Failed Narratives, Inconvenient Facts

Understanding tthe Two Current Wars

When Polybius composed his Rise of the Roman Empire, scattered through his account of events were observations about the failures of writing history. Here are two that are quite relevant to current events.

There are two kinds of falsehood, the one being the result of ignorance and the other intentional, and that we should pardon those who depart from the truth through ignorance, but unreservedly condemn those who lie deliberately. (Book 12. paragraph 12)

And here’s the second one:

In the writing of history it is just as misleading for an author to conceal what actually happened as to report what did not.” (Book 12, paragraph 14).

The remark about those who “lie deliberately” definitely applies to any claims made by Russian and Iran, nor is it anything new. The brutal comment made by the great German composer and musical analyst Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) summed it up perfectly, when he observed about one of his contemporaries that “Whoever believes only half of what this [historian] . . . writes, believes too much.”

There are equally scathing and pointed remarks about the problem made by Voltaire in his biography of Peter the Great and in his Philosophical Dictionary. In other words these problems have been noted for a very long time, but they’re still around. Although in my experience Polybius’ comments are at least as accurate nowadays as they were when he was writing, I’m not interested in either sorting out which is which or assigning blame or praise.

Failure is failure.

So having established my warrant, so to speak, I’ll deal with with the major failures of most current accounts of these conflicts, beginning with what in my view is the most significant: the mistaken idea of how wars end

How Modern Wars Actually End

Not the way most people—and especially historians—think. Interestingly the three major wars between 1860 and 1914 provide us with the three major ways that wars end. I’ll start with our own war of 1861-1865.

It’s widely assumed that this conflict ended in April of 1865, when General Lee surrendered to General Grant. But that’s not really true. When the two men met, the sole topic related to Lee surrendering his army, which was surrounded and outnumbered. We have numerous eyewitnesses to this meeting, and nothing said about the Confederacy surrendering, much less what those terms might be. As far as the North’s leading general—who later was elected twice to the presidency—was concerned, all that counted was that Lee’s army would stop fighting and go home. And Lee’s only counter involved allowing his officers to take their horses with them.

Now Lee’s was not the only Confederate army in the field. There was also the one commanded by Joseph E. Johnston, who in 1860 had been the senior officer in the pre-war army. We have fewer witnesses to what happened, but President Davis wanted to keep on fighting, and Johnston told him flatly that his men were whipped. Again, what’s important here is what wasn’t discussed: a formal surrender. In my view, that was because all three of the men involved (and possibly four, since Johnston then surrendered as well) were military professionals, knew very well that if they agreed to stop fighting, the conflict was basically over.

I should add two footnotes here. When the politicians in Washington angrily demanded that the military leaders of the supposed “rebellion” should all be tried. Grant basically told them to pound sand—and he was subsequently elected president. In the 1864 election, the Democratic Party’s platform specifically called for quitting the war, that is, giving up, and Lincoln was very pessimistic about winning a second term.

The second major war of the period involved Paraguay on the one side, and Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil on the other. Although largely ignored by Anglo-American historians, this was a truly bloody conflict that went on for nearly six years (October 1864 to March 1870). Paraguay had roughly a sixth of the population of its adversaries. Moreover, after the Battle of Tuyutí (24 May 1866), it was obvious Paraguay was going to lose. Although specific data is difficult to find, and in many cases most likely doesn’t exist, the contemporary Spanish historian Antonio Gutiérrez Escudero, observed that Tuyutí was the bloodiest battle ever fought in South America. He believes the Paraguayans had six thousand men killed in action and seven thousand wounded—figures that can stand comparison with the losses in some of our battles a few years earlier. For example, at Gettysburg in July 1863, the battle with highest number of soldiers killed in action, the South has 3,903 soldiers killed, and the North, 3,155.

But Francisco Solano López, the rule of Paraguay, kept right on for another three years or more. The war only ended when Brazilian soldiers cornered Solano López at Cerro Corá and he was killed in action. I should add that for all practical purposes the war ended on 1 January 1869 when Allied (mostly Brazilian) troops occupied Asunción, which was the capital.

I should add here for the benefit of those who think that the United States has a uniquely violent history. There were other major wars in South America: the War of the Pacific in the nineteenth century, and the Chaco War in the twentieth, and that’s not getting into the wars against Spain, the disastrous British attempt to seize Buenos Aires, plus internal wars, and wars against the Indians, notably in Argentina and Chile. Here’s the difference between us and the Argentines in this last: lots of North American tribes were left alive.

Finally (at last!) there’s the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Technically it wasn’t just Prussia, it was the North German Confederation. France declared war in July of 1870, and in roughly six weeks their forces were totally defeated and the French ruler taken prisoner. But France, like Paraguay, didn’t surrender. They kept raising armies and looking for alliances, didn’t actually surrender until 28 January 1871. So for months the war sputtered along, while the French engaged in “negotiations.”

In fact, the Germans were never really sure who they were negotiating in that the situation in the rest of France was extremely confusing. Were the people who claimed to represent the country really able to make a deal? The men who were supposedly negotiating made totally ridiculous demands, and there was still sporadic fighting going on during the negotiations. Finally, as the negotiations dragged on, we know from internal German records that there were almost as many factions and confusions on their side as on the French, despite the fact that they had clearly won.

Lessons: It’s Not Over Until It’s Over.

Three important conclusions, whose significance is hardly lessened by how widely they’re ignored.

First, based on these examples, eliminating or reducing the military power of your opponent doesn’t necessarily end a war, nor does a physical occupation of his country.

Second, the length of time between the point at which it’s clear your opponent has lost and the point at which he agrees, is by no means trivial. A point that’s not just confined to the last two examples. For instance, in November of 1918, the Germans and the Allies agreed to an armistice, but Germany and Austria didn’t formally surrender until the summer of 1919. The next war basically ended because the leading German commanders surrendered, a situation that was basically analogous to the situation in 1865.

Finally, there’s a philosophical problem: the definition of victory is not only complicated and elusive, but difficult to define, mainly because it depends on on the time frame. In 1919, the allied leaders were convinced they’d utterly defeated their enemy, and by and large that was the conventional wisdom.

Speaking of inconvenient facts: the commanders of the French and American armies disagreed. One senior French general—who was made a marshal for his achievements—said flatly that Germany wasn’t defeated and here would be another war. And as we all know, he was right.

Just because the conventional wisdom is that one side lost and one side won, if you extend the time farm for more than a few years, the situation is increasingly problematic. Supposedly the Soviet Union was victorious in 1945. But it was Pyrrhic victory: the Soviets lost around thirty million people, the wealthiest part of their empire (European Russia) was destroyed, and those losses, coupled with the disastrous results of a Marxist-Leninist government, led directly to its implosion. Yes, it took decades, but that’s my point. By 1990, it no longer existed, and Germany was wealthier and more powerful than ever. So was Japan.

We can see the same pattern in Vietnam, although the Vietnamese were smarter. Although supposedly the victor in the Indochinese wars, ten years later the country was a basket case, and the leaders of the state, all communists, realized the basic ideas didn’t work, scrapped them in 1986. And in 1997, the government admitted that over five million people had been killed in the war. A Pyrrhic victory with a vengeance, and Vietnam ended up having to fight a short war with Communist China, their former ally.

So all the current near hysteria, like the wild claims that Iran and/or Russia is “winning” reveals is a fundamental misunderstanding about how wars end, as well as a startling level of ignorance about what is required to win in a technological age.

The Importance of Industrial Power

I’ll be blunt. The United States won the Second World War because it was the world’s largest industrial power. It’s basically simple. It wasn’t that we had better aircraft carriers than the Japanese. It was that we could build more of them more quickly than the they could. Similarly our big advantages in the European theater was we could build more tanks, more planes that the Germans could. The basic reason the Soviet Union wasn’t defeated was American and British aid.

And when I say that I’m well aware of the platoons of British writers claiming the USSR won all by itself. The descendants of the same group that’s still claiming they won the first one.

Now when the fighting started, in quite a few key areas, both Germany and Japan had better equipment, but what’s interesting is that as the war continued, we were able not just to match but even exceed those initial advantages—and to out produce them at every level. Industrial power leads to technological superiority.

One reason this rather obvious fact is largely dismissed or ignored is likewise pretty simple: economic illiteracy, which leads to a belief in the the delusions of Marx and Proudhon, which in turn led to the rise of socialist economics. When the state assumes control over the means of production, the result is not just scarcity, but inferior products.

I’ve gone into that in detail in my previous essays on the Ukrainian and Middle Eastern conflicts, so there’s no point in going over it again.

Instead I want to emphasize how economic illiteracy contributes to a basic misunderstanding of an important aspect of warfare: not just defeating the enemy by destroying his weaponry, but destroying his means of providing his military with the centers of production and distribution his armies need in order to continue the conflict.

In modern warfare, this is called the importance of logistics, because wars are energy intensive. The vehicles consume enormous amounts of fuel, the tanks and guns require huge numbers of shells, and for armies to keep on fighting, they need a steady flow of replacements.

So here’s the difficulty. If the stockpiles of fuels and so forth, are too close to the combat zone, they’re highly vulnerable, but if they’re too far back, the army can’t get them quickly enough, and as I’ve explained, the army that can execute the OODA loop faster than its opponent has a significant advantage.

And the Ukrainians began using their technological advantage in drones to destroy the Russian logistical system. At first, their drones had an extremely limited range, but that changed very quickly, so Ukraine was able to expand their drone strikes so instead of targeting the depots that were roughly in the the 160 kilometer are behind the combat zone, they started targeting the the primary centers of production. That is, instead of fuel depots in the zone, they targets the refineries that produced the fuel that had to be transported into the zone, as well as the means of moving the fuels from the refinery to the depot.

Drones and missiles weren’t new. Both had been around for decades. But the Russians were squandering them concentrating on population centers. And although in most accounts that was all that was noted, there was an all important difference. When the Ukrainian drones attack Moscow and Petrograd, they weren’t trying to kill lots of civilians, they were trying to hit factories and refineries. And they did.

Difficulties in Understanding 1: Civilians and Institutional Guilt

In World War Two estimates of the civilian losses from the bombing campaigns have such a wide range of variance that they’re basically just guesses. I say that because the variance between the minimum and the maximum is almost 100 percent. When the range is that high, we’re off in never never land as far as actual numbers go. My best guess is that German civilian losses were about half a million and Japanese losses were around three quarters of a million. A bloody lot of civilians.

Now since in both theaters, we weren’t the aggressors, and in both cases the Germans and the Japanese behaved abominably, so if we accept the idea of institutional guilt—that the population of a country is responsible for its actions—then it could be argued that they should also pay the price.

Now I’m pretty dubious about this concept, but my real objection is that it doesn’t work, that strategic bombing, whether it’s fixed wing aircraft, ballistic missiles, or drones, would be better employed hitting the primary centers of production. In World War Two, given the inherent inaccuracy of level flight bombing, by definition, civilian casualties were going to extremely high, but half a century later, that was no longer the case.

In fact the widespread distress after 1945 about slaughtering large numbers of civilians was deliberately exploited by regimes that not only could care less about their civilian losses, but used their deaths as propaganda, first by Stalin, then by Hanoi, and now by Tehran and its proxies.

And given both that, the cynical manipulation of civilian deaths, and the deliberate targeting of civilian centers by Moscow and Tehran (and earlier by Stalin and then Hanoi, the whole idea collapses.

However, my chief objection isn’t moral or philosophical, but practical. Strategic air strikes should concentrate on the centers of production, which is exactly what Kiev is doing in one war, and Israel and the Coalition in the Middle East.

Difficulties in Understanding 2: Coalitions

Although there’s an old and widespread saying that politics makes for strange bedfellows, currently its ignored, particularly in the case of Iran.

I say that because in this case, the United States is leading a coalition of Iran’s neighbors. Earlier I pointed out that one of the members of the coalition, the UAE, has been conducting air strikes again Iran, since it’s the only Arab state with the ability to do that, simply owing to the distances involved.

And when you look at the history of wartime coalitions, two observations are pretty clear. It’s invariably the case that each member has joined out of self interest, and as some sort of apparent victory draws nigh, there’s a good deal of non-antagonistic palavering going on. And although it’s usually the case that one or two members are substantially more powerful than the others, they have to negotiate a deal that everyone can sign off on, because there has to be a united front to force the enemy to agree.

So being the leader of the coalition is tricky. Now no one’s talking, but I would argue that in the case of the Iranian conflict, a good deal of that has been going on. And in fact, last week, when Washington announced that Iran was about to come to terms, it was specifically mentioned that the other members of the coalition had agreed to those terms. And most of them were listed: the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan.

As far as Tehran is concerned their intransigence and bluster is immaterial. The Coalition has all the cards. They can’t ship out their oil, they can’t defend themselves against air strikes, and they now lack the resources to retaliate in any significant way. Moreover, from what little has been said, it’s clear that the Coalition isn’t willing to accept a “trust but verify” agreement; rather it’s more on the order of the one made the Corleone’s, on the order of the gun to head.

Like all inconvenient facts, these are routinely ignored. But as Aldous Huxley observed, just because a fact is ignored, it’s still a fact.