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Category: War
Firepower reminds that, in the end, almost every state gets access to the newest killing technology. Further, the state that gets it first doesn’t always come out on top.
Paul Lockhart, Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare (New York: Basic Books, 2021), pp. 624. $35.00
Death and destruction are part of war. That will not change anytime soon. Suffering and annihilation are curses humanity imparts to itself. Sadly, there will always be those willing to bathe their policies in blood.
Even the good guys, those who would seek peace and the protection of innocents, will find that justice sometimes demands the heaviest of hands. No issue merits more hard thinking than warfare, and thinking about war requires, first and foremost, thinking about killing.
A discussion of war without talking about lethality is about as helpful as a discourse on the Grand Old Opry without mentioning country music. Enter, Paul Douglas Lockhart’s Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare—an erudite, accessible, and comprehensive overview of the development of lethal weapons technology in early modern and modern history.
Lockhart, a professor of history at Wright State, traces the development of killing technologies from the introduction of gunpowder in Western warfare though modern times. Firepower gives equal weight to war on land and seas, also introducing the advent of airpower in the twentieth century.
Firepower is not just about the changes in weapons, such as when marching armies moved from matchlock muskets to flintlocks. Lockhart also covers the dynamic relationship between the use of lethal technology and changes in the organization and tactics employed by military forces.
The book emphasizes the relationship between the development of military forces and governance, political economy, and industrial development. Lockhart restates how the rise of the nation-state, powerful militaries, and the dominance of states in conventional warfare go hand-in-hand. In many ways, his book is a useful update of William H. McNeill’s The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (1984).
There is much to appreciate in Firepower including the simple, explicit, and practical explanations of technical military innovations and how they were employed in battle as well as how they interplayed with political and economic change.
What is most refreshing about this new military history is that, in contrast what is trendy in academia, Firepower does not shy away from the main activity of warfare—humans killing other humans.
The distinguished war historian Max Hasting recently wrote a piece getting a lot of attention decrying the reluctance of academia to teach the blood and guts of military history. It is a great failing of colleges and universities that they don’t teach military history that’s particularly useful for understanding how militaries fight wars. Lockhart totally goes against the grain. Good for him.
If anything, Firepower, doesn’t go far enough (though at over 600 pages, the book is long enough). War is all about killing. There is, however, a lot more to killing in war than just lethal technologies. The history in Firepower is a necessary, but not sufficient, background to understand the dynamics of competition and conflict. A sound military history education requires delving into all the operational aspects of warfare from logistics to medical practices, as well as the breadth of how the tactical level of war interweaves with campaigns and strategy and the larger issues of geopolitics.
Perhaps the most important aspect of a sound military history education is learning how to learn from military history. There is not much value in winning trivial pursuit by knowing the names and dates of battles or the muzzle velocity of a smoothbore musket. Nor does knowledge come from tapping into experts like Lockhart. The great value of military history lies not in the greatness of the historians, but in the rigorous critique of the sources and methods behind their histories and the sharp assessment of their analyses. Military history is a laboratory for hard thinking about the hardness of war.
There has never been a more important time for hard thinking about war. The monopoly of conventional conflict by powerful states is likely to continue and accelerate in the age of great power competition. This trend is fueled by a global, private-sector industrial and services base that includes not just defense industries but also advanced manufacturing companies; software and services platforms; the space industry; and commercial sources of new products, services and innovations. We can also expect more of the ancillary forms of conflict, from insurgencies and terrorists to sabotage and disinformation. Buckle up. Some of the bloodiest military history has yet to be written.
The next age of warfare will introduce new capabilities as groundbreaking as gunpowder. They will, however, not make war any less messy, unmanageable, deadly, or destructive. Further, none of these technologies, not even artificial intelligence, will take the human out of the human aspects of warfare. Technology is a factor in war, not the deterministic force dictating the outcome.
Firepower reminds that, in the end, almost every state gets access to the newest killing technology. Further, the state that gets it first doesn’t always come out on top. Military history is not just an arms race. History is, however, shaped by what big powerful players do with killing technology. Not remembering that and figuring out how it applies to keeping nations free, safe, and prosperous in the modern world is a sure way to fail to prevent the next war…and maybe lose it.
A Heritage Foundation vice president, James Jay Carafano directs the think tank’s research on matters of national security and foreign relations.
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The Secret Armies of Europe
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon has overestimated the value of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine by at least $3 billion — an accounting error that could be a boon for the war effort because it will allow the Defense Department to send more weapons now without asking Congress for more money.
The acknowledgment Thursday comes at a time when Pentagon is under increased pressure by Congress to show accountability for the billions of dollars it has sent in weapons, ammunition and equipment to Ukraine and as some lawmakers question whether that level of support should continue.
It also could free up more money for critical weapons as Ukraine is on the verge of a much anticipated counteroffensive — which will require as much military aid as they can get. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has previously said the offensive was delayed because they did not yet have everything they needed.
The error was caused when officials overvalued some of the systems sent to Ukraine, using the value of money it would cost to replace an item completely rather than the current value of the weapon. In many of the military aid packages, the Pentagon has opted to draw from its stockpiles of older, existing gear because it can get those items to Ukraine faster.
“During our regular oversight process of presidential drawdown packages, the Department discovered inconsistencies in equipment valuation for Ukraine. In some cases, ‘replacement cost’ rather than ‘net book value’ was used, therefore overestimating the value of the equipment drawn down from U.S. stocks,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh.
She added that the mistake hasn’t constrained U.S. support to Ukraine or hampered the ability to send aid to the battlefield.
A defense official said the Pentagon is still trying to determine exactly how much the total surplus will be. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the comptroller has asked the military services to review all previous Ukraine aid packages using the proper cost figures. The result, said the official, will be that the department will have more available funding authority to use as the Ukraine offensive nears.
The aid surplus was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
To date the U.S. has provided Ukraine nearly $37 billion in military aid since Russia invaded in February 2022. The bulk of that has been in weapons systems, millions of munitions and ammunition rounds, and an array of trucks, sensors, radars and other equipment pulled from Pentagon stockpiles and sent quickly to Ukraine.
Members of Congress have repeatedly pressed Defense Department leaders on how closely the U.S. is tracking its aid to Ukraine to ensure that it is not subject to fraud or ending up in the wrong hands. The Pentagon has said it has a “robust program” to track the aid as it crosses the border into Ukraine and to keep tabs on it once it is there, depending on the sensitivity of each weapons system.
There also is a small team of Americans in Ukraine working with Ukrainians to do physical inspections when possible, but also virtual inspections when needed, since those teams are not going to the front lines.
In late February, the Pentagon’s inspector general said his office has found no evidence yet that any of the billions of dollars in weapons and aid to Ukraine has been lost to corruption or diverted into the wrong hands. He cautioned that those investigations are only in their early stages
I’m biased so shut up
Strangling a taliban leader by sneaking into their compound at night alone
Narrowly avoiding death 4 times
Exposing yourself in a Taliban ambush to draw attention away from your boys
Running directly into enemy fire, neutralizing the enemy for your team to escape, being killed while doing so
With many more honorable actions to mention, I present to you
The Australian SASR
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Retired Staff Sgt. Nicholas Maimer. (Facebook)
A retired Special Forces soldier died in Ukraine after an apparent building collapse amid a Russian artillery barrage in the embattled city of Bakhmut, according to U.S. officials, claims from a Russian paramilitary leader, and media reports.
Nicholas Maimer, who retired from the National Guard as a staff sergeant, was working with a non-profit group seeking to aid civilians and train Ukrainian troops, CNN cited fellow Americans working in Ukraine as saying.
A spokesperson for the Idaho National Guard, from which Maimer retired on Dec. 24, 2018, with an honorable discharge, expressed condolences to the veteran’s family.
“Our hearts and prayers are with the family of Nicholas Maimer, along with his friends in the community,” said Lt. Col Christopher Borders in a phone interview.
Borders said that Maimer’s military career took him from the active duty Army to the Idaho Army National Guard, with intervening stints in the Utah and California Guard as well. Maimer, who earned his Special Forces tab while with a Utah unit in 2005, was qualified as a Special Forces engineer sergeant, an infantryman, a cavalry scout and a tank crewman.
The leader of the Wagner Group private military corporation, Yevgeny Prigozhin, appeared in a Tuesday video posted to Telegram that displayed a body and U.S. documents that appeared to belong to Maimer. The Russian oligarch claimed Maimer had been directly fighting against his troops, who have borne the brunt of Russia’s bloody drive to capture the city in eastern Ukraine, and deserved “respect because he did not die in his bed as a grandpa but he died at war,” according to a CNN translation.
Military Times could not independently verify the video’s authenticity, but Maimer’s uncle told the Idaho Statesman that the body in the video was that of his nephew.
A State Department spokesperson, speaking anonymously to discuss an American citizen’s reported death, told Military Times that officials are aware of the reports of the death of a U.S. citizen in Bakhmut and are seeking additional information. The spokesperson cautioned that their ability to verify death reports is “extremely limited” and reiterated that U.S. citizens should not travel to Ukraine due to the active armed conflict.
It’s not clear whether Maimer had experienced combat before he went to Ukraine.
Borders, the Idaho Guard spokesperson, provided a list of Maimer’s awards and decorations that did not include any specific War on Terror expeditionary ribbons or combat badges. But Borders noted the difficulty of compiling Guard troops’ service records, particularly for soldiers like Maimer who transferred multiple times between states.
The spokesperson said Maimer deployed to the Philippines as a Utah National Guard Special Forces sergeant from September 2006 until May 2007, though it’s not clear what duties he or his unit held.
According to archived press releases, the Utah Guard-led 1st Battalion, 19th Special Forces Group completed a nine-month rotation with the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines during that time. Troops assigned to that task force, which operated under the Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines banner, were not authorized to participate in combat save for self-defense scenarios, according to a 2016 RAND report.
Troops who participated in that mission were authorized the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, but Maimer’s seemingly-incomplete records do not include one. Other service awards did not include devices to which Maimer should have been entitled.
Maimer received at least one Army Commendation Medal and five Army Achievement Medals during his 20-year career, Borders said.
Davis Winkie is a senior reporter covering the Army. He focuses on investigations, personnel concerns and military justice. Davis, also a Guard veteran, was a finalist in the 2023 Livingston Awards for his work with The Texas Tribune investigating the National Guard’s border missions. He studied history at Vanderbilt and UNC-Chapel Hill.