Let me make my position clear: Osama Bin Laden is dead. U.S. Navy SEALs killed him yesterday. That is a good thing.
But seeing my countrymen celebrating in the streets at a man's death left me with some unfamiliar emotions. See, on the one hand, a man who desperately needed killing--a man whose hands are stained with the blood of more than three thousand Americans, and thousands more Iraqis and Afghans and Pakistanis and Arabs and Muslims and others from all around the world--got what he needed. On the other hand, Americans were celebrating in the streets that a man was dead. It's not something I expected to see in this country. It's the sort of thing we saw in the news after the 9-11 attack, except then it was people who had been taught to hate us celebrating our tragedy.
I'm not sure how I expected Americans to react. Honestly, I never expected we would learn of it this way. I had pretty much given up on such a decisive victory; I figued if he was still alive, he would die in a hole somewhere quietly and we would never know of it until years after the fact. And I know I wasn't the only one. So a decisive, unambiguous victory came as quite a surprise.
I wonder if that wasn't what the celebration was really about. In this war in which we have been conditioned not to expect victory, only a long hard slog to the next difficult step, we suddenly had a victory. A big one.
And when you get a big victory in the middle of a long hard slog, you celebrate.
But let's make no mistake: the slog is not over. The greatest danger to our country two days ago was that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would discover another weakness in our national defense and would strike us again, perhaps even worse than before. The greatest danger today? That we decide the war is over, lower our defenses and relax--and Al Qaeda or one of its murderous partners takes advantage of the weakness we have created and strikes us again, perhaps even worse than before.
Because Al Qaeda is still out there, and even if Bin Laden's death destroys his organization, there are still plenty of people out there who want to kill Americans. Yes, we may have the capacity to kill them all, but what must we become to do it? And how many new enemies will we make in doing it? Military force, even assassination--the word nobody is using--should remain options. But they can't be our only options. The days are long gone when a conquering army could level a city and sow the ground with salt.
How do we win this war? First, we stand ready to kill the Bin Ladens of the world, and we put them on notice that we have both the capacity and the will to do it. We just did that.
Second, we identify the people who would stand against the Bin Ladens in their nations, and we help them. The people of the Middle East who want the chance to choose their own destinies, the people who this year are rising up in their thousands to reject dictators and terror, are our best hope to strangle and smother the Al Qaedas of the world. Because when people have the chance to improve their own lives, when they can roll up their sleeves and make better lives for their families without having to blame someone else for their lot, that's what they do. And they are too busy doing that to worry about killing Americans. And their lives become better, and we trade with them. And war between trading partners is rare.
So we stand behind those who reject dictators and terror. If we can do that, we win.
And here's the really great part: so do they.
The enemy is dead. May we never know his like again.
HN
Monday, May 2, 2011
Sunday, May 1, 2011
How Many Wars Have There Been, Dad?
I asked my son what question he thought I should answer next in this blog. His response: "How many wars have there been in human history?"
Hmph. So much for throwing me a softball! He might as well have asked me how many died on the Eastern Front in World War II. Or how many fought for the Persians at Thermopylae. Or how many bullets were fired in the Civil War. The numbers are unknowable--we can estimate them based on what we do know, but we'll never know for certain.
Still, the question deserves a little attention. The main problem, as I see it, is in the terms: if we could know the numbers, we would still have to define what we mean by war and human history.
Now, HN, that's just stupid, you say. Everybody knows what a war is, and everybody knows what human history is.
Well, maybe. But bear with me. Someone with unlimited time and patience, with access to all the world's existing records, might be able to pore through book after book in library after library and find every recorded instance of war. That would be a complete list, as far as the records go--after all, if it isn't written down, it isn't really part of history. But would it really answer the question? It seems to me an approach like this ignores a huge part of our past. More on that in a bit.
So how should we define a war? You'd think we could say for certain, but a quick glance at our headlines shows we still don't agree on what a war is. Most news outlets will tell you the U.S. is involved in two wars right now--but the military considers Iraq and Afghanistan to be two fronts in the same war, the Global War on Terrorism. Who is right?
And what about the conflicts in Libya and Syria right now? What about Egypt, or Yemen, or Bahrain, or Tunisia? Are those wars? Insurrections? Rebellions? Revolutions? If the rebels lose, will they have been wars, or something else? To the rebels, I think it's safe to say most of these "Arab Spring" movements are wars. To the dictators they seek to throw down, probably not so much--unless the rebels win.
The past gives us plenty of examples, too, as far back as we care to look. What about Israel's incursion into Gaza in 2008-09? What about our own wars against the American Indians--should we count each campaign, or the destruction of each tribe, or each uprising as a single war, or was the whole bloody mess one war from 1865 to 1891? Was France's war in Indochina distinct from ours in Vietnam, or were they parts of the same war?
We can ask the question as far back as Alexander. Should we consider his conquests--of Asia Minor, Persia, Afghanistan, and western India--separate wars? I suspect he would have regarded the whole long march a single glorious string of conquests. I also suspect his adversaries would have considered each of their parts distinct from the others.
But let's say we can reconcile all those. Let's say we can reckon the number of wars of one sort or another during an average year of human history at one. It's probably a low guess, to be honest, but it makes the math easier--and after all, I'm a Histry Nerd, not a math nerd.
So the average number of wars is one--for how many years? We have hard historical evidence of war as far back as the pharaohs of Egypt; the five-thousand-year-old Narmer Palette appears to depict the pharaoh in the act of killing a captive, and another part of the palette shows a row of decapitated corpses. The cultures of the Fertile Crescent--the Sumerians, Assyrians, Hittites, and Babylonians--left similar records.
But archeology places war's origins even farther back. Jericho had walls and a tower, all of stone, eight thousand years ago; even if we don't know who threatened the city, we can be sure it was a who rather than a what. If your enemies are wild beasts, walls of earth or timber or thorns will suffice, and you don't need a tower.
And just so we don't leave the question unasked: how many walls of timber or earth already existed before Jericho built its walls of stone? We can't know that answer, either--but we can bet they weren't all for keeping animals out.
So if we take the earlier date, we get eight thousand years with one war apiece. Eight thousand wars in human history. If that sounds like a high number, consider this: the wars I've mentioned in this post--in fact, all the wars I've mentioned in this blog--don't even scratch the surface. For every year in which we can't count a single war in Europe, we can surely find a year with more than one. And that's only in Europe. I haven't even mentioned Africa, or South America, or Australia, or most of North America, or any but the tiniest slice of Asia. If anything, eight thousand is probably a conservative number.
War is part of the human experience. Our need to protect ourselves, or to improve our family's lot, or to seek more than we have--even if it means someone else, or many someones, must die--is universal. Whatever progress we have made in the last decades or centuries does not yet amount to an eyeblink in the scope of our history--and let's not forget the last century was the most violent in history in spite of that progress. It is wishful thinking at its most dangerous to believe we are anywhere near the end of war.
All the more reason to understand our past; perhaps understanding what we have fought over, and why, and how, will help us find ways not to fight over those things in the future. I remain hopeful we can figure it out, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. I believe courage is the highest of human qualities, and I have to believe one day we will discover the highest form of courage in something other than killing each other.
So eight thousand, by my very rough estimate, and counting. Let's hope the count ends one day.
Now go get your nerd on!
HN
Hmph. So much for throwing me a softball! He might as well have asked me how many died on the Eastern Front in World War II. Or how many fought for the Persians at Thermopylae. Or how many bullets were fired in the Civil War. The numbers are unknowable--we can estimate them based on what we do know, but we'll never know for certain.
Still, the question deserves a little attention. The main problem, as I see it, is in the terms: if we could know the numbers, we would still have to define what we mean by war and human history.
Now, HN, that's just stupid, you say. Everybody knows what a war is, and everybody knows what human history is.
Well, maybe. But bear with me. Someone with unlimited time and patience, with access to all the world's existing records, might be able to pore through book after book in library after library and find every recorded instance of war. That would be a complete list, as far as the records go--after all, if it isn't written down, it isn't really part of history. But would it really answer the question? It seems to me an approach like this ignores a huge part of our past. More on that in a bit.
So how should we define a war? You'd think we could say for certain, but a quick glance at our headlines shows we still don't agree on what a war is. Most news outlets will tell you the U.S. is involved in two wars right now--but the military considers Iraq and Afghanistan to be two fronts in the same war, the Global War on Terrorism. Who is right?
And what about the conflicts in Libya and Syria right now? What about Egypt, or Yemen, or Bahrain, or Tunisia? Are those wars? Insurrections? Rebellions? Revolutions? If the rebels lose, will they have been wars, or something else? To the rebels, I think it's safe to say most of these "Arab Spring" movements are wars. To the dictators they seek to throw down, probably not so much--unless the rebels win.
The past gives us plenty of examples, too, as far back as we care to look. What about Israel's incursion into Gaza in 2008-09? What about our own wars against the American Indians--should we count each campaign, or the destruction of each tribe, or each uprising as a single war, or was the whole bloody mess one war from 1865 to 1891? Was France's war in Indochina distinct from ours in Vietnam, or were they parts of the same war?
We can ask the question as far back as Alexander. Should we consider his conquests--of Asia Minor, Persia, Afghanistan, and western India--separate wars? I suspect he would have regarded the whole long march a single glorious string of conquests. I also suspect his adversaries would have considered each of their parts distinct from the others.
But let's say we can reconcile all those. Let's say we can reckon the number of wars of one sort or another during an average year of human history at one. It's probably a low guess, to be honest, but it makes the math easier--and after all, I'm a Histry Nerd, not a math nerd.
So the average number of wars is one--for how many years? We have hard historical evidence of war as far back as the pharaohs of Egypt; the five-thousand-year-old Narmer Palette appears to depict the pharaoh in the act of killing a captive, and another part of the palette shows a row of decapitated corpses. The cultures of the Fertile Crescent--the Sumerians, Assyrians, Hittites, and Babylonians--left similar records.
But archeology places war's origins even farther back. Jericho had walls and a tower, all of stone, eight thousand years ago; even if we don't know who threatened the city, we can be sure it was a who rather than a what. If your enemies are wild beasts, walls of earth or timber or thorns will suffice, and you don't need a tower.
And just so we don't leave the question unasked: how many walls of timber or earth already existed before Jericho built its walls of stone? We can't know that answer, either--but we can bet they weren't all for keeping animals out.
So if we take the earlier date, we get eight thousand years with one war apiece. Eight thousand wars in human history. If that sounds like a high number, consider this: the wars I've mentioned in this post--in fact, all the wars I've mentioned in this blog--don't even scratch the surface. For every year in which we can't count a single war in Europe, we can surely find a year with more than one. And that's only in Europe. I haven't even mentioned Africa, or South America, or Australia, or most of North America, or any but the tiniest slice of Asia. If anything, eight thousand is probably a conservative number.
War is part of the human experience. Our need to protect ourselves, or to improve our family's lot, or to seek more than we have--even if it means someone else, or many someones, must die--is universal. Whatever progress we have made in the last decades or centuries does not yet amount to an eyeblink in the scope of our history--and let's not forget the last century was the most violent in history in spite of that progress. It is wishful thinking at its most dangerous to believe we are anywhere near the end of war.
All the more reason to understand our past; perhaps understanding what we have fought over, and why, and how, will help us find ways not to fight over those things in the future. I remain hopeful we can figure it out, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. I believe courage is the highest of human qualities, and I have to believe one day we will discover the highest form of courage in something other than killing each other.
So eight thousand, by my very rough estimate, and counting. Let's hope the count ends one day.
Now go get your nerd on!
HN
Friday, April 22, 2011
The Battle of Hampton Roads, 8-9 March 1862
Battle of the Week 2011-10
In our classrooms, the Battle of Hampton Roads gets a curious treatment. We recognize it as a turning point in naval history and treat it as a giant contest between two behemoths--but we give it about three sentences in our textbooks and lectures, and perhaps a question or two on a test or quiz. Every fifth-grader can tell you about the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack (or, if he's from the Deep South, the Virginia), but how many know who won--or what the battle accomplished?
In our classrooms, the Battle of Hampton Roads gets a curious treatment. We recognize it as a turning point in naval history and treat it as a giant contest between two behemoths--but we give it about three sentences in our textbooks and lectures, and perhaps a question or two on a test or quiz. Every fifth-grader can tell you about the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack (or, if he's from the Deep South, the Virginia), but how many know who won--or what the battle accomplished?
There's a reason for that. See, the short answers to those questions are neither and nothing. Neither side won, in the sense that neither ship sustained critical damage and they both left the area under their own power; and they accomplished nothing in the sense that the Union blockade remained in place, but Confederate waters remained firmly in Confederate hands. Of course, the battle changed naval warfare profoundly--but the Civil War was over before the changes could have any real effect on the conflict.
The Confederate ram CSS Virginia was the second incarnation of the USS Merrimack, a steam-powered warship scuttled by Union forces when they abandoned the Gosport Naval Yard in April 1861. The Confederates raised her, cased her in iron, armed her with the latest guns (which the Federals had generously left in the shipyard), and sent her out to break the Union blockade that kept the south from exporting cotton or importing the weapons it needed to fight the war. She had her baptism by fire at Hampton Roads, a waterway at the head of the Chesapeake Bay where three large rivers come together.
The USS Monitor was the Union response to the news that the Confederates were putting an ironclad into the water. Unlike the Virginia, though, she was designed as an ironclad, mounting a rotating turret with two huge 11-inch guns instead of a more traditional broadside with smaller guns. Of the two ships, the Monitor was clearly the more advanced--but that did not make the Virginia any less a threat to the wooden ships she was built to prey upon.
On the 8th of March, 1862, the Virginia steamed into Hampton Roads, supported by three other Confederate ships and two gunboats, to take on the Union vessels blocking their way into the Chesapeake. She opened the fight by ramming the USS Cumberland, which sank so quickly she nearly took the Virginia down with her. Next the Confederate ships turned their attention to the USS Congress, which surrendered after an hour or so of hard fighting. Their next target was the USS Minnesota, whose captain had run her aground to avoid the Cumberland's fate. The failing light and falling tide forced the Virginia to abandon the fight, and she headed upriver to evacuate her wounded.
Confederate spirits were high that night, and the little squadron returned the next day to finish off the Minnesota and see to the other Union ships in the area. They found the Monitor, which had steamed in during the night, waiting for them. The escorts stood off and let the ironclads fight each other.
After the first few minutes of firing, it must have been clear to everybody that the fight would be a long one. Expecting to do battle only with wooden-sided ships, the Virginia carried only explosive shells and hot shot, neither of which had much effect on the Monitor's armor. But the Union ironclad had her own handicap--her big guns were loaded with half their normal powder charge for fear of explosions in her turret. Had the Virginia carried solid shot, she could have penetrated the Monitor's armor and sent her to the bottom. Had the Monitor been firing with full powder-loads, she could have done the same to the Virginia.
As it was, they wasted their ammunition for three hours. The Virginia rammed the Monitor once--but she had lost her ram when she sank the Cumberland the day before, and the attack did no damage. The Monitor tried to run astern of the Virginia and knock her unprotected rudder off--but the Confederate managed to lumber out of the way without damage.
Finally, a shell burst outside the Monitor's exposed pilot-house, temporarily blinding her captain, and she steamed into shallow water where the Virginia could not follow. The captain's intent was to return and rejoin the fight as soon he could, but the Virginia, after waiting an hour or so and determining the Monitor wasn't coming back, turned and steamed back toward her base at Norfolk. The Monitor returned in time to see her opponent apparently retreating--and both sides claimed the victory, even though neither had accomplished its objectives.
So the results: two ships sunk (the Congress had exploded in the night), four others--including the ironclads--heavily damaged, and three or four hundred men dead and wounded. And that's about it. The blockade remained in place, and the following month the Confederates had to abandon Norfolk, scuttling the Virginia because it couldn't go any farther upriver. The Monitor sank in choppy seas in December.
But the battle's real impact was the changes it wrought in naval warfare. The world quickly recognized the advantages of a turret over a broadside; although it meant a ship could carry fewer guns, those could be heavier, and the ship could bring its guns to bear in any direction without having to maneuver. The Union commissioned several more Monitor-class ships--in fact, the turreted design spread rapidly around the world, changing the way naval ships looked and fought. The design can still be found on battleships today, and turreted heavy guns remained the primary armament of the world's most powerful ships for three quarters of a century--until aircraft launched from Japanese carriers at Pearl Harbor showed the world how naval warfare had changed again.
So the Dreadnoughts and Bismarcks and Missouris and Yamatos all owe their concept to a small ship that changed the way nations thought about ship-to-ship combat. That, I suppose, is the real legacy of the Battle of Hampton Roads.
You can read more about the battle at the link below:
Now go get your nerd on!
HN
Sunday, April 17, 2011
A Nerd Moment. Has This Ever Happened To You?
I had a Nerd Moment yesterday morning.
You know what I'm talking about. You're buzzing along in your normal world, being responsible, being practical, when something happens that jolts you out of the practical world and sends you somewhere else. And for some time, a minute or an hour or a week, it's hard to see anything else and you feel compelled to focus on whatever caught your attention. In a movie or book, it's the pivotal moment, the moment when the brilliant but unproductive scientist or doctor or engineer watches something happen, drops whatever he's doing, and spends the next week working non-stop, barely sleeping or eating, coming up with the Big Idea the story hangs on. It's the moment that inspires an entrepreneur to start a company to solve one problem.
Some people call it a Eureka Moment, or a Moment of Clarity. I call it a Nerd Moment.
This time, the nerd struck me on my daughter's soccer field. It was a girl on the opposing team that did it.
She was tall--among the tallest players on the field. She was lean, and fair, and freckled. She squinted in the sun, her focus entirely on the game, and in her eyes I read just a hint of coldness. This girl knew just what she wanted and how to get it.
But it was her hair, flame-red and curly and bound at the back of her head to froth down her back to just between her shoulder blades, that really caught my attention. That, and the fact that her team wore vivid emerald green. And in my mind, she became something else.
I saw her as an Irish princess, a cloak around her shoulders and a long sword in her hand in an age before the Vikings ravaged Ireland. At first I thought the sword was hers--that she was a warrior-princess standing guard over her home while her father and brothers and cousins were off making war against one of their neighbors. But as the vision developed, I realized the sword was her father's; she stood holding it for him while he readied himself to leave for war. And she was less than happy to be the one left behind. She had already asked if she could go with him, but he had firmly refused, and her noble pride wouldn't let her beg. But she burned to go with him and share in the glory and adventure of battle, and she vowed to herself that one day, she would--no matter what he said.
To be fair, she could have been nearly anyone: a thrall from Sweden or Norway, a Dane, a Scot. She could even have been Berber. She could have been a stowaway on the Titanic, or working in a factory in London, or sister to a Dane who hoped to prove himself by joining a ship's crew and going i-viking. She could have been crossing the prairie with her family, moving west to a better life in Texas or California, or watching her father leave for the Army in 1861, or 1942. I don't know her or her ancestry--so I'm free to come up with any story I want. And to me, she is an Irish princess in an age before the Vikings.
I've never really had more than a passing historical interest in the Irish. My fascination has always been with the other side of the Irish Sea, with the Britons and Picts and Scots. But thanks to a nameless redhead in a green soccer jersey--I may just have to write an Irish story one day.
My daughter's team lost the game 5-4. But my daughter played hard, and that made me proud. And you know, it's not so bad to do your best and lose a close game when the other team has an Irish princess playing for them.
Be open to the Nerd Moments. You never know where they might take you.
And go get your nerd on!
HN
You know what I'm talking about. You're buzzing along in your normal world, being responsible, being practical, when something happens that jolts you out of the practical world and sends you somewhere else. And for some time, a minute or an hour or a week, it's hard to see anything else and you feel compelled to focus on whatever caught your attention. In a movie or book, it's the pivotal moment, the moment when the brilliant but unproductive scientist or doctor or engineer watches something happen, drops whatever he's doing, and spends the next week working non-stop, barely sleeping or eating, coming up with the Big Idea the story hangs on. It's the moment that inspires an entrepreneur to start a company to solve one problem.
Some people call it a Eureka Moment, or a Moment of Clarity. I call it a Nerd Moment.
This time, the nerd struck me on my daughter's soccer field. It was a girl on the opposing team that did it.
She was tall--among the tallest players on the field. She was lean, and fair, and freckled. She squinted in the sun, her focus entirely on the game, and in her eyes I read just a hint of coldness. This girl knew just what she wanted and how to get it.
But it was her hair, flame-red and curly and bound at the back of her head to froth down her back to just between her shoulder blades, that really caught my attention. That, and the fact that her team wore vivid emerald green. And in my mind, she became something else.
I saw her as an Irish princess, a cloak around her shoulders and a long sword in her hand in an age before the Vikings ravaged Ireland. At first I thought the sword was hers--that she was a warrior-princess standing guard over her home while her father and brothers and cousins were off making war against one of their neighbors. But as the vision developed, I realized the sword was her father's; she stood holding it for him while he readied himself to leave for war. And she was less than happy to be the one left behind. She had already asked if she could go with him, but he had firmly refused, and her noble pride wouldn't let her beg. But she burned to go with him and share in the glory and adventure of battle, and she vowed to herself that one day, she would--no matter what he said.
To be fair, she could have been nearly anyone: a thrall from Sweden or Norway, a Dane, a Scot. She could even have been Berber. She could have been a stowaway on the Titanic, or working in a factory in London, or sister to a Dane who hoped to prove himself by joining a ship's crew and going i-viking. She could have been crossing the prairie with her family, moving west to a better life in Texas or California, or watching her father leave for the Army in 1861, or 1942. I don't know her or her ancestry--so I'm free to come up with any story I want. And to me, she is an Irish princess in an age before the Vikings.
I've never really had more than a passing historical interest in the Irish. My fascination has always been with the other side of the Irish Sea, with the Britons and Picts and Scots. But thanks to a nameless redhead in a green soccer jersey--I may just have to write an Irish story one day.
My daughter's team lost the game 5-4. But my daughter played hard, and that made me proud. And you know, it's not so bad to do your best and lose a close game when the other team has an Irish princess playing for them.
Be open to the Nerd Moments. You never know where they might take you.
And go get your nerd on!
HN
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