Riding the Red Horse (59 page)

A Magic Broken
by Vox Day

A Throne of Bones
by Vox Day

The Wardog's Coin
by Vox Day

The Last Witchking
by Vox Day

Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy
by Vox Day

The Altar of Hate
by Vox Day

The War in Heaven
by Theodore Beale

The World in Shadow
by Theodore Beale

The Wrath of Angels
by Theodore Beale

NON-FICTION

On War: The Collected Columns of William S. Lind 2003-2009
by William S. Lind

Four Generations of Modern War
by William S. Lind

Equality: The Impossible Quest
by Martin van Creveld

Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
by John C. Wright

Astronomy and Astrophysics
by Dr. Sarah Salviander

CASTALIA CLASSICS

The Programmed Man
by Jean and Jeff Sutton

Apollo at Go
by Jeff Sutton

First on the Moon
by Jeff Sutton

AUDIOBOOKS

A Magic Broken
, narrated by Nick Afka Thomas

Four Generations of Modern War
, narrated by William S. Lind

TRANSLATIONS

Särjetty taika

QUANTUM MORTIS Un Hombre Disperso

QUANTUM MORTIS Gravedad Mata

Una Estrella Brillante para Guiarlos

QUANTUM MORTIS Um Homem Desintegrado

QUANTUM MORTIS Gravidade Mortal

Uma Magia Perdida

Mantra yang Rusak

La Moneta dal Mercenario

I Ragazzoni non Piangono

QUANTUM MORTIS Тежина Смрти

QUANTUM MORTIS Der programmierte Verstand

Grosse Jungs weinen nicht

Understanding 4th Generation War

1.
The word “generation” as used here is shorthand for “dialectically qualitative shift.”

2.
William S. Lind, COL Keith Nightengale, CPT John F. Schmitt, COL Joseph W. Sutton, and LTC Gary I. Wilson, “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation”,
Marine Corps Gazette
(October 1989): 22-26. Published simultaneously in
Military Review
(October 1989): 2-11.

3.
Martin van Creveld, lecture, Norwegian Naval Academy, Bergen, Norway, 14 May 2004.

4.
U.S. Department of Defense, Transformation Planning Guidance (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, April 2003),

5.
GEN James Mattis, letter to a faculty member at the National Defense University.

6.
Barbara Tuchman,
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1979).

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Battlefield Lasers

1.
FBI Sets Sights on Laser Pointer Aircraft Attacks, USNEWS, 5 June, 2014

2.
Laser Weapons System
Wikipedia link.

3.
Pew, Pew! Navy Laser Blasts Targets In Air, On Sea.
Video Link

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Make the Tigers Fight: Soviet Strategy in Asia 1925-1975

1.
David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 308.

2.
J. V. Stalin, “Concerning the Proletariat and the Peasantry,” 27 January 1925, online at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1925/01/27.htm

3.
J.V. Stalin, “Speech Delivered at a Plenum of the Central Committee of the R.C.P.(B.),” 19 January 1925, online at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1925/01/19.htm

4.
The Soviet policy of supporting national liberation movements in order to weaken larger rivals continued long after World War II.

5.
The discussion of 1925-1945 is based on S. C. M. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Richard C. Thornton, China: A Political History (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1982).

6.
The Japanese Army was overextended even before Pearl Harbor. Eleven divisions were in Japan and Korea, thirteen in Manchuria, and twenty-seven in China. Japan employed twelve divisions from the home islands and China to conquer Southeast Asia. A larger Soviet threat to Manchuria could have tied down some of these divisions and thus helped Britain and America.

7.
The pact was defensive. If one signatory attacked the United States, the others had no obligation to declare war on the United States. Nonetheless, Hitler recklessly declared war on America after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

8.
In this treaty, the USSR pledged to respect China’s sovereignty, not to intervene in her internal affairs, and not to aid anyone in China but the Nationalist government.

9.
The discussion of the Korean War draws on Richard C. Thornton, Odd Man Out: Truman, Stalin, Mao, and the Origins of the Korean War (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2000).

10.
The analysis of Soviet strategy in Asia from 1953 to 1968 is based on F. Charles Parker, Vietnam: Strategy for a Stalemate (New York: Paragon House, 1989).

11.
NIE 11-8-64 and NIE 11-8-66 are online: http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000267908.pdf http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000267915.pdf

12.
See, for example, Rick Atkinson, The Long Gray Line (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 365-390.

13.
The discussion of 1969-1975 is based on Richard C. Thornton, The Nixon-Kissinger Years: The Reshaping of American Foreign Policy (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2001).

14.
See Thornton, The Nixon-Kissinger Years, chapters 4 and 5 for more details.

15.
The strategy is outlined in National Security Decision Directive 75:http://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-75.pdf

16.
See SNIE 11/2-81, “Soviet Support For International Terrorism and Revolutionary Violence” online:http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000272980.pdf See also Nick Lockwood, “How the Soviet Union Transformed Terrorism,” The Atlantic, 23 December 2011.

17.
The popular image of the Iran-Iraq War is that the United States supported both sides; “everyone knows” that Donald Rumsfeld met Saddam Hussein and that the Iran-Contra scandal erupted after America sent weapons to Iran. Reality is the opposite of this image. Soviet support to both sides, directly and through Soviet allies, utterly dwarfed American support. See Richard F. Grimmett, Trends in Conventional Arms Transfers to the Third World by Major Supplier, 1981-1988 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 1989), 16-19.

18.
Stephen Daggett, “Costs of U.S. Major Wars,” Congressional Research Service, 29 June 2010.

19.
Joint IED Defeat Organization, “Iranian Weapons Smuggling Activities in Afghanistan,” 3 September 2009, https://info.publicintelligence.net/JIEDDO-IranWeaponsSmuggling.pdf. Similarly, the Syrians could have provided far more support to the insurgents in Iraq than they did.

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Learning to Ride the Red Horse: The Principles of War

1.
When I write something like this, I try to take a more conversational tone expressly to relieve that pedantry. I know I don’t always succeed.

2.
In your studies be wary of Fuller; he will sometimes lie in a heartbeat to try to “prove” a point. Note that Jomini takes a bad rap for allegedly trying to create and foment a highly regular and geometric view of war. I say “bad rap” because I read him as doing no more than trying to simplify with visual drawings and word pictures some concepts that are, indeed must be, first grasped in simple form before the mind can expand to take them in with greater complexity. If some soldiers, perhaps most notably some of our generals on both sides in the Civil War, misused Jomini’s teachings, perhaps the fault lies more with them than with him.

3.
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/principlesofwar.pdf

4.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lin-biao/1965/09/peoples_war/ch05.htm

5.
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/12-new-principles-of-warfare/

6.
Yezhov, “the disappearing commissar,” was a high ranking NKVD official, prominent in carrying out Stalin’s purges. After he was, himself, executed, photos all over the USSR were retouched to eliminate his appearance. He was made an “unperson.”

7.
As Marine General James Mathis put it: “[W]e must recognize that the term effects-based is fundamentally flawed, has far too many interpretations, and goes against the very nature of war to the point that it expands confusion and inflates a sense of predictability far beyond that which it can be expected to deliver.” http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/08autumn/mattis.pdf

8.
We shouldn’t read too much into that single word, “effects.” The US military is exceptionally good at tossing out buzzwords while paying the meaning of those words no attention whatsoever. For example, when the first plan for the 2003 invasion of Iraq it was rejected, apparently by Rummie, himself, as being insufficiently awe-shucksful, Tommy Franks’ staff added into the exact same plan the phrase, “Shock and Awe,” if memory serves, one hundred and twenty-seven times. It was then approved as being sufficiently and shockingly awful. You can’t make this crap up. Well, you could but nobody would believe it.

9.
Oddly, the Rommel legend appears to live mostly in the west. I’ve had a number of conversations, sometimes sober, sometimes not, with sundry German officers where Rommel’s name came up and the stated opinion was, generally, “Glory-hunting son of a bitch.”

10.
Lest you get the wrong idea, ideas are not all that count in war. Hitler’s military judgment was, as shown, generally sound. He failed, however, in being a ditherer and being prone to panic. These were, however, matters of character, not judgment.

11.
Are you, gentle reader, laughing too?

12.
For my take on Cannae, albeit with a different focus than the present piece, go here: http://www.baen.com/DecisionCycles.asp

14.
One wonders is there isn’t some sort of counterpunching meme floating around Orthodox civilization that makes them more likely to develop skill in this kind of defensive-offensive.

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