Beyond the great storytelling is one simple fact. If you are a military history buff, read military history. Gladwell doesn’t write for historians. He writes the equivalent of pop-history as he does for the things in his other books, such as analytics and sociology. He writes for his audience to hear a great yarn and learn a few things, hopefully cutting through the chaff and flares for the occasional profound insight into the human condition. It’s not like these stories from WWII haven’t been told before, numerous times, and in many Hollywood treatments as well. What Gladwell nailed, in this short collection of stories about WWII and the early Army Air Forces, before we had a separate Air Force, is that some military leaders are profoundly moral. Some military leaders are great tacticians of war and build a careful plan of action that solves a set of complex problems that lead to positive outcomes. Also, Gladwell tells us, some military leaders are sadistic. In this manner, Gladwell always captures the richness of human behavior, it’s idiosyncrasies, along with our many strengths and weaknesses. He doesn’t pass judgment, just puts it out there for us to consider right and wrong for ourselves.
Anyone in the military should have studied WWII in great depth. Anyone who considers themself well read has also read the fiction coming out of WWII. Novels such as Slaughterhouse V, by Kurt Vonegut, and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Great books of military history abound be they histories of various military campaigns, the political posturing, biographies of the great characters…many not so great. Recent histories of World War II include the stories of courage and the many thousand’s of personalities. Recently the story of Louis Zamperini, and B-24’s in the Pacific, told by Laura Hillenbrand in “Unbroken” captivated the Country. WWII will continue to be studied by historians for the length of human existence…but of it’s lessons for the masses and ordinary citizens, it will be but a passing chapter in high school history books. Unless, great stories and anecdotes told by great authors and storytellers like Gladwell (and Hillenbrand) persist.
The sheer horrors of war, Gladwell does more that hint about the furnace, the tinderbox homes in Japan where 100,000 died in the napalm firebombing. He glosses over Dressand theo topic of Voguts nightmare, attributing only 20,000 to a conflagration that probably cause similar numbers as Tokyo, but goes on to remind us that Curtis Le May, fire bombed Japanese cities as many as 667 times, a fact that get’s whisked away in the days after Hiroshima and Nagazaki, and beyond teh horrors of a confligration, inwhich human babies ignited on their mother’s backs as the hellish furnace of the napalm conflgration consumed every life in it’s path, the horrors of radiation sickness soon materialized. Like Vonugut, you cannot not read these passages and find any nobility in war. The book “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, written by Chris Hedges in 2002, is tells us perhaps, why humanity wages wars. Gladwell reminds us why we must continue to find ways to solve our differences peacefully even in the midst of wanting to strike out at those who oppose us, conquer us, or lead us into tyranny.
To be sure there are technical errors and errors of historical fact. But that does not detract from this story of what happened. This is not a revisionist history of WW II arieal bombing as some of military critics of his work have stated. These men existed. These bombing missions happened. The results are historical fact, Germany was defeated. Japan surrendered.
The Bomber Mafia grew up in Maxwell AFB, in Alabama, by technologies believing several things… Air Power could help bring wars to a close faster. The method, precise aerial bombardment of strategic targets that could cripple and adversary's ability to wage war. The doctrine of Strategic bombardment to crush critical nodes of production and transportation is sound. That doesn’t preclude the use of boots on the ground or naval blockades or the coming required to own the high ground in space. Those advocates of singular domain centric war fighting strategies are either idiots, having studied joint doctrine, or are simply arguing for a larger share of the defense budget… They can’t really believe anyone can prevail in war without all it’s levers. But the visionaries of Air Power, and control, superiority, or supremacy, in and from the air, are not singularly the thoughts of this bomber mafia or the diffrences between Le May and Hansell. Where is Giulio Douhet, where is Billy Mitchell, John Boyd, John Warden? Hansell was basing aerial bombardment on strategy and morality. Le May was getting a job done. These are not mutually exclusive. But it’s worth noting for air power was a revolution in military affairs. Many aspects of air power for a multitude of reasons.
A lesson for the current technology mafia that believes with unwavering optimism that the revolution in military affairs before us, has to do with software and networks.
All the technology in the world, the B-29, couldn't overcome with technology (the Norden Bombsight) the environment which it was forced to fight in either theater.
The sheer mass required, the range, and the environmental conditions. Sure, the analog nature of the bombsight couldn’t adapt flexibly enough to the changing conditions, whereas software could recalculate…yet software can’t really extend beyond the realm of ist’s analog (physical/kinetic) requirement to kill people and break things.
Much like, instead of precision, high altitude, daytime bombing (with bomb site), of strategic choke points, Moved to night time, low altitude, area bombing, because no air defensese exiosting. What allowed this change was a strategist (Le May) not tied to the doctrine of aerial warfare, but the doctrine of solving problems faster than the adversary can react. Flexibility is the key to AIr Power (Douhet), react faster than your adversary (Boyd).
Interesting stories…
Developnet o the norden Bomb sight, its been told a miliion times… can such a precise analoge instrument be combat ready and take the abuse of combat particularly if mass produced…thousands were required.
Development of Napalm by neurotic pyromaniacs in Cambridge MA.
Sadistic area bombing of civlians due to the terror of the advesary area/terror bombing of yoru own homeland durign the Battle of Britain.
Sadistic area bombing of cvilieans due to what appears to be 1) revenge for pearl Harbor 2) racist stereo typing of an entire culturee. Who was more human… Japanese gave Le May a metal not for conflagrating perhaps a million of their citizenry, something the Atomic Bombs never came close to doing, but because Le May turned around and assisted the Japanese people in building an air defense.
Flexibility of air power through deliberate change in CONOPs to overcome the descent not realized in the advanced technology of air power but the flexibility of air power itself.
3-dimension of maneuver room in the battle space pulse time. Ground and sea forces are by and large restricted to 2 dimensions plus slower time, and space, believe it or not, fights in a single dimension, and doesn’t even have the flexibility of time.
Because of this new invention things will get better…
RMA
Warfare remains hard. There is no single technology that changes the outcome. Some technology has indeed become an RMA but they are few and far between and they were not viewed as RMAs at the time. Andy Marshall didn’t coin the phrase until 1991. But it’s easy to argue that Gun powder significantly changed things. Air power significantly changed things. And finally, PNT from space significantly changed things. That’s about it. The current argument that integrated, netted, webbed, everything with AI and agile software development will now be an RMA is simply wrong. Gladwell doesn’t explicitly start out shooting that particular RMA in the face, but he presents a pretty good case for it. The Norden Bombsight, perhaps, being the technology that would usher in daytime, high altitude, precision bombing…which would change everything. It didn’t. The argument for the RMA will only be a reality if the CONOPS and Tactics involved in the operational art of war also change. Those don’t change with the technologies currently on the table. If a software change is necessary to fix a problem (something isn’t working right or a vulnerability has been discovered) that doesn’t change the way we fight. It would be nice to fix it, fast, but not at the expense of creating a bigger problem that hasn’t been understood or grasped (training issue, new vulnerability, untested)
If you bomb people, unless you kill them all (Cathars in Besnzie), people become more resilient to a cause, war is a force that gives us meaning.
Warfare crosses more than just physical domains air sea and space, economic, political…
There are tradeoffs, there are heros, there are idiots, there are arrogant bastards, there are lunatics…this is a human endeavor for both sides…
Innocent loss of life must be evaluated and minimized.
Uav/rpa advocates .. automation vs remote pilotong
Network centric web vs stove pipe
The internet ushered in the belief in a revolution of military affairs in the form of network centric warfare when multiple nodes and decentralized execution, wrought combat power. Several factors conspired against this reality, yet the advocates continue to believe. We fight in stove piped kill chaines not because we don’t have open standards but because it remains the most effective way to kill people and break things kinetically, aide the survival of the combat mission, and minimize fratricide from those who ought not be firing beyond the FLOT or FEBA and into the GRCA beyond the FSCL into the FEZ or MEZ.
Software disciples
Agile development vs legacy waterfall
Agile software development in the vernacular “DevOps” grew up in the miliinal tee-shirt clad, fake it till you make it culture in Silicon Valley where getting to market first was paramount, and software developers learned that Beta Testing could be done for free by the public. Compare this to the development of software for the space shuttle where software programmers wore suits to work and the code was the closest to error free of any code ever developed. Does the military need error free code? Or do we want pilots beta testing code in battle?
Acquisition agility
Is not a war fighting conops. If faced with an existental threat, such as Nazi Germany, acquisition can move rapidly. We have to buy pass laws of commerce and fair trade to by pass such things a competition to simply field development. Laws exist under the war powers act to eliminate some of these acquisition hang up.ucusions hang ups.
Space junkies
Space is the ultimate high ground thus it should be its own warfighting service (the won this pissing contest) complete it’s it’s own doctrine, CONOPS, and Tactics.
Everyone has their revolution. Which revolution of military affairs has actually achieved a change to the way we actually fight wars? Certainly airpower in general. From space, certainly the space based PNT solutions ushered in precision gilded weapons, as well as so many other things that exquisite timing can bring to the fight, maneuver, logistics, and advanced communications.
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