The stunning success of the Air Force in dominating its domain since the 1991 Gulf War has created two looming problems for the service leadership: The Air Force no longer has any substantive experience in how to fight and win in a highly contested environment, and its current airmen have never experienced serious losses of people and machines in air combat.
.. The Air Force’s immense success resulting from the courage, skill, and technological superiority of American airmen has now perversely made the service much less ready to fight the next big war.
.. More U.S. airmen were lost in just the European theater than marines killed fighting in the Pacific.
.. No American warplanes have been shot down by enemy aircraft since at least 1991 and none lost to enemy air defenses since 2003.
.. As a result, an entire new generation of Air Force pilots have flown combat missions that have not involved any serious opposition.
.. The Air Force is most brittle in this domain since virtually no one serving in today’s force has personally experienced any wartime attrition of either airmen or their airplanes.
.. the peak of deadly air combat in World War II. The staggering losses of the strategic bomber community flying against German defenses over Europe in 1943 were strikingly portrayed in the classic movie Twelve O’Clock High. This compelling film shows the unrelenting and intense demands of Air Force combat leadership when losses were so great that virtually no aircrews survived to complete the requisite 25 missions before going home.
How the British fought the American Revolution—bravely
That is because, as we all know, Cornwallis was a coward, and it was just like him to find such a fittingly ignominious hole wherein to snivel and whimper while, in the defenses around the town, his troops were destroyed.
Because we have learned that is what British generals did in the war. They ponced about in their splendid red uniforms, dipped snuff, and looked down their snooty noses as the silly-billy Americans dared take on the Most Powerful Army in the History of the World. And the moment the cannons burped, they abandoned their troops to be slaughtered while they stayed safely out of harm’s way, lest their wigs get mussed.
It’s part of our national mythology that does not serve us well. By belittling the enemy, we diminish the magnitude of our American achievement. While well intended, this “History Channel” fairytale about Cornwallis, the other British generals, the troops they led, and the conduct of the war is counterproductive.
Wargaming in the classroom: an odyssey
The truth is that if one just reads selected passages from Thucydides’ work, it is impossible to comprehend the events and complexities of the multi-decade Peloponnesian War. Moreover, as students rarely have the background or context in which to mentally file the readings, they quickly get lost in a plethora of Greek names, locations, and events. War college professors who believe their graduates know anything about Thucydides besides reciting the mantra “fear, honor, interest” are fooling themselves.
.. Remarkably, four of the five Athenian teams actually attacked Syracuse on Sicily’s east coast! As they were all aware that such a course had led to an Athenian disaster 2,500 years before, I queried them about their decision. Their replies were the same: Each had noted that the Persians were stirring, which meant there was a growing threat to Athens’ supply of wheat from the Black Sea.
.. It is one thing to discuss this war in a classroom, and quite another to have to plan it out for yourself, and then compare your results to what the Combined Chiefs presented to FDR and Churchill.
.. As the academic year draws to a close, I continue to employ wargames, including several geopolitical simulations created by National Defense University’s Center for Applied Strategic Learning (CASL). The results, so far, have exceeded all of my expectations. For six or more hours at a sitting, classes remain focused on the strategic choices before them, as they try to best an enemy as quick-thinking and adaptive as they are.
.. Every war college administrator can wax eloquently about their school’s mission to enhance their students’ critical thinking skills. But they then subject those same students to a year of mind-numbing classroom seminars that rarely, if ever, allow them to practice those skills that each college claims as its raison de`etre. Well, wargaming, in addition to helping students comprehend the subject material, also allows them an unparalleled opportunity to repeatedly practice decisive critical thinking. Moreover, it does so in a way where the effects of both good and bad decisions are almost immediately apparent.
.. Grant’s role was to pin down the Army of Northern Virginia, while the western armies ripped out the economic heart of the Confederacy.
.. I was astounded at the number of students who approached me after the Civil War exercise to mention that despite having studied the Civil War before, this was the first time they realized that the war was won in the west.
The One Thing, Historically, That’s Prompted Countries to Raise Taxes on the Rich
“The key events we see in driving that inverted U-shape are mass mobilization for war,” Scheve explains. When countries (especially democratic ones) mobilized for war, questions about fairness came to a head, because—even during nationwide drafts—it was most often the lower and middle classes that were on the front lines. “The actual rhetoric of the times was, if you’re going to conscript labor, you need to conscript capital,” Scheve says.
.. Scheve and Stasavage explain the story of taxation in the past two centuries with what they call the compensatory theory of taxation—the (fairly intuitive) idea that higher tax rates will be accepted as fair only if there’s a consensus, across all earners, that the rich are getting more benefits from the state than they’re contributing in tax revenues.