Armistice day -- lessons from "Kanzler" Bismarck and General Monash

The 11th day of the 11th month (also known as Remembrance Day and Veterans Day) was originally made memorable because it marked the end of WWI.  And well might it be commemorated.  The war it ended was unbelievably grisly.  It has often been compared to a meat grinder.  And it was pretty much that.  Strong and healthy young men were marched forward ("over the top") into withering machine gun fire.  Most died instantly. It was if their lives did not matter.  They were deliberately kil;led by their own generals.  Both sides did it but Britain's general Haig was most known for it.  He became known as the "Butcher of the Somme"

This strange behaviour was because they could think of no other way of waging war.  An outright charge on the enemy was how wars had been conducted since time immemorial.  That was what you did in a war.  But it was madness in the era of the machine gun and rapid firing field artillery.

One would have thought that manpower would be seen as the ultimate resource in a war and that it should therefore be conserved and carefully used.  It should not be squandered as in the disastrous Somme Offensive.

There was one General who did work to conserve his men:  Australia's General Monash, a son of emigrant German Jews.  As a  Jew he might well have been horrified by the mass deaths Jews had experienced and wanted no more of that.  A small excerpt about him:

"In July 1916 he took charge of the newly raised 3rd Division in northwestern France and in May 1918 became commander of the Australian Corps, at the time the largest corps on the Western Front. The successful Allied attack at the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, which expedited the end of the war, was planned by Monash and spearheaded by British forces including the Australian and Canadian Corps under Monash and Arthur Currie. Monash is considered one of the best Allied generals of the First World War and the most famous commander in Australian history"

It's an irony that he spoke, read, and wrote German fluently.

And there is another very eminent German who might well have been horrified by mass deaths.  Prussia's "Iron Chancellor" and founder of united Germany, Otto von Bismarck.

One of Bismarck's better known remarks (misquoted by Churchill) was: "Der ganze Balkan ist nicht die gesunden Knochen eines einzigen pommerschen Grenadiers wert"  (The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier).  You can't get more conserving of manpower than that.

Bismarck died in 1898.  Had he lived and ruled a few years longer,  World War I might have been fought very differently, if it was fought at all.  Monash showed what could be done in the field. 

I can't resist a few more quotes from Bismarck:


A little caution outflanks a large cavalry.

What we learn from history is that no one learns from history.

The most significant event of the 20th century will be that the fact that the North Americans speak English.

The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.

The Americans are truly a lucky people. They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors and to the east and west by fish.

Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong: it is a geographical expression.

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The Navy Swamp Needs Draining Too

From Obama-style social engineering to rampant corruption, the Navy is in trouble.

A scathing Navy report released Nov. 2 reveals that two major collisions — one between the USS Fitzgerald and merchant ship ACX Crystal off the Japanese coast on June 17 that killed 17 sailors and another between the USS John McCain and oil tanker Alnic MC near Singapore on Aug. 20 that killed another 10 — were caused by “fundamental failures to responsibly plan, prepare and execute ship activities to avoid undue operational risk.”

The USS Fitzgerald’s collision was precipitated by a “compilation of failures by leadership and watchstanders,” including lookout crews who “were inattentive, disengaged in developments on the Bridge, and unaware of several nearby vessels.” As a result they “failed to visually differentiate between two vessels in close proximity” while “attempting to cross a highly congested sea lane at night.”

Moreover the Officer of the Deck, the person responsible for safe navigation of the ship, “exhibited poor seamanship by failing to maneuver as required, failing to sound the danger signal and failing to attempt to contact CRYSTAL on Bridge to Bridge radio,” the report states. The officer also failed to “call the Commanding Officer as appropriate and prescribed by Navy procedures to allow him to exercise more senior oversight and judgment of the situation.”

The USS McCain’s collision was an equally damning sequence of errors. Because the person at the helm was having difficulty maintaining course while also adjusting the throttles for speed control, the Commanding Officer “ordered the watch team to divide the duties of steering and throttles.” This unplanned shift “caused confusion in the watch team,” that ultimately led the helmsman to believe the steering mechanism had failed. According to the report, crews attempted to fix the mistake by transferring steering “among various controlling stations four times within the two minutes leading up to the collision.”

Crew members also accidentally decoupled the ship’s two engines, and the two shafts “working opposite to one another in this fashion caused an un-commanded turn to the left.” This error, coupled with “lost situational awareness” on the ship’s bridge, effectively accelerated the McCain’s turn into the Alnic MC.

“The thing that stood out to me was in both situations they had minimal situational awareness,” stated Capt. Rick Hoffman, a retired cruiser captain who reviewed the report for Defense News. “In the case of Fitzgerald, nearly criminal negligence on the part of the bridge watch team. And in neither case did the ship sound five short blasts or raise the general alarm to let anyone know they were in danger.”

Incredibly, there were two additional incidents involving 7th Fleet vessels last year. In January, the USS Antietam guided missile cruiser ran aground near Yokosuka base. In May, the USS Lake Champlain collided with a South Korean fishing boat.

The report minced no words regarding why these incidents occurred: “In each of the four mishaps there were decisions at headquarters that stemmed from a culturally engrained ‘can do’ attitude, and an unrecognized accumulation of risk that resulted in ships not ready to safely operate at sea.”

Since the collisions, eight senior leaders have been relieved of duty, and members of both ships’ bridge and Combat Information Center watch teams have also received administrative actions. And while the Navy does not make these actions public, they may include career-killing letters of reprimand. Moreover, if the continuing investigation demands additional punishment, it will be forthcoming.

“We are dangerously underinvesting in our military,” insisted Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) after reading the report. “Training, readiness and maintenance are hit the earliest — and tragic errors like this are the canary-in-the-mine warning bells.”

While true in some respects, Sasse’s assertion — essentially that basic competence requires increased funding levels — rings exceedingly hollow, especially when one remembers that Barack Obama’s Navy Secretary, Ray Mabus, made political correctness one of his primary objectives.

Marines in Congress from both parties criticized Mabus, also the former Democrat governor of Mississippi, for force-feeding co-ed training on the Marine Corps. They viewed the move as retaliation following the Corps request for an exemption from allowing women in combat. That request was based on studies showing sex integration would raise the risks of casualties. Mabus also attempted — and ultimately failed — to make all service job titles “gender neutral.”

And funding has nothing to do with a massive corruption scandal encompassing as many as 440 Navy personnel, current and retired — including at least 60 admirals — under investigation for their involvement with Malaysian contractor Leonard “Fat Leonard” Glenn Francis. Francis allegedly provided Navy personnel with cash kickbacks and “wild times” in return for receiving classified information and contracts.

Contracts with whom? The Navy’s 7th Fleet.

In 2015, Francis pleaded guilty to bribery and fraud that included scamming the Navy out of approximately $35 million. He remains in jail in San Diego awaiting sentencing on Dec. 1. In the meantime, he is cooperating with the DOJ, which has already filed criminal charges against 28 individuals, including two admirals.

The Navy is enacting some after-the-fact reforms following the acknowledgment in September that budget constraints, 100-hour workweeks, extended deployments, and training and maintenance delays have severely taxed the nation’s fleet and personnel. But top leaders speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee refused to directly tie the quartet of accidents to those problems.

“These collisions, along with other similar incidents over the past year, indicated a need for the Navy to undertake a review of wider scope to better determine systemic causes,” the report states.

The past year? On Jan. 12, 2016, two Navy riverine command boats were captured by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). A Navy report on that incident also cited “failed leadership at multiple levels from the tactical to the operational” as the reasons for the debacle.

What kind of leadership? The unidentified commander in charge of the boats “opted to surrender rather than fight back, citing later fears that a confrontation could endanger the Obama administration’s efforts to lock in a deal with Tehran on its nuclear program,” The Washington Times reported.

“Clearly, under President Obama’s plan to fundamentally change America, the degradation of our military forces was a key element,” asserts U.S. Navy Admiral and former commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet James A. Lyons. “The capitulation of our military leadership to accept these mandates was more than shocking, as it was a manifestation of the corrupt ‘political correctness’ mentality run amok.”

Thus the ongoing effort to embrace progressive dogma proceeds, even if military readiness and people lives are sacrificed as a result.

A sailor aboard the USS Shiloh, one of the Navy’s missile cruisers monitoring North Korea, told an anonymous Navy survey everything Americans need to know. “I just pray we never have to shoot down a missile from North Korea, because then our ineffectiveness will really show,” the sailor wrote.

As the aforementioned incidents indicate, it’s already showing. Thus it behooves the Trump administration to drain this particular swamp ASAP. National security cannot be held hostage to social engineering and political correctness.

And commanders in every branch of the military who disagree should be sent packing.

SOURCE

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Chicago, land of gun control, hits homicide highs — and blames Trump

Five-hundred-and-ninety-three — that’s the number of homicides Chicago has seen this year so far. Oh, apologies. That’s the number of homicides the gun controlling city of Chicago has seen this year so far.

You’d think it time to admit the anti-Second Amendment atmosphere isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, at least in terms of curbing gun-related violence — yes? Nope. The city just came off a near-800 homicide count for last year. The mantra seems to be: Let’s focus on the positive.

Nevertheless, Trump’s at least partly to blame for Chicago’s high homicide rates — at least in the eyes of the left-leaning media.  More, from the Tribune: “Trump doesn’t care about the daily carnage on our city’s streets. Remember during the campaign, when he pledged he would solve everything, when he hinted of some magical police officer here who told him he knew just what to do to solve Chicago’s decades-long violence problems? There’s no magical police officer. Trump has done nothing. Trump will do nothing.”

The question is, Chicago: What will you do? Apparently — criticize.

More HERE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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