Incoming are some more blog posts, especially "Political and military deterrence", "Decision by attrition or decision by manoeuvre" (both scheduled already), another one commenting on the NATO summit and I may finish some about warfare under oppressing ECM and "Musings about above-ground sovereignty" (unless I find a better title for it after all).
July is thus on track to become a more productive D&F month, despite the nice weather. I actually wrote three blog posts in a single night recently.
I actually have about 30 unpublished draft texts, but they are unpublished because they're not worth being published - and most seem to be abandoned for good.
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By the way; the German milblogosphere is almost extinct. I didn't put much effort in researching, but there's simply not enough flesh to write a new blog post about German milblogs as I used to since there are even fewer such blogs active than in the past years. We're mostly down to augengeradeaus.net regarding attendance, which is 95% news about German or NATO military affairs and 5% fillers. It's being run by a professional journalist from a political weekly magazine, though.
Nachtwei, a retired politician, may be noteworthy as well, though I have little interest in his security policy news blogging.
The Vergessene Kriege blog about small wars and Third World conflict is quite active as well (though likely with few visitors) and even turned into a 'competitor' to myself by including mass surveillance concerns as a topic (rarely). It looks like a blog a stereotypical pacifist or development aid worker would be interested in.
Some activity appears to have moved from classic blogs to facebook pages, but I don't keep an eye on facebook.
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edit: I'd like to add about my blog;
I'm somewhat disappointed by my readers. There's lots of opposition, lots of disagreement - but I keep finding old errors of mine (such as a typo "20" instead of "200" that totally changed the meaning) in 3-5 years old posts and comments of mine and nobody pointed them out. In fact, I keep finding more mistakes of my own than get pointed out.
This is very disappointing. With all those disagreeing comments I expect the audience to at least point out the obvious and most severe mistakes of mine!
S O
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Keep it up Sven! Enjoying the recent high post rate and topics.
ReplyDelete'I actually have about 30 unpublished draft texts, but they are unpublished because they're not worth being published - and most seem to be abandoned for good.'
ReplyDeleteIts largely the same with me. Lots of good ideas, but no ability to flesh them out into something readable. Not without a horrendous amount of effort anyway.
On my blog, I just finished an article which compared the fighting power of the U.S. and german army during WW2. I would like to follow up with an article which actually gives them a numerical rating, along with a host of other armys from the 20th century. I've got five seperate categorys, and will assign a value of 1 to 5 for each (for a maximum of 25 points). Out of curiosity, how would you rate america and iraq during the persian gulf war? I remember you having a very low opinion of the iraqi army, as shown below. Could you elaborate on these statements.
-The American Way of War (tm)
'The USA - together with many allies - defeated the inept Iraqi army in 1991.
The Iraqi army was doctrinally no more advanced than the French army in 1918, though.'
-The "age of movement to contact"
'This was the standard in 2003, and the Iraqis were way too demoralised and incompetent to exploit this negligence. The failure of the operational and formation tactical level to create substantial advantages through clever manoeuvres was not punished.'
James F. Dunnigan has quantified the armed forces of the 1990's already (tables are in "How to Make War"), you could use them.
DeleteThe Arab armies are moderately functional. They can pull off large or difficult actions with long preparation and planning only, and only until something goes wrong. Other than that they're merely able to hide their lack of capability in static warfare. They are no threat to Europe, and would be no problem even if the Med was dry.
I haven't read dunnigans book, but now you've got me interested. Did he actually say that iraqs doctrine was a relic of WW1, or was that just your summary of it? Stephen biddle did a pretty good job of cataloging their deficiencys.
ReplyDeleteP.S. About your editors note on mistake finding, I've seen the occasional typo in your work, but its usually years after the fact when I'm re-reading them. Its been my experience that most authors get annoyed when you point out their mistakes.