Here is a list of names that continues into a fictional future. The narrator mentions four military men:
Alexander
Caesar
Napolean
Malanowicz
Googling discloses some Malanowiczes but not this one. According to their descriptions as given here, Alexander was headlong, Caesar was methodical, Napoleon stumped and Malanowicz used computers. The point being made is that military men have to be intellectuals. In the interstellar period, they have to understand machines, other intelligent species and mankind.
The narrator quotes one of his Academy instructors:
"'An instrument can be misused. A hammer can drive a nail or crush a skull.'" (p. 50)
A very good point. Think how existing technology could be used to clothe, house, feed and educate everyone on Earth and a lot of people off it. When enough people want this, they will make it happen.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Anderson was right, the greatest soldiers were also men who knew how think, to make effective use of that spark of genius they had. And Julius Caesar even wrote books!
Free enterprise economics, when allowed to work, has done vastly more than anything else to feed, clothe, house, etc., huge numbers of people than anything else has done. We are never going to have perfect societies because humans are flawed, imperfect, quarrelsome, strife prone, etc. So I dismiss Utopianism.
Ad astra! Sean
But a realistic assessment of what can be done with technology and reorganization is not Utopian.
_Commanders_ have to be intellectuals. There are vast parts of military experience that operate on a combination of trained reflex and instinct.
Trained reflex can be stubborn. When rapid-fire weapons became common in the 19th century, for example, it demanded dispersed formations moving independently in small teams across a battlefield.
This met enormous resistance, though. And the resistance was not mere traditionalism.
Shoulder-to-shoulder formations made command much easier.
Dispersed ones required more and more delegation, to the extent that above a certain level commanders were mostly administrators and map-readers.
That required a substantial psychological adjustment of expectations. Generals like Alexander, Caesar or Napoleon had been charismatics, often intervening on a battlefield at the crucial points; and that sort of thing became increasingly difficult as battle spread in time and space rather than being concentrated collisions between massed forces.
Dense formations also sustained morale through instinct -- they meant that people whose opinions you valued and who you were attached to were always looking at you and you at them.
This is a very powerful force to sustain "expected behavior".
Dispersal required not just new formations, but new methods of training and character-formation.
Note that the first army to systematically develop and use the new formations -- the German army's "storm troops" in WW1 -- were extremely selective in recruitment, and required very extensive new training.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree! WW I forced on commanders of both sides the hard realization that wars and battles had become too big for commanders to oversee and control by hands on personal supervision on the spot.
I think the US got an early lesson on this during the Civil War when both sides fought with Napoleonic era tactics and formations--just as weapons, both for soldiers and artillery, were becoming more deadly and accurate. The result was appalling carnage for both sides.
Unfortunately, the victorious Union did not take these bloody lessons to heart.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: No, it didn't. General Pershing went to Europe in 1917 as convinced of the superiority of "morale" and rifle-and-bayonet as any French general had been in 1914, and refused to be shaken in that faith, though many of his subordinates were.
Fortunately for us, as Stalin put it "quantity has a quality all its own", and we sufficiently outnumbered the Germans to overwhelm their tactical superiority by sheer attrition.
Plus we had better -strategy-. Strategy should drive tactics, not vice versa. Ludendorff's 1918 offensive was tactically and operationally overwhelming, but it had no -goal-. He said he'd just punch a hole in the Allied lines and see what happened next. That had worked against Russia but the Western Front was different.
If he'd had a -goal-, say a drive on Amiens (which was perfectly practical and would have disorganized the whole British position), he probably would have split the British and French armies and driven the British off the continent, and won the war before the US forces were numerous enough to make the difference.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
It can be so frustrating, as Pershing's case shows, how hard it is for commanders to adapt and change.
Fascinating, how close the Germans came to winning in 1918. I agree, Ludendorff should have had a goal, something concrete to achieve if his offensive succeeded in breaking thru the Anglo-French lines. Such as that drive to Amiens you suggested.
If he had we might have seen happening for real what occurred in your THEATER OF SPIES and SHADOWS OF ANNIHILATION, where the Germans succeeded in driving the British and Americans off the Continent.
I was sorry to see Horst von Duckler getting killed in SHADOWS. I liked him. It would have been interesting if he had survived to become chief of German Intelligence.
Ad astra! Sean
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