically, and some of these newer systems took months before they properly fitted in the whole. Yet the commander of a U-boat that had been sent south in late March 1943 to wreak havoc off Freetown would have been completely disconcerted by what he saw when he arrived back at his base in Brest in July.

This last point serves also as a useful reminder that these vital innovations were not just a question of inventing new weapons; these weapons had to be deployed and used effectively. That meant that organizational learning, training and doctrine all came into play.

The book’s subtitle is The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War. Kennedy does not limit himself to the inventors. Weapons, like intelligence, counts for little until it is put to use by the men at the point of the spear. He reminds us that one definition of engineer is "a person who carries through an enterprise through skillful or artful contrivance."

New weapons for old" is apt to become a very popular cry. The success of some new devices has led to a new form of escapism which runs somewhat thus-- "Our present equipment doesn't work very well; training is bad, supply is poor, spare parts non-existent. let's have an entirely new gadget!" ... In general, one might conclude that relatively too much scientific effort has been expended hitherto in the production of new devices and too little in the proper use of what we have got.
Patrick Blackett, "Scientists at the Operational Level"

While the British could not match the US in industrial production, during the war they were the undisputed champions of “artful contrivance.” On land, sea, and air they came up with new weapons and new methods that contributed to the final victory.

Part of this was cultural:

It was not surprising that a society brought up on H. G. Wells and Jules Verne novels, the Boy's Own Weekly, and Amateur Mechanics should now produce vast numbers of citizen-based concoctions intended to help beat Hitler.

A key ingredient was leadership. The British were blessed to have Churchill as their war-leader.

The plain fact is that there probably was never another war leader with his talent-spotting skills and his capacity to inspire and encourage.

WSC was the first Prime Minister to appoint a science adviser. He was a devoted reader of H. G. Wells and had a biography right out of Boy’s Own Weekly. In the First World War he had been the driving force behind the development of the tank (a weapon that had appeared in a Wells book in 1903).

Churchill understood that sometimes a leader must prod an organization to get the right men in place and to move the culture in the right direction. He forced the army to find a place for MG Percy Hobart a pioneer in tank warfare and a man with an enormous capacity for artful contrivance.

I am not at all impressed by the prejudice against him in certain quarters. Such prejudices attach frequently to persons of strong personality and original view... We are now at war, fighting for our lives, and we cannot afford to confine Army appointments to officers who have excited no hostile comment in their careers.

Hobart amply repaid Churchill for his confidence. He trained three outstanding armoured divisions and created a series of specialized weapons to defeat Rommel’s beach defenses at Normandy.

Kennedy’s account underlines the fact that G.K. Chesterton wrote the first rule of innovation:

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Starting from zero, the US Marine Corps created and perfected amphibious warfare. It was neither a short journey nor an easy one. Allan Millett describes their first attempt to put doctrine into practice:

The Navy's coxswains did not reach the right beach at the proper time; the unloading of supplies was chaotic; the naval bombardment was inadequate; and the Navy's landing boats were clearly unsuitable for both troops and equipment. The exercise, however, identified enough errors to keep the Corps busy for fifteen years.
(A. Millett Semper Fidelis on USMC amphious exercises in 1923-24)

Try-fail-learn-improve-try again. When you succeed, keep learning and keep improving. The Marines and the Navy kept at it all through the 1920s and 1930s. They also kept to this cycle throughout the war in the Pacific:

Tarawa II: Learning and doing

Guadalcanal

Vindicated by history

Winston Churchill was born into a political family and he was always a political animal. First, though, he was a professional writer; he made his living with his pen long before he won an election.

Anyone who worked under him well understood that if they won an argument the victory might only be temporary. There was the verdict of history to consider and WSC would no doubt help write that history.

Jonathan Jordan points out a classic example of the editorial tensions inherent when a work is both memoir and history.

All through the spring and summer of 1944 Churchill and his top military chiefs were reluctant to commit to the Normandy landings and the Campaign in France.

They opposed weakening the Italian front to mount a second landing in the south of France (Operation DRAGOON). They saw opportunities to make opportunistic attacks in the Balkans and on islands in the Aegean. Churchill (but not his generals) dreamt of a war-winning drive up the Italian boot and into Austria.

By July 1944 the American’s were out of patience. As the largest partner in the western coalition, they brushed aside British objections and insisted that DRAGOON go forward as planned.

Churchill vented his frustration to his top military advisor in July 1944:

I am not going to give way about this for anybody. Alexander is to have his campaign. If the Americans try to withdraw the two divisions still left with him, I shall ask you to send the 52nd division from the United Kingdom to breach the gap. I hope you realise that an intense impression must be made upon the Americans that we have been ill-treated and are furious. Do not let any smoothings or smirchings cover up this fact. After a little, we shall get together again; but if we take everything lying down, there will be no end to what will be put upon us. The Arnold-King-Marshall combination is one of the stupidest strategic teams ever seen. They are good fellows and there is no need to tell them this.

As Jordan notes in American Warlords, Churchill chose not to include the whole memo in his memoirs. He preferred not to declare the American leaders “one of the stupidest strategic teams ever seen.”

Post-victory good feelings are one explanation. So is the need to avoid offense to a vital ally. But even Churchill had to recognize that the American's strategic sense looked pretty good after Germany and Japan were defeated years ahead of schedule.

Jordan makes an interesting point about the role language played in the Anglo-American tensions during the war. The British perspective:

They distrusted the American mindset. Fixated on northern France, the Americans viewed military strategy as an unalterable blueprint, and strategic agreements as binding contracts among lawyers. Marshall and King could not see the value in extemporizing in northern Italy or the Aegean -- extemporization that would aid OVERLORD while lopping off key morsels of the German empire.

The British, especially Churchill, saw strategy as less a matter of time-tables and production schedules and more of a question of seizing opportunities when they presented themselves.

To Americans, this search for opportunities made the British look slippery and unreliable, forever trying to back out of solemn agreements.

Samuel Eliot Morison addressed this point in Strategy and Compromise:

The British Chiefs, especially Sir Alan Brooke, never could seem to understand why the Americans had to have commitments well in advance. They accused us of being rigid and inflexible, not realizing the terrific job of procurement, shipbuilding, troop training and supply necessary to place a million and a half troops in England, with armor, tanks and troop-lift, ready to invade the Continent

Britain and the US were two allies “divided by a common language” in large matters large and small. Jordan again:

Thing necessary for operations, to the Americans, were 'requirements,' while in the British vernacular they were 'demands'. The word 'demands' had an imperious ring to the American ear, and when the British presented 'demands', it sounded like an edict from King George III to his colonists. Similarly, the British might suggest that the group 'table' a difficult matter -- meaning lay it on the table for discussion -- while to the Americans, to 'table' something meant to set it aside for the future.

American strategists were not immune to shaping history through intentional omissions. From Masters and Commanders:

In 1956 Marshall made a terrible admission to Pogue about the lack of proper intelligence before D-Day. 'Don't quote this' he told his biographer, but 'We didn't know we were going to hit such rough country... G-2 [military intelligence] let me down every time in everything. They never told me what i needed to know. They didn't tell me about the hedgerows, and it was not until later, after much bloodshed, that we were able to deal with them.' Later in the same interview, after Marshall had said, 'We had to pay in blood for our lack of knowledge,' he repeated: 'Don't print that.'... The admission that Marshall was not warned about the bocages the deep, thick, ancient Norman hedgerows that gave the German defenders such fine defensive cover-- is a serious one, and a significant failure of US Military Intelligence (G-2). Brooke knew all about them because he had retreated over precisely that ground to evacuate from Cherbourg in June 1940, but his warning were largely disregarded as yet another excuse for not invading.

Raymond Aron

This essay by Roger Kimball is extraordinarily good.

Raymond Aron and the power of ideas

Allan Bloom wrote shortly after Aron’s death, “the man who for fifty years . . . had been right about the political alternatives actually available to us. . . . [H]e was right about Hitler, right about Stalin, and right that our Western regimes, with all their flaws, are the best and only hope of mankind.” He was, Bloom concluded, “the kind of man necessary to democracy but almost impossible in it; one who both educates public opinion and is truly wise and learned.”

It says something about our fatally frivolous culture that Aron is almost forgotten. Of course, if he were taken seriously, most of our public intellectuals and many university professors would have to seek other employment.

As Aron notes, the descendants of Marx and Nietzsche (and Hegel and Freud) come together by many paths. The existentialism of Sartre, the nihilism of Derrida or Foucault, all exhibit a similar intellectual incontinence. What unites them is not a coherent doctrine but a spirit of opposition to the established order, “the occupational disease,” Aron notes, “of the intellectuals.”

George Orwell famously remarked that there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. The Opium of the Intellectuals provides a kind of Baedeker of the higher gullibility that Orwell disparaged, analyzing its attractions, describing its costs, mapping its chief roadways and pointing out some escape routes.