The Scarlet Thief

The Scarlet Thief 
© 2013 Paul Fraser Collard
352 pages

Captain Arthur Sloames stepped off the boat with a terrible secret.  He wore on his shoulders the coat of a dead man.  When his transport left England, he was but Jack Lark -- a crushed and anxious common soldier whose ambition had led him to become an officer's aide. That officer perished of fever en route to a new command, however, and seizing on the opportunity Lark has assumed the man's identity.  It's not as if he can do worse than the stuffed shirts leading the army now, after all -- but faced against Russian cossacks and massed artillery, Lark soon realizes being the man who gives the orders is never so simple.   As mobs of uniformed men are thrown into battle against one another, Lark is doubly challenged: first,   to survive the brutal opening of the Crimean war, doing right  by his men; and to maintain his charade surrounded by officers who are not nearly as dimwitted as they appear from a distance.

Imagine the frantic action of a Bernard Cornwell novel, but with the humor drastically downplayed; that's the general feeling here, as Fraser is just as good at thrusting readers into the heart of battle and keeping the pages flying by.  The working-class character suddenly turned officer is very reminiscent of Sharpe's backstory, though Lark's promotion is one of stolen valor -- or rather, borrowed, because Lark may pose as an officer but he's a courageous soldier  who doesn't shy from leading his men from the front.  What he leads them into is not always advisable, but it wouldn't be a novel without disasters to test characters and learn from.   There are enemies both foreign and domestic; there are the Russians, of course, but Lark is also dogged by an old enemy who has inexplicably turned up in Crimea as well.

What will make Jack Lark stand out, I think, is not so much his similarities to Sharpe, but how very different his story will become.  The novels to come take Lark to India, Persia, and beyond, with roles beyond the battlefield.  I'm  especially intriuged by the idea of an English soldier fighting for the Shah.

Old Man's War

Old Man's War
© 2005 John Scalzi
320 pages

Boot camps on Earth may promise to make a new man out of you, but the intake camps of the Colonial Defense Forces do it for real. At the tender age of seventy-five, John Perry enlisted in the Colonial Defense Forces and disappeared from Earth, never to be seen again.  No knew what happened to CDF enlistees, but on Earth the rumors were pervasive: they can make you young again. Why else would they only recruit 75-year olds?   Perry thought it was a gamble worth taking, and even when he woke up in a new body -- a green one -- it was still better than being hunched over and arthritic. But then the mysteries around the CDF fell away to reveal ugly truths: the universe brims over with intelligent and aggressive species, and all of them are fighting tooth and nail to expand faster than the next guy. Ordinary soldiers stood no chance against the universe of horrors, but auguments -- with increased strength, stamina,  and abilities -- could at least hold their own, especially when coupled with the experience of mature humans transferred into them. Even so,  75% of augments would not survive their term of enlistment.

 Old Man's War is first in a trilogy,  and is somewhat reminiscent of Starship Troopers given the supersoldiers fighting against a galaxy of monsters. The alien creatures vary widely, from slime molds  to biological shredders. The Hork-Bajir would not be out of place here.  Part of the reason so many CDF troops die is that they're in constant use: if humans aren't defending colonies, they're attacking alien colonies or clearing out native species to make room for human colonists.  Can't we all get along?  ...no. The last person to ask that question in the novel got turned into a puddle of goo in an alien church, so...no. It's kill or be killed. The only diplomacy in the novel occurs after a ritual of individual combat designed to see how many questions the winners earn the right to ask.

This is the first Scalzi novel I've not read which is intended to be more serious than funny, and while there are light moments, Old Man's War is chiefly a SF combat thriller.  There are creepier elements to explore, too, like the "Ghost Brigades".   I could see reading more of this series, but I was mostly interested in the idea of transferring consciousness from an aged body into a lab-grown young one. Unfortunately, a lot of the tech the CDF uses is above the heads of our newly-arrived narrator, so we don't really get an inkling as to how it works. Because humans often steal technology from aliens, even the upper echelons of the CDF don't know exactly how things work, and they're not the only ones.  I might continue with this series if the kindle books go on sale, but I mostly read this for the basic ideas of consciousness-transferal. More monster-slaying doesn't strike me as too exciting.

Redcoat

Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket
© 2001 Richard Holmes
400 pgs

‘There is no beating these British soldiers. They were completely beaten and the day was mine, but they did not know it and would not run.’

I first knew red coats as the kit of villains, the bad guys of the American Revolution. A healthy diet of other history, however, has given me a ready admiration of the British army - - one I put aside when I'm watching something like The Patriot and am obliged to  hiss at Jason Isaac's amazingly evil dragoon commander character.  It's hard not to admire an army capable of allowing a small island bobbing amid the Baltic and the North Atlantic to maintain influence across the globe.  Redcoat falls within the area of military history, but does not record military campaigns. Instead, it delves into the organization, operation, and experiences of the men who wore red -- and green, sometimes -- throughout the 19th century. 

Holmes' exact range spans from the Seven Years War to the end of the Crimean war and the Indian Mutiny, or just about a century. In that century, Britain drove France from North America,  fought a dictator who had almost the whole of Europe at his command, and appeared both in the middle east and India for the first time. Drawing from diaries and letters,  Holmes examines different classes of soldiers -- officers and enlisted -- as well as the different services and their evolution.  In this period we find the British experimenting more with light skirmish troops at times,  and cavalry is similarly divided into light and heavy despite there not being much of a difference in practice.  Light infantry were equipped with a more precise rifle instead of the 'Brown Bess' musket employed by the regular infantry:  that musket was only good under 100 yards, while the Baker was effective at twice that range.  (Those familiar with Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe, of course, will remember he carried a Baker.)

Most soldiers came from the bottom ranks of society, enlisting primarily for pay -- taking the "king's shilling"-- while their officers were from the aristocracy.  Even the well-bred had to mix money with their service, however, paying for commissions and commands.  (Officers "buying" companies sounds very strange to our ears, but it's not as if modern professional armies appeared overnight.)  Holmes also includes chapters on medicine and camp followers -- particularly wives. Though soldiers were forbidden to marry without permission, the amount of debilitating venereal diseases prompted Britain's military leaders to allow more wives to travel with their husband on assignment to dampen the lure of prostitution.  Only 12% of wives were allowed, however, and those who did were required to work for the company in the form of laundry or otherwise. 

Students of the period will find this a valuable resource for information on the everyday life and duties of soldiers, including the perils and responsibilities. The chapters on organization and the duties of general officer and such were personally sleep-inducing, but they were soon replaced by horses and artillery and other exciting things.  Holmes doesn't shy away from the terror and gruesomeness of war -- I had no idea solid shot was as dangerous as he describes it, thinking that canister fire was more common.   For those curious about how a horse-and-musket army was organized and fought -- those who want to see behind the scenes of battles like Waterloo, say -- Redcoat should prove a fascinating read.    Holmes has other works on the British soldier in history, including Sahib and Tommy. 

Rifleman Dodd and The Gun

The Gun, and Rifleman Dodd
© 1933 C.S. Forester
311 pages

"There was sorrow in Dodd's heart as he looked down on the pitiful scene, but it did not prevent him from turning away and setting himself to survey the next adventurous quarter of a mile of his route. There are many who give up, and many who procrastinate, but there are some who go on."

C.S. Forester is best known for his Horatio Hornblower stories,  naval adventures set in the Napoleonic Wars.   These two short works, The Gun and Rifleman Dodd, are less known but equally entertaining and detailed. Both are set in Napoleonic Iberia, as both a peasant resistance and the shattered remnants of the old Bourbon Army fight for Spain and Portugal's liberty from Napoleon,  with the generous support of English seapower and the Duke of Wellington.

The first story, The Gun,  follows an eighteen pound siege gun which abandoned on the field after a crushing Spanish defeat, but recovered by a priest and a few farmers, The gun passes from hand,  as many realize its incredible potential and attempt to shift it to the best place -- and those who particularly value it seize it by force. It does get put into action, however, fomenting rebellion on the plains and sending the French into retreat for the first time.

Rifleman Dodd pieces together the adventure of the eponymous rifleman after he is cut off from a retreat, and lost behind enemy lines. A hard-worn veteran of five campaigns, Dodd knows how to soldier and stay alive, and so when he encounters a group of Portuguese irregulars, he becomes their leader and becomes a phantom menace to the French, who are haunted by visions of a green Englishmen.  Even as they methodically begin sweeping and scouring the hills to destroy his hiding places, Dodd and a couple of survivors -- and finally, Dodd alone -- endeavor to put flames to Bonaparte's plans.

Although a sketch of their plots gives both of these novels an air of romantic air,  they're not fanciful in the least.  Forester does not shy from the brutal behavior of both parties, French and irregulars, as they fight tooth and claw with one another.  Forester also does not reduce the French to a distant enemy:  in Rifleman Dodd, he tells their story in alternate chapters, and every person Dodd kills is named as he falls.   There's no denying the adventurous drama of the last bit of Rifleman Dodd, however, as he beards the French lion in its den.  Good stuff!

As a bit of trivia, Bernard Cornwell mentions a missing rifleman named Dodd in one of his Sharpe novels, also set in Spain.   This is a deliberate reference to Rifleman Dodd, and one of Cornwell's stories about becoming a writer involves trying to find more stories like Dodd, and then realizing he'd have to write them himself.  Three cheers, then, for Rifleman Dodd, which was not only a great little story by itself, but one that gave us the force of nature that is Sharpe.

Rifleman Dodd was originally known as Death to the French. I speculated that the title was changed after the outbreak of World War 2, but Rifleman Dodd seems to have just been the American title.

Related:
Cornwell's Sharpe books
Forester's Horatio Hornblower sea stories

Fool's Errand

Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan
© 2017 Scott Horton
318 pages

Incredible as it sounds, it is nearly possible for a child conceived in the first week of the US invasion of Afghanistan to have come of age and deploy there himself. He's out there now, a sixteen  or seventeen- year old waiting for the day when he can fight in his father's war. The Afghanistan war is an odd one -- the United States' longest war, yes,  but one of its least-cared about:  not popular yet not  protested.  Americans just don't seem to care about the trillions of dollars burned under the shadow of the Hindu Kush mountains, the thousands of American soldiers killed, or the hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians killed in attempts to destroy the nebulous enemy.  Fool's Errand is a case not just against the war, but against apathy.  This war was badly conceived, badly executed, and maintained as a litany of errors, one feeding the fire that the initial invasion intended to squelch. The United States will leave Afghanistan eventually, and the area will collapse into civil war eventually. The only question is how many more lives will be ruined and how many more enemies DC will create in its belabored efforts to fight a hangover by hailing the hair of the dog.

They hate us for our freedoms,  the president said as  American troops marched into Afghanistan, and the wound of 9/11 was still too raw for anyone to question the claim.   9/11 was barbaric and unconscionable and to posit that it was done as a reaction to DCs own policy in the middle east would have seemed like an insult to the innocent slain – even though bin laden and al-Queda’s hatred for the American troops parked in Arab countries, used as bases to constantly bomb Arab citizens, was well documented. Even as the United States moved toward Afghanistan with an objective of overthrowing  the Taliban that had given bin Laden shelter,  the war was not inevitable:  the rulers of Afghanistan then were willing to give bin Laden up,   given to a US ally, but the administration in its heated desire for revenge had no interest in doing anything deliberately.  Instead, American men and material were thrown into the same grave that claimed the armies of Alexander, the Brits, and the Russians.  Homo sapiens is a misnomer.

From there the misery continues: having destroyed the old order, as disagreeable as it was, DC fumbled repeatedly in attempts to create a new one.  It created an effective civil war in the country in its use of one pliable-but-despised tribe to do the governing, and through the breakdown of social order rose the criminal chaos that the Taliban had largely arrested by imposing its own illiberal order.  Oddly, people object to being invaded and bombed, and a relatively small number of scattered al-Queda fighters grew into a native resistance -- and the more bombs that fell, the more lives destroyed in an attempt to get the bad guys, the more enraged and distressed men picked up guns and started fighting.  Money gone to train Afghanis to defend their "country" disappeared with the trained troops, who had little real interest in fighting their neighbor insurgents.  The chaos spread across the region as DC tried to intervene in other regimes, and the "war on terror" became a sustained nightmare of bombs for those on the ground, creating new lifetimes of American enemies in the middle east. Osama bin Laden, hiding comfortably, could bask behind his own MISSION ACCMPLISHED banner:  he wanted to draw the Americans into an unwinnable war, and they drove straight into the minefield. (And he's not the only enemy DC effectively helped:  the Islamic Republic of Iran was once surrounded by armed Sunni states; now those rivals are ruined and Iran has much more influence over the region, to the despair of DC's partners in crime, the House of Saud.)

Depressing and infuriating, Fool's Errand tells a full story. There's the military history of the invasion and growing insurgency, followed by futile attempts to squelch it,  but Horton also dips into the politics of the region and of DC, showing how  the anti-war aims of Obama were frustrated by inertia and the fact that the DC establishment --  the bureaucrats, the lobbyists, and the defense and intelligence contractors who are guaranteed work --  has no interest in bowing to history just yet. They'll keep sending other people's children to die and burning other people's money.


Related:
The author's podcast, featuring over four thousand interviews with foreign policy analysts, dating to 2003.

These Rugged Days

These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War
© 2017 John Sledge
296 pages

Although Alabama was not the site of as many bloody battles as Virginia and Tennessee in the Civil War, it was not a quiet backwater only troubled at the war’s end. From the Confederacy’s birthplace in Montgomery in 1861 to the coup de grâce burning of Selma in 1865, Alabama saw altercations, skirmishes, and at least one major battle throughout the war. These Rugged Days is a personal history of Alabama in the civil war, in which the accounts of battle are made more intimate and entertaining by unique stories from the ground.

When South Carolina seceded from the union, Alabama was one of the first states to follow, and its central location in the deep south seemed to recommend Montgomery as a capital – one supported by two major commercial rivers, no shortage of rich farmland, a secure port, and ample mineral deposits. As an example of like repelling like, however, the politicians who gathered in Montgomery in that humid spring were put off by the clouds of mosquitos. Although the seat of government moved to Virginia, Alabama’s rail lines and rivers were of great interest to the enemy. Union cavalry raided and captured several cities in northern Alabama early on, only to be driven out. Sledge notes that Florence and Huntsville would change hands several times throughout the war. Although many citizens of northern Alabama were unionists, and the first Union troops were careful not to step on toes, the eventual Union reprisals against civilian populations in the wake of guerilla war alienated the military and their civilian hosts against one another. Larger in scale was the siege of Mobile, the port of which  fell in 1864. Mobile was an important port city for the entire South, hosting blockade runners who darted to Cuba and back with supplies long after New Orleans had fallen. The battle of Mobile Bay involved several ironclads, as well as the use of naval mines (or “torpedoes” – this battle gave birth to the expression, “Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!”).  The city itself, however, would not be taken until 1865.

Sledge opens the book with a story from his childhood, recounting the moment in which history became real: he and a friend discovered a half-buried Spencer carbine along a creek bed, one presumably dropped by an invading Yankee during Wilson’s raid. Throughout These Rugged Days, he draws on stories that add a human touch to the already lively account of daring raids, rebellious farmhands, and steady action. The chapter on Streight’s Raid, for instance, includes several humorous accounts – though the raid was bound for some level of absurdity from the beginning. It was a cavalry raid conducted on mules, who frequently gave their riders trouble and drew amused crowds. The troopers had their own laughs; in one abandoned town, a few newspapermen turned cavalry broke into the town’s news office and printed a broadsheet that presented the arrival of the Yankees as if they were a group of young men come to pay a social call. (“It is unknown how long the general and his friends will stay with us.”) The conclusion of that raid saw the troopers surrender to a force a third of their size after being bloodily harried for days. The rebel commander Nathan Bedford Forrest ‘put the skeer in’ his opponents by sending aides with orders to nonexistent companies and shuffling his two guns to appear like a battery of fifteen. Streight was not amused when he realized how small a force had taken him in. The book concludes with Wilson’s Raid, a large cavalry action that involved a running battle between carbine-carrying Yank cavalrymen fighting against a much smaller Confederate force led by Forrest. They sparred from Montevallo to Selma, where Wilson achieved his aim in burning the city and its naval foundries, which had helped make Mobile such a tough nut to crack. (Selma’s contribution to the naval war were honored in the good ship Selma, which was the last to surrender at Mobile Bay. )

Although there are other books on Alabama in the civil war, These Rugged Days is easily the most entertaining book I’ve read on the subject. The author has obviously inherited his father’s ability to weave a story that keeps audiences spellbound.


Related:
With the Old Breed, Gene Sledge. (Literally related: Gene Sledge is John's father.)
The Yellowhammer War: The Civil War  and Reconstruction in Alabama

Grunt

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
© 2016 Mary Roach
285 pages

I've never given much thought to the idea of military science. What might it involve? The chemistry of better weapons, the psychology behind successful strategy gambits? The science encountered here, in Mary Roach's Grunt, is similar to that performed on the early astronauts and the materials that would take them itno space. What happens to the human body under these conditions? What kind of material is optimal, based on these variables? What if this situation happens? If that sounds plodding, you don't know Mary Roach. Her books mix comedy and science, and achieve the comedy both by zeroing-in on subjects that are taboo (dead people and feces, say) and through Roach's droll delivery. Here she plagues military researchers and servicemen by investigating the labs where combat-ready clothing is engineered, watches seamen struggle to escape a sinking submarine simulation on scant sleep, reviews the progress of artificial limb-building considers the virtue of applying maggots to a flesh wound, and plays with a TCAP system so soldiers in the field can communicate without destroying their hearing. The experiments conducted to improve men and materials (or in the case of submarine crews, to tax them further on less sleep) are typically interesting in themselves, but Roach adds offbeat appeal by sharing weirder studies. (One study indicated that polar bears were fantastically interested in menstrual blood, but not by blood drawn from veins. This is apparently a polar bear thing, as black bears were equally bored by drawn blood and menstrual blood.)

Interesting as ever, but -- as usual -- not something to read with lunch.

Lockout

Lockout
© 2016 John J. Nance
412 pages

Something very strange is happening at 35,000 feet. A lost and unresponsive Airbus is feeding false data to its pilots, assuring them that they're halfway over the Atlantic and nearing New York, but any glance out the window tells the crew they're headed across France and seemingly towards Tel Aviv. The Airbus is carrying an ousted Israeli prime minister, who did everything he could to push Israel and Iran over the brink of war while in office. In DC, three intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense are scrambling over one another's toes and endangering innocent lives trying to figure out what's going on and what to do next. If the Airbus continues on its present course, it could very well pass over the border of Iran and trigger a nuclear war between the mullahs and the Israelis. Such is the story of Lockout, in which a couple of pilots and their passengers become the unwitting collateral damage of one or more black ops projects.

Confession: I didn't realize aviation thrillers were a genre. I've seen plenty of crisis-on-an-airplane movies course -- Air Force One, Taken, Flightplan, Nonstop, etc -- but didn't imagine that kind of drama could be rendered in books. Well, John Nance has certainly proven me wrong. Lockout's narrative takes readers through diplomatic intrigue, technical puzzles, street chases, counterespionage schemes, jet combat, and ordinary "whodunit" questions. The author, a Vietnam pilot turned airline pilot, doesn't shy away from putting his technical knowledge about jet aircraft to work; the key problem of the story is that computer controls over the Airbus have ceased to function, and manual control systems...well, those are soooooo 1980s. Restoring control of the plane to the pilots involves descending into the pit of the electronics bay and figuring out the power and wiring relays down there enough to interrupt the automatics without reducing the plane to a falling airframe. Admittedly, characters working through circuit logic with one another might not reach a large audience, so these scenes are only part of the ensemble of mystery. The main plot takes place over a matter of four hours, as several on-the-ground mysteries converge into the one -- a plane that delivered where it shouldn't have been, whose electrical work doesn't match Airbus specs, who had intelligence agencies looking for it before they even knew it was in trouble, and which might provoke World War 3. For fans of thrillers and airflight, this is a fun one.

The Age of Napoleon

The Age of Napoleon
© 1975 will Durant
870 pages

Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me – or didn’t.  Will and Ariel Durant intended for Rousseau and Revolution to be the final volume in their epic history of Western Civilization, but grew bored waiting for the Grim Reaper to show up and claim them.  They decided, therefore, to scratch an itch, and devote a final volume to Europe in the age of Napoleon.  No individual has ever dominated a single volume in this fashion; even Charles the Fifth,  in The Reformation, would disappear  in chapters chronicling Persia and Arabia.   But Napoleon’s story encompasses not just France and England, but Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria,  and Russia.  The emperor does move backstage at times – in the chapters on  English poetry and novels, for instance – but he is never completely gone.  This final volume manages through Napoleon’s person to be just as comprehensive, but more tightly bound.

The Durants open with a more involved chronicle of the French revolution that concluded Rousseau and Revolution, this one making more obvious that the revolution was a slow but quickening crumbling of royal legitimacy that collapsed into the chaos of revolution after a few sudden shocks.  The king’s decision to attempt to escape France in fear of his life was one such shock, demonstrating that he was and remained an actor – not a prop.  From here, the Durants follow the Wars of the Coalitions, as the various nations of Eurrope fell in to and out of alliances with or against France, with the enmity between England and France being the only fixed point.  In 1807, with Napoleon  enjoying one of his greatest triumphs – the subjugation of Prussia, and the pretended friendship of Russia –  the Durants pause to cover  both French and English culture, including one hundred pages on English poetry alone.   They then alternate  sections on the culture of Germany, Russia, Italy, Iberia, etc and sections on the Napoleonic wars as they encompassed these regions.

Related to this volume’s unusual dominance by one person is the unusually heavy amount of military coverage here. The Durants typically dispatch wars in  a few sentences, concerned with them only as a background to  the social or political events that develop as a consequence.  There’s no getting away from battles and Napoleon, though, even considering the energy he poured into the political administration of France and Europe, and the long-term effects that energy would have.  The result is not a military history, however; there are no maps of battles.  Instead, the Durants treat the readers with their usual balance of literature, science, economics, etc.   there is a section on Jane Austen, for instance.  Another prominent author, Germaine de Staël,  maintained a long rivalry with Napoleon; she wrote a celebratory survey of German culture that pined for more amity between France and the Germans, and was present in Russia when Napoleon drove towards Moscow.  Beethoven, of course, merits a full section of his own.

Napoleon reliably described himself as a Son of the Revolution, even though his policies ended some revolutionary dreams.  His concordant with Rome, for instance,  re-established the Catholic Church in France, albeit in a corralled form. That was a far cry from the total secularization (or de-christianization, depending on the revolutionary), dreamed of by many – those who redrew the calendar and butchered France's artistic legacies,  those who in a just heaven will be consigned to  war forever with the whitewashing Puritans and the sculpture-smashing Wahhabis,   as well as others who would destroy art and heritage for ideology. Napoleon did apply much of the revolutionary, modernizing spirit to those parts of Europe he conquered  -- overwriting their ancient laws and traditions with constitutions from his own pen.   Although Napoleon kept faith with some of the past as convenient -- his concordant with Rome, for instance -- the Durants observe that in his army and state,  merit reigned, allowing even commoners to advance.

Although the Napoleonic wars have never been of great interest to me, the Durants' volume created an actual enthusiasm in me about the subject. As usual, I was impressed with their critical but forgiving evaluation of Napoleon, whom they regard as one of the singular men of history.  His reputation owes not just to his role in closing the violence of the revolution, or in his spectacular battles -- but pouring so much energy into his work, and being so successful in combat and in administration, that he transformed Europe,  planting seeds that would flourish throughout the 19th century. A century after his final defeat at Waterloo, an even greater war -- one spurred by changes Napoleon wrought -- would be harrowing the soil of France in blood, bones, and cannon once more.

And now, dear readers, what's next in Will Durant's Story of Civilization?

C'EST FINI! 

The Irish Soldiers of Mexico

The Irish Soldiers of Mexico
© 1997 Michael Hogan
298 pages

And it was there in the pueblos and the hillsides
That I saw the mistake I had made
Part of a conquering army, with the morals of a bayonet brigade
And amidst all these poor dying Catholics --
Screaming children, the burning stench of it all --
Myself and two hundred Irishmen decided to rise to the call
From Dublin City to San Diego,  we witnessed freedom denied
So we formed the St. Patrick Battalion and we fought on the Mexican side.
("The St. Patrick's Battalion", David Rovics)

One discovers the oddest stories through music.  Take this, for instance -- the story of a few hundred Irish immigrants to the United States, who shortly after participating in the invasion of Mexico, decided to defend it instead. They fought valiantly in five battles, flying the green flag of St. Patrick,  and their survivors continued to serve Mexico even after the war as a check against brigandry.  To the United States, they are an embarrassment best forgotten, a blotch on the United States' first military adventure outside of strict self-defense. To Mexico, they are red-headed heroes: they are the San Patricos.  The Irish Soldiers of Mexico  makes the best of scarce resources and supplies generous background information to give the fighting Irish their deserved laurels.

Hogan grounds the decision of the Irish to bolt in both race and religion. Prior to the waves of European immigration in the late 19th century, the early Republic shared England's pride in its Anglo-Saxon heritage, complete with varying degrees of disdain or contempt for non-Saxons. Prejudice against the Irish was as pronounced as it might be against blacks or Native Americans, at least until so many Irish came over that they begin blending in.   The early Republic was also expressedly  Protestant in its religion,  viewing the Catholic church as Old World and un-American as it was possible to be. Even Maryland, established as a Catholic sanctuary and home to the largest landowner of the founders, Charles Carroll, was quickly taken over by Protestantism.   The abuse incurred by the Irish for both their Celtic blood and their Catholic region kept a barrier up between them and the affection they might have had for their adopted country, and made them sympathetic to the plight of Mexico -- what was Ireland, but a poor nation of Catholics, dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestants who regarded its inhabitants as fit only for serfs?   The abhorrent behavior exhibited by the invading US Army -- the same abhorrent behavior exhibited by virtually every invading army anywhere,  in which men are replaced by uniformed chimpanzees bent on looting, raping, and burning --  coupled with the seemingly deliberate attack on Mexican churches forced the Irish to make a decision. Who would they keep faith with? Their paymasters, or the people of Mexico, whose plight was so much like the Irish?

Although this book concerns a military battalion, it is not principally military history; what we know  based on  terse US records and  Mexican records (reduced by fire, unfortunately) is that the San Patricios were particularly noted for their work on the cannons. In one battle, after Mexican troops had exhausted their ammunition, the Irish fought to the last, recovering their compadres' retreat.  Those San Patricios who were captured were put to death in a gruesome manner -- not shot as soldiers, but incompetently hung after standing at attention for four hours, or beaten with the lash in excess of the Articles of War.  Half the book's volume is given over to notes, and much of its content proper explores the racial and religion aspects of the Irish stand. While this information is slight, this is an often-overlooked chapter in the Mexican war, one that Irish Americans in particular should note with interest.

Related:
Green, Blue, and Grey: The Irish in the American Civil War, Cal McCarthy

Revolutionary Summer - Independence Kickoff

288 pages

© 2014 Joseph J. Ellis

Earlier in the week I read Joseph Ellis’ Revolutionary Summer to kick off my yearly tribute to American Independence.   Ellis should be familiar to readers here, as I enjoy his narrative histories of the revolutionary and early republican period of America enormously. Revolutionary Summer follows two interlapped threads of the revolution, political and military, as they flowed together.   That summer was the summer in which a tax rebellion sharpened into a bid for complete independence, and it started before the Declaration of Independence. In May, for instance, the colonies began working on their own constitutions,  superseding the earlier ones granted through the king’s authority.   British commitment to reversing the rebellion – two diplomat-generals  and a task force of 50,000 men, carried on the largest fleet ever seen off the waters of North America – also made it clear that a threshold had been passed: both sides were committed, root, hog, or die.

I’m using Ellis’ book to kick off my annual tribute to American independence, or rather the early Republic since I tend to read little about the war itself. I am no less fatigued with politics than I was last year, however, largely because the political atmosphere here is  still charged and turbulent, and so will be cutting the politics with literature and one travel memoir.   Expect a biography of a forgotten founder, at least one book on the Constitution, and a bit of literature. I’ll most likely use my Classics Club list to provide the spot of American lit.

Countdown to Zero Day

Countdown to Zero Day:  Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon
© 2014 Kim Zetter
448 pages

A couple of years ago I created a new label, 'digital world', in recognition of the fact that the Internet is no longer a discrete system (like a grid of water pipes). It has seeped into every aspect of our everyday lives, as basic as electricity. Through it, the entire developed world moves. War is no exception to this digital revolution, and the fun is just beginning. People may associate cyberwar with the theft of intelligence, or perhaps monkeying-around with the power grid, but the case of "Stuxnet" demonstrates how weaponized computer programs can cause physical destruction no less complete than a bomb. What's more, the specific vulnerability used to great effect here is virtually universal in the industrial world. Countdown to Zero Day is a forensic-political history of how the United States used a computer virus to effect the kind of destruction only imaginable before by an airstrike, and a warning to the entire online world that we are vulnerable.

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, cyberwar appears to occupy a grey area between the two. The policy of the Bush administration, once it became obvious that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, was to squelch the threat through any means necessary. While there may have been many in DC who wanted to see another example of shock-n-awe, even Bush knew a third war in the same mideast minefield wasn't possible. Remote sabotage, however, offered an alternative to war or a nuclear Iran, and a program which started under Bush would bear full fruit during the Obama administration. What a small elite knew in DC as "Olympic Games", the world would later call "Stuxnet": a virus that began as a carefully targeted weapon and but which would later spread across Eurasia.

The author delivers the full story of Stuxnet in a back and forth narrative: the first track begins with the eruption of the virus, and the methodical picking-apart that Symantec, Kapersky, and other cybersecurity firms subjected the code to. Step by step, they attempted to figure out what the code was doing, how it got in, what mechanisms the code was using, and finally -- what was its intended target? This campaign of digital detection work wasn't the product of one cyber Sam Spade, but a collaborative effort between various businesses who shared their information and results. Eventually, over the course of two years, they realized that the initial program was highly target specific: it was aimed at two kinds of programmable logic controllers, or computers used in industrial work. The particular PLCs targeted were used in rotors that were specific to the kind of centrifuge that Iran used to enrich uranium.

The teams dissecting the Stuxnet code marveled several times at its structure, but marveled all the more when they figured out - -based on reports coming in from Iran -- how the program worked. Because the centrifuges' speed and weight necessitate careful handling -- slow acceleration and then slow deceleration, nothing too abrupt -- the program's main attack was to methodically stress the centrifuges by taking them up to speed, or down, in patterns resigned to slowly ruin the pieces. What's more, long before this act of digital undermining ever began, the program silently sat and waited, recording the normal activities: during the actual sabotage, the program fed recorded data to he plant's control room, meaning eventually the Iranians had to physically watch the motors to see what was happening. The program had a nucleus so deeply hidden that when the machine software was placed under repair by the Iranian engineers, the core program methodically re-wrote the new programming. It's as if an invasive bacteria promptly turned the body's immune system into its own means of reproduction.

The case of Stuxnet is important because PLCs are pervasive; they aren't just used in manufacturing, but are common wherever computer-controlled machinery is used. They're in hospitals, food production plants, powerstations, transit networks: there's no end to the mischief that could be managed by attacking them, and until recently very little done to protect the systems. Stuxnet was a wakeup call to many technical directors in the developed world, an alarm bell to their vulnerability. As the recent WannaCry attack which cripped hospitals in the UK demonstrates, however, we're not taking cybersecurity anywhere near enough seriously. (The WannaCry and Stuxnet attacks also demonstrate the volatility of cyberweapons: they don't go away. In both cases, code and tools designed by DC were trapped and corralled into use by other parties.) Throughout the world we rely on computers which haven't been protected for years, or we have foolishly ensnared vital public infrastructure like the power grid with the public internet. Stuxnet was only the beginning -- perhaps it may be like the Hiroshima-Nagasaki attacks, a singular event that frightens everyone into more caution. I doubt it, though.

Related:
@ war: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex, Shane Harris
Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World,  Joel Brenner

1066: A New History

1066: A New History
© 2009 Peter Rex

The list of English kings begins with William the Conqueror, but such a list is really a thing of propaganda; although England's patchwork of ancient kingdoms were slow to be united against threats like the Vikings, there was a line of English kings, and an England, that existed before the Normans. In 1066, Saxon historian Peter Rex labors to illustrate how long it took the Normans to truly effect their conquest. After a history of the battle itself, Rex then chronicles the many rebellions which erupted against the 'bastard Duke's' rule. The battles of 1066 (there were three) and the rebellions had the effect of wiping out the English nobility, and allowing for their total replacement by the Normans. Rex notes that the English state's efficient structure allowed William to quickly effect his will even at the shire level. After ten years of intermittent rebellions, England was finally quietened, but the English would have the last laugh: the Normans would, quickly enough, lose first Normandy, and then their French.

Casual readers should note that this is a short but dense book, with more names than the Domesday telephone book.  Parts of it were familiar to me from The English Resistance. 

The Armada

The Armada
© 1959 Garrett Mattingly
443 pages

In the late summer of 1588, all of Europe held its breath as an enormous Spanish fleet, consisting of a hundred and fifty vessels of varying sizes, set sail for the English channel. Their mission: to rendezvous with the elite troops of General Parma in the defeated Netherlands, and to transport them to England, there to revenge the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and depose Anne Boleyn’s daughter .    That invasion never happened. As is famously known, the Armada met English fire and northern winds, and a third of its number was lost utterly on the shores of Britain and Ireland.  It was for Elizabeth, constantly confronting intrigue from Catholics and Puritans alike, a glorious moment:  here, before all of Europe,   the wind and waves declared that she was the Dread Sovereign of all England.  The Armada is a storied history not just of the Spanish fleet’s doomed voyage into the channel, but how Spain came to launch such an expensive and unwieldy endeavor.

Much of the weight of The Armada gives the background information for the “English Enterprise”.  Europe is in the throes of the reformation, and rebellions against princes carry with them the fervor of holy wars.   France, who might oppose the sudden envelopment of England into the Spanish empire,  is struggling with its own civil war, and every one of the three contenders is a Henry.  The Netherlands have risen against their Spanish lords, with the military and fiscal support of Elizabeth – who is presumably more interested in having enemies of Spain at her doorstep rather than Spain itself, given the two powers’ mutual hostility.     There is a very good chance that Phillip could get away with styling himself the English king:   he’d already enjoyed the title as Queen Mary’s husband,  and Elizabeth reigns over a divided nation. Many of her subjects maintain faith with the Catholic church,  secretly or openly,  and several rebellions and conspiracies intending to restore a Catholic monarch to the throne have already erupted.  If their former king landed and called them to rise against a woman already declared illegitimate by the Church,   how easy would it be for them to bury their fears about civil war and declare for Phillip?

Fortunately for England’s men in arms, and their mothers, it never came to that.  The English engaged in a running battle with the Armada as it made its way towards the Channel; there was no epic showdown, but a series of smaller skirmishes, two of which – when combined with the storms of the Channel – did serious damage to the fleet. By the time they  neared the rendezvous, in fact ,the admirals in command had to view their stores of rotten food, ailing men, and badly leaking ships in the cold light of reality.  The Armada was no longer capable of breaking the Dutch blockade that would allow the Spanish to take on their army and transport it to Spain. It might not even make it home, if it continued to be harassed.  Part of the problem was that the Armada was so enormous and unwieldy.  Its ships were gathered together from across Spain’s domain, and many were Mediterranean galleys built for ramming that were out of place in a battle that involved more artillery than swashbuckling shipboard raids. Even in the age of standardized equipment and radio communications, the Allies required months of planning and stockpiling to prepare for D-Day.  Spain had a similar challenge, but its every piece of equipment might vary from casting to casting, and its barrels of food spoiled as quickly as they could be found.   The Spanish sailed in the hopes of a miracle, but they found none.  When news reached Phillip II, he wrote to the his bishops and could express only thanks that -- in the light of the storms -- more men were not lost.

I knew virtually nothing of the Armada except that it sailed, met a storm, and failed. Although in retrospect a brief review of the history of the period would have served me well as a reader  (particularly in regards to France, whom I seem to ignore utterly between 1453 and 1789) , the author's delivery is indeed novel-like. The personalities of the period, like the swaggering Drake, add to the tale's liveliness.  Although the wars of the day seem far removed from us now, the author's epilogue couldn't be more current: he cautions the reader that wars of ideologies are always the hardest to win.

The Other War of 1812

The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War
© 2007 James Cusick
398 pages

If the War of 1812 rings any bells for most Americans, they may associate it with the creation of the Star-Spangled Banner, the national anthem whose lyrics no one seems to know.  Those with a taste for history who look into it may regard it as the United States' unfortunate ensnarement in the Napoleonic Wars,   responding to the attacks on its trade from  both English and French quarters. The invasion of Canada hints that the Americans were not quite perfect innocents, and still more persuasive is the case of the other invasion.  Far to the south, another war with ties to the War of 1812 had already been brewing, and would continue to work out bloody chaos for several years thereafter. I refer, of course, to the Georgian invasion of Florida.

Prior to its final annexation into the American union in 1821, Florida exchanged hands several times between the Spanish and English.  It was, in 1811, a strange sort of colony. Its residents were Spanish subjects, but most of the occupants and even leadership were not Spanish themselves.  Some called themselves Anglo-Spainards, for they hailed from varying parts of the British isles and yet gave Spain their allegiance while they lived in Florida.  Many were free blacks -- some having escaped from Georgia, some manumitted under Spanish law for various reasons.  There were even Minorcans, previously brought in by the English to help rebuild Florida after so many Spanish residents left following the Seven Years War.    Spain, in 1811-1812, was in a bad way:   its king was lost to Napoleonic schemes, its legitimate regent besieged by the French at Cadiz.  Any moment all of Spain would be lost to Napoleon, and then where would little Florida be?

Georgians were asking the same question, but they knew the answer. Little Florida would cling to Great Britain's skirts; they would allow British warships to steam from Floridian ports, there to play hell on American shipping. As war loomed with the English, the thought of the English navy safe at harbor so close to the American coastline was enough to raise anyone's hackles. Spanish Florida was an enormous pain even in good years -- not only did it continue importing new slaves from Africa, but it maintained itself as a safe haven for escaped slaves from Georgia. Worse yet,  these escapees were armed after joining the Florida militia.  And then there were the Indians, who were constantly used as a threat by Spain against the Georgians whenever border disputes loomed.  Getting the Spanish out of Florida would be useful all around.

In today's America, Florida would have never stood a chance. In these early years of the Republic, however ,expansionism was still being reigned in by circumspection and the Constitution; as much as Madison might want to take Florida,   how could he declare war against Spain -- the colonies' first ally! -- and shake them down? It was neither right nor lawful, and no one would let him get away with it.  Instead, Madison encouraged a certain revolutionary war colonel named Mathews to investigate the state of things in Florida,  and find people who wanted a little regime change. If they happened to raise the flag of revolution, kick the dons out of St. Augustine, and raise the American flag, well...then, by golly, who was Madison to stand in their way?

Of course, things didn't quite work out that way. The Other War of 1812, heavy with details of diplomacy and brush combat, tells the story of how the revolution  died before it began, but was artificially resuscitated by a few hundred Georgians pretending to be Floridians with a hankering for Independence.  Because the ranking US Army officer in Georgia maintained that he could not invade Florida, only come to its defense after the local 'authorities' declared independence and requested aide,  the Patriots leading their war against the Spain had to make do on short rations. Their war was grim, 'war even unto the knife'. Part of this was desperation, part of it the misery of battle conditions. (July is not fighting weather in the sunny South.)   The Georgians also had a serious grudge with St. Augustine and Fernandina, those cities who stole their trade and bid their slaves run, and they were especially vicious when fighting the Creeks, Seminoles, and free blacks of whom they lived in fear.    Eventually, the war petered out, but  the author points to the amount of destruction a few Patriots raised as one of Spain's reasons for realizing Florida was a losing proposition.  The Americans were too close and too hungry to be held at bay long.

The Other War of 1812 is a good bit of history -- substantial reading, yet accessible.   The war itself is not a riveting affair, just swamp raids, plantation burnings, and a prolonged siege of St. Augustine. There are a couple of stirring episodes  -- a scouting party cut off for four weeks in hostile terrain, somehow holding its own despite being vastly outnumbered, for instance --  but the real star here is diplomacy. I don't mean commissioners arguing with each other, but rather the light this sheds on how complicated relations were between the Americans, Spanish, English, and native crimes.  The author provides some books for further readings, as he links this Patriot war in with several of the Creek and Seminole uprisings that would erupt in the 18-teens.  I'm now itching curiously, but there's so much ahead of Creek wars in my interest queue.

Further Reading:

• War of 1812, John K. Mahone. According to Cusick, this text  is singular in integrating the Patriot War, the War of 1812, and the Creek Wars together. 
• Britain and the American Frontier, James Wright
• Struggle for the Gulf Borderlands, Frank Owsley
• The Spanish Frontier in North America, David Weber

Drone

Drone
©  2013
432 pages

In El Paso, Texas, the raging narco-wars between drug trafficking gangs in Mexico has bled over into American streets -- claiming the life of the American president's son.  Having run on a platform of balancing the budget and reversing foreign-policy foul-ups that have lost countless American lives and money overseas, President Meyers nevertheless realizes something has to be done. After diplomatic and above-board covert ops fail to produce results, she turns to an ex-CIA spook named Pearce, who is now the head of a private military contractor that specializes in combat drones. His deadly campaign against one drug cartel will stir up a hornet's nest of woes, because several factions within Mexico are being manipulated by an Iranian who is involved in a multinational conspiracy.  More an intelligent technothriller than a Duke Nukem action-American novel, Drone offers speculation as to how drones might be employed -- and legally justified -- in the near future.  Drones are depicted here not just providing recon and a platform to launch missiles, but sniping targets using facial-recognition software.  Maden's presidential figure is an interesting character, a populist who achieved office by running against her own party and vowing to end endless foreign wars;  she struggles to keep her desire for justice and order in line with a firm commitment to Constitutional government.  A downside of the novel, but a necessary part of its drama, was the domestic chaos that erupts from Meyer's  new policies toward Mexico. After the narco-gangs strike back and the border is functionally militarized,  the media casts Meyers as an anti-Mexican tyrant, creating 'a day without immigrant' labor strikes, etc.  Maden has a good mind for the diverse kind of political chaos imaginable in the United States today, but -- alas for those of us who read this presently -- that sort of chaos is going on now, so it's not enjoyable in the least to read about.   Everyone in this novel has a little schmutz on their face, including the principled executive who can only take the least-worst option of a list of bad choices.

The Forever War

The Forever War
© 1974 Joe Haldeman
236 pages

“I called to the waiter, 'Bring me one of those Antares things’ Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole damn planet.” 

Sometimes you just can't win.  In Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, Haldeman relies on his experience as an engineer in Vietnam, and his extensive scientific reading, to create a visceral account of war and alienation in the far future.   He begins in the near future, however, in the 1990s, as an Earth which has begun to aggressively explore and colonize the Milky Way via a network of 'collapsars' becomes embroiled in a war against another spacefaring power.    Earth has never fought in space before, and since the Vietnam War had actually been tending toward global pacifism. A few veterans from previous wars guide Earth's policy and martial strategy, however, and so begins a galactic quagmire that will span hundreds of years.   Yet because of the relativistic effects of near-light space travel, Private William Mandela and other troops in the first wave will become aliens to their own people,  aging only a couple of years as the decades pass on Earth.    I am not surprised in the least at Forever War's enduring reputation for SF  excellence, as Haldeman succeeds brilliantly on multiple fronts.

At the heart of Forever War's success is the curious consequences of relativistic physics.  Because time passes more slowly the closer a traveler gets to lightspeed,  what seems like weeks to Madella is years on Earth -- and the more traveling one does, the more severe the distortions are. Haldeman hints at this early on, when a sergeant who barely looks older than Mandella  takes over their training. After only a couple of years of "subjective" time -- that is, Mandella's experience of time -- he returns to Earth to find that decades have passed. His mother is elderly, and Earth is in a grim way.  Culture has changed significantly, too, and Mandella feels like a stranger in a strange land.  Despairing of finding a place on Earth, Mandella and his lover-in-arms Marygay return to the service.  Earth becomes a distant memory, but because the war lasts so long Mandella frequently experiences future shock as he encounters evidence of even more radical transformations in Earth's culture.  These changes are staggering: the world is united under the authority of the UN, a government on a war footing which attempts to control every aspect of life, with resulting economic and personal depression. "Every aspect" includes sexuality, as homosexuality is used as a method of population control and assumes such prominence that heterosexuality is regarded as tantamount to sociopathy.  Haldeman's perception of sexuality as fluid and complicated might get him stoned today, for conflicting with the present notions of hard-set "orientations".  Yet here -- as in 1984, as in Brave New World --  this government attempt to rein in the most unruly passion of humanity is resisted.    In the beginnig, Mandella and other soldiers are assigned sexual partners for the night, but tend to gravitate toward one particular partner. Mandella's only thread of hope, of sanity in a universe constantly changing around him, is his fellow relic and lover Marygay.  

The time dilation also effects the military consequences of the war:   Earth's soldiers are far better at war in general, but because so much objective time passes between launches and arrivals, the Taurans often seem to be fighting with weapons from the "future".  Those weapons bear mentioning, because the martial aspects of Forever War are the second big triumph for Haldeman. Frankly, I've never read  SF-military combat this interesting.  Key to space soldiering is the Fighting Suit, a skintight unit that protects and augments the body within; later on,  the fighting suits are an early example of technohumanism,  using an access port plugged in above the hip to interact with the body's systems.   The suits allow for greater effacy and are vital to staying alive in a hostile universe, but they're not foolproof.  Bumping against a rock of frozen gas might cause a deadly explosion, for instance, and if the suits are damaged in combat they're likely to cause total user death through overheating and such. Still later "stasis fields" are invented that prevent electro-chemical activity, so  combat within them has to be  the old-fashioned stuff:  swords and arrows.

Virtually everyone who reads this catches the parallel between Haldeman's soldiers -- who return home to find it a foreign country in every way but the name -- and returning veterans from Vietnam,  who found not a home but an insane asylum in 1960s-1970s  America.    Although modern readers aren't traveling at the speed of light, sometimes it seems the world is. We're all living in various stages of future shock, unless we're kids for whom new things are simply to be expected, and so Mandella is our man.  I found his story gripping on every level -- the science, the combat, and the societal evolution.   Although we're unlikely to start zipping around the stars anytime soon, several aspects of Haldeman's future bear thinking about: the control of society and  soldiers through chemicals, especially.

The Twilight War

The Twilight War: the Secret History of America's Thirty-Year War with Iran
656 pages
© 2013 David Crist

 In the presidential campaign of 2008, John McCain made plain what kind of aggressive foreign policy he would pursue by half-singing a chipper little ditty called “Bomb Iran”, to the tune of the Beach Boys classic, “Barbara Ann”. His malice was not even creative, for the song originated as a parody in early 1980. That parody, though, was close to being reality, for throughout the 1980s.  American ships engaged in a quasi-war against Iran, ostensibly to protect the free flow of oil amid the Iraqi invasion of Iran. In The Twilight War, Kevin Crist documents the complete diplomatic and military history of the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, from the Carter administration to the the frustrated diplomacy of Barack Obama. Written by the son of a CENTCOM general, it approaches being the American equivalent of Iran and the United States, written by an Iranian aide who appears here in interviews. The Twilight War goes into much more detail on military operations, however.

The essentials of the failed Iran-American relationship are known to most everyone: in 1953, the United States and Britain collaborated to oust Iran's democratically-elected president, Mossadegh, and later militarily supported the increasingly authoritarian shah until he was thrown out in 1978. Most Americans were blissfully unaware that anyone in Iran had reason to cry foul until student revolutionaries seized the American embassy and held over a hundred American citizens, some of them civilians doing aid work, for over a year. The water was thus poisoned from both wells, leading to bumperstickers and Beach Boy bombing threats in America, and cries of “Death to America!” in Iran. Yet the power-caste in D.C cares little for principle; for them, what mattered about Iran was not that it had abused Americans, or that it had previously been manipulated by the American government: what mattered to the fellows in the Pentagon and Langley field was that Iran stood between the Soviet Union and the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf region. If Iran could be enlisted as an ally against the godless Soviets, huzzah; if not, well...no revolutionary government stays popular, and the invasion plans were already on the books.

Thus the initial approach to Iran was framed within not its Islamic status, but within the frame of the Cold War. The CIA accordingly passed in information to their newly avowed enemy, Khomeini, to help him exorcise the communists and other Soviet sympathizers from his rank. At the same time, however, the CIA and other military intelligence agencies attempted to create networks of informants and agents on the ground Iran, who would lay the groundwork for an invasion if that ever became necessary. What no one expected was Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, which wasted over a million lives over an eight-year period. After Iran survived Hussein's invasion and prepared to mount its own, the west –- organized by the United States – obliquely but purposely supported the Iraqi cause by selling war material to Saddam and interfering with Iran's ability to purchase in European markets. More directly, the United States took on a military role in the Persian gulf, protecting oil tankers and other neutral ships from the Iranian military – and ignoring Iraqi movements, as they did when an Iraqi fighter fired a missile at the USS Stark. As with the USS Liberty incident, in which Israel nearly destroyed an American ship, the blood in the water was quickly covered over in the interests of diplomacy. Such was the American commitment tin the Gulf that a separate global command, CENTCOM, was created to watch the middle east, and two mobile sea-bases were created in the Gulf itself to respond to Iran's “guerilla war at sea”.

Later on, after the Soviet Union collapsed, there were moments that the United States and Iran might be able to build upon.The United States' growing commitment in the middle east, prompted by the Gulf War, created no small amount of resentment and fear in Iran, however. For decades, Iran had been the plaything of the British and Russian empires, then the target of both the American and Soviet spheres of influence, and now the Americans weren't even settling for fighting through proxies: their tanks were right there, in Saudi Arabia. Terrorism became an increasingly large factor in foreign relations, and the American commitment to both Saudi Arabia and Israel – Iran's most unfavorite neighbors – continues to be a barrier. More recently, through the Bush and Obama administrations, the prevailing official reason for Iran's designation as classroom pariah has been its pursuit of nuclear energy and the possibility of that pursuit also allowing Iran to manufacture nuclear arms.  Frankly, I no longer trust the official reasoning of anyone coming out of D.C --  coming of political age in age of Iraq's phantom WMDs, and continuing to see the United States talk about both sides of its mouth in Syria  -- but the growth of the genocide in a bottle club is a serious issue.  Still, as Crist's account shows, there have been numerous instances when Iran and the United States were making headway, and then one party of the other decided not to follow through in good-faith arrangements.    

Although The Twilight War's detailed account of military operations and aborted diplomatic deals can sometimes appear overwhelming  in its thoroughness, Iran is not fading in importance.  To the contrary: only recently, an army of Russian, Iranian, and Syrian troops were able to surround ISIS and its allies in Aleppo.  When the United States toppled Hussein's regime in Iraq in the hopes of creating a democratic opponent of Iran,  Iran's influence in Iraq instead swelled.  They're not going away, and after sixteen years of constant war in the neighborhood, Americans aren't particular enthusiastic about more nation-building games.   This book is a good resource for understanding what has happened so far.  In the light of the seemingly unpredictable Trump, however,  who knows what will happen? (Given Trump's business ties in Saudi Arabia and his avowed support of Israel, my guess is that he's more likely to be antagonistic towards Iran than now.) 

Related:

Iran and the United States: an Insider's View, Seyed Hossein Mousavian   

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup,Stephen Kinzer

Civilian Warriors

Civilian Warriors: the Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung  Heroes of the War on Terror
© 2013 Erik Prince
413 pages

In the 21st century, the line between public and private warfare has gotten a bit fuzzy. I realized this most fully when reading a few cybersecurity books early in the year, mulling over how natural security was imperiled by cyber attacks on private firms or networks, but this fuzziness is also expressed via the world of private military contractors.     Flash back seven or so years ago, when my rage at the debacle in Iraq was white-hot, I would have never read a book about Blackwater, let alone a defense of it from its creator, Erik Prince.  Back then, Blackwater was tantamount with evil. They were lawless mercenaries, the very image of what was wrong with the military-industrial complex.  Finally released from confidentiality agreements, here Prince goes to bat for the company he created and guided through the rocky years of the War on Terror.

I purchased this book because I stumbled upon Erik Prince while listening to some podcast or another, and he sounded perfectly normal. He didn't do an evil laugh even once.  (It helped that the book was on clearance for $6.)  Prince opens with an argument that private military contractors aren't a novelty. His examples are convenient (he cites the Marquis de Lafayette, not the Hessians), but that's to be expected. He also notes that military contractors been put to more use in the 20th and 21st centuries than at any other time, but then wars are a lot more complicated they used to be. There's no more of this telling your peasants with pointy sticks to go stab the peasants with pointy sticks next door, there's logistics and such.  Prince's original idea for Blackwater was to fill the need of the American military for training facilities, since budget cuts closed or limited their options. His training lodge not only provided rented space for shooting ranges, but taught courses to interested service organizations. Prince continually responded to the needs of the US as he saw them in the news, achieving rapid success after the Columbine assaults when he began training police in active shooter response scenarios. (Prince created a school mock-up for them to practice in.)  After al-Queda bombed the USS Cole, Prince acquired a NOAA ship and turned it into a training ship for sailors to practice threat interdiction.

It was their work in Iraq that made Blackwater infamous, however. They entered the area as security guards for the United States' top man in Iraq, Paul Bremer. Later on they would escort other State department officials, and as Iraq was a warzone, that entailed armored vehicles and M4 rifles. As Blackwater grew, it took on other tasks like handling airdrops in their smaller planes. Prince writes that he viewed Blackwater as a military force that had adopted the principles of lean manufacturing, a kind of Fedex to the government's post office.  If Blackwater's security convoys drove aggressively, it was to satisfy their contract stipulations:  no losses. Prince would have practiced more discretion than the government allowed him, but they insisted on ambassadors traveling in flagged SUVs, not beaten-looking Iraqi vehicles. Prince also reviews the several bloody incidents which turned Blackwater into a whipping boy for the Bush administration in the war, arguing that his men were merely defending themselves and that they made for effective scapegoats despite also using their resources  in a few humanitarian causes.

I suspect Prince is correct in maintaining that military contractors aren't going anywhere. In Afghanistan, there are more contractors than US servicemen, and I think it telling that Candidate Obama condemned Blackwater, and then -- when the group served as his security detail in Afghanistan --   President Obama commented that they were getting a 'bad rap'.   If citizens don't want war, but the  security state does, then the obvious thing to do is hire people to do the war bit on the state's behalf, or even better to use drones. Although as a candidate Trump indicated that he was less interested in foreign wars than his competitors,  I wouldn't be surprised if whatever is in the D.C. water leads to military contractors operating discretely in Syria. They're certainly in Iraq now, fighting ISIS -- at least two thousand of them.  They aren't necessarily active combatants, but filling in a lot of the logistics holes that Prince noticed and started finding people to fill here.

I found Prince to be interesting as a man -- rich boy turned volunteer fireman & Navy SEAL, then entrepreneur in his own right --  and his apologia informative about the shifting nature of war as executed   Even if war is a racket, the operation of that racket is worth noting as it changes.

• Related:
• The Heart and the Fist, Eric Greitens. The memoir of a humanitarian turned Navy SEAL, one recently elected as governor of Missouri. 

When Tigers Fight

When Tigers Fight: The Story of the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945
© 1989 Dick Wilson
269 pages

"We Japanese cannot win here. We are trying to plow the ocean."

Before plunging into the abyss of hubris and attempting to claim the entire Pacific as its own  in 1941, the Empire of Japan was hard at work attempting to enlarge itself at the expense of its 'elderly, doddering brother', China.  China was, in the 1930s, in a weak state: riddled with outside colonies and barely unified after a period of feudal civil war, its only defense against Japan's increasing aggression being sheer size and numbers.  After reviewing the early stages of Japanese intervention in China, which included taking over Germany's colonial interests and asserting its own after the Great War,  Wilson uses the Marco Polo Bridge incident as the start of the war and delivers a straightforward military history, concluding in the epilogue that the Sino-Japanese war was a complete waste for both sides. China was ravaged, falling into the hands of an internal dictator, and would not emerge onto the global stage for decades thereafter -- while Japan would, astonishingly, bounce back as a commercial titan.

Before large-scale combat actually began, Japan had effectively annexed a portion of northern China, Manchuria, and placed a surviving member of the Chinese nobility there as their puppet. The armed conflict assumed an air of self-perpetuation escalation, as these things do, and soon Japan's goal was the complete military subordination of China. Its early attacks seized Beijing, in the north, and Shanghai in the south. (The infamous Nanjing sadism followed Shanghai.) From there, Japan labored to link  its spheres of power, resulting in numerous battles  in the mountains and vast expanses between the two cities.   China's Nationalist leaders were able to augment their meager defenses with men and material from the west: not just the United States and Great Britain, but Germany and Russia as well. One of the more interesting tidbits exposed in this book is that Hitler struggled to rid the army of its anti-Japanese types, so while Bavarian's most famous mediocre painter  was looking for alliance with Tokyo,  other German elements were supporting the Rising Sun's scorched victims!)  Once Hitler plunged into his foolhardy invasion of Russia, Japan felt free to  seize Anglo, Dutch, and American East-Pacific holdings and thus began a separate campaign for Burma, which lay between British India and the Japanese empire in China.  After a retreat, the Allies returned in a year to reclaim the territory, and by that time Japan was being slowly pushed back by the US Navy and Marines. Even as it was driven into defeat,  the somnolent internal war in China between Nationalists and Communists became much more active.

For me, this was only the beginning  in trying to get a handle on the Chinese side of the war. It seems like a good outline, and Wilson doesn't skip over important aspects like China's guerrilla warfare or the utter horror the war let loose in China: both from the brutal behavior of the invading army to the  grim measures the Nationalists resorted to, like flooding the country to stymie a Japanese offense but killing and displacing thousands in the bargain.




Related:
Forgotten Ally: China's WW2, Rana Mitter
The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang