Micro Mention "American Prometheus"

 

J. Robert Oppenheimer is a tragic figure of American history whose accomplishments were all overshadowed by one thing; he was the father of the atomic bomb. Once a hero, then painted a villain and torn down by his own. “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin captures that narrative.

I talk about that idea in more detail in my full review. 

What I want to point out, though, for this little piece is, isn't it amazing how like in this book, when the conservative political party froths its way up into a moral panic, lives are ruined, and careers are destroyed.

But when a right-wing politician straight up breaks the law, they fly away in their helicopter with no consequences. Or fights an entire debacle shadow war with no consequences. Or an actual conventional war, twice, with little to no plan with no consequences. Or, finally, continues to be president after seriously suggesting protestors be shot in the legs or to cure a virus with bleach injections.

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Micro Mention "The Home Front: Life in America During WWII"

World War 2 was an incredibly destructive event, but it was no picnic back on the home front either. In the audible original “The Home Front: Life in America During WWII,” you can get a sense of the heroic and, sadly, some not so heroic American actions during & after the war.

I’ve thought a lot about, talked a lot, and even written a lot about the Second World War on this blog, and I think, more than any other event in the modern era, no event has shaped our world more than it. Certainly, other events before and after helped to shape the present, but it’s almost like there is a clear dividing line in modern history that even World War One didn’t quite define—not like the second one. The world was one way before the war and quite another place after it.

My suspicion is it’s because as we settled into the cold war, we collectively realized as a species that we now had the means to end civilization and extinguish ourselves with nuclear weapons. It’s hard to grasp, to even approach, that we seriously considered suicide for decades—generations—as a species.

"American Prometheus" by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin--Nonfiction Review

In this review, we’re talking about the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. It tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer—father of the atomic bomb.

What I love about this book:

As someone interested in technology, physics, and history, this book satisfies all of those interests in one fell swoop. At first, I assumed it would be strictly a biography of Oppenheimer during his time with The Manhattan Project and shortly after that because that’s when he was the director at Los Alamos, where we all know him for his work—the building of the first nuclear weapons. “American Prometheus” is actually the entire story of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life from the cradle to the grave. As such, it provides us with great context for how and why he became the father of the atom bomb. 

Oppenheimer was someone whose life straddles two sides of a pivotal moment in history. I enjoyed vicariously seeing the world—as best you can imagine through books like these—through his eyes and perceptions. It has been growing in my mind this idea that while we may have been on the winning side of World War Two, we won at a significant cost to our nation’s soul and character. 

The World Wars are often expressed in numbers—number of dead—number of planes, tanks, and ships lost—number of dollars spent. So the intangibles get left by the wayside because they’re impossible to quantify. What I mean by our national character and soul is that when we fought against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, we were morally in the right and superior to our foes. 

But then we won, and things change. An ugly thing started to creep into America, the presumption that we would always be morally right and superior to our adversaries—no matter what we did because we dubbed ourselves the good guys. It stood to reason that any actions done by the good guys would have to ex post facto be good and justified for the greater good. Even when objectively it wasn’t true. This book shows in the latter half how our paranoia caused us to turn on our own, seeing traitors and communists everywhere in our midst, including our national luminaries such as Oppenheimer.

This is not the focus of this book but is given context through Oppenheimer’s life that it occurred to me when reading “American Prometheus” that there is a kind of repetitive beat to the American character. We fought the American Civil war, and the crux of it was that all people are people and should be able to partake and enjoy the fruits of freedom, against a foe who, based on an odious theory of race, disagreed. Then after we won, we backslid with the death of reconstruction. In World War Two, something similar happened, and after we won, we backslid again. 

The argument could be made that this has always been our central conflict. It’s been with us even all the way back to the Revolutionary War against Britain because our founding fathers pointed out, as a central justifying point for our rebellion, the question; what is a King? Is he not but a man? And as just a man, how could he be any more than merely equal to his fellow-men?

What I don’t love about this book:

So this book won a Pulitzer Prize in biography in 2006—and that’s great, don’t get me wrong—but my complaint is for such an esteemed book, and it’s a great book, how is it the audiobook version is produced so poorly? 

The narrator isn’t totally to blame. He’s fine. But somewhere along the line, the editing got sloppy, and the sound levels are all over the place. In one sentence, it’ll sound like Jeff Cummings is right next to you. The next, he’ll sound like he’s across the room, and then right back next to you a heartbeat later. I get it’s an older audiobook, but—holy hell—it’s not like 2007 when the audiobook was released was the dark ages. For a ninety-five percent exclusive audiobook reader, it was beyond distracting for me.

My chief complaint about the content of this book is that the authors will state a point, share a quote, and then make sure to repeat it again. This typically happens at the beginning of one of their usually very long chapters—my feelings about that topic are well documented—and then rehammer that point or quote later in the chapter. It isn’t clever. It just adds to a whole circular repetitive feel to the whole book. You might have noticed I just did something similar with nearly every sentence in this paragraph, and it was annoying then too!

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Author's Website: https://kaibird.com/

Parting thoughts:

One of the most terrible things about American culture over great periods seems to be our proclivity to vacillate back and forth on our beliefs. It’s uncomfortable—to me at least—how many times we defeat a foe either ideologically, on the battlefield, or both only to then cede ground to them. Then some of our number spontaneously decide something like, “well, maybe those objectively terrible people had a point!”

Again calling back to the civil war period, we did it with the Confederacy, then the Ku Klux Klan, and now some people openly call themselves Nazis. All of those original groups engaged in slavery and genocide to varying degrees. It does a disservice to the men and women who sacrificed so much to put them down that we now allow them a seat at the table as though they had something legitimate to add to the conversation. Now I get this is starting to sound like an anti-free speech argument, and that isn’t my intention. I believe in free speech. I believe you should be allowed to say nearly anything you want without censorship from the government, as defined in the first amendment.

What I don’t believe in is immunity to consequences because of your words or a guaranteed platform provided by privately or publicly owned companies. The first amendment protects you from the government, but any other entity which isn’t the government is free to decide not to do business with you because you went on a racist tirade on Youtube. I cannot begin to tell you how much it makes me grind my teeth when people get this wrong still when they accuse Youtube or Facebook, their job, or whatever else that isn’t part of the government of violating their first amendment rights.

I digress—and I’m straying from my original point—I can’t help but be horribly conflicted with what happened in Afghanistan. On the one hand, I never agreed with the war. I didn’t think we should have invaded in the first place. To continue to pour blood and treasure into the cause decades on, intellectually, I understand, would be folly. But it smacks a lot of what I was saying earlier. It kind of smells like the age-old American tradition to cede ground because we’re tired of the fight—and maybe this fight wasn’t worth fighting in the first place. I thought so and still think so.

But watching people cling to the outside of American planes in takeoff—people who fought with us, people who believed in us, only to fall to their deaths—how did it come to this? 

There had to be a better way.

Talking In Obscurity, "A Crime in the Family," by Sacha Batthyany

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 https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/656iwc/A_Crime_in_the_Family_Edit_7tfh9.mp3

It's podcast day Obscurists! Today Steve and I are talking about "A Crime in the Family," by Sacha Batthyany a memoir about the author's family and their actions and inactions during the worst times of WW2. I've already reviewed this book on the blog and you can check out that full review here. 

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"A Crime in the Family" by Sacha Batthyany--Nonfiction Review

We’re talking about Sacha Batthyany’s “A Crime in the Family,” which is a hard historical look at a small picture of WW2 in Hungary. It shines a light on the great question of the last century; how could normal people tolerate and abide such evil?

What I love about this book:

Often books about the holocaust and WW2 are broad in scope, fixated on the numbers of victims and the titans and tyrants of the day. And while that can be fascinating in its own right, I appreciate that this book is about individuals who lived through those times. I like the human scale Batthyany adheres to wherever possible.

I was especially taken with the excerpts taken straight from journal entries of people who lived through the events of Hungary’s participation in the war as a Nazi ally. The journals were from the perspectives of a Hungarian Jew and a minor noblewoman who wasn’t Jewish—both lost everything in their own turn. One when the Nazis came, and the other when the Russian Red Army steamrolled through Hungary.

There is something morbidly fascinating about Batthyany’s story of his great aunt. Maybe she didn’t directly participate in a massacre of Jews at Rechnitz—maybe—but she was still hostess to Nazis and threw the party that involved people getting drunk while casually murdering Jewish laborers. When discovering such a terrible secret about your family, what do you do? Writing a book about it and shining a light on it seems the only responsible thing to do, like Sacha Batthyany did with this book.

This book is unsparing and withering toward the Batthyanys, and it was written by a Batthyany. There is a certain amount of courage to admit the truth that Great Aunt Margit was flat out, stone-cold, evil—and the rest of the family carried that stain with them in their cowardice that also resulted in the deaths of more Jewish people through inaction.

This had to be an incredibly difficult book to write, and I admire Sacha Batthyany for doing it because he didn’t just summarize the past from journal entries. He really did the work, faced the past, went to all the places, talked to surviving family members of the Jewish family who were so entwined with his own. I can’t imagine how anxiety-ridden he must have been facing Agnes and her daughters to talk about the past and how his family failed them in varying degrees.

What I don’t love about this book:

I’ve said this before with nonfictions; I like a little distance between biographer and subject, which is impossible with this book because Batthyany is writing about his family, which obviously he is a member of that family. 

What I really don’t like about this book is when he deviates or creatively imagines what might have happened or how a thing was said when his source materials don’t provide the necessary detail. He imagines how certain family members interacted, sometimes in more than one way, down to their tone, and imagines motivations behind those actions. In my opinion, this is all naval gazing at its absolute worst, and every time he engaged in it, I understood he was trying to inject more character and life into the story. Still, the story didn’t need it—the journals and family stories spoke enough for themselves. They didn’t need his novelistic touches.

Batthyany also includes a lot of his conversations with his psychiatrist in this book, and while I was reading it, I wasn’t sure if I liked that aspect of this book or not. I’m still not sure—so it’s not a dislike per se, but I think my unease with it is, I feel, seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist is a very personal medical thing. Most people don’t talk about their regular doctor visits with strangers. It’s the same thing to me. To me, sharing your experiences with therapy or your doctor is your choice, but it’s odd to me to do it with strangers and not just with family and close friends. I wasn’t against hearing the details of his sessions with his therapist, but I was confused about why he’d want me, a stranger, to know this about him. Maybe the point is to show a ripple effect through the generations of his family from actions and inactions his family took in the past that has had a profound impact on him today.

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Parting thoughts:

Cowardice is important thematically in this book, and it’s something that is nearly universally disdained. Though, in the moment of crisis—if we’re all being honest—it’s hard to know whether or not we have the fortitude to rise to the challenge and stand up for what is right. I know I’ve struggled with this topic before. Sometimes, I’ve had occasion to be proud of my actions, others—not so much.

It’s a hard thing to realize you’re a coward. Admitting it to yourself is soul-wracking. But, what I’ve learned through personal experience is that just because you were a coward today doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be one tomorrow.

Bravery, like any skill, is something that can be practiced and improved. I have many social anxieties, not a shocking revelation—most introverts do, I imagine. Parties or really any social gathering greater than five people make me uncomfortable, as my starting position. I don’t know where to stand, what to do with my hands, how to engage in conversation with someone I don’t know very well, what to do when someone smiles, or even how to ask basic questions. In theory, I do. You just do it. But in practice, I find myself wandering the space aimlessly and wraith-like, not really interacting with anything or anyone just existing in this space.

That’s all just typical human interaction with nothing but a little embarrassment at stake. So when faced with the hypothetical of real consequences, like do I stand up to the Nazis who, for the most part, would think nothing about murdering me, I’m incredibly uncertain. I can understand why the Batthyanys were who they were. Also, why, they, for the most part, were universally against talking about the past. The answer is shame, pure and simple. 

It was vital to tell the story of that shame, though, as Sacha Batthyany did because it provides practice in the realm of the hypothetical for everyone who reads it. Shame can transcend the moment and pass like a stain from one generation to the next. It’s essential to learn that and know that—feel its weight and impact if only vicariously, for maybe that will be your only defense when faced with a test similar to the ones the Battyhanys collectively failed.

Micro Mention "The Daughters of Yalta"

"The Daughters of Yalta" by Catherine Katz is an amazing history taking place near the end of WW2, which gets glossed over as much as its subjects. It captures that tragic optimism that the allies might have made a better world, only for the cold war to happen.

I think a lot about the character of America immediately before, during, and after WW2. The time period this book concerns itself with, during the war, was still a period where I feel the United States was acting according to its highest ideals. Having just emerged from its isolationist ways, the country fought for the good of everyone and against tyranny.    

However, the Cold War would be such an overcorrection from the isolationism of the past that—to ensure primacy—our leaders often looked to our old foe's authoritarian playbook to sow fear and demand obedience, both domestically and abroad. If you'd like to check out my full review of this book, you can find it here. 

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Author's Website: https://www.catherinegracekatz.com/

"The Daughters of Yalta," by Catherine Katz--Nonfiction Review

Hello, obscurists! Today we’re checking out Catherine Katz’s “The Daughters of Yalta,” a nonfiction look at the lives of three young women, close to the highest echelons of power amongst the allies near the close of World War II and the conference at Yalta. That was the conference where the end of the war was discussed, and the details of the future United Nations were hammered out—roughly.

What I love about this book: 

Katz shines a light on a point in history near the end of World War II that isn’t discussed much, and I didn’t know a lot about either—the Yalta conference. By telling the story from the perspectives of Kathleen Harriman, Sarah Churchill, and Anna Roosevelt, who were all present to assist their fathers, we get to see the war up close from a female perspective, which, to be frank, is often overlooked in the histories of the war.

For the meat of the book, there is a tight focus on the events immediately before, during, and around the conference. I appreciated this approach because it drives home the awkwardness of the allies meeting at Yalta. At times it feels like the allied powers preparing to take a victory lap near the conclusion of the war, and other times it feels like an odd extended family gathering. Then at other times, both of those masks fall away, and it becomes a realpolitik struggle between adversaries who barely tolerate each other. Katz captures all of that in this book. 

On top of the conference’s high-level political dramatics, we get to learn about the figures involved in the conference through the eyes of their daughters. The book’s narrative is sometimes heartbreaking when you consider how Anna, finally managing to be in her father’s inner circle, has to confront the truth that her father was dying. Then there are the Churchill’s, Sarah’s own struggles in love and being so close to her father, Winston, while in the military herself. Of the daughters, though, I think I loved dynamic and fearless Kathleen the most. The fact that she basically taught herself Russian, in short order, and went to wherever she needed to be so that she could be of the greatest use—including the site of a mass grave—demonstrates the quality of the steel in her soul.

What I don’t love about this book:

There really isn’t a whole lot I didn’t love about this book, but in the area of maximum quibble, occasionally, I found it challenging to keep Sarah and Anna straight in my head. Though I think that’s less to do with the writing of the book and more just because they’re similar-sounding names, and I’m an audiobook person. So really, the fault is mine here.

I can understand an argument that the post-Yalta part of the book goes on a bit long, diminishing the effect of the tight focus earlier on in the narrative. Personally, I liked the after Yalta epilogue and getting to hear a sketch of the rest of these three women’s lives. However, for me, the chapter immediately preceding that was a bit more like marking time until Katz worked up to telling the story of the days right before and after FDR’s death.

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Parting thoughts:

A thing that I liked in this book that I thought I would leave for this section to expand a bit more on is how there was real optimism at times, toward the end of the war, that the allies would create a better world. In my opinion, at times, even the Russians felt that optimism too, which is what makes the following decades of the cold war all the more tragic.

World War II’s legacy should have been how the world, despite its differences, came together to reject fascism, but—not to get too cynical here—that’s still a fight we’re struggling with even today. Sadly, World War II’s real legacy is the dawn of the nuclear age, which, again, could have been—if we were all a bit better—an age of new power sources for constructive ends. It wasn’t to be, though. Find me a person whose first thought when they hear the word “nuclear” isn’t “weapon,” and I’ll show you a liar.

It genuinely becomes more and more surprising to me, the more I read history, that we didn’t contrive to annihilate ourselves in nuclear hellfire before now. There’s always tomorrow, I guess. The problem with nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction as doctrines are they assume that the leaders are all sane—something I’m not convinced is a prerequisite to be a world leader. I think it should be, no arguments from me on that point. I’m just saying it isn’t so, which is different. But to end this digression on a more positive note, I also believe that if people, who fought and lived through World War II, could be optimistic that the world could be better, then who are we to argue? We owe it to them to try harder, be smarter—in short—be better than we have ever been so that the next group after us can be even better. That’s the point of studying history.

"Slaughterhouse-Five," by Kurt Vonnegut--Fiction Review

Today we’re going to talk about “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, the novel that made that man’s career. Sometimes, the hype is real, and while my personal favorite Vonnegut story is “Sirens of Titan,” I felt I should talk about the most well known Vonnegut story first. 

“Slaughterhouse-Five” is a hard story to classify because Vonnegut was one of those literary darlings who didn’t constrain himself to any one mere genre. But since I hate the dreaded catch-all “fiction,” classification let’s give it a shot—“Slaughterhouse-Five” certainly has its share of science fiction elements, with the time travel and whatnot. However, I’d probably have to peg it most accurately as a darkly humorous anti-war novel. 

***The Non-Spoiler part of this review***

What I love about this book:

To steal a descriptor I find fitting that I had read about a character in a novel I’d read recently, Kurt Vonnegut was cheerfully disappointed in the entirety of the human experience. His writing captures that feeling at all times. While typically, I consider myself an optimist or would like to think I make an effort at being an optimist, and let’s face it I’m probably just a deluded pessimist. It’s sometimes fun to read someone’s work, which takes the diametrically opposite outlook on life. That’s why I love Kurt Vonnegut’s work, including this book, he reminds me that no one and nothing should take itself so seriously.

The time and place Vonnegut manages to conjure with his writing specifically when he’s talking about Dresden. He talks about his brief impressions of the city before the firebombing, immediately afterward, and years later. In the section immediately after the bombing, when the POWs are conscripted to sift through the ruins, I was especially disturbed by his description of the hunt for bodies as being the worst Easter Egg hunt ever. It’s that jarring contrast that makes Vonnegut’s writing powerful. 

What I don’t love about this book:

Kurt Vonnegut is often remembered or accused of being pretentious, and it’s a charge that even if you don’t agree with it, you can see the argument for, even in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” There are numerous times where Vonnegut delves into metaphysics in this novel that become eye-crossing tedious to follow. It’s especially likely to happen when he discusses his beloved aliens, the Tralfamadorians, which normally I’m thrilled by the inclusion of space aliens.   

Another thing I’m not a fan of is the numerous and varied characters don’t develop. They are precisely the same people when you meet them as when they leave the scene forever. Part of this, is there are a lot of them, when you have a large cast of named characters it’s hard to give them all the spotlight to grow and change—but nobody does. It makes sense why Billy doesn’t change throughout the book—he’s unstuck in time and experienced all the moments of his life and therefore has nothing to cause him to change or grow. The other characters orbiting Billy, make less sense, though. If I were to hazard a guess, the implicit messaging is all characters are like Billy, they just can’t perceive it as he can, and therefore no one is capable of change. I get it—it’s just not something that resonates with me.   

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***The Spoiler part of this review***

***Ye be warned to turn back now***

"Shattered Sword," by Anthony Tully and Jonathan Parshall--Nonfiction Review

It’s the Friday after memorial day, my fine internet strangers, so for today’s review, we’re talking about “Shattered Sword” by Anthony Tully and Jonathan Parshall, a history on the Battle of Midway during World War Two. How this nonfiction is different from most contemporary histories of the battle written in English is it’s largely from the Japanese’s perspective. 

What I love about this book:

“Shattered Sword” is a deep dive into the minute details of the Battle of Midway, leading up to the battle, during, and immediately after the battle. The authors use a plethora of eyewitness accounts where possible and inform those accounts by filling in gaps with official logs from the ships that fought the battle.

I appreciate the attention they took to giving the best possible description of the military hardware being used and their differences on either side of the conflict. The same goes for the different tactical doctrines of the Japanese and American naval ships and aviators. 

War is rarely as symmetrical as it’s imagined in the movies where it’s either shown as a conflict of equals or one side which is vastly technologically superior to the other. World War Two is a fascinating conflict to me because it’s a hodgepodge of different militaries with different advantages and disadvantages, and the technology level is asymmetrical. 

What I mean by this is the Japanese Zero fighter was unquestionably a better plane than the American Wildcat—fighting a Zero in a Wildcat was almost always a death sentence. The Japanese didn’t have a handle on radar like the Americans did, which created a whole different tactical dimension. American torpedos were notoriously unreliable compared to their Japanese counterparts, often being too heavy and sailing right under their targets or when they weren’t, ramming into their targets but then would fail to explode. On the other hand, American anti-aircraft guns were strikingly superior to the Japanese AA guns, which didn’t manage to shoot down more than two American planes, according to “Shattered Sword,” during the Battle of Midway.

The book captures this back and forth comparison of Japanese strengths and weaknesses vs. American strengths and weaknesses—but it’s more than just that. It also describes the mindsets and cultures of that era that created those advantages and disadvantages. “Shattered Sword” has, even more, to offer than just military hardware comparative analysis and cultural commentary of the opposing forces—it also delves into the strategic mistakes that Admiral Yamamoto made before a single shot was ever fired. Then it breaks down hour-by-hour how those mistakes disastrously played out for the Japanese at Midway.          

What I don’t love about this book:

I appreciate the authors’ rigorous sticktoitiveness to what can be analyzed or conjectured from their own personal ken. However, when it comes to the point at the end of the book about the significance of the actual Battle of Midway in the Pacific War, I feel they’re a bit understated. Indeed, I accept the notion that in a prolonged war, based on economics, access to raw materials, personnel, and frankly the number of usable shipyards, I believe that an American naval victory in the Pacific over the Japanese was inevitable. I understand their reasoning for pouring a cold bucket of reality on the myths of Midway.  There certainly is an over-inflation of the importance placed on an American victory there to the Allies cause. 

What I disagree with is they seem only to measure “significance” based on the final results of the war. There is a lot to be said for soldiers’ and sailors’ morale and how it impacts their fighting effectiveness. And the other thing to take into account is initiative, which is paradoxical because the authors talk about the importance of initiative more than once in this book and how important it is for strategic purposes. So a loss at Midway would have been a massive blow to both American morale and initiative, while maybe this wouldn’t change the end result of the war; it would have certainly dragged it out longer, and cost more lives and ships. That’s my counter-argument for why winning at Midway was so crucial to the American navy. The authors even point out that after Midway, the Japanese won a few tactical victories but never recaptured the overall strategic initiative and, therefore, couldn’t make any moves that weren’t just reactions to what the Americans were doing.          

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Parting thoughts:

I watched the 2019 movie “Midway,” at about the same time I was reading this book. While it does an admirable job of using actual historical American aviators as characters instead of fictional creations, and it gets the what happened and when mostly right—it’s still primarily popcorn-munching nonsense. 

What it and nearly every other movie based on World War Two gets wrong—on purpose, in my opinion—is how ill-prepared the United States was at the beginning of the war. Hollywood is squeamish about this fact, and not just with “Midway” if you’ve ever seen “Pearl Harbor,” you can see the same thing. What I’m referring too are these movies play lip service to the idea that we weren’t prepared for war and then the plucky, brave American ace combat pilots get into their planes and give those ole’ Japanese what for and splash a few zeros. 

That myth is a disservice to the memory of those men who flew those planes and fought the Japanese. What they were, was mostly amateurs, who had shittier and slower planes than the Japanese—but those brave amateurs still got into those crappy planes, fought, and died in droves. Day in, day out, until we managed to grind the Japanese down by our ability to outproduce them, and those amateurs became seasoned pilots, and we finally built some better planes. That is true bravery, to know you’re outgunned, by better pilots, with better machines, and still, you’re going to fight until the homefront can build more and better ships and planes. Books like “Shattered Sword” and “Tin Can Titans” and “The Arsenal of Democracy” really drive home our ill-preparedness to the point that as an American, it gave me a minor existential crisis. 

The United States, as the underdog and not the most technologically advanced in warfighting capabilities, like with every other American, is a foreign concept to me.  It’s a statement that almost has no meaning—like saying the sky is going to be C sharp tomorrow instead of blue. It sheds light on our current pathological over preparedness to fight a conventional war like nothing the world has ever seen or is likely even capable of launching against us. The United States isn’t satisfied with spending more on defense than the next most prepared guy—we spend more on it then the next ten most prepared guys, where guys are countries, and nearly all of them are our allies. This is why no one does or likely will, in the near future, commit to fighting us in a conventional war. If at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, we’d agreed to settle things by lining up all of their tanks vs. all of our tanks—then the conflict would’ve ended in less than an hour.  Hell, most of our tanks wouldn’t need to fire a single shot or even put shells in most of the tanks—or gas. This is because the Taliban never had the resources to field a battalion of tanks, so why would they fight that way? The answer is they wouldn’t, and obviously didn’t, they stuck to their strengths, which is mostly guerrilla warfare tactics in either mountainous or urban environments. That isn’t a way to win against a standing army, but it is a way not to lose and, after all, a strategy that is essentially a holding pattern until the paradigm changes is a perfectly valid one—I mean, we did it. Also, this isn’t the first time this tactic has been used against us, all of the Vietnam war was essentially our soldiers wandering the jungle while the Vietnamese used guerrilla tactics on us until we gave up and went home.      

These are the sorts of thoughts that give me pause when people start talking real gung-ho about a war with China. They cite our military might: how powerful our ships, planes, guns, bombs, drones, and whatever else is and how technologically advanced we are as if I can’t appreciate that simple logic. Going back through American history—to all the wars that were win or face annihilation, which wasn’t all of them despite what the government would like you to believe, we didn’t win because we made the best guns, ships, or planes. In World War Two, for example, we won out against the Japanese and the Germans who overall had superior training and weapons because we could make more than them. As in, in more people and guns—Russia was especially good at the people part, not so much the guns part. In a modern conflict between the United States and China, who do you think has the production advantage? 

This is all navel-gazing, though, because it’ll never be an issue. Here is a bold prediction, and history has a way of making people eat those, but I don’t believe a multi-year, global conflict like a world war, fought with traditional weapons, like guns, planes, tanks, and ships—can ever happen again. That sounds reassuring, but it isn’t, it’s much worse than that because nuclear weapons exist. The moment a nuclear power gets backed into the metaphorical corner by conventional weapons where the genuine threat of annihilation seems likely—or even possible—well then, they can always just nuke the fuck out of the other guy. That guy will, of course, choose to nuke the fuck out of him right back. After all the radioactive fallout finally washes away over the bones of our civilization, then the cockroaches will get their shot at being “civilized.”

While we’re on a negative spiral here—let’s commit to it, and I’ll leave you with this particularly unpleasant thought. The only reason all of this hasn’t already happened is because of a concept called nuclear deterrence. What it basically means is, “I have nukes, and you have nukes, and if you use your nukes, I’ll use mine, and vice versa, and either way, we’ll both end up dead—so let’s not do that.” However, the Achilles heel of nuclear deterrence is it presumes everyone involved has an understanding of and respect for the power of these weapons and is also perfectly rational, reasonable, and not suicidal. Unfortunately, about ten thousand years of human history teach us that those traits are really just options in our leaders and not necessarily requirements.