pathology_doc

Was re-reading Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham's Fire Power last night. This is a well-written account of how the British Army incorporated artillery firepower into its methods of making war between 1904 (the beginning of its experience with quick-firing artillery) and the end of the Second World War.

It's relatively heavy going, and not a coffee-table technoporn book - it goes into fairly deep discussion of how the British Army's artillery handling methods evolved in the First World War - trigonometry and mapping early on, sound-ranging and flash spotting later in the war (for locating enemy artillery-pieces that couldn't be seen from the British line), protective "creeping" barrages¹ and the eventual development of unregistered 'shooting off the map' which enabled surprise attacks to be delivered without notice² - and then, after much confusion and misdirection between the wars and into the early forties, rediscovered and reapplied even more effectively with the improvements in command and control that wireless communication brought in World War Two.

The First World War chapters may be an eye-opener for some people, especially those brought up on the "butchers and bunglers" or "Blackadder" views of the British in World War One. Both authors were artillerymen themselves, and much of what they write is from experience. The chapters on command and control in the Second World War are of great interest - reading them, it's clear that the French and British outnumbered Nazi Germany on the ground in 1940 and had more and possibly better tanks, but that the French command system was so inefficient - and the French generals so paralysed by fear and shock - that this more than made up for the material superiority. "Blitzkrieg" was in fact a word scarcely used by the Germans - what happened in France in 1940 could perhaps more accurately be described by the phrase "Shock and Awe".

It's interesting to consider that the rash, overconfident, attack-obsessed generals of the First World War French Army might - if pulled forward through time - have made a better fist of wielding their nation's sword and beating Nazi Germany than their Second World War counterparts. At the very least they would not have been afraid, because the flavour I get is that fear was 90% of what beat France in 1940. A very similar thing was said by Wellington about Napoleon - that he believed his opponent's system to be weak and his reputation to be the bulk of his capability, and that not fearing both, he had a chance against the man. And ultimately he was right.


1. This is why you see so many accounts of British soldiers walking to their goals - not because they're the victims of insane parade-ground discipline but because there's usually a wall of exploding steel in front of them keeping their opponents' heads down. Where the conditions were bad and the infantry "lost" the barrage, or the barrage was shifted forward too fast for the conditions, that's when things went bad. For further discussion, see Prior and Wilson The Somme, UNSW Press.

2. Having enough shells to do the job properly is important. This in turn depends on industry back home, and how geared-up it is to serve the needs of the army. The French and Germans, unlike the British, had been gearing up for a rematch of the Franco-Prussian war ever since it ended, and even they sometimes ran short. Civilian parsimony meant that British industry could not at first supply the Army's needs, in terms of either guns or reliable shells to fire from them, a thing that had only begun to be resolved halfway through 1917.

The big problem with which the British were faced is that until mid-1918, there still wasn't quite enough artillery to properly support two major attacks at once. So you could blast a gap, say, 3000 yards wide and 1500 yards deep, kill a lot of Germans at acceptable cost to yourself and then fortify what you'd taken ("bite-and-hold"), but it took time to re-site the guns for the next 'bite', and in that time the enemy had shifted his reserves and stiffened his defences. Towards the end of the war, a new attack could be begun the instant the first was beginning to bog down, and no shifting of reserves to cope was possible. The British pounded the Germans like this for a hundred continuous days, from 8/8/1918 to the end of the war. Had British industry been up to it, and had parsimonious, pacifistic politicians not strangled the Army budget year after year leading up to the war, the same thing might have been done a year or two earlier.

It's a most dangerous time of the year
With road accidents killing
the corpses are chilling
the families in tears
It's a most dangerous time of the year.

It's the unhappiest season of all
When bad drivers are rushing,
Jaywalkers they're crushing
It leaves us appalled
It's the unhappiest season of all

911 we're calling
for ambulance squalling
ER docs are laying on hands
and surgeons are trying
to stop you from dying
and ICU does what it can

It's a most dangerous time of the year
So for God's sake start thinking
Don't drive after drinking,
Speed or oversteer
It's a most dangerous time of the year!!!

Pearl Harbour, 70 years on.

And yet, so the story goes, if the diplomats had delivered the declaration of war just a little bit earlier it would merely have gone down in history as one of the best-timed surprise attacks in the history of warfare.


Historical Background.
Oddly enough, the seeds had been laid down as long ago as the First World War, when the Royal Navy - frustrated by their German counterparts' (justifiable) refusal to come out for another stand-up fight¹ - had hatched a plan to attack the High Seas Fleet in harbour with carrier-launched torpedo bombers.²

They had the carriers and they had the bombers. They even had previous experience with carrier-launched air strikes, although the aircraft had returned to land bases afterwards. The one thing they didn't have was time, for the war was over before preparations for the mission were complete.

The planning exercise served the British well, however, for in the next war they dusted off the idea and used it against the Italian fleet in Taranto. Three battleships were put onto to the bottom of the harbour, one for good. They did it with biplanes too, albeit more modern ones with more modern torpedoes³, proving that the basic idea of 1918 was sound.

The Japanese, who had shamelessly (and justifiably and openly) been copying Royal Navy methods from the late 19th Century to the first part of the 20th⁴, took the hint, and pulled off one of the most stunningly successful air strikes in history. The damage it did in material and prestige was immense. Alas, unlike Japan's even more stunning naval victories over the Russians in the war of 1904-05, it did not destroy America's naval capability - and Japan paid dearly for that.


Footnotes.
1. They would have been butchered. The British deficiencies that led to the loss of three battlecruisers and the failure to sink more German capital ships at Jutland had largely been repaired and both sides knew full well how it would have gone, to the point where the High Seas Fleet mutinied when ordered to try.

2. The British are often accused of being hidebound, unimaginative and lagging well behind other nations in their development or adoption of technology. This is rubbish. Even in the context of World War One, they were (among other things) the first to take aircraft carriers into combat, the first to scramble fighters from a warship to defend against an air threat, and the first to develop and deploy the tank.

3. Anti-aircraft provisions in the battleships of World War One were next to non-existent, limited to a few high-angle small-calibre guns. The profusion of light and medium automatic weapons which characterises the battleships of the WW2 era was a thing for the then-distant future. Surface defences in the harbour might have been a different matter.

4. Shogunate Japan had paid dearly for annoying the West in the 1850s and 60s, and Western warships formed a major part of that embarrassment. The Japanese decided they must have a surface fleet of their own, that it must be fit to fight against the best of the West, and that the British - with their very long history of naval supremacy - were the best people to copy. Admiral Togo, who masterminded the destruction of the Russians at Tsushima in 1905, was an open admirer of Nelson, while many Japanese ships were either designed by British naval architects or built in British yards. One of them, Togo's flagship Mikasa, is a museum ship to this day, the last survivor of the battleship line designed by Sir William White. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and until such time as the Japanese decided on their own naval doctrine it served them very well.

Probably because I recently bought the DVD and saw the last film in the cinema this year.

Now we all know that DH could easily have been entitled "In which Harry Potter learns a great deal that he has never previously been told and now cannot check back", and a whole lot of threads came up that hadn't really reared their ugly heads until well into HBP.

Which got me to thinking, let's imagine that we have Harry and Hermione standing in the graveyard at Godric's Hollow. Everything up to that moment, from Harry's (and in broad also the reader's) perspective, is as it has been in canon. And then, instead of what is actually written upon his parents' graves in canon ("The last enemy which will be conquered is Death" IIRC), he finds the following:


"And with strange aeons, even Death may die."


The implications are obvious to anyone familiar with the quote*. Of all the things for Dumbledore not to tell him...



* And for anyone who's not, it's HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.

Did she really say what I think she said?

Kristallnacht, here we come.

Dear Sun/Hemmi,

I know it's at least half a century too late for this rant, and probably more. I know there's absolutely nothing I can do now except curse the shade of Jiro Hemmi and all who worked under him, but what the hell were you thinking when you drafted the design of the Model 152 and didn't include a common log scale on an otherwise incredibly useful slide rule?

OTOH, you do get bonus points for the Teledyne-Post 44BA-47O: the extra precision between 4 and 5 on the C and D scales (keeping the 0.02 divisions when just about everyone else with a 10 inch scale reverts to 0.05) is tops. If I had to start up slide rule manufacture again, I'd go with this model modified to the Rietz scale set. There's more than enough room on the front for the L scale if you move the manufacturer's logo back where Post's used to be.

(They did, to their credit, rectify the omission on the 153. And as a bonus, they put on an extra scale to allow calculation of hyperbolic functions.)

1. There will be no wedding bells for Bert and Ernie, according to those in charge. "Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation." Muppetsexual, perhaps? Seriously, though, why would you do it? It'd be like Snoopy finally shooting down the Red Baron or Charlie Brown's team winning the baseball game - once it's done, where do you go from there? Besides, anyone with half a brain knows that the canon pairings are Ernie/Rubber Ducky and Bert/pigeons...

2. With friends like these, who needs enemies? UNRELEASED music and personal belongings were stolen from singer Amy Winehouse's home in the days after her death. The star's father, Mitch Winehouse, believes one of her acquaintances took copies of unreleased tracks, lyric books and letters. And he has vowed to root out the culprits when he returns from a family holiday taken to come to terms with his loss, The Sun reports. Filthy little grubs.

3. Whether or not they are actual one-hit wonders, some bands will always be remembered for one song. Sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes not. THE lead singer of 80s glam rockers Warrant was found dead at a Los Angeles hotel late today, TMZ reported. The body of 47-year-old Jani Lane - who wrote the band's hit Cherry Pie and also had a solo career - was discovered at the Comfort Inn hotel in Woodland Hills.

But did he die with a smile on his face ten miles wide? It's disturbing to think that this could actually be the case.

#1 - bitter, but perceptive. This is XTC's take.



#2 - searching. This one courtesy of Midge Ure.

Whatever you might say about the aftermaths (and there is plenty of criticism that even the most eager of hawks could provide), one must admit that the primary phase of Bush's wars - the defeat of the Taliban and Hussein regimes and their ejection from power - proceeded swiftly and with the minimum of fuss in both cases.

Libya is ultimately Obama's war, and no greater contrast could be imagined. Bush understood what Obama does not - that in order to topple a demagogue, you must get your hands dirty and go in on the ground. More to the point, you must have the will to do so. Obama certainly did not - the US put in a major effort right at the start, to get things rolling, and then pulled back to let the rest of NATO do its thing. NATO seems not to be doing all that well.

I'm still not sure exactly what has gone so drastically wrong, but I would put it down to terminal self-doubt combined with fear of "legal" consequences and possibly overlain with the dangerously seductive myth that a war can be won with air power alone at reasonable cost (political, military and financial).

It can't.

There are two ways to win a war with air power alone. The first is to resort to the strategic bombing campaign as practised by the Allies in World War 2, or alternatively to nuclear weapons, and make of the enemy's nation a burned and blasted wasteland. Unless there's a pressing reason, which I leave to the imagination, it's something the parliamentary democracies understandably and justifiably steer clear of these days.

The second is to be engaged in a war of specific strategic aims and limitations, in which both sides are either committed to certain goals or constrained by certain factors. If geographic constraints dictate the only way for Nation A to attack Nation B is by use of an invasion fleet, an air force might - by destroying that fleet while it is at sea - eliminate the means of making war at a stroke. Land wars, of the sort that Libya's is, are not like that. To successfully prosecute a land war, one must fight both on land AND in the air, and one must ensure that combat operations in all three dimensions are properly integrated.

Furthermore, one must ensure that one's land forces are evenly matched to those of the opposition AND numerically equal to their tasks. This is patently NOT the case in Libya, where the forces the West is supporting appear to be of dubious capability and are taking major reverses even with Western strike support (supposing that support to be fully effective all the time). The component of NATO with the most resources (the US) has cut and run, doing its little bit to say it was there and then walking away leaving the lesser lights to do the job alone.

Such things are inexcusable when the stated aim is 'regime change'. If it had been stated at the very begining of the Western intervention that NATO aid would strictly be limited to taking out the Libyan Air Force (including aviation assets operated directly by the Libyan Army, e.g. strike and scout helicopters) and then the rebels were on their own, that would have been one thing. What we are trying to achieve now is quite another, and simply cannot be done at a limited cost. Iraq War 1 possibly came closest to ending this way - had we killed enough of Saddam's soldiers, it's theoretically possible he might have decided to withdraw from Kuwait on his own rather than be forced out by the ground phase - but there you have an example of that limited sort of war where the criteria for victory have been very carefully defined.

The Allies could not, without ground forces, have conquered Nazi Germany. The only reason Japan capitulated without an invasion was because of the new factor of the atom bomb, which promised the hitherto impossible goal of complete national and racial obliteration, especially in the context of an island nation whose military had been utterly destroyed and was incapable of defending it.

ELECTRIC cars could produce higher emissions over their lifetimes than petrol equivalents because of the energy consumed in making their batteries, a study has found.

Why am I not surprised? Rule One of Greens and technology - the first has no comprehension of the limitations (or the power) of the second.

An electric car owner would have to drive at least 129,000km before producing a net saving in CO2. Many electric cars will not travel that far in their lifetime because they typically have a range of less than 145km on a single charge and are unsuitable for long trips. Even those driven 160,000km would save only about a tonne of CO2 over their lifetimes.

129km a day over three years, or shorter drives over a longer time, would just about do it, but there's that annoying range limitation. Electrical energy is very difficult to store 'densely' - petrol is several orders of magnitude more efficient, and far quicker to recharge. I hear the recharge time for an electric is absurdly long (twenty to thirty minutes), totally unsuitable for long-distance driving. You'd be sitting idle for one hour out of three!

The British study, which is the first analysis of the full lifetime emissions of electric cars covering manufacturing, driving and disposal, undermines the case for tackling climate change by the rapid introduction of electric cars.

Assuming that the case for anthropogenic dominance is correct, which I am firmly convinced - given previous ice ages and warm cycles - that it is not. It may be an answer (or part thereof) to a separate and unarguable problem: the finite nature of hydrocarbon reserves at present rates of consumption. This presupposes that one has a significant reserve of non-fossil electrical power which can be relied upon for charging purposes (and yes, I am talking nuclear).

The Committee on Climate Change, the UK government watchdog, has called for the number of electric cars on Britain's roads to increase from a few hundred now to 1.7 million by 2020.

Pointless chasing after numbers plucked out of the air - the worst kind of government policy. This brings me back to what I said at the start, which is that starry-eyed environmentally-deluded bureaucrats (envirocrats???) simply don't understand how to develop or deliver technology.

Britain's Department for Transport is spending $66 million over the next year giving up to 8,600 buyers of electric cars a grant of $7700 towards the purchase price. Ministers are considering extending the scheme.

The DoT would do far better to spend the money ensuring that recharging infrastructure is in place, and that research funds are given for technology development to make that recharging fast (more in the order of three to five minutes) and safe (large currents have a tendency to cause fires if not properly controlled).

The study was commissioned by the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, which is jointly funded by the British government and the car industry. It found that a mid-size electric car would produce 23.1 tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime, compared with 24 tonnes for a similar petrol car. Emissions from manufacturing electric cars are at least 50 per cent higher because batteries are made from materials such as lithium, copper and refined silicon, which require much energy to be processed.

Provided you can get that energy from nuclear or other such sources, the cost to your precious CO₂ balance is a lot less, but it does highlight that these fucking morons are seeing everything in terms of CO₂ emissions and not even looking at the fossil fuel conservation aspect.

Many electric cars are expected to need a replacement battery after a few years. Once the emissions from producing the second battery are added in, the total CO2 from producing an electric car rises to 12.6 tonnes, compared with 5.6 tonnes for a petrol car. Disposal also produces double the emissions because of the energy consumed in recovering and recycling metals in the battery. The study also took into account carbon emitted to generate the grid electricity consumed.

Again, the way to solve this is to do what France has done - or to develop more esoteric things like tidal and ocean-thermal, which are not sunlight and atmosphere dependent for their power source. There will always be tides, and there will always be a cold deep ocean beneath the warm upper surface. Temperature gradient = energy.

Greg Archer, director of Low CVP, said the industry should state the full lifecycle emissions of cars rather than just tailpipe emissions, to avoid misleading consumers. He said that drivers wanting to minimise emissions could be better off buying a small, efficient petrol or diesel car. “People have to match the technology to their particular needs,” he said.

The Times

I think Mr Archer is right - the whole "no carbon emissions" sales pitch is excellent for dragging in rich Greenbots with more money and desire for penitence than common sense (or understanding of anything even remotely resembling "science"), but there would appear to be hidden costs. Now those costs might be mitigated by a careful nationwide consideration of technology requirements, but without a lot of expensive research (and, I am happy to admit, road time) that range and time limitation is not going to go away - and there's going to be a glut of shiny new one-owner electric cars on the market, going cheap.

Lord I'm one, Lord I'm... shit, not even two hundred miles from home. Time for a recharge already? On a bright note, here's an excuse for Tim Horton's to put a store up every 150km on the Trans-Canada Highway with squillions of outdoor powerpoints.

"How do you take your coffee, sir?"

"With 1.21 GIGAWATTS, my son!"