Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/May 2020/Book reviews




 * By Nick-D

Walls: A History of Civilisation is, well, a history of defensive walls. It was written by academic historian David Frye.

This is a strange and deeply flawed book. Frye's core thesis is that defensive walls have generally been a terrible idea due, as far as I can tell, to the supposedly enfeebling influence they have on populations. He appears to be a fan of the noble savage myth, and throughout the book contrasts weedy civilised societies who were silly enough to build defensive walls with the more robust uncivilised populations who attacked them.

Frye's argument rests on thin ground. The purpose of building defensive walls is never seriously described, nor is the mechanics of siege warfare in the pre-modern era: I expected the book to cover topics such as the efficiencies arising from fixed fortifications, how such fortifications needed to be garrisoned and how walls were integrated into military doctrine and strategies. Instead, readers are served up simplistic descriptions of events based around a view that building walls usually ends in disaster. This leads to rubbish such as an argument that the Roman Army became an essentially passive force which lurched from failure to failure once the empire shifted to a defensive posture and invested in defensive fortifications - most works note that the construction of fixed defences was a symptom of the long-term decline in Roman power arising from a wide range of factors, and that the Roman walls were actually the last line of a sophisticated set of diplomatic and military measures used to protect the borders. In later chapters there's a confusion between defensive walls, defensive fortresses (such as the Maginot Line, which Frye oddly praises) and border walls, such structures being treated as though they were interchangeable. The assertion made at times that defensive walls marked the difference between civilised and uncivilised societies is, to put it bluntly, total hogwash.

All up, this book is best avoided. I'm giving it one and a half stars due mainly to its broad scope and the good quality of Frye's prose.

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 * By Nick-D

Another book that covers what it's title suggests, this book discusses the German Army's military and moral record during World War II. It's author, Ben H. Shepherd, is an academic historian who specialises on the military history of Germany during World War II.

This is a large (530 pages) and very ambitious book. Shepherd covers the Army's structure before and during the war, as well as its equipment, doctrine and conduct. It is structured around a narrative history, with chapters focusing on each main front and period of the war, including several chapters on the Army's conduct during the occupation of eastern and western Europe. This approach is generally very successful.

Shepherd's main argument is that the Army was a key element of Nazi terror across Europe, and degenerated over time as officers and soldiers became increasingly politically radicalised and brutalised by their experiences in battle. He demonstrates this clearly using well-chosen examples of its conduct in battle and during occupations. He explains how its military performance from 1939-41 couldn't be sustained, noting that Germany's war objectives were unachievable and the Allied troops were eventually generally able to out-fight German soldiers. The examples of war crimes clearly demonstrate why the myth of the clean Wehrmacht should never have been taken seriously, and Shepherd makes the important point that the Army's elite units, which are often admired for their fighting prowess even today, were disproportionately likely to commit war crimes compared to standard frontline units.

The book's greatest limitation is that at times Shepherd simply doesn't have enough room to give justice to the topics he covers. For instance, while the importance of training on the Army's performance and ideology is noted throughout the book, how the training system worked is never really discussed. Logistical issues are alluded to, but never really explored, and the coverage of the Army's dysfunctional intelligence system is too brief. This book would probably have worked better as a pair of works.

Overall, this is a very useful book, and a good single-volume history of its subject which deserves to be widely read and consulted.

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 * By Hawkeye7

This is basically an overview of military conflict since 1990. Having slain the dragon (the Soviet Union), the US was then confronted by the snakes - militant organisations like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Here the term "the West" is used to mean the US and erstwhile allies and quasi-Allies, so it includes countries like Japan that we wouldn't normally think of as part of "the West". But it's mostly about the US, which after all spends more on defence than everyone else put together.

David Kilcullen is an Aussie Army colonel who rose to fame in the US as one of David Petraeus's advisors. He uses my model of tactics as memes, but takes it a bit further. Because militants have brief lives due to their being killed in large numbers, evolution and natural selection proceed at a brisk pace. Thirty years has represented several generations, and they have adapted well to the new environment. Kilcullen notes that an organisation that become too large or powerful becomes a threat, and evokes a major response, also making a predator-prey model appropriate. He illustrates this with examples of how targeted drone strikes have made the environment steadily worse.

The second half of the book is about the revival of the dragons, albeit in smaller and less threatening form in the revival of Russia and the rise of China, and the wanna-be dragons, Iran and North Korea (the threat posed by India is not examined). These nations have adapted to their new circumstances, and the new global environment, in many ways more successfully than the US. The discussion of Chinese military thought is quite interesting; Chinese theorists have a more expansive view of what constitutes conflict and warfare than their counterparts in the West. The danger here is that the US might blunder into a war with China without realising that what it is doing is considered a hostile act.

Kilcullen coins the term "liminal" to cover operations that straddle the boundary between covert and clandestine operations. Russia has raised this to a fine art. Kilcullen covers this fairly well, but still has not dug too deep. The people in Crimea see themselves as Russian, don't want to learn to speak Ukrainian or be governed from Kiev by people who do. He does note, however, that guarantees of the territorial integrity of Ukraine were in return for assurances that NATO would not expand east of Germany, promises that the West broke.

The author proposes three possible strategies for the United States. The first he calls "doubling down", which is to continue the way things are going, spending more and more and getting less and less in return. The American way. The second is to "embrace the suck", which is to accept the new world order, just as the UK did in handing over to the US after the Second World War. The third is the Byzantine solution, whereby the West, like the Eastern Roman Empire, soldiers on, but without great power status, accepting a more modest role.

In all, a thought-provoking read for someone self-isolating at the moment.

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