Center for a New American Security

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Midway, the turning point in WWII's Pacific theater (well, turning point once you know how things end). Unlike The Bateman, Charlie is not a military historian. But she has taught the Battle of Midway on more than one occasion (she recommends Eagle Against the Sun as a basic primer on the Pacific War). And from that perspective Midway has it all:

-strategic use of intelligence (decrypted Japanese radio transmissions revealed that the movement in the Aleutians were a feint, the carriers were coming to Midway)
-organizational learning (Nimitz took our carriers to Midway after realizing how to use them as mobile air fields for strike, vice reconnaissance)
-and unintended consequences (following the Doolittle Raids, Japan pushed out its defensive perimeter making Midway a strategic location and prime engagement opportunity).

It's wicked fun to teach (Midway makes for the second best short answer ID term after Blitzkrieg).

And in the real world, Midway was momentous. Following the disastrous surrender on Wake Island and surprise attack at Pearl, Midway was the first victory for the US in the Pacific. And we scored big, sinking 4 Japanese carriers (to our one).* But as in all things in WWII, even victory carried a high price. The video below is a memoriam to Torpedo Squadron 8, the first to engage Japanese carriers albeit without fighter cover. They lost all 15 planes, and there was but one survivor. And they didn't even get a hit. (John Ford's award winning combat film of Midway can be found here.)



*At least as important as destroying the carriers were the deaths of Japanese pilots. The Japanese lacked and effective training and replacement system. While the US often pulled successful pilots off the line and made them instructors, the Japanese did not. At the end of the war, they were not just out of POL, but out of pilots as well.

In honor of the unsung Revolutionary War hero, The Swamp Fox, the South Carolina legislature has declared 27 February to be Francis Marion Day.

Charlie, an inveterate Jayhawk and Yankee lover, isn't one to celebrate rebels from south of the Mason Dixon (John Brown adorns her office desktop). But in this case, she's willing to make an exception.

Update: Man, this brings back memories from childhood for Abu Muqawama, mainly of driving through Francis Marion State Forest on the way to see his relatives in South Carolina. Also, the great Walt Disney movie that Abu Muqawama and his mother used to watch. Ho, snap, it's on YouTube!

Folks, there is a great article in the American Scholar on Francis Lieber, the Prussian émigré who wrote America's first code of conduct during the Civil War.

During the hot and desperate summer of 1862, a senior American commander found himself consumed with the question of insurgents. Major General Henry Halleck had become general-in-chief of the Union armies in July of that year, and he soon discovered that the army had no laws or regulations to govern its contacts with the bands of irregular Southern forces in the field. A lawyer by training, Halleck found the absence of guidance maddening. Union troops were encountering an array of rebel forces, some uniformed, some not. “The rebel authorities claim the right to send men, in the garb of peaceful citizens, to waylay and attack our troops, to burn bridges and houses and to destroy property and persons within our lines,” Halleck vented in a letter sent on August 6.

Halleck’s correspondent was eager to help. Francis Lieber (1798–1872) was then a professor of history at Columbia College. A Prussian immigrant, he was a military veteran who had recently devoted himself to studying the conduct of war. What’s more, he was a passionate supporter of the Union cause and was keenly ambitious to influence national policy. Less than a year after that first exchange, a short paper Lieber wrote for the general on how international law regards insurgents and guerrillas had blossomed into America’s first code regulating the conduct of its army in warfare.

“Lieber’s Code,” as it soon became known, was widely disseminated, and it deeply influenced the later Hague and Geneva conventions. It is no exaggeration to say that this émigré professor with longstanding connections to the Southern aristocracy made one of the most substantial contributions to the modern law of war. Lieber was acutely aware of the novelty of his project. “It is an honor of the United States that they have attempted, first of all nations, to settle and publish such a code,” he wrote to Halleck.

The code achieved its stature with remarkable speed. Lieber completed the text in March 1863, and it was cursorily reviewed by a panel of generals and quickly approved by President Lincoln. Dispatched to military commanders in May 1863 as General Orders No. 100, it circulated through the army ranks and within a few years had been lauded by a United States Supreme Court Justice as an authoritative expression of the law of war.

Interestingly, Lieber was not in favor of extending rights to insurgents and guerrillas:

Lieber’s good will did not extend to the guerrillas and insurgents that bedeviled Halleck. Those Southerners who engaged in hit-and-run attacks on Union forces and then blended back into civilian life could be treated like “highway robbers or pirates,” he wrote. They deserved none of the benefits of prisoners of war, and they could be summarily executed. Guerrillas, he wrote in his pamphlet on the subject to Halleck, “are peculiarly dangerous, because they easily evade pursuit, and by laying down their arms become insidious enemies; because they cannot otherwise subsist than by rapine, and almost always degenerate into simple robbers or brigands.”

That wouldn't pass in the days of Human Rights Watch and FM 3-24. But the main point -- and enduring lesson -- of Lieber's code was this:

As warfare evolves, then, and as conflicts develop, ethicists and regulators must struggle to keep pace: holding the line where they can, ceding ground where they must.

Please read this article if and when you have the chance. All those interested in the laws of war will find it fascinating.

This has little to do with counterinsurgency, per se, but Abu Muqawama is posting it for those interested in military history and because Victor Davis Hanson -- aside from being one of America's preeminent intellectuals -- has been leading the charge since 2001, through his books and articles, in support of the idea that the West is in a violent clash of cultures with Islam. His ideas have certainly been well-received by the White House and Bush Administration staffers. Abu Muqawama doesn't usually read his columns in the National Review, but VDH recently caught this blog's eye when he signed on to what its supporters are hoping will be a right-wing alternative to the generally left-wing Middle East Studies Association. (The Arabist has more on that here.)

Bob Bateman, who has often taken time out of his schedule to mentor and advise both Abu Muqawama and Charlie, really lets loose on VDH on the Small Wars Journal website. LTC Bateman is an active duty lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, served as a strategist for Gen. Petraeus in Iraq, and is the author of several well-respected military histories, including this one here. Here is, in a nutshell, Bateman's message to VDH:

[Y]our personal technique of torturing the facts until they conform to your thesis is hurting America, and ... your personal signal work, Carnage and Culture, is a pile of poorly constructed, deliberately misleading, intellectually dishonest feces. I believe it is my personal obligation to try and correct the record and demonstrate for as many people as possible, why they should not believe you when you try to cite history in support of any of your personal shiny little pet rocks.

If you're not a big fan of VDH*, read more here. If, on the other hand, you like the guy, best just click here instead.

*Why do Hanson's conservative admirers refer to him by his initials? Don't they realize this is what the arch-enemy (the French) do with their intellectual heroes? JPS, BHL, etc.

Update: "something seems wrong with Bateman’s ability to read and comprehend language..." VDH's reply is here. Abu Muqawama wants to see these two guys meet in a darkened alley and settle their differences the old-fashioned way.