Table of Contents

- Catching the Gravitational Lens Express: The Scientific Backstory to Mission to Methone

by Les Johnson

- Every Seven Minutes

by Dr. Robert E. Hampson

- Magic Systems Aren’t Magic: A Few Notes Toward More Authentic Magic in Fantasy Novels and an Invitation to Read the Witchy War Series

by D.J. Butler

- Fixing Broken Memory

by Dr. Robert E. Hampson

- Character of the Female Warrior: an FAQ

by Kacey Ezell and Jennifer Whetstone

- Life Beyond Earth? Look to Small Stars

by Kerry Hensley

- Conflict in the South China Sea

by J.R. Dunn

- Why FTL Will End the Universe—and Six Ways to Avoid It in an SF Story

by John Lambshead

- Atomic Follies

by Jim Beall

- Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse, Part One of a Series

by Thomas P. Kratman

- Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse, Part Two of a Series

by Tom Kratman

- Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse, Part Three: The Rest of the Organization Principles Explained

by Tom Kratman

Baen Books

Free Nonfiction 2018

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Catching the Gravitational Lens Express © 2018 by Les Johnson

Every Seven Minutes © 2018 by Dr. Robert E. Hampson

Magic Systems Aren’t Magic © 2018 by D.J. Butler

Fixing Broken Memory © 2018 by Dr. Robert E. Hampson

Character of the Female Warrior © 2018 by Kacey Ezell and Jennifer Whetstone

Life Beyond Earth? Look to Small Stars © 2018 by Kerry Hensley

Conflict in the South China Sea © 2018 by J.R. Dunn

Why FTL Will End the Universe—and Six Ways to Avoid It in an SF Story © 2018 by John Lambshead

Atomic Follies © 2018 by Jim Beall

Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse, Part One © 2018 Thomas P. Kratman

Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse, Part Two © 2018 Tom Kratman

Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse, Part Three: The Rest of the Organization Principles Explained © 2018 Tom Kratman

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Catching the Gravitational Lens Express:

The Scientific Backstory to Mission to Methone

Les Johnson

The stars are our home. The Earth, our wonderful and special habitat, orbits the star named Sol at about 18 miles per second, yet most people don’t even give this amazing fact a second thought. The next logical step for human civilization is to spread to our moon, the asteroids and the other planets in the solar system. Finally, we are beginning to see that happen. Granted, those of us who recall Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon thought this would occur forty years ago, but we have made progress and it now appears that a sustainable space infrastructure is coming into place that may allow the progression to happen—at least to Mars.

Today, multiple new companies, such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, are challenging the status quo and driving down the cost of access to space in the process. Elon Musk of SpaceX makes no secret of his desire to send people to Mars in his lifetime. Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin has as one of his goals the development of space to help solve problems on Earth. More established rocket companies, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Orbital Sciences Corporation, are being reinvigorated as well. All are building rockets or spacecraft to carry people to, and through, space more affordably than ever before.

NASA will soon launch the long-awaited Space Launch System, a monster rocket capable of sending people back to the Moon and on to Mars. NASA is also beginning to develop the nuclear rockets that will be needed to make travel to and from Mars more affordable and faster. The Europeans, Japanese, Russians and Chinese are all making plans to send crews to the surface of the Moon. The global social and economic dynamic been has never before been so space-focused. The space renaissance of which we’ve dreamed might be taking shape.

Going beyond Mars will be much more difficult due to the vast distances involved and our lack of a space propulsion system capable of allowing us to travel hundreds of millions of miles in a reasonable amount of time. Rockets, even nuclear rockets, won’t allow us to get people to Jupiter and beyond in less than a decade—far too long. Physics tells us that there are ways we can shorten the travel time, but the technologies are nowhere near maturity, and likely won’t be for another fifty to one hundred years. Nuclear fusion, beamed energy, and antimatter propulsion may be possible, but they will take some time to develop.

Meanwhile, we have discovered thousands of planets circling other stars. Most of these exoplanets appear completely unsuitable for sustaining life as we know it, but many are in locations where life might just be able to exist. Their discovery has led to the obvious question, “How can we get there?” Unfortunately, the solar system beyond Mars is out of reach—let alone interstellar travel. At least for now.

These advancements and discoveries are prompting the broader society to consider the Big Questions so often asked by scientists and science fiction fans as they look out into space and wonder:

- Is it possible to travel to other star systems? And, if so, then how? (Real physics answers please!)

- Are we alone in the universe?

- If we aren’t alone and interstellar travel is possible, then why haven’t we been visited, and why don’t we see signs of life out there?

These are some of the questions I attempt to answer in my new Baen novel, Mission to Methone. Mission to Methone (M2M—hey, I work for NASA in my day job. Creating initialisms and acronyms is part of the job description!) is my personal vision of hope for a future where we have space development of the inner solar system, we have space solar power stations supplementing the electrical grid on Earth, we have asteroid mining, we have lunar bases and we have robust Mars exploration. (I want it all!) In M2M, an artifact from an alien civilization is found in our solar system, forcing humanity to grapple with some potentially unsettling answers to the Big Questions.

Can We Cheat Relativity and Travel at or Faster Than the Speed of Light?

One of the great issues facing physics today is the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics. Relativity says that nothing can travel at or beyond the speed of light because doing so would require infinite energy. (And who has that much energy lying around?) But wait, the other theory, quantum mechanics, says that some natural occurring events that involve particles moving from Point A to Point B happen instantaneously in a process called tunneling. If tunneling is truly instantaneous, then wouldn’t that be an example of faster than light travel? Perhaps. This question was first seriously addressed by Prince Louis de Broglie.

Prince Louis de Broglie lived in the latter part of the 19th century and into the early 20th and, yes, he was a prince. After serving in the French army during World War I, he engaged in his theoretical physics studies at Paris University. De Broglie made his mark in the field of quantum mechanics with the publication of his Ph.D. thesis, “Researches on the Quantum Theory,” in which he formulated modern wave mechanics. In layman’s terms, he theorized that physical particles like protons and electrons could be described as quantum mechanical waves—just as quantum mechanical wave theory had been accepted at the time for explaining the behavior of light.

His theory was confirmed in 1927 when the famous Davisson and Germer experiment confirmed that electrons could diffract like light, and therefore had wavelike properties. He was later awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work.

How does this relate to faster than light travel? It doesn’t, at least directly (yet), but it might!

In classical physics, if an electron of a certain energy is trapped in an electric field, then it is considered to be in a potential well. (Think of it as being dropped in a hole. If the hole isn’t very deep, you can jump or climb out. Your “energy level” is large enough to escape the hole. If the hole is too deep for you to jump out, then you are trapped within it.) Unless the electron has enough energy to escape, it will remain in the potential well forever. This is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. In classical physics, electrons cannot cross a potential barrier unless they have enough energy to do so. Image courtesy the author.

In reality, electrons can be placed in a deep potential well from which they should never be able to escape and yet do so anyway—sometimes. Sometimes the electron will remain inside and sometimes not. And, if you study enough electrons in potential wells, then you would see that there is some probability of its escaping over a specific period of time. This can only be explained if you think of the electron as a wave. In wave mechanics, the location of a particle is described in terms of probabilities and waves, which can be shown graphically in Figure 2. If you think of the electron’s location as being somewhere under the curve, and the curve can extend beyond the potential barrier, then there is a small chance the electron will relocate itself outside of the potential well and on the other side of the energy barrier. Thinking back to the hole you jumped into above, it would be as if you, from one moment to the next, simply appeared standing on the ground next to the hole rather than remaining inside it. That’s quantum tunneling.

Figure 2. In quantum physics, an electron behaves like a wave and has a small probability of escaping the potential barrier even if its energy is too low. Image courtesy the author.

Tunneling on a microscopic scale is real and is the reason that many modern electronic devices work. Examples include computer flash drives, scanning tunnel microscopes, and diodes. It is also the key process in radioactive decay.

The problem with a macroscopic object, say a human being, tunneling is scale. The matter wave of macroscopic objects are inversely related to their mass. In practical terms, this means the probability of you or I tunneling or relocating to another location in the universe is EXTREMELY small, but not zero. (What would be the likelihood of randomly tossing one hundred pennies and having them all come up heads? Very small, but not zero!) The probability of macroscopic tunneling is so small, however, that the likelihood of it happening in the lifetime of the universe is very close to zero. But that’s in nature. What if someone or something figures out how to externally relocate a macroscopic object’s matter wave to the destination of their choosing? By forcing the small, but finite probability of the object relocating to be equal to 1, the object would jump out of the hole and go where it was directed to go. (Which, itself is probably not accurate. It would simply go from point A to point B because that’s where it is supposed to be, probabilistically. Just like in our natural world it appears to remain at Point A because that’s where the probability of its being is highest.)

The speed of tunneling is another topic. In M2M, I assumed that tunneling across large distances is limited by relativity to be no faster than the speed of light. There is some evidence that the effect may, in fact, be instantaneous—but I’m not ready to assert that this phenomenon violates Professor Einstein’s rules. Not until there is sufficient, credible evidence to do so.

I also speculate that interstellar tunneling is facilitated by an interesting property of very large masses, like black holes and stars, called gravity lensing.

Light is constrained to move within the fabric of physical reality known as space-time. In the absence of a massive object, light behaves in the relativistic universe in which we live just as it would in a non-relativistic (i.e. Euclidean) universe by moving in a straight line. But when a massive object is interposed between us and whatever is emitting the light, something curious happens—the light appears to be bent around that object. The space-time around the massive object is bent, and the light which is constrained to move through space-time, bends with it.

The result is something similar to what happens when light is refracted in everyday glasses worn by nearsighted people. When light is bent, it can come to a focus. The effect was first measured in 1919 when astronomers Arthur Eddington and Frank Watson Dyson observed stars that appeared near the sun during a total solar eclipse. Similar observations were made across the globe and, sure enough, the light from stars passing close to the Sun (VERY close to the Sun and therefore only visible during an eclipse) was found to be bent by the Sun’s mass. They made these observations before they could be readily explained by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity—which came much later. Since then, the effect has been observed on a galactic scale with massive galaxies bending the light from more distant galaxies, enabling them to be seen by our telescopes.

It turns out that the Sun’s gravitational lens has a focal line at about 550 Astronomical Units (AU). One AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, or approximately 93 million miles. It is for this reason that the alien races exploring other star systems place their de Broglie transfer stations at these locations. (Other stars have masses different than our Sun and their gravity lens locations are therefore different.) By using this lensing effect, one can theoretically use much less energy to send any sort of radiation or quanta (light, radio, and, presumably, matter waves) than would be required without the lensing. According to physicist Dr. Claudio Maccone, a radio with a power of only a few tens of watts could use this lensing effect to send detectable signals to Alpha Centauri!

Are We Along in the Universe?

Our Solar System contains eight planets, five dwarf planets, numerous moons and thousands of asteroids. We know that at least one planet contains life (Earth) and another might have supported life at one time (Mars). There are also at least three moons, Europa, Titan and Enceladus that may have conditions suitable for life. And this is just within our own Solar System.

Thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, we now know that there are thousands of nearby stars with planetary systems, some of which are known to have planets in the “habitable zone,” which means they may have conditions suitable for life as we know it. Based on the statistics from Kepler, it appears that almost all stars have planetary systems, with an estimated 2.5 planets per system.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains between one-hundred billion and three-hundred billion stars. That translates to estimated two-hundred-fifty billion planets. Recent estimates place the number of galaxies in the universe at nearly one trillion. If the stars in these galaxies are similar to our own, and we have every reason to believe they are, then there are about 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the universe. Does anyone seriously believe we are alone? Though I doubt we humans are being or have been visited by extraterrestrials (see my essay, “The Aliens Are Not Among Us,” on the Baen website for my rationale), I don’t believe it is impossible for that to happen or for it to have happened in the past. In fact, when I think about these numbers, it is nearly impossible for me to believe that we are alone in the universe.

And then there is the observational evidence for the existence of ET. There is none. Despite decades of radio searches and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of astronomers (professional and amateur) gazing at the stars, there is no sign of another civilization like our own out there anywhere or any time. Surely, the argument goes, if other technological civilizations exist, then their presence would eventually become obvious—as ours is on track to being as we move out to explore our Solar System and develop toward becoming an interplanetary species. We’ve only been in the game, that is, we’ve only been a technological civilization for a few hundred years out of the four and a half billion years of Earth’s history. Within the next thousand years, it is likely that anyone nearby in the galaxy will know we exist by our energy emissions alone. If another civilization developed technology before us, which is likely given the sheer numbers involved, then their presence should be obvious to us.

But again, there is no evidence of anyone else out there. This is called the Fermi Paradox, named after Enrico Fermi, the physicist who is credited with raising this question. Why not? Why have we not seen signs of ET among the stars? I don’t pretend to know if we are truly alone or if the universe is teaming with as-yet undetected life, but that will not stop me from speculating.

Physicist Stephen Hawking warned that “Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they could reach." That’s enough to cause one to pause and think, regardless of the reality of his concern. We know how humans behave toward each other; why would we expect ET to behave differently? That is a scary thought.

Finally, we have some amazing places to explore within our own solar system. One of them, Saturn’s moon, Methone, is so odd that I believe we should go there sooner rather than later.

Why Methone?

Orbiting Saturn between the much larger moons Mimas and Enceladus lies the almost three mile-long, egg-shaped Methone. Methone (pronounced “mi-thoh-nee”) is so small that it remained undetected until NASA’s Cassini spacecraft discovered it in 2004. Like the planets and many of their moons, Methone owes its name to Greek or Roman mythologies—in this case, Greek. Methone was one of the Alkyonides, the seven beautiful daughters of the Giant Alkyoneus—an opponent of Heracles. Methone figures prominently in M2M.

Cassini passed relatively close to it in 2012, passing just 1800 miles away where it took some spectacular photographs (Figure 3). As you can see, Methone looks like a nearly-perfect egg.

Figure 3 Methone, one of Saturn's moons, as seen by the NASA Cassini spacecraft. Image courtesy of NASA.

There are no visible craters and it is believed that the moon is made from or at least covered by ice. Based upon Cassini’s observations, scientists have determined that Methone has a density one third that of water, making it less dense than any other moon or asteroid in the Solar System. You can see why imagination might run wild and turn it into a spaceship rather than a moon.

While we embrace the space revolution that appears to be happening, we should keep our sights set on the ultimate goals of preserving the Earth, establishing the human species on other planets in our solar system and, eventually, on planets orbiting distant stars. As science advances, we will almost certainly find a way to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics or come up with a new theory that does. In a hundred years, or perhaps a thousand, we’ll figure out how to travel fast enough to reach those other stars. Maybe we will just tunnel our way there—who knows? On a galactic scale, a thousand, even ten thousand years, rounds to nothing when compared to the billions of years that preceded us.

If we might be able to reach the stars in one to ten thousand years in a galaxy that is billions of years old, then why hasn’t anyone else? Shouldn’t they, whoever they are, be here already? They aren’t, and that is worrisome. Perhaps we should take Stephen Hawking’s advice, keep quiet, advance our technologies, and dream . . .

Every Seven Minutes

Dr. Robert E. Hampson

The dream sequence, an all-too-clichéd way to begin a scene or impart background information the author wants the reader to have. But dreams are real, and they do have a purpose. How can an author use them with more scientific accuracy rather than as an info-dump shortcut?

Anyone who has the tendency to repeatedly hit the snooze button on your alarm clock has probably experienced the seven-minute dream.  The alarm goes off, you barely rouse yourself—just enough to reach out and hit the snooze button, then settle back into the pillows.  You have a vivid dream, from which you are awakened by the alarm clock . . . again . . . your seven-minute snooze is over.

How can you have such a vivid dream in just seven minutes?  And what is a dream, really?

To answer the first, we will need to talk about the sense of time in dreams, and that's probably best to save for after a discussion of the second question. Some understanding of the nature of dreams will also give some insight into the question of time in dreams.

What are Dreams?

Dreams are memories.  Our memories.  They needn't be personal.  Snips of movies, commercials, descriptions by a friend, all are fodder for dreams.  Sleep consists of many stages, typical scientific terms refer to four stages, from stage one, light drowsiness in which you are vaguely aware of surroundings, to stage four, in which the body is so deeply unconscious that most muscles in the body are shut down.  A person spends most of the night progressing from stage two to stage four sleep and back again.  Persons with sleep apnea, asthma or who wake frequently in the night frequently oscillate all the way from stage one to four and back again, often without spending sufficient time in deep, stage four sleep to feel fully rested.  Dreams typically occur during stages two and three in what is called REM (rapid-eye-movement) or "paradoxical" sleep—so called because the brain (and eyes) are as active as during wakefulness even while the body stays completely asleep (even paralyzed). At least, that's what scientists have told us up until very recently. We now know that dreams can also occur in stage two and three Non-REM (or NREM) sleep and that's fairly important for those seven-minute dreams in between pressing the snooze button and the next time the alarm goes off.

A full sleep cycle can take as little as forty-five minutes, or as much as two hours.  During a cycle, the amount of time spent dreaming is quite short, about ten minutes per cycle, although it is possible to cycle between REM and non-REM sleep, and in and out of the dream state, multiple times per cycle.

The recent movie Inception got a lot of things right regarding dreams, dream settings, and time within dreams, but sorry, this part they got wrong—people do not typically dream the entire time they are asleep, nor when they are sedated—at least not at the sedation level that would keep a person asleep for seven to ten hours.  Sedation suppresses brain and body activity, similar to stage four, and usually also suppresses REM sleep.  Sure, there are drugs that promote sleep and dreaming, but they result in a very light sedation and have their effects mainly through pain relief and muscle relaxation. Doctors in the neurosciences who specialize in sleep and dreams often hear reports that people taking melatonin and certain opiate based pain relievers (such as hydrocodone and oxycodone) have vivid, strange dreams. To the researcher who learned that dreams only occur in the REM state, this seems counterintuitive, since melatonin and the pain relief drugs reduce the amount of REM, and increase the time spent in NREM sleep per sleep period. However, studies of patients who get their sleep only in ten to fifteen-minute naps show that people report that they remember having dreamed even when there was no REM sleep during the nap. Whether these dreams are actually more unusual, or simply more easily remembered is not clear, but it is likely that such dreams are the ones reported by patients taking these drugs.

But back to those seven-to-ten minutes of dreaming. How can a dream seem so complete, so detailed, and so long and yet occur within orders of magnitude of less time than the events portrayed? Several reasons: first, dreams are strung together from memories. These are memories of events during the day, the past, personal experience, stories read from books, movies, TV. Even if only vague impressions, the mind can make a dream from it.

Memories are stored in the brain as associations. Ever struggle to name a song? Remember part of a tune or a verse, but can't think of the title until you sing the verse through to the end and rewind to the beginning? That's association. Each verse, each phrase, is associated in memory, and you have to run through the chain of associations to get to the title. There are other types of associations: cooking smells may help recall a vivid memory of childhood, a sound can trigger a traumatic memory, a touch or color may bring back memories of a first date . . . first love . . . first kiss. Once a memory is recalled, it can lead in turn to another memory, and another, and another. Such associations are nearly instantaneous. A series of memories spanning minutes, days, months or years can be recalled in seconds.

The second reason why dreams seem complete and detailed is that filling in the gaps with details is what the brain does. Any student of music can tell you that they can hear instruments when reading music. In fact, there is a fascinating study in which brain imaging proves just that point: a conductor reading a score shows the same brain activity he or she displays if he or she is hearing (or even playing) the music. Optical illusions work this way, too. The eyes see only lines, shapes and shadows. The brain fills in—even when there are no details in the original image. Mathematical models that mimic the connections of neurons (brain cells) have demonstrated the ability to restore information even when up to half of the information becomes missing or garbled.

Finally, dreams allow the brain to disconnect from the body. There is a location in the brain called the "red nucleus" that acts like a cut-off switch. During dreams, the nerve impulses to the muscles are stopped, and many signals from the rest of the body do not reach the brain (consciously). The brain acts as if all of the connections are intact, but the normal feedback delay is not present, and the whole process runs faster. Note that this can account for the helpless feeling we experience in some dreams—running in slow motion, say, or sitting in the back seat of a runaway car, unable to defend against an attacker. During these events, the red nucleus block of nerve signals is not complete. Commands to muscles are blocked, but the information that those muscles are not moving is getting to the brain.

Again, the relatively new findings of non-REM dreams, and the effects of certain drugs on sleep and dreaming are important here. A particular sleep disorder results when the red nucleus does not completely shut off the signals to muscles. Patients with behavioral sleep disorder act out their dreams, and have awoken to find themselves out in public, or in the middle of attempting to walk, drive, cook, etc.

The disorder is treated with sedative drugs that reduce REM sleep and dreaming, and result in a restoration of the "off switch," and deeper sleep stages. More recently, doctors are treating the disorder with melatonin, which reduces REM sleep, but retains some dreaming in the NREM state. During both REM and NREM dreaming, there is an increase in our awake-type of brain activity, however, it is much weaker in NREM dreaming, and there are more of the slow, rhythmic patterns associated with deep sleep stages. Thus, while the brain is clearly asleep (based on the slow rhythms), during dreaming, there is activity associated with the recall and association of memories.

Thus, dreams are memories. Memories can trigger recall of other memories at widely separate times. The brain (and mind) are good at taking incomplete information and filling in details—often with familiar situations, and other memories. The brain does not have the normal feedback from the body to signal what is a real experience and what is not. Hence, the seven-minute dream. In reality, the dream may have only lasted for about two minutes, but that is enough time to trigger a sequence of stored memory patterns in the brain, and for the mind to make up a script to go along with the sequences. It is the ultimate moviemaker's storyboard.

Dreams—the Story in the Brain

What is the purpose of dreaming?

Simply stated, dreams are a necessary function of making temporary memories permanent. It's long been known that dreams are composed of memories, and that memories can be triggered by specific electrical activity within the brain.

Dr. Wilder Penfield was a Canadian neurosurgeon noted for mapping most of what we know as the "topography" of the brain. Penfield noted that, in the course of brain surgery to treat epilepsy, when applying electrical stimulation to various brain areas to locate damaged brain cells with the patient awake, the patient was able to tell the surgeon what they saw, felt, tasted, etc. Modern neuroscientists have built enormously on this discovery, and by studying which functions are lost due to brain damage.

Neuroscientists now know which brain areas are responsible for movement, sensation and various memories. In the 90s, Professors Matt Wilson and Bruce McNaughton at the University of Arizona determined that brain cells activated in the rat brain while running a maze were activated in the exact same sequence and relationship while the animal slept immediately following the behavior. From studies since that time, we know that the reactivation of electrical patterns during sleep is essential to consolidation of memory from short term storage (essentially what you do when you repeat a phone number to remember it long enough to place a call) to long term storage. In fact, this is where Non-REM dreams may be important: Neuroscientists have found that the reactivation of patterns primarily occurs during NREM sleep, and not during REM sleep.

Why is consolidation necessary?

Memory comes in two forms: short term (also known as "working") and long-term memory. Short term/working memory is temporary. It will eventually be forgotten, and in fact, it is best if it is forgotten! The perfect example of short-term memory is recalling a parking spot at work, school or while shopping. It is necessary to remember the detail of the location for a short time-span, but if remembered for longer terms, it can interfere with itself (we call this "proactive interference"). The memory of where I parked yesterday, or last week, would interfere with finding my car today! Thus, short-term memory should be forgotten once its usefulness is over.

So how do we humans move information from short-term to long-term memory? Two ways: repetition, or strong associations. Repetition is the familiar one. Rote learning. Memorization. "Repeat after me . . . My car is on level four, second row. . . . " Strong emotion is one of the key features to association—whether love, hate or fear, association in memory is a powerful motivator.

The key feature of consolidation is that repeating information strengthens the connections between brain cells that form the basis of the information code for memory. However, such strengthening requires time, and metabolic processes in the brain cells. This is one reason why an accident victim may not remember details of an accident (or up to hours before). There may not have been enough time to consolidate the memory before the brain received a trauma that caused it to stop processing information.

What's more important, though, and relevant to the discussion of dreams, is that sleep provides the time, the low body activity frees up the metabolic processes, and dreams provide the repetition to enable memory to be stored most efficiently. With consolidated memory, the mind can build a sense of time with respect to events in the outside world.

Ask Me for Anything But Time . . .

Now that we know that dreams are constructed of our own memories, what about time in dreams? How can so much apparent elapsed time be condensed into a few minutes of dreaming? A popular phrase in psychology from about ten or more years ago is "time-binding." The label refers to that ability of humans to place memories of events in sequence and judge the amount of time that passes. Time-binding is less known by its presence, but by its absence.

One of the tests given to children suspected of depression or attention deficit disorder is to have them place pieces of a story into sequential order and tell how much time they think elapses during the story. Failure to do so is a pretty good indicator that the child has a deficit in time-binding, and such deficits indicate an abnormal interaction with the outside world.

However, problems with time-binding are neither unusual, nor crippling. So why is time-binding an issue? Do humans really need to know that only two minutes has elapsed while we wait at a traffic light? Or that James Garfield was president before Chester Arthur and after Rutherford B. Hayes?

As a memory scientist and a writer, the answer is an enthusiastic yes! In fact, a proper sense of time is important to real life, dreams and enjoyable reading. In the real world, everything is a sequence of events, and the consequences of those events only have a finite duration. Event A: A burner is lit on the stove; Event B: a hand is placed over the burner. If B precedes A, no problem—unless the hand remains after the burner is lit. If A precedes B, well, that could be a problem—it depends on how much time has elapsed. Time-binding is difficult for persons on mind-altering drugs, in clinical depression, schizophrenia, and many other disorders.

Dreams and Memory in Fiction

Finally, what does this have to do with writing (and reading) fiction, notably science fiction?

Quite a bit, actually. Aside from the obvious usage of time-binding as a plot point, I suggest examining the story for its time-binding. For examples I'm going to pull out two novels I read in college: Titan by John Varley, and Lord Valentine's Castle by Robert Silverberg. In Titan, the protagonist, Captain Cirocco Jones, and her companion Gaby spend months climbing the support cables trying to reach the hub and speak to the controlling intelligence Gaia. In Lord Valentine's Castle, Valentine, the juggler, travels to the Coronal's festival on Castle Mount, recovering from amnesia and learning about himself and his place in the world. Again, the story action takes place over many months as the travelers cross the continent or climb the Mount to reach the festival.

I chose these two examples because even thirty years after a single reading, both novels left me with a profound unease. It took a while to realize what bothered me, and it was many years later that I realized all of the implications.

The problem was time-binding. Essentially both authors set their protagonists off on a strenuous physical journey that would take months to years to complete, and only gave us bare glimpses of the events in between, yet both authors treated that interval as if we were watching the action the whole time. Varley's time-binding in Titan was the greater problem, considering that the action for the first third of the story was roughly continuous, then the reader was expected to suspend this sense of continuous time while Cirocco and Gaby climb the support cable. Silverberg's novel did the better job of time-binding because the story takes place in vignettes spaced over the whole duration of the journey and we do get more of a sensation of time passing. Perhaps it was the fact that the reader is expected to accept that these events are happening to same persons over extended time, or perhaps it is the uneven time flow where the author realizes that they are running out of time/space and need to fast-forward through the next time interval.

This is exactly the issue with time in dreams. Dreams do not accurately reflect the passage of time. The human brain introduces discontinuities, and we "remember" the details in between, even though no physical time has passed. It's actually part of what can makes dreams so disconcerting. In fiction, such a transition is too disconcerting, and most authors introduce a break in the story if long periods of time need to pass without much story action.

Now for two examples of successful time-binding, and again I shall call up stories that have remained with me for twenty to thirty years: In Joe Haldeman's The Forever War we follow William Mandela through four years of subjective time, and several centuries of Earth time. The discontinuities are well-written and believable because Mandela reacts to each interval and discontinuity in time via culture shock and adjustment to each new society (via the new recruits). In Walter Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz, we follow different protagonists across several thousand years of post-apocalyptic landscape thereby learning an important lesson in the cyclical nature of history with respect to man and society. The novel was originally three separate stories that Miller realized was a complete novel only when writing the third. To complete the novel he extensively rewrote the novelettes to provide continuity while preserving the unique essence of each section. Despite the span of 1,800 years, there is no doubt that Canticle tells a continuous story—particularly with the bookending of Brother Francis' story with events in the closing scenes of the book. Successful time-binding.

What other kinds of issues are there with of time-binding?

Sequence.

I'm not particularly fond of novels that jump back and forth in time, or between POV characters, because the transition is often quite jarring. It is important for the writer to provide the little cues that allow time-binding by the reader, and when those cues are absent, the reader can get quite confused. Ever have that dream where you're taking an exam but never went to class, left your book in your locker and can't remember the combination, and now you can't find the classroom, but vaguely remember that you shouldn't be doing this because you graduated twenty years ago? It's a perfect example of problems with POV shifts and time-binding.

Dwight Swain in Techniques of the Selling Writer suggests that successful writers create "scenes" that unfold in real-time (or even slow-motion), separated by "sequels" with which you can fast-forward through intervening time. It's why Star Trek had warp speed and transporters. By not abusing the sense of time and sequence created for the reader, the skilled writer can reserve jarring violation of sequence and distorted sense of time for use when appropriate to the mental state of the protagonist!

"To Sleep, Perchance to Dream . . ."

Time and sequence are likewise important to both dreaming and consolidation of memory. The subconscious creates dreams by pulling events at random from memory, but those events don't stand alone, they are part of a sequence that includes other memories not incorporated in the dream. The mind tries to fill in the gaps in time-binding—sometimes failing, as in the case of the Exam Dream. In other cases, it succeeds too well. Dreams can take on a reality, complete with false history that is hard to distinguish from reality. It's because that what the brain has constructed uses our own memories and incorporates the features that make those memories seem valid—most importantly, time. Cause precedes effect, birth before death, just as a fictional character's past precedes its future.

In dreams, we don't actually have much time to build a sequence—a whole lot of memory is called up in very rapid succession, and it is up to the parts of the brain which normally deal with memory, sequence and cause-and-effect to put it all together . . .

. . . eventually creating . . .

. . . a dream.

Magic Systems Aren’t Magic

A Few Notes Toward More Authentic Magic in Fantasy Novels and an Invitation to Read the Witchy War Series

D.J. Butler

Choose Your Magic

When I tell people that I write fantasy novels, more often than not the next words I hear are “what’s your magic system?”

This is a ridiculous question. It reflects a state of affairs in which many fantasy writers today are writing “fantasy” novels with no magic in them at all, and using artificial constructs euphemistically called “magic systems” or “hard magic” instead. This is a loss to fantasy literature.

Magic is notoriously difficult to define. Etymologically, we get the word from Greek mageia, which means the theology of the magoi,[1] the dream-interpreting Persian priests said to have called on the infant Jesus.[2] This suggests that as we examine the meaning of the word “magic” more deeply, we’re going to find connections with religious practice, spirituality, oracles, and things done by outsiders, that is to say, people other than ourselves.

A recent study of Jewish magic by Yuval Harari devotes its substantial first chapter to reviewing academic understandings of what magic is from the mid-nineteenth century to date.[3] Harari characterizes the evolving understanding of magic as moving broadly through three trends, or three kinds of theoretical explanations of magic. There is obviously significant overlap among his categories, and I would suggest we should see a fourth category interwoven with the others. What follows is my synthesis and summary of what Harari claims.

Harari describes early theories as evolutionist, meaning that they identify magic as “a stage in the process of spiritual and cultural advancement that humanity undergoes in the course of its development.”[4] Some of these theories find the origin of magic in specific human needs (exorcism of spirits, which are the source of all “physical and spiritual problems”[5]) or in posited early beliefs about the structure of reality (in animistic thought, in which all things have individual spirits;[6] or in the allegedly even earlier belief that all things have a collective soul;[7] or in the belief in “the law of participation, which implies a linkage between the individual’s personality and things in the world”[8]). Other theorists have tried to identify in magic a pre-modern intellectual phase with some relationship to science and religion, e.g.: that magic is the “original form of human thought,” preceding religion, which in turn precedes science;[9] that magic is the “first sign of scientific thought,” in that it posits knowable laws of the universe that can be manipulated to achieve results;[10] or conversely that the laws of magic have their origin in religion, where they “serve as part of the perception of holiness and holy powers.”[11]

Harari goes on to identify as separate trends sociological and anthropological explanations of magic; for simplicity’s sake I’ll lump these together. Some theorists have found the definitions of magic in the community of users and non-users, for instance arguing that: religion is how we collectively approach the “lofty and beneficent” gods for help, whereas magic is how we individually approach “inferior and negative entities;”[12] magical acts are externally or physically identical to religious acts, but are socially prohibited;[13] magic is religion before it gets organized, and lone sorcerers are replaced with a priestly caste;[14] or magic is what is performed by people of low or vague social class.[15] Some writers have argued for a calendrical explanation of magic: religion is comprised of acts that are performed cyclically, and magic is undertaken in response to crises.[16] Recent theorists have argued that there is little or no distinction between magic and religion at all: that all magical and religious behavior exists on “a continuum of ritual behavior”;[17] that the difference between magic and religion exists only in the eye of the Western observer;[18] or that the difference between magic and religion is purely a semantic problem.[19]

I would extract a fourth category of theories of magic from Harari’s summaries, to wit, psychological explanations of magic. Some thinkers have seen magic as “the emotional reaction of primitive man to the anxiety evoked by the surrounding world.”[20] Others have seen magic as a psychological tool, protecting the self or “ego” and thereby developing the institution of the individual,[21] ritualizing optimism to confer hope,[22] or imposing order on the world.[23]

Magic is as Magic Does

Obviously, we have just begun to scratch the surface of what magic is in the real world. No mention is made in the above summary, for example, of the content of real-world grimoires, of magic as initiatic traditions, of what real-world spells actually look like, of the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy, or many other important and interesting issues.

Nevertheless, Harari’s summary suggests a criterion by which we may judge the verisimilitude of “magic systems” or otherwise the magic described in a fantasy story. An authentic magic system would fit many, or maybe all, of Harari’s definitions. In other words, an authentic magic system would be one in which academics who are not themselves practitioners, observing magical practice in the story world, could propose any of the foregoing theories to explain why practitioners do what they do.

To make a few more specific points. In an authentic magic system:

1. At some margin, magic should resemble science, with knowable laws and repeatable operations.

2. At some margin, magic should resemble religion. The line separating magical and religious ritual should be difficult to find. One person’s magic should be another person’s religion.

3. Magic should be connected to social and in-group status (the theology of the stargazers becomes the wizardry of the Greeks).

4. Magic should meet (individual and also collective) psychological needs of those who seek to employ it.

A “hard magic” system certainly could meet our criterion for authenticity. Without conducting any kind of survey, my unscientific impression is that most of them don’t, and in fact, don’t consciously try. Instead, they are constructed to follow consistent internal logic and provide a system of costs and possibilities for the story setting.

The lack of authenticity in the magic systems of contemporary fantasy is a loss; let’s consider again Harari’s list. In the real world, magic is intimately connected with the human response to crises (which is to say, growth, heroism, narrative, destruction, change, and initiation). Magic is at some (or all) stages intrinsic to human thought, and it is closely related to human worship. Magic is defined by social lines, and by our perceptions of our own cultures and other cultures.

In other words, magic is tightly connected to the human spirit. Fantasy at its best is the what-if literature of human spirituality, one reason being that magic in the real world is tightly bound to the human soul. Therefore, what-if postulates about authentic magic in a fantasy setting are what-if postulates about our spirit, and the human condition. A “hard magic” system that is rigorous, logical, and consistent, but lacks the ambiguity, sociality, spirituality, visceral psychology, and thought-content of real magic, has taken a long step away from the human soul. To me, candidly, many “hard magic” systems feel like fan fiction for a roleplaying or collectible card game, rather than the mirror to the human condition they should be. Our literature becomes the poorer thereby.

So, Dave . . . What’s Your Magic System?

My Baen series Witchy War, which includes novels Witchy Eye and Witchy Winter, is set in an alternate earth in which I’ve taken Jacksonian America apart and rebuilt it as an epic fantasy setting. Therefore, all the magic as practiced by the characters in Witchy War comes from real-world magic, either built from the blocks of real-world or in the form of whole real-world traditions.

Sarah Calhoun and other characters in Witchy War (the monk Thalanes, but also the Yankee chaplain Ezekiel Angleton and the Necromancer Oliver Cromwell) practice a high magical art called many things, but especially gramarye. I deliberately emphasize this name for its connection with grammar, and the implication that such magicians construct spells from basic principles. Specifically, they build spells using the laws formulated in the real world by James George Frazer (and in the story setting, by Sir Isaac Newton in his groundbreaking opus, the Principia Magica):

If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not.[24]

In other words, Sarah and other gramarists practice magic like anthropologists. This is explicitly a magical approach taken by the educated and upper-class among magical practitioners, including Polite monks (sisters and brothers of the Humble Order of St. Reginald Pole, patron saint of Christian magic) and university-trained magicians, though the monk Thalanes at least expresses the view that all magic is some form of gramarye. Gramarists’ spells work because the practitioners have the ability to construct analogies and impose them on the world by force of spirit.

High and Low Forms of Magic

Early on in Witchy Eye, the Appalachee Elector Iron Andy Calhoun refers to the Emperor Thomas as a “Chaldee numbskull,” which is to say, a devotee of astrology.[25] This is a fair accusation: Thomas has nativities cast, uses judicial astrology (the art of forecasting events and choosing propitious times by studying celestial bodies), and seeks to capture the benevolent influence of the zodiac and the planets by the use of images (when we first see him in a recruiting handbill in Free Imperial Nashville, the image of Thomas’s crown “subtly” incorporates the “seal of the planet Mars”). This latter astrological art is not one you see in supermarket tabloids these days, but is taken very seriously by such important grimoires as The Picatrix[26] and Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy.[27]

Witchy War includes practitioners of Vodun (voodoo). In Witchy Eye we meet Etienne Ukwu, the gangster son of New Orleans’s bishop. Etienne is also an initiated houngan, that is to say a Vodun priest (and he has other intimate connections with Vodun divinities, but . . . spoilers). In Witchy Winter, when he confronts an initiated mambo working for his enemy, the Chevalier of New Orleans, the accusation that each hurls at the other is faithlessness: the misdeed of being a mere bokor, a mercenary practitioner of Vodun magic operating outside the confines of an accepted tradition and without the consent of the loa.[28]

German Brauchers in Pennsland and the Ohio are referred to in Witchy Eye, but really come onto the stage in Witchy Winter. Braucherei is a tradition of active prayer on behalf of petitioners; brauchen is to try in Pennsylvania Dutch, and a braucher is willing to try to effect a cure or solution on behalf of another person—provided that the braucher must remain disinterested, so he receives no payment and can’t be related to the person he’s helping. In Witchy Winter, Luman Walters is a hedge magician whose quest for initiation into the secrets of the universe has led him to borrow or steal from many magical traditions, including braucherei. The braucher prayers (formulaic prayers, that sometimes have fixed ritual gestures and may require physical components) Luman knows come from the best-selling grimoire ever written in North America, John George Hohman’s The Long Lost Friend.[29] Another braucher art Luman practices is the writing of himmelsbriefe—fixed-text “heavenly letters” which, written with fine materials and pure intent, and supposed to protect their bearer.[30] Braucherei’s strict moral requirements weigh on Luman, and push him to take some large personal risks late in the story.

In the Hellenistic world there existed a cosmopolitan, international system of magic, in which spells and magical words fossilized into existing professional practice and were shared around the Mediterranean. Even relatively insular cultures like the Jews participated in this international system, while omitting certain practices and adding their own contributions.[31] In the Witchy War setting, this corpus of magic is identified with the pseudo-pharaonic culture of Memphis and said to have been preserved by the great Memphite wizard Jean d’Anastasi (this is, ahem, one of my little historical jokes). Memphis is Luman Walters’s other great source of spells and arcane arts,[32] and although it imposes dietary taboos on him, it doesn’t include the moral strictures of braucherei . . . and at least one of those Memphite spells gets Luman into trouble.

Classical shamanism is at home on the steppes of Asia, but features of shamanism appear in magico-religious practice all over the globe. In Witchy Winter, the ceremonial misbirth of one man’s child drives him to seek a physician. In turn, that healer must first heal himself, and he does so by shamanic initiation, rising on a drum-that-is-also-a-horse out of his body and into the eternal world of the stars. There he is torn to pieces by cosmic ogres and rebuilt with iron bones and a piece of quartz in his head; this rebuilding gives him powers, including the power to return to celestial world, where he can interact with the spirits of all things, living and dead, and effect powerful healing. In the course of his rebuilding, it is implied that this religious experience dates back to or connects with the lore of the red-headed giants who were among the earliest inhabitants of the continent, and who have now mostly been driven into the north. Note that the words shaman and shamanism do not appear in the book.[33]

A North American spiritual practice said to have shamanic features is the Midewiwin medicine society of the Ojibwe. The Midewiwin know healing songs, and at key points in the year enact important rituals in their lodges that are designed to fill their spirit pouches with beneficent power.[34] Midewiwin medicine men appear briefly in Witchy Winter.

The Fine Line Between the Magical and the Spiritual

Finally, as in the historical real world, in the Witchy War setting, there is a fine line between Christian practice, scripture, and liturgy, on the one hand, and magic on the other.[35] Examples in Witchy Eye include: corn reading, the practice of reading passages of the gospels to fields of grain in order to drive away malevolent spirits and permit the grain to grow better; a curse pronounced by the Bishop of New Orleans, complete with the shaking of dust from his shoe on the cursed party;[36] and an instructional illusion spell formed of the stained-glass windows of a cathedral. A particularly fun example for me from Witchy Winter is one cleric’s conversion of a funeral mass into an attack spell, complete with hostile psalm passages, a voodoo doll in the casket rather than a corpse, and a crowd chanting kyrie, kteinon (“Lord, kill!”).

This doesn’t exhaust the forms of magic that are referred to or appear in Witchy War. Lullian Alchemy gets a nod, for instance, and there are rune-carving vitki priests in the Germanic northwest of the Empire, and there is a deck of Tarocks that shows extraordinary properties. But I’ve tried throughout the series to build “authentic” rather than “hard” magic, because I believe that authentic magic connects more meaningfully to the human condition. And connecting to the human condition (in the context of a rollicking adventure tale) is what I think fantasy literature should be all about.

[1] Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “mageia”.

[2] Matthew 2.

[3] Yuval Harari, Jewish Magic before the Rise of Kabbalah, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017, pp. 15-67.

[4] Ibid o. 15.

[5] Ibid p. 20.

[6] Ibid p. 18.

[7] Ibid pp. 29-30.

[8] Ibid p. 53.

[9] Ibid pp. 21-23.

[10] Ibid p. 18.

[11] Ibid pp. 34-45.

[12] Ibid pp. 32-33.

[13] Ibid pp. 35-38.

[14] Ibid p. 38.

[15] Ibid p. 58.

[16] Ibid p. 63.

[17] Ibid p. 64.

[18] Ibid p. 65.

[19] Ibid p. 65.

[20] Ibid p. 24.

[21] Ibid pp. 26-28, 39-43.

[22] Ibid pp. 45-50.

[23] Ibid p. 59.

[24] James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1963, p. 12.

[25] I have found a useful handbook for getting into the basics of astrology to be Frances Sakoian and Louis S. Acker, The Astrologer’s Handbook, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1973. You’re going to want to have a good handle on naked-eye astronomy before you even start, or it will be hard going. An excellent historical survey is Nicholas Campion, A History of Western Astrology, 2 vols., New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. The classic and highly influential early modern work is William Lilly’s Christian Astrology, a three-book work first published in 1647. Lilly was the great English astrologer of his day. My edition is William Lilly’s Christian Astrology, 2 vols., Bel Air: Astrology Classics, 2004.

[26] John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock trans., The Illustrated Picatrix: The Occult Classic of Astrological Magic Complete in One Volume, Renaissance Astrology, 2015, pp. 84-132.

[27] Donald Tyson ed. and James Freake trans., Three Books of Occult Philosophy Written by Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications, 1993, pp. 375-411.

[28] I’ve found accessible discussions of voodoo thought and practice in: Mambo Chita Tann, Haitian Vodou: An Introduction to Haiti’s Indigenous Spiritual Tradition, Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications, 2016; Kenaz Filan, The Haitian Vodou Handbook: Protocols for Riding with the Loa, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2007; and Kenaz Filan, The New Orleans Voodoo Handbook, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2011.

[29] John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend, Daniel Harms ed., Woodbury, Llewellyn Publications, 2012.

[30] C.R. Bilardi, The Red Church, or the Art of Pennsylvania German Braucheri, Sunland: Pendraig, 2009, pp. 307-315, and Karl Herr, Hex and Spellwork: The Magical Practices of the Pennsylvania Dutch, York Beach: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2002, pp.75-105.

[31] Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 291-350. “To take a modern example, the charm against the Evil Eye will contain the name of Christ or of a Saint in a Christian charm, the name of Muhammed in the Muhammedan, and that of an angel or a mysterious name of God in the Jewish formulas, though all the rest would be identical.” M. Gaster, The Sword of Moses: An Ancient Book of Magic, from an Unique Manuscript, Lexington: Theophania Publishing, p. 6.

[32] Luman’s mental “grimoire” is drawn from Hans Dieter Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986.

[33] The single must-read book on shamanism is Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

[34] See Frances Densmore, Chippewa Customs, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Press, 1979, pp. 86-97.

[35] A ground-breaking and influential study of this subject is Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London: Penguin Books, 1971. An interesting book to read while considering the subject is Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Scot’s aim is to end the persecution of witches, and it seems likely he didn’t believe in the reality of the magic he was documenting at all. Nevertheless, to expose the very idea of witchcraft as his peers understood it to ridicule, Scot documents many instances of Christian prayers or artifacts being put to magical ends. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Mineola: Dover Publications, 1972.

[36] Matthew 10:14-15.

Fixing Broken Memory

Dr. Robert E. Hampson

© 2018 Lightspring, image licensed from Shutterstock

Memory loss: there can be no more tragic condition for humans, particularly in Alzheimer's Disease where memory loss is progressive and debilitating. AD patients initially show problems with “working memory” (new, temporary memories for a specific purpose, such as remembering where you parked your car), then more serious memory deficits set in resulting in loss of “reference memory” (established information such as personal history and facts learned in school). Eventually, the memory loss is so severe, the patient loses all sense of self, and becomes like a stranger to family members, having already forgotten the names and faces of their loved ones.

Loss of memory function can be temporary, such as amnesia, or progressive and debilitating, such as the example of dementia given above. It can accompany head injury or stroke, result from disorders such as Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's and epilepsy, or occur as a consequence (intended or not) of medication and drugs of abuse. Much research on human memory has focused on identifying brain areas that can produce amnesia and/or dementia when damaged. Therapeutic measures to counter memory loss have focused on protecting those brain areas, correcting metabolic or chemical imbalances, and in rare cases, testing drugs that improve the neurochemical processes underlying memory and promote enhanced memory abilities. Unfortunately, few of these research directions deal with the underlying issues of replacing or restoring the actual function of memory performed by assemblies of neurons (electrically active cells) in the brain.

Until now.

For the past 35 years, I have been privileged to be a member of a team that has examined basic functions of the brain underlying memory. This spring, we announced the successful testing of a system with the potential to become a prosthetic device for restoration of memory function in humans [http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/aaaed7]. The unique capability of this system is the potential for bypassing memory-associated brain areas that have been damaged and to take over information processing for the damaged areas. The work was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) via their Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program directed by Dr. Justin Sanchez. The project is also the culmination of nearly twenty years of DARPA, NSF, and NIH-supported research in various animal models prior to extending the testing to humans.

To explain the magnitude of the problem of "Broken Memory" requires some background in what physicians and scientists know about memory function. Readers may also be interested in a Baen nonfiction essay "Remember to Remind Me" from 2015 [http://www.baen.com/remember]. Furthermore, to understand our team's prosthetic approach will require a diversion into some of the key researchers and their findings, as well as competing theories and proposed treatments. After the basics, we will discuss the timeline for getting from this “basic science” to the current studies. No announcement of proposed treatment would be complete without a discussion of alternatives—such as drugs, memory training, and even alternate prosthetic proposals. Finally, we will discuss the current state of the art in the context of advanced theories and treatments as put forward by science fiction writers and futurists.

Human Memory—and How to Damage It

Human memory is generally categorized in different ways in order to identify both the function and the involvement of different brain areas. The most common category is short-term vs. long-term memory. Short-term memory is information that only needs to be retained for a brief duration—such as the interval between reading and dialing a phone number. Such information is rapidly and easily forgotten. Long-term memory is just what it sounds like: information that is stored in our memory more-or-less permanently, such as the names of friends and family, or information we learned in school. Two alternative terms that mean close to the same thing as short- and long-term memory are “working memory” and “reference memory.” Working memory is a particular type of short-term memory in which the information is retained only briefly, used for a purpose and then discarded. Reference memory is facts and figures that we learn through repetition and long exposure—in other words, long-term memory such as the names of U.S. Presidents or states, how to do algebra, or read Latin. Short-term and working memory are often synonymous, but researchers quibble over the time lengths involved; my studies involve intervals of up to two minutes, yet others may concentrate on lengths of less than ten seconds. One area of agreement, however, is that short-term memory has the potential to become long-term memory through several processes that have actually been covered in the “Remember to Remind Me” essay mentioned and linked above. Memory of any duration can also be categorized as "Episodic" meaning that information that is experienced one or more times; or “Declarative,” which is essentially information of descriptive and mechanistic nature. Thus, Episodic memory is related to what we experience, while Declarative memory is related to what we learn. Note that none of these labels is entirely appropriate to skill memory such as riding a bike, driving a car, or speaking a language. Skill memory is a form of reference memory, but there are several important differences involving how we learn skills by repetition.

What then, is the importance of these different types of memory and the brain? Doctors and scientists have long known that certain types of head injury could damage some types of memory, but it was not until the case of “H.M.” in the 1950s that neuroscientists began to truly understand the particular role of the hippocampus in the various functions of memory. In 1957, Henry Molaison underwent surgery in hopes of stopping his epileptic seizures. The surgery would remove most of the medial temporal lobe—an area extending down and forward on the left and right sides of the brain. Make a fist with your hand, place your thumb along the outside of the first finger, don't curl it inward or across the other fingers, then hold the hand thumb down. That's a rough likeness of one-half of the brain, and your thumb represents the temporal lobe. On the inner side of the temporal lobe is a structure called the “hippocampus,” Latin for “seahorse” (due to the fact that early anatomical descriptions noted a similarity to the curve of a seahorse's tail). The operation successfully stopped the seizures, but it left the patient with a profound amnesia. Most importantly, the type of deficit was “anterograde amnesia,” a failure of short-term memory in which the patient is unable to retain temporary information for more than a few minutes, and in turn, unable to turn that information into permanent (reference) memories. The fact that H.M.'s amnesia was so similar to the diagnosis of progressive dementia described by Professor Alois Alzheimer in 1901, led scientists to closely examine the pathology of Alzheimer's Disease and carefully consider the role of the hippocampus in memory.

There are many brain areas involved in memory; injury to the parietal lobes (the back of the hand in our fist-like model of the brain) can impair recall and reference memory. Specific brain areas for language and speech combine sensory (sight and sound), motor (speech and writing) and memory functions (and are located roughly equivalent to the “knuckles” in our hand model). Specialized amnesias such as “aphasia” (forgetting words) or “alexia” (inability to read) can result from damage limited to those areas. However, the most profound association between memory and brain area resides in the role of the hippocampus to mediate the formation of new memory, making it extremely important for short-term, working memory, and/or episodic memory.

The hippocampus (orange) lies along the inner edge of the temporal lobe on both sides of the brain. © 2018 Sebastian Kaulitzki, image licensed from Shutterstock

Codes for Memory in the Brain

Once brain areas were identified with particular functions, neuroscientists started looking closer at how the individual neurons (brain cells) were involved. For the “sensory” and “motor” areas of the brain, this study had been well underway at the time when the hippocampus came to center stage in the 1960s. However, the techniques used to study the association between brain, senses (touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision) and muscle movement were not appropriate. Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield mapped much of the brain's relationship with the body by using small electrical charges to activate parts of the brain and either observe what body part moved (motor) or asking the patient what they felt (sensory). However, that approach yielded very few results when applied to memory and the hippocampus.

Then in 1971, researchers John O'Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky noticed that certain cells in the hippocampus of rats were active only when the rat was in a particular position in the cage or test chamber [https://doi.org/10.1016/0006-8993(71)90358-1]. The finding led to nearly 50 years of research into "place cells" in the hippocampus, correlating their activity with various elements of location. Cells have been identified with preferences to corners, edges, head directions, body directions, both future and past movements. O'Keefe and colleagues later referred to this as a "cognitive map" of the environment. In 1994, Matt Wilson and Bruce McNaughton demonstrated that place cells were not only involved in a physical representation, but that they were an important component of memory [https://doi.org/10.1126/science.8036517]. Utilizing a track that limited a rat's movement through the environment to specific lanes, thus a specific sequence activating place cells, the team demonstrated that the same cells were re-activated during sleep in the same sequence as when the animal had passed through them in the test session. By making the rat's behavior and reward dependent on remembering a previous sequence of movement, and then manipulating whether this sleep-replay could occur, Wilson, McNaughton and their colleagues were eventually able to demonstrate that the replay was an important phase of memory formation.

My own research started out in a lab that studied the hippocampus, and for years, I, too, recorded place cells and mapped the position correlates of hippocampal neurons. However, we soon discovered that there was more than just spatial information represented by the hippocampus. By this point, place cells had been identified in mice, rats, guinea pigs, cats, dogs, monkeys and humans; yet simply mapping position did not mesh with the known involvement of the hippocampus in encoding all types of memory, as shown by the case of H.M.

From Rodents to Primates to Humans

In the late 1960s/early 1970s the neurophysiology laboratory of Dr. Gary S. Lynch at the University of California at Irvine was deeply involved in understanding the role of the hippocampus in memory. Many theories had been put forward: that the hippocampus acted as an amplifier, that it detected mis-matches between new and old information, that it fulfilled a “pattern completion” role (filling in the gaps in partial data), or even that it had a purely olfactory function (sense of smell). Lynch believed that the hippocampus was processing information related to memory, and one of the young researchers, Dr. Sam A. Deadwyler, started experiments designed to find out exactly how hippocampal neurons encoded information. Soon after, Dr. Theodore W. Berger at the University of Pittsburgh was studying how hippocampal neurons altered their function when information was repeated, strengthening some connections, and altering others to produce a new result when familiar inputs were received. Deadwyler would end up in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at Wake Forest School of Medicine, and Berger in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California, but their eventual long-distance collaboration would bear significant fruit in the form of a model of hippocampal function in memory that shaped my own career, and underlies the recent memory prosthetic paper.

In 1996, I was part of Deadwyler's lab, and studied the activities patterns of collections of hippocampal neurons while rats performed a task requiring short-term memory. These “ensembles” or collections of neurons fired in different patterns in both time and “space” (in this case, space referred to different neurons distributed throughout the hippocampus) depending on the type of behavior required in the task. More importantly, we could identify patterns that clearly distinguished between the various stimuli in the task including position (similar to place cells), behavioral responses, and what part of the task was occurring. Analyses based on the neural ensemble activity alone without looking at those variables could identify and even “predict” some of those variables even before they occurred [http://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/16/1/354.full.pdf]. In fact, the patterns could even identify when the rat was about to make an error in the task [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC33635/]. Over the following ten years, Deadwyler's laboratory refined the analysis to identify the “codes” and improved the ability to predict correct and error responses. The studies moved from rats to monkeys, and would eventually move into human studies, but a few other factors had to come into play, first.

During this same time interval, Berger teamed up with neuroscientist Dr. Vasilis Z. Marmarelis, who had developed a mathematical approach to apply nonlinear systems analysis to neural function. Nonlinear systems are often mislabeled as “chaotic.” More accurately, they do not behave in a regular, exactly repeating manner; rather, they form patterns that appear to recur, but with significant differences each time (consider the annoying lack of pattern in a dripping faucet!). Berger and Marmarelis applied the nonlinear analyses to study the activity of slices of hippocampus kept alive in cell-culture conditions that allowed recording in isolation from all other brain activity [https://doi.org/10.1016/S0925-2312(98)00160-X]. Even in isolation, they noted that activity of the hippocampal neurons was highly dependent on temporal and spatial (in this case, spatial = distribution of neurons and connections across the hippocampal slice) activity of both the input signals and the activity of other neurons in the tissue slice.

Deadwyler and Berger compared notes at several scientific conferences throughout the 1990s and by 2002 had decided to team up to apply the nonlinear model to study the predictive patterns of hippocampal neurons with respect to memory. At the time, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had announced a program to promote Brain Machine Interface research. Deadwyler and Berger's team joined with other researchers on the project and began to extend the modeling from Berger's hippocampal slices, to Deadwyler's behaving rat studies, and eventually into studying memory in other species. By 2005, Berger had published his concept for a prosthetic device in Toward Replacement Parts for the Brain (MIT Press, 2005). The device would record from the inputs to the hippocampus, compute the nonlinear prediction of hippocampus output, then stimulate "downstream" from the hippocampus with that prediction, effectively "bypassing" a damaged hippocampus to restore the function of encoding information for memory processing.

In 2011, the team published their first report that the prosthetic-style stimulation improved memory performance in rats with an intact (undamaged) hippocampus [https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2560/8/4/046017]. But what about a damaged hippocampus? Would the method work where the hippocampal signals were confused or incomplete? In short, yes. Part of the test of the model was to use a drug to partially inactivate the hippocampus and see if the model stimulation would improve or restore the memory function . . . and it did!

With a successful demonstration in rats, the team focused on progressing to a system that could be applied to human memory. However, primate memory is more complex than in rodents, and more than one brain area is involved. In fact, it was mentioned above that some laboratories differ on the definition of “short-term memory” with some laboratories focusing on very short intervals of 1-10 seconds, with others focusing on a longer interval out to 120 seconds. Studies in nonhuman primates traditionally ascribe the very short duration memory to the prefrontal cortex—in the front part of the brain, and the longer duration memory to the hippocampus. By this point, I had taken a more active role in directing the study, so Deadwyler and I initially tested Berger's model in the prefrontal cortex of rhesus monkeys [https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2560/9/5/056012] and then the hippocampus [https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2560/10/6/066013] with success in both approaches. Along the way, Berger and his colleague Dr. Dong Song had adapted the original model from rodent hippocampus to primate prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, and then began to adapt the model for humans [https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSRE.2016.2604423]. The details were different, but the essential model remained a means of predicting hippocampal outputs from inputs to bypass a damaged hippocampus. To restore memory function even when memory was already in decline, the models were trained to discriminate between successful memory (correct trials) and unsuccessful memory (error trials) such that the residual memory function could be reinforced by the operation of the model.

It was now time to test the system in humans.

Nootropic Drugs, Biofeedback and Deep Brain Stimulation

There are many proposed ways to improve human memory, and even rescue it from decline. Science Fiction typically invokes a miracle drug that can “speed up the brain” or similarly “promote the use of more than 10 percent of your brain!" In fact, much of this is nonsense; it is neither the speed of processing, nor the amount of brain in use that determines memory accuracy and efficiency. In fact, humans use nearly all of their brain, all of the time. Inactive tissue is, frankly, dead. The brain remains active all the time, just not particularly involved in all functions at any given time. Just because a person is remembering a song, doesn't mean their vision and touch processing areas aren't active. The brain processes a lot of information, all the time. As you read this essay, you may not be thinking about the sensation of clothes on your skin, seat of the chair, position of your legs, but the sensation is there if you choose to pay attention to it. Likewise, problems with memory fall into two categories: attention to details, and disease/injury.

“Brain training” exercises can be found on the internet and even as smartphone apps. The hype promises an increase in mental acuity and a defense against senility and dementia. Memory tricks and training encourage the user to learn to pay attention to details and make information more memorable. Biofeedback works the same way, it encourages one to adopt brain states that are conducive to attention to detail, and hence improve memory. This does help, and people can be trained to remember with greater success, but the technique has no benefit when the hippocampus and other brain areas are damaged by head injury, stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson's Disease or Alzheimer's disease.

There are pharmacological means of making the biochemical (and electrical) interactions of neurons more efficient. “Nootropic” drugs enhance the communication within and between neurons, focusing attention and increasing the apparent “power” of memory and cognition. The recent movie Limitless is actually based on studies of a drug called “aniracetam,” which makes neurotransmission—the chemical communication between neurons—more efficient. At the same time, movies that invoke the “you only use 10 percent of your brain” concept or postulate a dramatic instantaneous “evolution” to a higher state of being (such as Lucy) are pure fantasy. Thus, there are nootropic drugs that can have a benefit in patients with memory disorders. Memantine is one of those drugs, and it is currently prescribed to Alzheimer's patients to slow down the memory loss associated with the disease. Unfortunately, we still don't have a way to totally arrest the decline and save a patient's memory.

Another popular science fiction trope is electrical stimulation of the brain. Many people probably equate brain stimulation with electro-convulsive shock therapy (ECS). The image of mental patients being shocked off of a table is a visceral one, and hard to erase. The truth is that milliampere and microampere stimulation is a very valuable tool in treating brain disorders, unlike the tens of amperes and volts associated with ECS. Cochlear implant devices have restored the sense of hearing to patients for over thirty-five years. Retinal implants have been FDA approved for five years, and promise to do the same for patients with loss of vision. Transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation apply magnetic fields or electrical current (which generates magnetic fields) to the scalp to influence neural activity. While both techniques produce changes in brain activity and behavior, the exact mechanisms of action are largely unknown, and more research is needed. Deep brain stimulation (DBS), uses a milliampere rhythmic electrical stimulation to the thalamus (a structure responsible for relaying sensory and motor information between the body and the brain) to alleviates many symptoms of Parkinson's disease. DBS is considered the “pacemaker of the brain,” and dates back to 1987, with the procedure becoming much more common in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many hospitals and medical centers have each implanted thousands of patients with DBS electrodes and stimulators over the past twenty years!

Jan Scheuermann feeds herself a chocolate bar, using a robotic arm signals from her brain [Photo by University of Pittsburgh, used with permission.]

Neuroelectrical prosthetics are becoming much more common, and a science fiction author of my acquaintance likes to “complain” that scientists and doctors are making it too hard to write SF, since we keep making the wildest predictions of SF come true! Over the past ten years we have seen retinal prosthetics, brain-controlled robotic arms (above), and even fuzzy cat ears that wiggle in response to brain waves. But what about memory? Can DBS or a technique similar to it restore or even facilitate memory?

Brain Stimulation and Human Memory

It is an acknowledged fact that sometimes the most astounding findings in science occur by accident. With thousands of patients receiving DBS implants, sometimes the electrodes are not precisely in the desired position. However, as a consequence of these sub-optimal placements, clinicians and researchers have learned that DBS stimulation can have effects on other brain systems, potentially relieving anxiety and depression, calming Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and even assist in treating eating disorders. An electrode placement in one patient was particularly surprising. In the course of studying a patient with electrode placement close to the fornix (one of the brain structures containing major inputs to the hippocampus), as well as subsequent patients with deliberate placement of DBS stimulating electrodes in the fornix, Toronto Neurosurgeons Adrian Laxton, M.D. and Andres Lozano M.D., Ph.D. determined that DBS-style stimulation slowed the progression of Alzheimer's Disease [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wneu.2012.06.028]. In California, UCLA psychologist Nanthia Suthana, Ph.D. and neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried, M.D., Ph.D. stimulated entorhinal cortex (another structure with strong inputs to hippocampus) with DBS-like signals and also enhanced learning and memory [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.07.066].

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was already involved in the advancement of brain-controlled prosthetics. Program manager Colonel Geoffrey Ling, M.D. (U.S. Army, retired) launched the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program which culminated in the brain controlled robotic arm shown above. The program went on to develop wearable artificial limbs that begin to fit the definition of “bionic.” A term first coined by Jack Steele, M.D., meaning “lifelike,” it gained a foothold in science fiction, but has since spread into common use [see “On the Road to the Brainships: A Look at the Current Science of Interfacing the Brain,” http://www.baen.com/brainships]. Building on the results from several DARPA-funded research programs, including ours, plus the results by Laxton and Lozano, and Suthana and Fried, DARPA initiated the “Restoring Active Memory” (RAM) program in 2014 under the leadership of Justin Sanchez, Ph.D.

DARPA RAM has funded two different approaches to the problem of facilitating and restoring human memory. One is a very DBS-like approach led by Michael Kahana Ph.D. and Daniel Rizzuto Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. The UPenn team includes neurosurgeons and researchers at nearly a dozen hospitals, research institutions and instrument companies. I lead the other group with laboratory and clinical colleagues at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and USC, using an approach based on the work pioneered by Berger and Deadwyler.

The UPenn team was actually first into press with their results in which they studied hundreds of patient brains to detect changes in the surface and subsurface brain activity associated with correct and incorrect memory functions. The recording approach is based on electroencephalograms (EEG) that incorporate the activity of large assemblies of neurons, and do not always correlate to single brain areas (not that brain always has distinct areas, either!). Spectrographic analysis of this data revealed high frequency activity in the temporal lobe when memory was functioning correctly, which was absent or weaker when memory errors were committed. These results suggested that it was possible to detect a “brain state” corresponding to strong vs. weak memory. Kahana and Rizzuto's colleagues designed a study to detect the “bad memory” state and to reinforce the “good memory” state via stimulation applied to the surface of the brain over the area where the changes in EEG signal had the greatest correlation with memory errors. The stimulation was applied during the time period when the hippocampus “encodes” information for later recall; the recall of that information proceeded naturally, with no stimulation, allowing the team to test how the “good memory” state influenced overall memory function. The approach was successful and the team demonstrated memory improvements of around 15 percent in memory function and recall [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02753-0].

An interesting corollary finding by the UPenn team and other researchers was that stimulation applied directly to the hippocampus was unsuccessful. In fact, direct stimulation of the hippocampus with a DBS-like signal impaired memory, leading both teams to look at stimulation sites outside of hippocampus. This finding was of significance to the WFBMC/USC team, since our stimulation was applied directly to the hippocampus. However, our techniques were fundamentally different both in the theory and type of stimulation.

Berger's theory was based on the detection of discrete neuron firing in the hippocampus. Deadwyler's team had identified neurons which changed their electrical activity in response to the events of a behavioral trial—i.e. was it the encoding or the recall phase? Did the subject simply view the stimulus or did they have to make a response? Was the position to the left or right? Was there one picture or two or three? Each neuron studied responded to a particular feature or combination of features, but no one neuron was capable of responding to (and hence encoding) every feature of a trial or item to be remembered. Encoding of the whole information required multiple neurons—an ensemble in neuroscience terms—and the details of ensemble activity are lost when recorded as EEG-style signals far from the neurons that produce them. Furthermore, Berger had demonstrated that ensemble firing was a product of nonlinear dynamics within and between neurons. Thus, fixed frequency stimulation would disrupt that memory-dependent activity. What was needed instead was a pattern of stimulation that mimicked the nonlinear ensemble codes underlying memory function.

Our project recruited patients who were undergoing a surgical procedure to map the occurrence of epileptic seizures. These patients had electrodes implanted into hippocampus to determine where their seizures originated, with some occurring within hippocampus, and others originating in neighboring brain areas. The patients also had baseline memory that ranged from excellent to impaired, due to their disease. The WFBMC team was able to record neuron ensemble activity from the input and output regions of hippocampus while the patients performed a computerized “working memory” task. The data was then sent to USC for nonlinear modeling. About a week after the original recording session (before the patient was scheduled to have the electrodes removed), the WFBMC team again tested the patient, but this time, the recordings from the input areas of hippocampus were fed into an online, real-time version of the nonlinear model, and the output of the model was sent to a device capable of delivering a pattern of minute electrical stimulation pulses to the output areas of hippocampus. Each stimulation pulse was limited to 2 milliseconds and was only 150 microamperes of current, much less than DBS stimulation or even the pulses used by Wilder Penfield in his surgical experiments to map brain function. The stimulation was also limited to occur only during the “encoding” phase of memory on about a third of the test trials. Another third of the trials received a randomized pattern of stimulation that was not produced by the model (and tended to look similar to the fixed frequency stimulation utilized by the other teams mentioned above). The final third of the trials received no stimulation so that they could be directly compared to the stimulated trials.

The result of the stimulation test was a thirty-seven percent improvement on working memory trials in which information was required to be held for up to two minutes. Another version of the task tested memory up to seventy-five minutes, and showed that the stimulation improved retention and recall of memory by thirty-five percent. The randomized stimulation trials did not show any improvement, and even showed a decrease in memory function in some subjects, consistent with the direct hippocampal stimulation tested by UPenn and UCLA. We were also quite encouraged by the fact that the system worked to improve memory even in patients who were already experiencing problems with short-term memory. Given that the nonlinear model was constructed from recordings in the same patient, critics had warned us that we would require perfect memory to train the model, and would not be able to produce positive effects in someone without perfect memory. On the contrary, by identifying the neural “codes” when memory was correct or incorrect, and building the model based on those correct codes, we were able to build-in a “tolerance” to errors that allowed us to improve memory for all of the patients tested.

Both sets of experiments provided results that suggest that it is possible to design and build a brain-interface prosthetic device to improve memory in humans. However, what is really needed to turn these results into a device, and which device is more appropriate for treating the type of memory loss seen in Alzheimer's Disease and other brain injuries and diseases? The answer is that both approaches would produce a valuable memory prosthetic: a device based on the UPenn findings would detect when memory is not functioning properly, and produce a state associated with correct function; whereas a device based on the WFBMC/USC design would be able to by-pass damaged areas of the brain involved in processing memory. However, the UPenn device, like pharmaceutical enhancement, biofeedback, TMS and tDCS, relies on the normal cellular mechanisms of memory being intact. None of these approaches would necessarily help patients who begin to lose neurons and neural circuits due to epilepsy, Parkinson's and advanced stages of Alzheimer's. On the other hand, the WFBMC/USC device concentrates on hippocampus, and may not be applicable to memory functions dependent on brain areas such as prefrontal cortex, or long-term memory beyond the seventy-five minutes tested so far. Ultimately, the designs will evolve as further research is performed, but the current results are exciting and promising as the next step to being able to counter memory loss.

Fixing broken brains requires knowledge of what makes the brain work in the first place. © 2018 Lightspring, image licensed from Shutterstock

Where Do We Go from Here?

As a scientist, what are the next steps? What will turn either proof of concept into a viable prosthetic? And, as an author who dabbles in the science fiction realm, what are the more futuristic implications of this work?

For the research and development, we need more patient testing. We need to change up the memory tasks we use and see whether the principles apply to all types of memory, or just some. We also need to determine how best to convert the algorithms and models into ones that can operate independently for years without external supervision—in other words to create something analogous to a pacemaker which senses, responds, and acts automatically without a human having to make decisions. There is also additional technology needed, such as improved electrodes that fit more electrical sensing into smaller designs, and can remain implanted for years without losing the ability to sense the electrical currents underlying brain activity. We need to determine whether our designs are robust enough to provide solutions for multiple injury or disease states. Finally, we need to always strive for new technologies that allow us a more precise “view” of the function of the brain, especially when we can do it from the outside and not require implanted electrodes and sensors!

From a more speculative approach, what are the implications of this research? Are we truly unlocking all of the abilities of the brain?

First and foremost, you will notice that this essay does not talk about “enhancement” of memory, particularly in subjects with normal memory and the absence of disease or injury. The primary reason is that enhancement was not our goal; our goal was restoration of lost function. The most basic premise of the WFBMC-USC research has been to find a way to bypass a damaged brain area to allow restoration of normal function. We do that by mathematically modeling the function of hippocampus, recording the signals that are naturally input to hippocampus, route that to our model, and then send the output of the model back as a corrected and strengthened information stream using the subject's own codes and signals for memory. This last point is extremely important, because it also means that we are working only with what is already present in the brain under normal, undamaged conditions!

There are, however, some interesting implications for the science fiction fan and futurist: To date, neural-interface prosthetics have come in two types: input to brain, and output to brain. Input prosthetics substitute an artificial signal for the normal sensory signals such as vision and hearing. Thus, retinal implants and cochlear implants are input prosthetics, and as our neuroscience techniques improve and the devices miniaturize, we may even see fully implantable devices such as “bionic eyes” and “bionic ears” popular in TV, movies and books (e.g. Martin Caidin's Cyborg, the basis for TV's The Six Million Dollar Man). On the other hand, output prosthetics turn brain signals into external movement: robotic arms and neurally-controlled limbs are output prosthetics and provide an important link between thoughts and actions, particularly for people who have lost the ability to interact with their environment.

Combining the two types of prosthetic—input and output—how far are we from an artificial body, or even the ability to strap on a mecha (as in Travis Taylor's Tau Ceti Agenda series) or even a spaceship (as in Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang)? We are starting to see the first signs with Johnny Metheny, a man who lives with a permanently mounted artificial arm that he controls much the same way he would a natural arm [https://www.army.mil/article/167735/darpas_mind_controlled_robotic_arm_does_everything]. As a society we have clear evidence of the need for functional artificial limbs for soldiers, accident victims and cancer survivors who have lost limbs, but what about a whole body? The late Stephen Hawking provided striking evidence that even as his body withered, his mind remained sharp and vital. Again, the advances in brain computer interfaces used for entertainment [https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/bionics/brainy-startup-neurable-unveils-the-worlds-first-braincontrolled-vr-game] show us that the ability to make a difference exists today, and only needs to be put into practice!

There is, however, a third class of prosthetic that is still very early in development, and that is characterized by devices that do not involve the input or output functions of the brain. A “brain-to-brain” prosthetic, such as DBS or the memory prosthetic reported here, suggests the ability to fix broken brains and overcome injury and disease. Over the past ten years, some epilepsy patients have received the option of an implant that senses when a seizure is about to occur, and sends signals that can prevent or lessen the severity of the seizure. As always, science fiction gives us examples, such as Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man, but also cautions scientists and clinicians alike to not be so arrogant as to think we know everything there is to know about the brain! Still, I think that over the next five-to-ten years, we will see an explosion of possibilities for brain-to-brain prosthetics, and will see adoption of those technologies within not much more than that time span.

Brain-to-computer interfaces (BCIs) are simply a specialized case of brain-to-brain prosthetics, where the output “brain” is a synthetic one. The “Neurable” brain-controlled game headset mentioned above is a BCI that has its origins in the use of EEG signals to provide computer control to “locked-in” patients who have lost all voluntary muscle control. By recording the EEG signals associated with viewing images on a computer screen, such devices can be used to track a person's attention, and even allow them to select and "point" at images and letters on a screen to type messages. This is an early phase compared to the full immersion computer interfaces proposed by James A. Hogan in The Genesis Machine and Realtime Interrupt, or the “cyberpunk” genre popularized by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and others; still, it is a start, and it is a technology that exists now.

The possibilities truly are endless. From the perspective of the current research, I cannot truly imagine which of the present approaches to restoring brain function will be adopted, and which will be discarded or sent back “to the drawing board” for more study. I do know that our memories are at the heart of what it means to be human, and are threatened by head injury, stroke, and diseases that damage the brain. We showed that we could tap into a patient’s own memory content, strengthen it and feed it back to the patient to assist patient's own brain in making correct memory. The ability to preserve and restore memory is one of the most important research directions that I can imagine, and it is this that keeps me coming to work each day.

[Disclaimer: The studies described above have been developed in part with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The views, opinions and/or findings expressed are those of the author(s) and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. Approved for public release, distribution unlimited]

Character of the Female Warrior: an FAQ

Kacey Ezell and Jennifer Whetstone

The concept of the female warrior has long been fascinating in fiction. Lately, it’s become trendy for authors and directors to make a point of including a Strong Female Character™ in their work sometimes regardless of need. But how realistic are these characters compared to the real thing?

I get asked this question a lot. I’ve spent my entire adult life serving my country in uniform, like my mother did for twenty-four years before me. My military and combat experiences have given me a certain perspective on what it’s like to be a woman in the military, but it’s just that: my perspective. I was talking to a friend of mine and another truly badass military chick, and she said that she gets asked a lot of the same questions, which got me thinking that it might be fun to put together a bit of an FAQ regarding Strong Female Characters™ in the military.

First, let me introduce you to Lieutenant Colonel Jennifer Whetstone. Lieutenant Colonel Whetstone is a USAF pilot and Regional Affairs Strategist for Latin America. Like me, she flies the mighty UH-1N Twin Huey in the Washington DC area. She earned her wings in 2003 and has over 1800 hours in the UH-1N and C-12 aircraft.

So, without further ado, I give you a few of the most Frequently Asked Questions of Military Servicewomen as Relates to Science Fiction and Fantasy (FAQOMSARTSFF, because you know we military chicks like to abbreviate stuff).

How did you become interested in a career as a military officer and aviator?

KE: When I was seven, I read Dragondrums, and fell in love with Anne McCaffrey’s dragons. I wanted more than anything to be a dragonrider when I grew up. However, as dragons are in relatively short supply on Earth, at nine years old I decided that being a pilot was close enough. Both my parents were career Air Force officers, and so when I told my dad about this, he recommended that I go to the Air Force Academy. So that’s what I did.

JW: I can’t point to a specific moment when I decided that this was the career for me. My father and grandfather are both military helicopter pilots, so I’d been exposed to aviation my entire life. I do remember at a very early age not thinking of the military and aviation as actual work. My mom tells me of a time at about six years old when I asked my dad when he was going to get a “real” job, like working in a grocery store!

In any case, I’m so grateful for my grandfather’s and father’s career choice as it exposed me to the wonders of flight throughout my childhood. I have fond memories of visiting the cavernous hangars where my dad worked, climbing all over aircraft as if they were playground equipment, watching Santa fly in on a helicopter every Christmas season, and spending hours under the hot sun at airshows every summer. This cumulative exposure influenced me to the point where I just couldn’t imagine doing something else for a living.

If I were to point to a single, defining moment that swayed me towards this career, it’d have to be when my grandfather, who worked for Bell Helicopter at the time, strapped the entire family into a Huey and took us for a flight through the Palo Duro Canyons. With my feet dangling out the open doors, wind in my face, a feeling of pure and intense delight settled over my ten-year-old self.

Yes, six-year-old me was right. This hasn’t been a real job—it’s been a passion that has opened the door to myriad opportunities to grow as an officer and a leader.

Who are some of your favorite fictional female officers/warriors and why?

KE: So, it’s impossible not to love Honor Harrington, even though she is annoyingly expert at everything she tries. Honor really embodies what I consider to be a first principle of success in any career field, but especially the military, which is this: First, Be Competent. No one will respect you or even like you if you can’t do your job and do it well. This is especially critical in career fields where one’s job performance directly affects whether your comrades live or die.

Also, I was always a huge fan of Princess Leia, in part because she was both badass and unapologetically female. Michael Z. Williamson’s Kendra Pacelli and Angie Kaneshiro are the same way. And, of course, there was Lessa, who I loved because she wasn’t perfect. She was prickly and not very nice to people sometimes, but she held the strength of her convictions and was absolutely dedicated to her cause. That really appealed to me as a slightly socially awkward little girl.

JW: My family had a tradition of settling in on Friday nights with a pizza, a bag of Doritos, and a two-liter soda to watch the new episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. From the pilot episode, I was taken with Lieutenant Tasha Yar. Not only was she a Starfleet officer, but she was the Chief of Security! As a female! I was intrigued by her strength and competence amongst her male peers. At the same time, I admired that she didn’t lose her femininity despite holding a traditionally masculine leadership role. Needless to say, I was devastated when her character was killed off in the predictable Star Trek manner of doing away with Security Officers.

Another character that I admire is Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley of the “Alien” films. Specifically in the first film of the series, Ripley’s place as a capable member of the crew is seen from the start, with no regard for her gender. At the time of the film’s production, her role as a strong, female protagonist was likely viewed a radical one! Nonetheless, Sigourney Weaver’s powerful portrayal of an officer resolutely determined to save humanity from a dire threat demonstrated to me that women need not degrade themselves (with skimpy clothing, saccharine personality, etc) to satisfy the stereotypical expectations of a heroine’s behavior.

Are there any character traits common to female warriors in fiction that you find

particularly realistic? Unrealistic? Why?

KE: I have to be honest. I get really annoyed when female warrior characters are portrayed as “just one of the boys.” Because in truth, we’re never “just one of the boys.” It doesn’t work like that, and trying to hard to be “one of the boys” is a surefire recipe for ostracization and erosion of morale and unit cohesion. It’s just too weird for everyone to wrap their head around. Plus, it’s unnecessary, in today’s U.S. miltary at least.

The men who serve our country are by and large well equipped to treat women as complete equals, as long as everyone adheres to the first principle of being competent at the job. For a woman to try to be something she’s not just leads to awkwardness and a lack of communication and connection. And in the military, sometimes those connecting bonds are what keep us safe.

When talking to young women coming into the military, I encourage them to strive for a dynamic of being “a sister among brothers,” rather than trying to be “one of the boys.” It’s a far more natural dynamic that allows everyone to be more relaxed with one another. Again, Angie Kaneshiro’s interactions with her crew in Angeleyes is a great example, although not all of her crew were male.

But above all else, she must be competent. And in large part, I think that fiction gets this principle right. John Ringo’s Faith and Sophia in the Black Tide Rising series are great examples here. While it’s easy to raise eyebrows at the idea of a teenaged lieutenant of Marines, one can’t deny that John took great care to represent Faith’s essential competence. The way he wrote of her Marines responding to that competence they witnessed is entirely realistic, in my opinion.

JW: I find it unrealistic when a female warrior does not demonstrate vulnerability. By vulnerability, I don’t mean weakness. But, when there is a strong character who seems to have divorced herself from all of those things that make her a woman, I have difficulty identifying with her character. I want to know about her struggles. I want to see that, despite whatever difficulties she faces, she can use her training and her problem-solving skills to come to a solution. I don’t want to see a character making the perfect decision in every situation, never facing any conflict. Characters develop and grow amidst conflict and imperfection. I tend to identify with imperfect characters who have the integrity to make the tough decisions in order to accomplish the mission, despite the personal cost.

What problems or dilemmas for female warrior characters are under-addressed in

fiction?

Over-addressed?

KE: So, like it or not, women are still the only humans who can carry and birth children. And once the child is born, someone must raise it. This is a huge area of discussion among my real-life peers, because the question must naturally arise: “How far can we go to accommodate pregnancy/childrearing and still accomplish the mission?” And the truth is that there’s no easy answer (except maybe the Honor Harrington method of growing a fetus in an artificial womb tank). I don’t see authors addressing this facet of female military service very much. One exception is Tom Kratman’s The Amazon Legion, which I found to be a really interesting and innovative solution to the problem of “who cares for baby when mommy’s out kicking ass?”

On the other hand, while I know that sexual harassment and assault still exist and are absolutely crimes that have no place in military service (or anywhere, really!), I’m super tired of every female warrior being portrayed as the victim of a sexual assault, just as I’m tired of every male warrior being portrayed as a predator who wants nothing more than to exploit his female comrades. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of my brothers-in-arms are stand-up, good men who would cheerfully geld someone who threatened their sisters. We are taught to look out for and protect one another, and that’s what most warriors do. The exceptions are there, but to be honest, they mostly don’t last long in the military. Not that I’ve seen.

JW: One thing I’d love to see addressed more frequently is family life! Just because a woman is in a powerful position of leadership doesn’t mean that it’s an all or nothing proposition. There are fictional female warriors who have had children, but their role as mother is oftentimes either glossed over (Leia Organa) or becomes a singular motivation, to the detriment of the character’s career (Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity.) To realistically present a female warrior as a mother requires a delicate balance. You want to avoid the maternal aspect of the character overshadowing her ability to stand alone as an interesting and valuable character. At the same time, it is useful to discuss the challenges a female leader faces in trying to balance career aspirations and family life. Fiction often informs real life and provides young and old alike with allegorical lessons from which they can learn and apply to their own circumstances. As such, balancing work and family obligations is a very real issue facing young women today. Seeing these issues addressed by powerful women in fiction provides hope and inspiration for the next generation of warrior mothers!

How does being female affect your command style?

KE: It would be super easy for me to be flippant and say that I don’t know, because I’ve never not been female. But the truth is that coming up female in a male-dominated career field has shaped the way I look at things and interact with people, and that’s naturally going to affect my command style.

A lot of us are socialized as little girls to take great care of people’s feelings, and not to say anything hurtful if we can help it. While being cognizant of people’s emotions is useful and necessary for a commander, I have learned that I must communicate clearly, even bluntly, regardless of how people’s feelings might be hurt. That being said, I do take care to deliver information, orders, feedback, in a manner appropriate to the situation, and I don’t know that I would have the awareness to do that without that early training in reading and responding to people’s emotions when I was young.

JW: Being female has absolutely affected my command style throughout my military career, but in different ways as I’ve grown and matured. When I first commissioned into the Air Force in 2001, I felt that the only way to be a strong leader was to be more assertive/confident/dominant than my male peers. I don’t think I was unique in that regard; many females I’ve spoken with also felt pressured to overcompensate with certain personality traits historically associated with the traditional (male) leadership ideal. I, like several of my female counterparts, had abandoned my femininity.

Thankfully, I realized fairly quickly that I wasn’t becoming a better leader by conforming to those previously established norms. As I developed my leadership style over the years, I found that it has been much more beneficial and effective to embrace those qualities inherent in me. Empathy, compassion, and sheer grit are all qualities intrinsically associated with women and employing those qualities in my career has taken me farther than I would have imagined.

What do you want to see in your “ideal” female warrior character?

KE: I can’t say it enough: First, Be Competent. Unless her lack of competence is part of the story, a female warrior who isn’t good at her job is a) no warrior and b) so unrealistic as to throw me out of the story. People who can’t do the job don’t last long in the military, and oftentimes, women who can’t do the job are the first to go. This isn’t sexism, it’s just my observation.

Secondly, the character should be herself (again, unless it’s a plot point that she isn’t). If she’s a girlie-girl, she should be able to own the fact that she’s a girlie-girl when socializing with her comrades, otherwise, it’s not reflective of the level of comfort that military members really need to have with one another in order to do the job and keep each other safe.

Thirdly, she shouldn’t be omnipotent (Sorry, Honor!). No woman is a master of everything she tries. And unless you’re talking biotech enhancements, no woman is going to physically overpower a man of equal training and greater strength and build. It just doesn’t work that way.

Fourthly, she really does need to have a sense of humor and a relatively thick skin. But I think that’s true of all military/warrior characters. The nature of our job demands it, and there’s a reason why we all indulge in dark humor as a coping mechanism. When dealing with life and death matters, sometimes the choice is to laugh so that you don’t start to cry. Whether you’re male or female.

JW: The ideal female warrior character demonstrates balance in her life. She is competent, cool under pressure, fierce when necessary, but never loses her humanity. Women bring a lot to the table already and there is no reason for a female leader to sacrifice her innate abilities and characteristics that make her uniquely female. A beautiful woman and a combat boot-wearing badass can exist in the same space—for me, that’s the epitome of a female warrior.

Now, like I said above, these are just our perspectives. And if you’re in love with a completely over-the-top, kickass, one-of-the-boys, does everything right heroine, we’re not trying to tell you that you’re wrong. But it might increase your enjoyment to compare and contrast her outlook and demeanor with the perspectives of a couple of women who’ve served. We’re not necessarily representative of all of our sisters-in-arms. Like any group of individuals, we’re going to have diverse perspectives and ideas. However, I think you’ll find that if you talk to us, you’ll see that like many Strong Female Characters™, we take pride in being ourselves, and being good at our jobs.

Which is really just good advice in general.

Life Beyond Earth? Look to Small Stars

Kerry Hensley

Five billion years ago, our Sun condensed out of a cloud of gas and dust. Shortly after, planets coalesced out of the flattened nebula, and the strong winds of the young Sun blew away the remaining gas and dust. Moons were ejected, moons were captured. Cosmic debris careened through the solar system, causing chaos. After a time, everything settled. The planets cooled. Life blossomed.

Five billion years from now, our Sun will exhaust its supply of hydrogen. Its outer layers will swell and engulf Mercury, Venus, and Earth. The Sun’s core will be exposed and its outer layers will drift away, driven to fluoresce by X-rays emitted by the hot core but later invisible to our eyes. The core will cool until it too fades from view, living out the rest of its days as a black dwarf.

Our Sun is a middle-aged star in the suburbs of the Milky Way, a rather average spiral galaxy. While humans have come to see the Sun as a typical star, that’s really not quite true. Sunlike stars are much more common than the massive stars that end their lives as supernovae, leaving behind rapidly spinning neutron stars or black holes, but they still only make up a small fraction of the stars in the universe. The most common stars in the universe are all around us, but hidden, too dim to be seen with the naked eye.

A false-color near-infrared image of the central region of the Orion Nebula, a star-forming region over a thousand light-years away. The bright stars in the center of the image are extremely massive—about 15-30 times the mass of the Sun. These few massive stars are far outnumbered by the smaller, cooler stars in this star-forming region. Credit: ESO

Invisible Stellar Neighbors

About three quarters of the stars in the universe belong to a class of small, cool stars called M dwarfs. The name is historical, harkening back to a system of classifying stars based on the strength of a spectral line of hydrogen. (The modern classification system scrambles the historical system and instead labels stars according to their temperature, from O, the hottest and most massive stars, through B, A, F, G, and K, to M, the coolest and least massive stars. It’s common to tack L, T, and Y on to the end of the sequence, but it’s up for debate as to whether these ultra-cool objects should be considered stars or not.)

The fact that there are so many M dwarfs compared to other types of stars is a consequence of something called the initial mass function. The initial mass function describes what will happen when a gas cloud fragments and forms stars. I think of it kind of like breaking a glass; when it shatters, there are usually a few large pieces and a bunch of smaller ones (waiting to be found later by unsuspecting bare feet). Star clusters are much the same; a collapsing gas cloud gives birth to a few massive stars and churns out huge numbers of smaller stars.

M dwarfs are tiny, relatively speaking, containing about eight percent to fifty percent of the Sun’s mass in about 0.1 percent to twelve percent the Sun’s volume. For most stars, more mass translates to more energy output, so these tiny stars emit only a few hundredths or thousandths as much energy per second as the Sun. While most of the light from stars in the universe comes from the relatively rare very massive stars, most of the mass comes from these very small, but extremely numerous stars.

A comparison of the sizes of the Sun, an M dwarf, a brown dwarf, and Jupiter. M dwarfs are smaller, cooler, and redder than Sunlike stars. Brown dwarfs are, in a manner of speaking, in between stars and planets; they are too small and cool to fuse hydrogen in their cores, but they are able to fuse deuterium (otherwise known as heavy hydrogen; deuterium has a nucleus made up of a proton and a neutron whereas a hydrogen nucleus is just a proton). Unlike stars, brown dwarfs are thought to have bands of clouds and have aurorae at their poles. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

The Sun’s nearest neighbor is an M dwarf: Proxima Centauri. It’s just over four and a quarter light-years away, but in order for it to be just barely visible to the naked eye it would need to be ten times closer. In order for Proxima to be as bright as Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, it would have to be more than three hundred times closer—less than a light-year away. This would place the star practically in our backyard, between the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud.

Because M dwarfs are too faint to be seen by stargazers, it makes sense that a lot of early SF took place around stars that were visible in the night sky. The allure is understandable; peering toward Aldebaran and imagining a swarm of Taurans preparing to invade the Moon is far more captivating than conjuring up an image of an impossible-to-see star with a hard-to-remember name. Despite being hundreds of light-years away, Aldebaran looks like it’s just an arm’s reach away. Aldebaran sounds like an exotic place, with exotic stories following suit. An M dwarf named GJ1214, on the other hand, is indistinguishable from the thousands of other stars that fill out the catalog from which it gets its name.

Slowly, though, nearby M dwarfs became the setting for SF adventures. Some of the first novels involving interstellar travel took humanity to the nearest stars—M dwarfs like Proxima Centauri and Barnard’s Star. Many novels simply transported Earth (in all but name only) into another star system, which, to an astronomer, always seemed like a missed opportunity.

Planets are intimately linked to their parent stars since they form from the same cloud of gas and dust. Earth certainly wouldn’t be the same around a different star! On short timescales, the Sun’s eleven-year cycle of activity, which manifests as rising and falling rates of solar storms, directly affects life on Earth. On long timescales, the lifetime of the Sun sets an absolute upper limit on how long humanity (or whatever might take our place) can remain on Earth. We’ve got five billion years to leave the solar system—better start learning what else is out there. What kind of planets might we find around our neighboring stars? Should we go looking for Earth twins around M dwarfs?

The Good

There are several reasons why M dwarfs should be the first stars we look to in our search for Earthlike planets. We’ve already touched upon a couple: there are a lot of M dwarfs out there in the universe, and many of them are close to us—several thousand of them within a hundred light-years or so. What else makes them good candidates for hosting discoverable Earthlike planets (and possibly Earthlike life)?

Short Years

M dwarfs are much cooler than the Sun, so in order for their planets to have the same average temperature as Earth, they need to be much closer to their star than Earth is to the Sun. This has some downsides, which we’ll explore later, but for now this simply means that a year on these planets will be much shorter than a year on Earth. For example, a year on Proxima Centauri b is about 11 Earth days. (Exoplanets are named after their parent star, with b assigned to either the first planet discovered or the planet nearest the star, and additional letters in alphabetical order indicating planets discovered later or farther away from the star.) This means that a stargazer on this planet would see a markedly different sky each night!

The short length of year is good news for astronomers searching for exoplanets; in order to confirm the presence of an exoplanet, a good standard is that you have to observe the planet crossing in front of the star at least three times. (Assuming you’re searching for exoplanets using the transit method, that is. Check out William Ledbetter’s "The Exoplanet Hunters" to learn more about different methods for discovering exoplanets.) This lowers the chance that what you think is a planet is actually just a starspot masquerading as a planet. If you’re looking for a planet with a period of an Earth year, that means waiting at least three years to confirm that the planet exists—and waiting even longer to learn about its atmosphere and whether it might be habitable.

Venus passing in between Earth and the Sun as seen by Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager onboard Solar Dynamics Observatory. While exoplanet hunters are looking for the dimming of starlight as planets cross their disks, cool, dark starspots can mimic this behavior as the star rotates. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Long Lives

One of the most intriguing things about these stars is their extraordinary longevity; every M dwarf that has ever formed is still roaming the universe today, and many will outlast the Sun by billions of years. The least massive M dwarfs have expected lifetimes in the trillions of years. When I say lifetime, I’m referring to the main sequence lifetime—the amount of time a star spends converting hydrogen into helium in its core. When most stars run out of hydrogen for nuclear fusion, they evolve off the main sequence and become giants or supergiants, before eventually ending their days as white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes. However, this may not be the case for all stars; because M dwarfs evolve so slowly, the universe is too young for us to know what happens to them after they leave the main sequence!

During a star’s main sequence lifetime, its power output tends not to change too much, with the exception of isolated events, like stellar flares. M dwarfs provide steady energy to their planets hundreds to thousands of times as long as the Sun will. This has big implications for life; unlike extremely hot and massive stars which are born, burn through their hydrogen, and explode as supernovae within a few million years—likely too quickly for life to develop—M dwarfs persist and are stable long enough for life to develop and evolve. M-dwarf lifetimes are so long that there’s time for life to blossom and fade many times over, with civilizations arising from the millennia-old ashes of the last.

We’re About to Know a Lot More

On April 18, 2018, NASA’s long-awaited Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) successfully launched. TESS is predicted to discover about a thousand new exoplanets, seventy-five percent of which will orbit M dwarfs.[i] Because of the way the TESS mission is designed (most of the stars observed will be looked at continuously for twenty-seven days, although some will be observed for as many as 351 days), most of the planets discovered in their stars’ habitable zones will orbit M dwarfs. This is really exciting—while the exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope helped us get a sense of the broad range of planets in one region of the galaxy, TESS will help us understand what planets in our neighborhood are like.

The Bad

Now, as they say, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Nearby stars with habitable planets just waiting to be discovered? Well, maybe. There are two big reasons that M dwarfs might not be the habitable-planet-hosting stars of our dreams.

Tidal Locking

Earthlike planets around M dwarfs will have short orbital periods. This made the list of best things about planets around M dwarfs, too, because short orbital periods mean more transits and greater likelihood of discovery. However, short orbital periods mean that these planets are very close to their parent stars, and they are likely to be tidally locked—one side of the planet permanently facing the star, with the other side permanently facing away.

Without considering any other factors, this means that the dayside will be very hot while the nightside will be very cold—cold enough that without some way for warmth to be transferred from the dayside to the nightside, the atmosphere will freeze out at night. As daunting as this seems, it doesn’t spell certain doom for Earthlike planets around M dwarfs. Since M dwarfs are otherwise good candidates for potentially habitable (and discoverable) planets, a lot of research has explored the details of these planetary systems and tried to find ways for M dwarf exoplanets to be friendlier to life.

Astronomers have found that if a planet around an M dwarf can cling to even a little bit of its atmosphere, heat can flow from the dayside to the nightside, preventing the dayside from becoming unbearably hot and the nightside atmosphere from freezing out.ii Other models have shown that if there’s a substantial amount of water in the atmosphere, persistent clouds will form at the substellar point (where it’s always high noon with the star directly overhead), deflecting some starlight and further lowering the temperature there.iii

Another weird facet of tidally-locked planets is the dramatic change in lighting from the substellar point to the terminator (where it’s permanently dawn or dusk). Think Ursa Minor Beta (from Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant at the End of the Universe), where it’s always perpetual afternoon just before the bars close—tidal locking is a way to achieve that time-standing-still feeling. (No word on discoveries of exoplanet bars yet.) If you want to take in a romantic starset or starrise with a loved one, you’d have to travel to the terminator. To get a glimpse of the stars, you’d have to cross over into the perpetual night.

In Stephen Baxter’s Proxima, this fact is exploited to great effect. (Mild setting-related spoilers in the rest of this paragraph.) At the substellar point, storms rage continuously, turning the hottest region of the planet into a dense jungle. Away from the substellar point, as Proxima inches toward the horizon, the landscape transitions to deserts patterned with shifting oases. Nearer to the terminator, the desert gives way to forests. The clash of warm air from the dayside and cool air from the nightside creates a permanent storm system in a ring around the planet. Life on Proxima c is entwined so closely to its star, which looms, far larger than the Sun appears to us, in the sky. Seasons are caused not by the tilt of the planet relative to its orbit, as on Earth, but instead come from Proxima’s dramatic stellar cycle, to which the planet’s unwilling inhabitants scramble to adapt.

While the fictional Proxima c is habitable enough, it’s not yet clear whether or not the planet that actually orbits Proxima Centauri (Proxima b, discovered in 2016) could be. We don’t yet know whether or not the planet is tidally locked, although it’s certainly possible. Whether or not Proxima b is tidally locked, it will have to contend with another serious problem.

Nasty Space Weather

Space isn’t a perfect vacuum, especially not near a star. Our solar system is filled with a mix of plasma and magnetic fields called the solar wind. The solar wind flows out from the Sun and forms a bubble that shields the planets as the Sun travels through interstellar space, which is similarly not totally empty; the interstellar medium is mostly hydrogen but can also include molecules like buckyballs, too.

Space weather happens when the solar wind and other solar outputs interact with Earth and the other planets, sometimes with disastrous results. The Sun is a writhing mass of plasma, laced with tangled magnetic fields. When the Sun’s magnetic field becomes too tightly wound, it can snap into a more comfortable configuration, unleashing solar storms and coronal mass ejections—torrents of hot plasma and magnetic fields that lash against Earth’s protective magnetic field.

Space weather can be both beautiful and destructive; solar storms cause the Northern and Southern Lights, and the more powerful the storm, the more widespread the auroras become. A classic example is the 1859 Carrington event—a solar storm so violent that the aurora was visible as far south as the Caribbean. The flipside of this is that the Carrington event threw telegraph systems (the height of technology at the time!) into disarray. If the Carrington event were to happen today, it could cause serious damage—to Earth-orbiting spacecraft, power grids, and oil pipelines—to the tune of a trillion dollars in damages in the U.S. alone.iv (We’ve had near misses since 1859, but eventually one of these storms is going to smack us right in the magnetosphere. I hope not to be around when one does.)

As devastating as solar storms can be to life on Earth, the Sun is a relatively calm star. Unfortunately, M dwarfs are exactly the opposite. These stars, though tiny, unleash powerful stellar storms far more often than the Sun does. Remember Proxima Centauri, our stellar neighbor that would need to move ten times closer just for us to be able to catch a glimpse of it? Two years ago, Proxima let loose a stellar flare so powerful that the star was briefly visible to the naked eye, and these immense flares are apparently common. Bad news for Proxima b…

If planets around M dwarfs don't have strong magnetic fields, their atmospheres will be stripped away by the stellar wind well before life has a chance to develop. Strong stellar flares and coronal mass ejections will only speed up the process; while all planets experience atmospheric loss, including Earth, atmospheric stripping by the solar wind seems to be enhanced for planets without magnetic fields. NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission has observed the slow removal of Mars’s atmosphere by the solar wind.

An artist's rendition of ions being torn from Mars's atmosphere by the solar wind. NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft measures the rate at which Mars loses hydrogen and oxygen to space. Over millions of years, the interaction of the Sun with Mars’s atmosphere has caused our neighboring planet to lose most of its atmosphere (sixty-six percent, as estimated by MAVEN Principal Investigator Bruce Jakosky and collaborators.[v]

The space weather issue is addressed loosely in Proxima as well, with speculation about Proxima c’s massive iron core. This could imply that the planet has a stronger magnetic field than Earth’s, although the absolute magnetic field strength is never touched upon. One studyvi found that an Earthlike exoplanet orbiting an M dwarf would need a magnetic field 10 to 10,000 times stronger than Earth’s, depending on how violent the star’s stellar storms are. It’s not yet clear how a small, tidally-locked (and therefore slowly rotating) planet could generate such a strong magnetic field. Perhaps a showstopper, perhaps not.

If all of this seems dire, cling to one simple fact: The universe is a very big place, and humans have explored only a tiny corner of it. Sure, physics and chemistry are the same no matter where you go, but tweaking the temperature, pressure, and composition of a planet might open up some interesting possibilities. Finding Earthlike life on an Earthlike planet orbiting a Sunlike star would be exciting, a long-sought validation that we aren’t alone in the universe. But finding truly strange life around a far-off star… That would change everything. It could change our whole definition of life, and we might not even recognize it when we find it. Where should we look for life as we don’t know it?

The reflection of sunlight off liquid in Titan’s north polar lakes. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/DLR

Life on Titan

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, may be the coolest object in the solar system. It has been slowly unveiled, first by Pioneer 11 and later by Voyagers 1 and 2 and Cassini. Cassini returned one of the most haunting images I’ve ever seen: the narrow crescent of Titan, tinted orange with photochemical haze, almost obscuring the glint of sunlight off an alien sea.

In some ways, Titan is Earthlike: It’s rocky, with a thick atmosphere and persistent liquid on its surface. It even has a complex weather system and distinct geographical regions. However, the similarities end there. Titan dips in and out of the protection of Saturn’s magnetic field, spending part of its orbit bracing against the solar wind and part of it shielded against it. It’s tidally locked to Saturn, so only one side of the moon faces the giant planet. (To a human standing on Titan’s surface, Saturn would be only dimly visible because of absorption of optical light by methane in its atmosphere. Titanic lifeforms would need infrared vision to see Saturn through the haze.) It’s bitterly cold, with a surface temperature of -290°F (94 K). The liquid in those seas is a blend of methane and ethane rather than water.

As a recent graduate working at the Jet Propulsion Lab, I was tasked with finding a way to figure out the proportion of liquid methane and ethane in the lakes of Titan. This turned out to be pretty tricky; the methane in Titan’s atmosphere absorbs most of the visible and infrared light reflected off the surface, except in a few narrow regions.

True-color visible light (left) and false-color infrared (right) images of Titan. The moon’s atmosphere is essentially opaque to optical wavelengths, but the surface can be seen through several windows in the infrared. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute (left) and NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho (right).

The best part of my job was sifting through the images taken by Cassini (may it rest in peace!). I spent hours making maps of Titan’s north pole and found every excuse to pore over the RADAR maps of the lakes, mentally tracing the alien shorelines. Since RADAR tells us about the smoothness and elevation of a surface but nothing about the color, the maps were colored in a pretty Earth-centric way: golden-brown plains punctuated by deep blue-black seas.

As tantalizingly Earthlike as Titan may appear, there is no evidence that it currently hosts life. Life as we know it is almost certainly out of the question; Earth life needs liquid water as a solvent, and at Titan’s temperature, water exists as ice that’s as hard as rock. This opens up another interesting possibility: silicon-based life.

We shouldn’t expect to find silicon-based life on Earth. As my college organic chemistry professor said, all life on Earth depends on Schnapps. Well, okay, he didn’t say that, but that was what the college freshmen in the lecture hall heard. What he really said is that life as we know it, from tail-wagging puppies to flagella-wiggling bacteria to the as-yet-undiscovered but inevitably terrifying creatures of the ocean deeps, is built from and subsists on CHNOPS: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and just a little bit of phosphorus and sulfur.

One of carbon’s chemical cousins is silicon. Silicon is about ten times less prevalent in the universe than carbon, but the two elements share an affinity for forming four chemical bonds. Silicon is choosier about the elements it bonds with; it doesn’t go around making compounds with just anything. However, when you put silicon and oxygen (or water) together, it forms silicates—one of the major components of a typical Earth rock. This is one reason that carbon lifeforms dominate Earth: there’s just too much water and oxygen around for silicon to form anything other than inert materials. (Although it should be noted that silicates do have a place in Earth life: diatoms and marine sponges incorporate SiO_2 into their bodies.)

RADAR image of Titan’s north pole from Cassini. The largest sea, Kraken Mare, is larger than Lake Superior. Credit: International Astronomical Union Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature." 2018 March 18.

http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/.

Titan, however, has almost no water or oxygen in its atmosphere, and it’s far too cold for water to be a liquid on its surface. Titan also has a substantial reservoir of stable liquid hydrocarbons in those methane-ethane lakes—a good candidate solvent for silicon-based chemistry. As exciting as this seems, Titan is flush with carbon and probably doesn’t have enough silicon for silicon-based life to dominate. It’s more likely that carbon and silicon might bond to each other, as researchers have convinced them to in Earth bacteria.vii

All of this is speculative, of course, but I like to imagine a not-too-distant future in which a probe splashes down in Titan’s seas to discover carbon–silicon lifeforms that stare with infrared-seeing eyes at Saturn, rings and all, looming above. It may be a while until we get a chance to explore Titan’s seas—the proposed Titan Mare Explorer (TiMe) mission was not funded, and the launch window for this type of mission has closed until 2023—but we can look elsewhere in the universe for silicon-based life.

Hazy, Titanlike planets are expected to be common in the universe,viii so there are plenty of places to look. One good place to look is—you guessed it!—around M dwarfs. Titanlike planets would orbit a Sunlike star in thirty years, but would take only one year to orbit an M dwarf. Since they’re at a greater orbital distance than Earthlike planets around M dwarfs, this means they’re unlikely to be tidally locked and less likely to be struck by stellar flares. (This also means they’ll take longer to discover and confirm—astronomy is all about tradeoffs.)

Looking Ahead

The drive to find life, whether it’s like us or not, has expanded the boundaries of astrophysics. In the next few decades, our understanding of alien worlds will be advanced by proposed space missions like the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx) and the Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor (LUVOIR), both undergoing conceptual development now.

Artists’ depictions of two proposed space telescopes that would greatly advance our understanding of exoplanetary systems and the universe as a whole: HabEx (left; not to scale—the star-shaped shade, which is tens of meters in diameter, would be separated from the telescope by tens of thousands of kilometers) and LUVOIR (right; the primary mirror is proposed to be as large as 15 meters in diameter). Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech and NASA/GSFC

These missions will be capable of detecting the subtle chemical fingerprints of oxygen, methane, and ozone, and taking pictures—pictures!—of planets light-years away. Imagine—the first glimpse of the blue waters of an extrasolar sea, the first spectroscopic whiff of ozone. Will it be enough for us, just knowing that we share the universe? We’ll never know until we make that first detection. So look to the nearby stars so small that they can’t be seen. Turn your telescopes there. Discoveries await…

[i] Sullivan, P. W. et al. (2015) The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite: Simulations of Planet Detections and Astrophysical False Positives. The Astrophysical Journal, 809 (77).

ii Several references exist. A good one is Carone, L., Keppens, R., and Decin, L. (2015) Connecting the Dots – II. Phase Changes in the Climate Dynamics of Tidally Locked Terrestrial Exoplanets. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 453 (3). pp. 2412–2437.

iii Yang, J., Cowan, N. B., and Abbot, D. S. (2013) Stabilizing Cloud Feedback Dramatically Expands the Habitable Zone of Tidally Locked Planets. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 771 (L45).

iv Damage estimate from https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/110302-solar-flares-sun-storms-earth-danger-carrington-event-science/.

[v] Jakosky, B. M. et al. (2017) Mars’ Atmospheric History Derived from Upper-Atmosphere Measurements of 38Ar/36Ar. Science, 355 (6332). pp. 1408–1410.

vi Kay, C., Opher, M. and Kornbleuth, M. (2016) Probability of CME Impacts on Exoplanets Orbiting M Dwarfs and Solar-like Stars. The Astrophysical Journal, 826 (195).

vii Kan, S. B. J. and Lewis, R. D. and Chen, K. and Arnold, F. H. (2016) Directed Evolution of Cytochrome C for Carbon–Silicon Bond Formation: Bringing Silicon to Life. Science, 354 (6315). pp. 1048–1051.

viii Lora, J. M., Kataria, T. and Gao, P. (2018) Atmospheric Circulation, Chemistry, and Infrared Spectra of Titan-like Exoplanets Around Different Stellar Types. The Astrophysical Journal, 853 (58).

Conflict in the South China Sea

J.R. Dunn

It’s a cliché that generals are always preparing to fight the last war. But that’s also true of writers, both fiction and nonfiction. While there is no lack of speculation about future conflicts, the most likely of these has largely been overlooked. It’s not going to happen in the MidEast, it’s not going to happen in central Europe, and it’s not going to happen in Korea.

“Blue China”

The site of the next major war is the South China Sea, a nearly enclosed section of the Pacific 1.35 million miles in extent, bordered on the north by Southern China and Taiwan, on the east by the Philippines, on the south by Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei, and on the west by Vietnam.

Within that extent lies two major island chains (if the term can used for such a collection of acre-wide pea-patches) the Spratlys, a not far from the Philippine island of Palawan, and the Paracels a few hundred miles southwest of Hainan Island. Other islands include Scarborough Shoal (known as Huangyan Island to the Chinese), the Pratas Islands, and the Macclesfield Bank, along with hundreds of shoals, reefs, and sand banks, many of them nameless, some of them only intermittently visible above the surface.

Map courtesy Flikr. Source: D.Rosenberg/MiddleburyCollege/HarvardAsiaQuarterly/PhilGov’t.

China has laid claim to the entire sea as a region it has christened “Blue China,” as integral to the Chinese nation as the Forbidden City or the Great Wall. Blue China is the area enclosed by the “nine-dash-line” an imaginary and extremely vague borderline that follows no physical entity known to geographers. The line forms a feature known as the “cow’s tongue.” (It’s remarkable how much cow imagery infuses Chinese rhetoric. One of the worst accusations that could hurled during the Great Cultural Revolution was “cow demon.”)

The Chinese claim is absurd on the face of it. The “cow’s tongue” stretches 1800 miles from the Chinese mainland to a point only a stone’s throw from Malaysia, ending at the James Shoal, one of those features that spends most of its time under water. The Chinese claim conflicts with those of all bordering countries (all of which are dismissed by the Chinese as simply elements of the “First Island Chain”), including the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Brunei, and Malaysia. Most of these claims are legitimized by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which provides for a 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone for each maritime state. Many of the Spratlys lie within the Philippines’ 200-mile limit, but are over 500 miles from any Chinese territory, while the Paracels are split between the maritime limits of China and Vietnam.

The South China Sea is an extremely valuable piece of territory. It contains nearly one-tenth of terrestrial fishery reserves, which play a large role in feeding the one-and-half-billion people lining its shores. It is estimated to contain 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (some of it in the form of “flammable ice.”). It’s also a crucial waterway, with over $5 trillion in trade transiting its waters annually, including up to fifty percent of the world’s oil, on its way to China, Japan, and the west coast of the U.S.

Clearly, the country that controls the South China Sea has a stranglehold on East Asia and points beyond—which appears to be exactly what the Chinese have in mind.

China Presses its Claim

The nine-dash-line is not a communist daydream but was something inherited from the previous regime. In 1947 the Nationalist government proclaimed ownership of the South China Sea by means of a map showing the nine-dash-line encompassing the area. The claim was based on assertions that China had controlled the entire expanse as long before as the Tang dynasty in the 9th century. In fact, there was no sign of any Chinese maritime activity before the 15th century—and that must have ended when the Chinese fleet was scrapped late in the century.

The communists held off on pressing their claim until they had amassed the military and economic clout to make it stick. The first confrontation occurred on January 19, 1974, when a South Vietnamese Navy flotilla attempted to dislodge a Chinese People’s Liberation Army unit on Duncan Island in the Paracels. The Vietnamese troops were repulsed and the supporting ships, three frigates and a corvette, were outmaneuvered by the four Chinese minesweepers present, with the corvette sunk and the three frigates driven off. Fifty-three Vietnamese were killed and sixteen wounded, with another forty-eight taken prisoner.

That skirmish initiated a series of confrontations between China and the region’s other states that continued for forty years. In 1988 Vietnam, united under the communist Hanoi government, made another stab at defying the Chinese, this time in the Spratlys. Detecting Chinese ships in the area, Vietnam decided to forestall Beijing by immediately occupying the islands. Two armed transports were sent to the Union Banks area of the Spratlys, where they planted the PRV flag on Johnson South Reef, one of those islands that only occasionally appears above water. On March 14, the reef was approached by three Chinese frigates. Vietnamese troops landed to defend the flag, and were soon confronted by armed landing craft filled with Chinese marines. Film footage shows Chinese troops, backed by the frigates, cutting down the Vietnamese troops standing in waist-deep water with machine-gun fire. The frigates then turned on the Vietnamese vessels, sinking them both. Sixty-four Vietnamese were killed in the battle. Video reference here: https://youtu.be/YFxLeNVLRoM

Hostilities over the islands have continued at a low boil ever since. The Chinese have repeatedly attacked Vietnamese fishing boats, on several occasions sinking them by means of ramming. In June 2011, a Chinese “fishing boat” harassed a Vietnamese oil exploration vessel, cutting its cables by ramming. Three years later, in May 2014, Chinese vessels turned water cannons on a Vietnamese flotilla subjecting a Chinese drilling rig near the Paracels to turnabout treatment. The Chinese were forced to pull the rig back, an event celebrated as a major victory by the Vietnamese. Video reference here: https://youtu.be/qPj17wtQwUg

Philippine fishing and patrol boats were subject to same type of treatment. One epic encounter involved Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratlys, where in 1999 the Philippines grounded a surplus landing craft to mark its claim. The vessel, manned by a small unit of marines, has served as an outpost ever since—surely one of the worst military billets in the modern world. The Chinese have made numerous attempts to lay siege or otherwise shut down the outpost.

In April 2012, the Philippine Navy intercepted eight Chinese fishing boats at Scarborough Shoal. This led to a standoff with Chinese forces, with the Filipinos forced to withdraw after two months. As with previous confrontations, the Chinese proceeded to occupy the shoal.

Filipino president Benigno Aquino responded by appealing to the UN under the provisions of the UNCLOS treaty. In July 2016, the UN tribunal found in favor the Philippines, dismissing Chinese claims in the region. The Chinese, needless to say, ignored the decision, asserting that it was “unfounded.” Aquino’s successor, the erratic Rodrigo Duterte, has chosen to overlook the UN decision in favor of closer ties with China.

In addition to the local powers, China has also harassed third parties in the South China Sea, including the U.S. In recent years, several American ships and aircraft have suffered near-collisions caused by Chinese interference. In December 2016, during the waning weeks of the Obama administration, a U.S. Navy drone was seized by the Chinese only fifty miles from the Philippines. This was generally interpreted as a message for the incoming Trump administration.

Island Building

China made its boldest move involving the South China Sea beginning in 2013.

Let it never be said that the Chinese are not innovative. China is clearly unafraid of novelties, as witnessed by its unique (and yet unproven) mixture of centralized authoritarianism and freebooting capitalism. The response to foreign challenges to its maritime claims was also innovative. Lacking any firm ground to make a stand, the Chinese went ahead and created it.

By 2013 it was apparent that the Obama administration’s “pivot toward Asia” was mere rhetoric, and that the U.S. had instead slipped into another one of its isolationist doldrums. The Chinese were quick to take advantage. In a massive dredging operation involving dozens of gigantic ocean-going dredges, China built up a series of shoals and sandbars in the Spratlys and Paracels into full-fledged islands capable of supporting substantial military establishments.

Seven islands in the Spratlys and Paracels were restructured—Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef, the aptly named Mischief Reef in the Spratlys, and Triton, North, Tree, and Woody islands in the Paracels. Most of the actual island creation occurred in the Spratlys. It appears that the Chinese are treating the more easterly islands as a strategic glacis to act as a block against an advance into the area. The total new acreage amounts to seventy-two acres, or 290,000 square meters.

Fiery Cross Reef, originally a coral outcropping a little more than a meter in height, was the site that received the largest refurbishing, with twenty-seven acres (110,000 square meters) of new land. New features included a 10,000-foot-long runway capable of handling any aircraft in the Chinese inventory, and a harbor capable of handling troopships. An enormous communications array was constructed, along with a high-frequency radar site at the northern end of the island. The island’s new barracks can accommodate up to a full battalion of troops.

Woody Island, Subi, and Mischief reefs also feature long runways. Smaller islands have helipads, radar stations, and SAM or ground-launched cruise missile installations. Mischief, Subi, and Fiery Cross Reefs are also home to elaborate buried storage tunnel networks.

Dredging operations at Subi Reef. Image courtesy U.S. Navy.

Woody Island in the Paracels acts as China’s headquarters for the South China Sea, featuring a large array of advanced communications equipment. China’s mainstay operational fighter, the J-11B, has been spotted using the air base, along with Y-8 heavy transports. Woody Island also features the region’s premier geopolitical oddity, the metropolis of Sansha, which in 2012 was declared a “prefectural level city,” a designation usually reserved for cities of upwards of a million people. Sansha’s population is all of 1,500. Evidently plans to turn it into a tourist resort and cruise ship destination are well in hand.

Basically, the Chinese set about creating a network of island fortresses to defend their claims over the South China Sea. In response, the surrounding nations have increased their military budgets by a third, with arms purchases skyrocketing. Malaysia increased its weapons imports by over 700 percent, while Indonesia and Singapore made smaller but still substantial increases. Vietnam has purchased six Kilo-class submarines from the Russians, something that would concentrate the minds of anyone but the Chinese, along with $1 billion worth of Russian fighters.

The U.S. response was to carry out more freedom of navigation cruises through the area, to underline both the UNCLOS rules and the American doctrine of freedom of passage on the high seas. In this, it was joined by other Western states, the UK and Japan in particular.

One of the most recent of these missions, in March of this year, involved an entire carrier battle group centered on the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70), a Nimitz-class supercarrier. Accompanied by several Aegis guided-missile-equipped escorts, the Vinson transited the South China Sea without incident, followed by a visit to the People’s Republic of Vietnam (March 5-9), where the Vinson strike group docked at the old American base at Da Nang and the ship played host to a number of Vietnamese officials. It marked a high point in the two-decade rapprochement between the old enemies.

Immediately afterward, the Vinson cruised northward, again entering the disputed waters, to rendezvous with a task force of Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) centered around the Ise, a helicopter carrier also capable of fielding the F-35B Lightning II. The combined force carried out joint exercises for several days within spitting distance of the new Chinese installations.

A more pointed gesture regarding Chinese pretensions in the area can scarcely be imagined. Clearly, the U.S. is beginning to pull together a regional alliance against Chinese aggression. Although Chinese government officials and state media fulminated against the U.S., promising everything up to the apocalypse itself, an actual response failed to occur.

If considered solely as an effort to extend national power, the Chinese program in the South China Sea must be viewed as a success. Over a period of decades, China, once the Sick Man of Asia, has carried out a series of carefully calibrated moves—only a small fraction of which involved violence—to gain effective control over its near overseas region, the South China Sea and the nations bordering it. This has been accomplished without unduly straining relations with most foreign countries or adversely affecting China’s international standing. The end result could be viewed as something resembling the control the U.S. exercises over the Caribbean and its contiguous states.

But that’s not all there is to it, because China has a deeper agenda. Over the long term, China wants two things: to eject the U.S. from the Western Pacific and to exercise total hegemony over the entire region.

“Hegemony” is a concept not often mentioned in the West that plays a large role in Chinese political thinking, both domestically and in foreign relations. It’s a product of their imperial history, reinforced by decades of Maoist communism. To the Chinese, there is no comity of nations, no partnership between equals—there is the dominant power and those that are dominated, a strict hierarchy in which only a single major power can exist. From the Chinese viewpoint, the United States is the dominating power in the Western Pacific—their neighborhood. The fact that the U.S. has acted as a peacekeeping, nonbelligerent force (excepting gross errors such as the Vietnam War) protecting the status quo and the rights of local nations, means nothing to the Chinese, even though China itself has prospered under the U.S. umbrella. The newly militarized South China Sea is, from the Chinese standpoint, the first step in ejecting a weakened U.S. from the region and ensuring Chinese hegemony over East Asia.

From this point of view, the Chinese efforts don’t look quite so impressive. In fact, they look like a sure recipe for failure.

A major flaw is that China is challenging the U.S. at one of its strongest points—the U.S. Navy, which, along with the Marine Corps, comprises one of the most successful military forces of the modern epoch. Furthermore, the Chinese are playing into one of the Navy/USMC’s chief strengths: opposed assaults against enemy island-based installations. U.S. naval forces have carried out dozens of these, once considered to be one of the most difficult of military operations, during WW II, Korea, and the Grenada invasion, and have never once been defeated. Even in its current condition, weakened by decades of neglect and politically correct personnel and promotional policies, the U.S. Navy remains the most potent maritime force on the planet, one that an opponent challenges at his peril.

In addition, China is also confronting one of the great secondary maritime nations, one that gave the U.S. Navy itself a run for its money within living memory—that being Japan. While post-World War II Japan has downplayed military power as a means of carrying out national policy, that can change at any time, and in fact, it is undergoing an evolution at this very moment.

Because the South China Sea is not the only Pacific crisis involving China. There is also the long-simmering dispute in the East China Sea, south of the Korean peninsula and encompassing the area between the Ryukyus and the northern Chinese coast. China also claims this 81,000-square-mile region, along with all the islands within it, including the Senkaku island chain (called the Diaoyu in Beijing), dismissing the fact that these islands are already claimed and occupied by Japan. For the past decade, China has waged an unrelenting campaign of harassment against Japan. Constant violations of Japanese airspace by military aircraft—up to 700 a year—accompanied by regular naval incursions, have become a way of life in the area. In 2013, the Chinese declared an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea, which was ignored by both Japan and the U.S. Japan responded by buying up three of the five major islands, which had been privately owned, and proceeded to arm them, along with the Ryukyus, with advanced mobile antishipping and antiaircraft missiles. It seems that Chinese policy has succeeded only in awakening one of its great national nightmares—a militarily powerful Japan. (In a development not unrelated, the USAF in October 2017 sent the 34th Fighter Squadron, equipped with F-35A stealth fighters, to Kadena Air Base at Okinawa for exercises. Some of these occurred over the disputed waters, and also involved pilots of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force [JASDF].)

China’s Strategy

For the moment, Chinese strategy in the South China Sea seems to be aimed at anti-access/area denial (A2AD). With its island fortresses, integrated radar and communications systems, and concentrations of both ballistic and cruise-missile antiship weapons, the Chinese position appears formidable. China could at will declare the area to be official Chinese territory, establish an ADIZ, and pretty much shut the area down to anything but a full military response. From that point on, the South China Sea could serve as a base for power projection aimed at the smaller states of the region and beyond at China’s major rivals—Japan and the U.S.

China’s primary weapon for this theater is the DF-21D ballistic missile. With an impressive name translating as “Assassin’s Mace,” the DF-21D is an antiship ballistic missile (ASBM), a so-called “carrier killer.” Adapted from an earlier solid-fuel IRBM design, the DF-21D can be fired from a mobile launcher from just about anywhere along the coast of China. It has a range estimated at 1250 to 1850 miles (2000 to 3000 km), which means it can easily cover most the South China Sea. On launch, it is guided by independent Over-the-Horizon (OtH) radar, and then receives midcourse updates from drones or the BeiDou tracking satellite before switching to internal radar for terminal guidance. It is claimed to be fitted with a Maneuverable Reentry Vehicle (MaRV) which means that the warhead could conceivably outmaneuver missile defenses. The Circular Error Probable (CEP), the area in which at least half the warheads would land, is said to be on the order of 90 ft (30 m). An upgraded model, the DF-26, with a range of around 1850 to 2500 miles (3000 to 4000 km) was unveiled in 2015 and is probably entering the inventory.

DF-21Ds on parade. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The DF-21D caused something of a panic when it became operational in 2010, as the latest of a long line of weapons guaranteed to render the carrier obsolete. In truth, if these missiles can live up to their reputation, they are a weapon to be reckoned with.

China also has a large array of antiship cruise missiles, both ground and air launched. Most are based on Russian or U.S. designs (including one transparently patterned on the U.S. Navy’s BGM-109 Tomahawk). But a few are of indigenous design. These include the CSS-N-1 Scrubbrush, which can be fired from a coastal site or a missile boat, with a range of 110 nautical miles (NMI). The CSS-N-5 Sabot, derived from the Russian Styx, which is fired from coastal batteries and has a range of thirty to fifty nautical miles. The CSS-C-7 Sadsack, another Styx variant with a range of 190 nautical miles, the CSS-C-6 Sawhorse, with a 110-mile range. Air-launched models include the CAS-1 Kraken and the CJ-10 Long Sword.

Chinese tactics involving these weapons are transparent. Chinese rocket forces would first use DF-21Ds to sink any carriers entering the South China Sea and then, utilizing the Spratlys and Paracels as unsinkable aircraft carriers, inundate the remnants of the task force with both air and ground launched cruise missiles. Only then, with the invading fleet’s air cover destroyed and missile/air defenses badly degraded, would manned aircraft enter the fray in order to pursue and sink any fleeing vessels. This attack might be thought of as a 21st-century version of the 1988 slaughter of Vietnamese troops in the Spratlys, with missiles rather than machine guns. The Chinese, if possible, would sink every last ship in a calculated and brutal act of force to discourage any similar efforts in the future.

Yet another threat exists: China’s impressive fleet of diesel-powered submarines could track and degrade a fleet even as it was approaching the South China Sea. While Chinese nuclear-powered subs are nothing to write home about, its diesel models are world-class. The danger of diesels lies in their ability to run much quieter than nuclear subs (which must keep reactor pumps constantly running) and are correspondingly more difficult to detect. China operates at least sixteen attack boats in its South Sea Fleet, along with twice that number in its other two fleets. Until recently, these were older Ming (Type-035) or Song (Type-039) class boats, but it’s likely these have been replaced by modern Yuan-class (Type-039B) hulls.

One thing we need not worry about is a Chinese carrier force, whatever that may consist of. At the moment, the Chinese are operating a single carrier, the Liaoning (CV-16), a modified Soviet-era Kuznetsov-class carrier bought from Russia. Though rated as combat-ready by the People’s Liberation Army Navy, the Liaoning can be viewed as a demo model, useful for training and gaining experience.

Currently two new carriers of indigenous design (CV-17, CV-18) are under construction with two more planned. Once these ships are commissioned, China will have a carrier fleet second only to that of the U.S.

But possessing and knowing how to use carriers is two different things. Operating carrier forces is an abstruse art, one that only two nations, the United States and Japan, have ever fully mastered. It’s unlikely that the Chinese, lacking experience and doctrine, will match this right out of the gate.

The Chinese situation regarding carriers is similar to that of Germany and its battleships during WW II. Lacking both support ships and experience in utilizing battleships, the Nazis chose a strategy of sending out its capital ships solo as glorified commerce raiders in an attempt to destroy Allied convoys crossing the North Atlantic. After the Bismarck was sunk on just such a mission (May 1940), Germany retained its surviving battleships, Tirpitz and Scharnhorst, in friendly ports (first in France and then in Norwegian fjords), utilizing them as a potential threat against Allied forces. (Scharnhorst was sunk in 1943, again acting as a commerce raider). It’s likely that China would select this alternative, keeping its carriers in port as a fleet-in-being rather than risking them in a mano a mano confrontation.

China also has a problem with its carrier-based aircraft. The model being fielded, the Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark, is unable to take off from the Liaoning with a full munitions and fuel load. Since the planned carriers are also ski-jump designs, this drawback is likely to remain in force. It’s difficult to see carriers going into action with such an Achilles heel.

As for air power, China is currently fielding the Chengdu J-20 fourth-generation fighter (as China insists on calling its fifth-generation fighters). Clearly patterned after the F-22 Raptor, the J-20 was designed as a match for U.S. stealth fighters. The first PLA units equipped with the J-20 were declared operational February, 2018.

It’s likely that the J-20—along with earlier models—will be armed with the Very Long Range Air to Air Missile (VLRAAM), with a range of from 250-300 miles. This missile is designed primarily to target support aircraft such as tankers and AWACS that act as force multipliers for U.S. air forces. These planes will no longer be out of range and immune from enemy action. Shooting them down would render any U.S. air campaign infinitely more difficult.

Clearly, the Chinese have created a formidable welcome for anyone attempting to trespass on Blue China once Beijing makes its expected move. It’s also clear, from the nature of the weapons themselves, that planning involving the South China Sea has been in play for decades. These weapons were designed and built with one opponent in mind: the United States and its Navy.

The U.S. Response

But it’s not often that military forces actually match what appears on paper. The heat of combat quickly boils away bogus claims and wish-fulfillment dreams, and that’s very likely to be the case here. We should not overlook the fact that the master strategist Sun Tzu was Chinese. The Chinese have not forgotten one of his prime dictums: “All warfare is based on deception.”

For instance, a closer look at the mighty DF-21D reveals that it has never been tested against a maritime target. Ground targets, yes, but a ship? Not once. This makes perfect sense—China’s entire maritime strategy is hinged on this weapon system. If it’s tested and it doesn’t work—and missiles, as we all know, are very finicky devices—their entire strategy goes up in smoke. What the Chinese need is a dark and brooding Sauron of a weapon looming balefully above Blue China. Why ruin it by testing the thing?

There is also considerable question as to whether Chinese electronics and cybernetics are sophisticated enough to handle the datalinks necessary for targeting the missile.

Antiship cruise missiles such as the Exocet and Styx have had quite a successful run for the past thirty years, but countermeasures have caught up and it’s unlikely they will be as impressive as in the past. It’s also a fact that many Chinese cruise missiles are relatively short-range, with target radiuses limited to from 50 to 200 miles. It would not require a lot of effort to stay out of their way.

As for China’s diesel boats, no one can argue that they aren’t crackerjack weapons. But China’s major sub base in the South China Sea area is on the island of Hainan, which is located on the continental shelf. Sea depths around the island range from 30 to 90 feet for quite a few miles out from the base. The South Sea sub flotilla would have to traverse what amounts a shooting gallery before going into combat and returning for refueling and resupply would be out of the question.

As for the J-20—this fighter may eventually develop into a challenge to U.S. stealth aircraft, but it’s simply not there yet. A major roadblock lies in the aircraft’s engines, the WS-10B, a Chinese copy of the Russian AL-31F Saturn, a 1980s design that’s several generations out of date. China’s own engine for the J-20, the WS-15, exploded during testing, and the Chinese have not been able to solve the problem, which involves cutting-edge alloy technology. Using the WS-10B has cut the J-20’s performance to fourth-generation fighter levels—it can’t achieve supercruise and requires an afterburner to accelerate to military power. As it stands, the J-20 is now easy prey for the F-22 or F-35.

So, like the Russian S-400 air defense system, which recently beschmucked itself in Syria after a decade-long superweapon buildup, the Chinese Goliath is neither as buff nor as fearsome as many have claimed. What would be the best strategy for the U.S. and its allies in turning back a territorial power play?

The chief term here is “allies.” The U.S. would not be going into combat against China either alone or with cobelligerents scarcely concerned about the outcome, as in some recent wars. The local powers clearly have serious interests in how matters fall out. In some cases, it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that these amount to life or death.

Japan and Vietnam would play crucial roles alongside the U.S. in a war with China. We need not dwell on the irony that these two states were both bitter enemies of the U.S. within living memory. Both are serious regional powers, both have critical interests in the region, and both have well-earned reputations for military prowess. The fact that the U.S. would be sailing into battle alongside them is good fortune of the highest order.

Vietnam has long played the role of Ireland to China’s UK for nearly a millennium, with the Chinese regularly attempting to occupy the country and just as regularly being chased out. (A history that the U.S. might have read with profit back in the 60s.) The PRV’s role in a South China Sea conflict would be twofold: first, its army and air force would act as forces in being on China’s southeastern border, forcing Beijing to concentrate there rather than deploying to the main area of operations. Apart from that, while Vietnam’s fleet of Kilo-class submarines is far from state of the art, they would act as a definite threat to Chinese surface and submersible units, forcing them out of the Gulf of Tonkin and the southern reaches of the “Cow’s Tongue.” It’s far from impossible that Vietnamese subs could interdict Hainan (which is a little over 200 miles from the Vietnamese coast), preventing maritime forces based there from going into battle.

Japan’s initial role would be similar—using its missile installations in the Ryukus and the Senkakus and its fleet of Oyashio and Sōryū-class submarines to slam shut the northern door to the area of operations. The Japanese military could prevent China’s northern fleet units (This includes the Chinese carrier Liaoning, which would be unlikely to sortie in any case) and aerial assets from reinforcing the island bases. It could also seriously jeopardize Chinese naval units attempting to operate in the East China Sea.

The U.S., as is usually the case, will shoulder the main burden.

Though some analysts have envisioned a mad dash by carrier strike forces into the cauldron (a few have even imagined Littoral Combat Ships taking on the role of major surface combatants), this is far from necessary, much less advisable. Because if China has the Spratlys and Paracels, the U.S. has the Philippines.

U.S. Navy operations in the South China Sea will resemble those of the Central and Southwestern Pacific in 1942-1945. Rather than attack both island chains at once, U.S. forces would first move on the Spratlys, and once they were secured, only then go on to the Paracels. The Spratlys are a little over 200 miles from the Philippines.

This means that a U.S. naval strike force does not have to linger in the open sea in clear view of Chinese OtH radar, diesel subs, drones, and any other hazard that Beijing has dreamed up. Instead the U.S. can hunker down amid the islands. There it would be hidden from conventional radar by the island’s radar shadows. As for OtH radar, it operates by amplifying extremely small signals reflected from the ionosphere back to the receivers. Island clutter and temperature inversions created by the islands would be likely to complicate the process to the point of complete uncertainty. (There also exists surface-wave OtH radar, but this type lacks the range to be useful here.) Deprived of initial radar guidance, the DF-21D and all but air-launched cruise missiles would be rendered irrelevant. (Drones, which provide targeting data, would be unlikely to penetrate defended airspace in necessary numbers, and the Beidou military satellite can be easily be spoofed.) As for China’s diesel subs, anti-submarine (ASW) resources could plug the channels leading out to open sea with much more confidence than on the high seas.

In effect, the Navy would be converting the islands into the equivalent of fortresses much larger and more capable than those of the Chinese. (All this, of course, in contingent on Duterte or his successor allowing U.S. naval units into Philippine waters. But we shouldn’t forget that most Filipinos avidly support the U.S. and distrust China.)

Another possible action would be mining the approaches to Hainan, to assure that Chinese diesel subs still in port could not intervene. Mining is an effective tactic that is often overlooked. Mines dropped from B-29s sank much of what remained of the Japanese merchant fleet in the last months of WW II, effectively isolating the Home Islands. A handful of mines shut down the Caribbean approaches to Nicaragua in 1984. Such a minefield could be laid either by U.S. Navy assets or by Vietnamese Kilo subs.

Once the carrier strike force is in place, the campaign would open up with B-2 Spirit strikes against major installations in the Spratlys and Paracels. We should assume that both Anderson Air Force Base on Guam and Kadena Air Base on Okinawa will have been disabled by DF-21 strikes, so the raids would originate from either the continental U.S. or Hawaii. While much has been made of the abilities of Chinese long-wave radar to detect stealth aircraft, this largely applies to smaller planes like the F-22 and F-35, which have features (the tailplanes, e.g.) which nearly match the radar’s wavelength. B-2s have no such features and remain difficult to detect.

These strikes would lay down heavy conventional bombs on runways and cruise missile sites, along with Anti-Radiation Missiles (ARMs) launched against radar stations, including those on the mainland. The raids would be supported by cyberwarfare to cripple China’s C3I capabilities, both in the islands and on the mainland, along with satellite assets in LEO.

At the same time U.S. stealth fighters could begin sweeps above the islands. This is where the F-35 Lightning II would come into its own, particularly the USMC’s VSTOL F-35B variant. While China could conceivably knock out most of the airfields in the region, the F-35B could operate from small strips virtually anywhere in the Philippine archipelago, as well as bases in Vietnam. Palawan, in particular, the long southern island reaching almost to Indonesia, would be a perfect staging area. (Interestingly, the Japanese based some fighter-bombers on the island before their assault on the Philippines in 1941.) Marine stealth fighters appearing from all directions would complicate China’s air strategy almost impossibly.

Palawan is only minutes away from the Spratlys, allowing even the relatively short-legged F-35s a useful period over the area of operations. This would also render tanker support not strictly necessary in the early stages of the battle. (On the other hand, the Navy could well be operating the MQ-25 “Stingray,” a stealthy drone tanker, in the near future.)

AWACs might still be able to operate in the face of Chinese VLRAIMs by “stuttering”—taking a “snapshot” of activity, analyzing it and forwarding the results to combat aircraft, and then minutes later taking another snapshot from a different position. The aircraft could drop to low level, hiding behind land features (There are plenty of mountains in the Philippines, fortunately) between shots.

Arming AWACS and other support aircraft is long overdue—they could easily carry and launch both radar and infrared AIMs for self-defense. The F-35s networking capability, by which aircraft can share realtime tactical information, can also go a long way toward replacing AWACS.

With the Chinese garrisons cut off and isolated and local air superiority assured, landings could occur. The Spratlys are within striking range of V-22 Ospreys and Marine LCACs operating out of the Philippines. The LCACs would depart first. At forty knots it would require the hovercraft 5-6 hours to reach their targets. The V-22s could take off several hours later, bypassing the hovercraft a few miles from the beaches so as to spearhead the assault. The Marine attack would be accompanied by a full press of other assets—cyberattacks, EW operations, and air and missile strikes—to assure that the vulnerable hovercraft and tiltrotors were not intercepted.

The Marines could take the target island, destroy whatever needed destroying, and then hunker down to await a counterattack. One necessary cargo for the LCACs would be Patriot ABM systems to deal with Chinese ballistic missile strikes. It’s not unlikely that the PLA might choose to barrage the islands in much the same way as WW I Imperial German Army artillery did its forward trenches when they were lost to infantry attacks. Alternately, the Marines could clean up the island, pack any prisoners into the hovercraft, and take off for a nearby island which the Chinese would be uncertain was occupied. They could then blast the first island as much as they liked.

It wouldn’t be necessary to take every last glorified sandbank. Updating the WW II “wither on the vine” strategy, securing only the major islands and letting the others hang would work.

With the Spratlys under control, the carrier strike force might now enter the battlespace, perhaps accompanied by Japanese helicopter carriers of the Hyῡga-class, along with the larger Izumo, and perhaps even naval units of the smaller powers. With the cruise-missile threat eliminated, they might rendezvous at the Spratlys to prepare the assault on the Paracels.

A classy gesture at this point would be to present Beijing with an ultimatum: avoid damage, casualties, and humiliation involving their inner island fortresses. China could surrender them to international control, with the final outcome left to negotiations under UN rules. In a sane world, this would end the whole affair. But the Chinese have invested so much in the way of resources, effort, and national identity and pride in the region that they would be far more likely to choose to go down fighting.

Regarding the Paracels, Woody Island would present a special case with its large civilian population, perhaps swelled by the presence of tourists. It might be wise to avoid taking the island itself, instead settling for crippling its installations. The rest of the Paracels chain should be straightforward.

What about repercussions on the U.S. home front? There would no doubt be cyberattacks—the Chinese have been preparing for these for years. But after a prolonged stupor, the U.S. has begun working on countermeasures (we no longer hear about “smart meters’ for gas and electric utilities, which would have allowed third parties—including Chinese “Blue Army” cyberwarfare teams—to control utilities across the country.) No nuclear attack would occur—it simply wouldn’t be worth it. In particular, there would no EMP strike such as the more hysterical policy analysts have been shrieking about in recent years. Talk to an experienced electrical engineer about EMP. Starfish Prime, the 1962 nuclear shot that introduced the world to EMP, has been grossly misrepresented. Its effects on Hawaii amounted to 300-odd burglar alarms going off, the phone system partially down, and a few street lights shut off. No exploding transformers, no power lines melting, no return to the 19th century. We can keep EMP out of our calculations.

Could a South China Sea war go in the other direction? A complete fiasco for the allies, leaving China poised like a colossus above the Western Pacific? Of course it could. War is the kingdom of uncertainty. When you open the door to conflict, you never know that’s going to come leaping out at you. The breaks could all go China’s way. The allies could hamstring themselves with politically correct policies and rules of engagement, handing the initiative over to Beijing. (The Vietnamese could tell you how this works out.)

But it’s not likely. China is facing a nearly united front against its actions. It is gambling on new and untried weapons systems. It is utilizing methods of combat it has not practiced in centuries (the last time China operated a navy was in the 1470s.) It is up against two effective and competent regional powers and the world’s reigning superpower. It is facing, as previously mentioned, the two major maritime powers of the modern era, both of which possess unmatched experience, tradition, and doctrine for facing the kind of challenge the Chinese have mounted. The PRC also has a potentially fatal Achilles heel produced by its own system. Its officers and men are all products of an authoritarian communist state, one that still retains more than a touch of its previous totalitarian nature. Virtually all of them will be victims of what social psychologists call the “compliance mindset”: that individuals have a minimal amount of capability, that the group is always right, that orders are orders, that initiative and imagination are dangers that must be avoided. Once the chain of command is broken, the Chinese will face a serious danger of overall paralysis. Sun Tzu would not have approved.

As it stands, some kind of confrontation is shaping up. China is throwing its weight around, violating international norms, bullying small neighbors, and no one has drawn the line. It has achieved a dominating position in the South China Sea without any visible cost. Classically, an authoritarian state in such a position does not turn back. China’s actions today are similar to those of Saddam’s Iraq in the years before the First Gulf War.

This is where writers come in. One of the reasons China has been able to pull this coup off is the ignorance of the Western world. The third millennium has introduced a new and unfamiliar form of insularity. What was once caused by ignorance is today caused by a surfeit of information, a fog of data that clouds pretty much everything outside of the everyday. The result is a citizenry that knows even less about what is going on in the world than previous generations of the newsprint era did. The public in the late 30s were well aware that Imperial Japan was on the rampage in China and East Asia. Most Americans today do not have the vaguest notion that anything is wrong in the Western Pacific.

This can’t be allowed to prevail. This country’s citizens need to be reminded, to be informed, and in a word, to be woken. Consensus in a democratic polity cannot exist without dialectic and discussion. Writers, filmmakers, and artists of all sorts must act as triggers for that discussion. It’s part of the price asked of us—and properly so—for the lives of freedom and nonconformity that we’re enabled to live. Artists of the 30s in the UK, France, and the U.S. fell down on their responsibility to warn and give guidance where the totalitarian states were concerned. We know how that worked out.

We don’t need to start out the new millennium in the same way. The media will not do the job, the academy will not do it, so it’s up to us. Let’s power up our keyboards and get to work.

Bibliography:

Asia Times Staff, “US aircraft carrier Vinson, Japanese Navy drill in South China Sea” Asia Times, March 14, 2018

BBC, “Why is the South China Sea contentious?” July 12, 2016

China Power Team, "Does China’s J-20 rival other stealth fighters?" China Power, February 15, 2017

Dillow, Clay, “Military nightmare scenario brewing in the East China Sea” CNBC.com, April 4, 2017

Ebbighausen, Rodion, “South China Sea dispute - Long way ahead for China, ASEAN” Deutsche Welle, May 5, 2017

Eckstein, Megan, “Vinson Strike Group Makes Historic Port Call in Vietnam Amid Growing Navy Ties, South China Sea Tensions” U.S. Naval Institute News, March 6, 2018

French, Howard W., “What’s behind Beijing’s drive to control the South China Sea?” The Guardian, July 28, 2015

Glaser, Bonnie S., “Conflict in the South China Sea” Council on Foreign Relations, April 7, 2015

Globalsecurity.Org. DF-21 / CSS-5 [ SC-19 / KS-19 ASAT ] DF-21C /CSS-5C

Global Security Org. “Spratly Skirmish—1988”

Gomez, Jim, “Navy says it won't be deterred by Chinese-built islands” Navy Times, February 17, 2018

Holmes, James R., “Defeating China's Fortress Fleet and A2/AD Strategy: Lessons for the United States and Her Allies” The Diplomat, June 20, 2016

Hunt, Katie, “South China Sea: Court rules in favor of Philippines over China” CNN, July 12, 2016

Kaplan, Robert D., “The South China Sea Is the Future of Conflict” Foreign Policy, August 15, 2011

Kazianis, Harry J., “Is China's "Carrier-Killer" Really a Threat to the U.S. Navy?” National Interest, September 2, 2015

Keck, Zachary, “Japan May Place Anti-Ship Missiles on Okinawa. And the Reason Is China” National Interest, March 3, 2018

Kuntz, Jonathan W. “Japan’s Military Provides America with New Strategic Options” National Interest, November 1, 2017

Lendon, Brad, “Chinese stealth fighters are combat-ready, Beijing says” CNN, February 11, 2018

Lendon, Brad, “Mattis: US will defend Japanese islands claimed by China” CNN, February 4, 2017

Majumdar, Dave, “Here Is Why the US Military Is Not In Panic Mode Over China's Carrier-Killer Missiles” National Interest, June 20, 2016

McCurry, Justin, “Japan steps up military presence in East China Sea” The Guardian, December 18, 2015

Miranda, Miquel, “The Ambiguous War Over the South China Sea” Cable Magazine, February 1, 2018

Pesek, William, “Making Sense Of the South China Sea Dispute” Forbes, August 22, 2017

Tata, Samir, “China's Maritime Great Wall in the South and East China Seas” The Diplomat, January 24, 2017

Scimia, Emanuele, “Japan's East China Sea Military Buildup Continues” National Interest, May 6, 2016

Wong, Catherine, “China’s rising challenge to US raises risk of South China Sea conflict, Philippines warns” South China Morning Post, February, 2018

Xu, Beina, “South China Sea Tensions” Council on Foreign Relations, May 14, 2014

Yoshihara, Toshi, “The 1974 Paracels Sea Battle. A Campaign Appraisal” Naval War College Review, Spring, 2016

Why FTL Will End the Universe—and Six Ways to Avoid It in an SF Story

John Lambshead

Every schoolboy with any interest in space opera knows two things: the first is that it is absolutely de rigueur to have your heroes buzz around in FTL ships of some sort, and the second is that it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a mass to light speed because said object increases in mass with additional velocity until that mass itself becomes infinite.

This has led space opera authors to devise all sorts of clever side-steps to travel faster than light without accelerating mass to light speed. An early solution was E.E. “Doc” Smith’s inertialess drives, an idea later reused by well-known writers such as Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Alastair Reynolds as well as in Rick Priestley’s 40K miniature game. It’s an idea not without issues. A photon may have a theoretical mass of zero at rest but it surely has momentum when it gets underway—all of which means that an inertialess space ship would bounce back like a super-ball if it collided with a photon. As there are quite a few photons knocking around in space, a trip in an inertialess starship would be a bare-knuckle ride to beat everything else in the cosmic fairground.

Other science fiction universes, such that found in the Star Wars movies, have a gizmo called a “hyperdrive,” or something similar, and leave it at that. Press the big red button and off you go. A variant is the hyper-jump where the spacecraft instantly jumps from point A to point B without actually moving. Battlestar Galactica employs something along these lines. Arguably the cleverest, and certainly the most amusing, hyper jump variant is the Infinite Improbability Drive in Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Star Trek used warp drives, where a ship compresses space in front and expands it behind the vessel. Not too far from this concept are starships which “bend” space to “reduce” the distance between two points. People can even do it with their minds by “tesseracting” in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. And then there are our old friends the worm holes, whether natural or synthetic. Down the rabbit hole you go, and where you end up is . . . a long way away. A variant on this are star gates as used as plot devices as in, well, the Stargate series and movies. Arthur C. Clarke probably invented the term “star gate” but A. E. van Vogt employed a similar plot device, the cyclopex, in the early fifties.

The last major group of FTL travel methods involve stepping outside the universe into somewhere else where the laws of physics are subtly different. David Drake’s RCN series books provide a highly imaginative example. In his stories normal Newtonian spaceships drop out of space to sail their way through bubble universes like Napoleonic men o’ war.

However, ingenious those these ideas be, they fail to address the key problem that makes FTL impossible, in so far as we currently understand the universe: an FTL drive is also a time machine.

We experience a Newtonian universe in our daily lives. When we travel across a fixed distance our watches inflexibly tick away the seconds at one second per second. If we want to get somewhere quicker we have to move faster: the rate of time is fixed, we can’t alter it, but speed is variable. In like manner, the same seconds are ticking away at the same rate on the watch faces of the people around us, even if they are travelling in different directions. But our experience is illusory or, to be more accurate, a special case of large objects moving slowly.

In the universe described by relativity, the speed of light is always constant irrespective of whether the object from which the light derives is stationary or moving. The laws of physics are constant throughout the universe, i.e. the speed of light is the same everywhere. It is time that is variable. Hence, the rate of time slows down as velocity climbs towards light speed.

One other key difference between the relativistic universe and our common perception of it has serious implications. We tend to see the Earth around us as stationary and to judge velocity according to that frame of reference. If I ride a bike at ten miles an hour relative to the Earth and throw a ball in front of me at ten miles an hour, the ball has an initial speed of twenty miles an hour, not ten. Fighter pilots trying to attack a distant target will accelerate their plane as much as possible before firing a missile to increase its range.

Fig 1. A confusion of starships.

When we start considering space opera warships, or any object, moving fast and firing laser cannons or similar at each other, then completely different rules apply. Take three warships moving in convoy equidistant apart in a line and let’s see the universe from Ship 2’s frame of reference. From its viewpoint, it is stationary and, because Ships 1 and 3 have the same velocity they are also stationary in 2’s frame of reference. Now let’s assume the ships have faster than light “sub-space” radios that broadcast a constant signal.

There is a mutiny on Ship 2, but the mutineers can’t just take off on a new heading because they will be seen by Ships 1 and 3 who, when they fail to get a satisfactory answer on the subspace radio, will open fire. Fortunately, one of the mutineers understands relativity and comes up with a cunning plan. He advises the mutineers to open fire simultaneously on Ships 1 and 3. Because Ship 2 is stationary in its frame of reference, both targets are at the same fixed range, and as the speed of light is also fixed, then both 1 and 3 will be destroyed simultaneously. Neither will be able to get off a warning on their FTL transmitters so that the other can take evasive action.

Now let’s introduce Ship 4 scudding along at velocity Y. In 4’s frame of reference the ship is stationary, so the convoy is moving at Y on a reciprocal heading. Therefore 2’s laser shot will have farther to go to hit Ship 1 than Ship 3 because 3 is moving towards the laser burst but 1 is moving away. The fact that 2 was moving when it fired is irrelevant. Both laser bursts cross space at the speed of light.

Ship 3 will therefore be destroyed first in Ship 4’s frame of reference. Cessation of its FTL transmission warns Ship 1 that something is wrong, so it takes evasive action. The laser misses and Ship 1 survives.

Now introduce another ship moving in the same direction as the convoy but faster so it is overtaking at speed X. Ship 5 is also stationary in its frame of reference so the convoy is moving backward, at speed X on a reciprocal course to Ship 5. The laser shot now hits Ship 1 before Ship 3 so Ship 3 can take evasive action and survive.

Frames of Reference

Ship 2: Ships 1 & 3 are destroyed but it can get on its FTL transmitter and talk to Ships 4 & 5.

Ship 4: Can talk to Ships 4, 2 & 1 but not 3 because it’s destroyed.

Ship 5: Can talk to Ships 2, 3 & 4 but not 1 because it’s destroyed.

Should be an interesting conversation!

Now this is a simplified and rather contrived tongue-in-cheek example and much better explanations written by physical scientists (I’m a biologist) can be found on the web.

For example:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special_Relativity/Faster_than_light_signals,_causality_and_Special_Relativity

And a more detailed explanation here:

http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html

The example employed here used FTL radios. Once you introduce FTL drives, then it is possible to come up with examples where a starship can return home from a journey before it sets off.

Just think, a crewman could meet himself before he left, and warn himself not to go because the captain will turn out to be a tyrant and the food terrible. But if he didn’t go then he wouldn’t warn himself not to travel so he would sign aboard.

The fact that everything can have a different frame of reference doesn’t matter so much if nothing moves faster than light. Once anything does, then the universe hits the buffers of: FTL = Time Travel = Potential Causality Paradox.

As Matthew Buckley points out, it’s as if the universe is saying to us that when it comes down to Relativity, Causality and FTL, pick two—because you can’t have all three.

Note that it is the act of sending information (including large objects as information) FTL that causes the problem, not the method by which the information is sent.

So could relativity be wrong? Well, I’m a biologist not a physicist so I have no idea ultimately, but the physical scientists seem struck on the idea and it has been repeatedly tested and not found wanting. Then what about causality? Is our idea of causality erroneous?

Causality is one of those primary building blocks of science (and reason). Although there can be some subtle effects when considering quantum mechanics, it is difficult to imagine a universe where events precede causes. And that’s before we get into the classic time paradoxes of shooting one’s grandfather.

In the final analysis, if we are not prepared to give up on causality, and relativity also remains as one of our scientific core theories, is there any way we can twist the universe to allow us to have FTL?

The key point here is to prevent a time paradox occurring. One suggestion is that the universe might act in some blind fashion to ensure causality always “works,” and so prevent paradox or, to put it another way, an immutable law ensures that the past can’t be changed. What has happened has happened and can’t be altered. So you can’t go back in time and shoot your grandfather. You may try to go back in time with that intention, but the time machine or gun will malfunction, or you will shoot your grandfather only to find out that your grandmother was “no better than she should be,” and you came from different stock.

Another related possibility is that the universe might allow a time paradox to occur but then realign itself to wipe the paradox from history as if it never occurred. If you shoot your grandfather you cease to exist, which may mean he ceases to exist to tidy things up, or your family ceases to exist or your nation, species, planet, solar system, right down to the universe itself, ceases to exist.

Tricky!

The third logical solution is that a paradox splits the universe into two, so each event can happen in some way without breaking causality.

Doctor Who has taken the first option: horrible monsters fly out of the Time Vortex and seal off the paradox, trying to destroy everything involved to repair the fabric of time (“Father’s Day” episode). Of course, Doctor Who is one of the few popular SF franchises that has tried to seriously tackle issues of time paradox.

A TARDIS is a highly complex sentient device and one can bet that not many were made. Also a “Time Lord” is not a normal Gallifreyan. They are superhuman (supergallifreyan?) in many ways, physically different having “looked into the abyss” with “non-linear perception of time.” So presumably Time Lords can be trusted to travel in space and time FTL without carelessly causing time paradoxes.

There are “fixed points” in the Doctor Who universe which can’t be altered. These are events that have happened to the Doctor in his past so they can’t be changed without risking a causality paradox. For example, he can’t bring a dead assistant back to life when he witnessed the death because “it’s already happened”—already happened in his frame of reference, that is.

But doesn’t the Doctor often change time? Well, not in his time line. He may have been the cause of that event that happened in our past all along and it occurs in his future (interesting ramifications from this last point—see below). There is no change in our frame of reference because, say, what the Doctor did in 55 A.D. was what had always happened. We just didn’t know that until the episode was broadcast.

In the early stories, when the Doctor returns to Gallifrey, which is in our past, he arrives a set time after he left. It’s as if the Time Lord/TARDIS combination can maintain its own frame of reference in synchronicity with Gallifrey—and hence all other time travelling Time Lords— irrespective of how he hops in and out of our time line. The Doctor also tends to drop assistants back on Earth further down their own time line from where they took off, thus preventing paradox. The one time The Doctor breaks this rule with Rose Tyler, she prevents her father’s death creating a causality break—Father’s Day—hence the appearance of the Time Vortex monsters acting as a sort of Causality Police.

It’s true that you can find all sorts of anomalies in Doctor Who, given that hundreds of script writers must have worked on the plot lines since 1966. Nevertheless, you have to give the series points for at least trying.

This brings me to think how space opera writers can handle the FTL = Time Travel conundrum. Here are some suggestions.

#1: Ignore the problem

No, really, you are writing fiction in a fantastic setting. Who cares about frames of reference? Not your readers. Not if you offer them a cracking good story populated with fascinating characters. For example, the giant sentient spacecraft in Iain M. Banks’ Culture universe “push against the grid” to go FTL. How this avoids time paradox is never touched upon and no one notices. It just does, okay! Banks and Drake, The Culture and RCN are my all-time favorite space opera book series, and that they never mention causality bothers me not a jot.

#2: Choose Causality and FTL

Abandon the Theory of Relativity as a flawed concept. In your universe the speed of light is not fixed, so unwanted time travel ceases to be an issue. Essentially, this is the approach that Dave Drake and I took in the Citizen series, although we never say so explicitly.

#3: Invent a “Plot Voucher”

Plot voucher is a term created by Nick Lowe for an object used by the protagonist to move the plot along. Q’s gadgets in James Bond films are classic examples. In this case the plot voucher is some way of negating time travel impacts. It could be a Time Standardisation Rectification Medium, better known as TIMSRECTUM, which controls the frame of reference so your heroes can’t land back at base before they take off. Just don’t go into the physics of your magic gubbins too deeply.

#4: Embrace the Issue

Tackle time paradoxes and causality maintenance as a component of your plot. Use the difficulties that can be created as problems for your protagonists to overcome. Make your space opera universe a strange and terrifying environment where the normally accepted rules of life hold no sway.

#5: Don’t Go FTL

It is possible to write space opera with STL (slower than light) spaceships using (i) the time-slowing property of fast moving objects, (ii) “stasis fields” or (iii) multi-generation colony ships. Personally speaking, I don’t find such stories as exciting as FTL based novels, but maybe that’s just me. Throw in immortality if you want the characters in your novel to meet up in the future after riding on different STL ships

#6: Sidestep the Issue

Have your protagonists travel through gates that come out in different universes so causality maintenance is then irrelevant. I really like Philip Farmer’s World of Tiers setting, which has many of the features of space opera of the star gate type but doesn’t involve FTL.

I am sure that there are many other solutions that I haven’t thought of.

So which way should an author jump? Which approach should be selected? Well, a good writer can make something out of anything. They can spin fantastic and wonderful stories out of the most unpromising material. By that token, any of these will work if handled right.

If I am prodded into choosing, I would favor approach number 1—ignore the problem. If it’s good enough for Drake, Weber, and Banks it might be good enough for you. Option 3 is fascinating and, with the right author and the right touch, could make for amazing stories. However, it is probably the most difficult of all the options to plot.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Mind how you go, people, especially if you’re going FTL!

Atomic Follies

Jim Beall

"Atomic" was the big pre-WWII science fiction "handwavium," with atomic drives powering spaceships, atomic weapons fighting wars, and atomic energy fueling empires. When WWII ended, however, atomic was real.

It had not come easy, nor had it come cheap. The Manhattan Project had consumed resources on an unprecedented scale (1) but, as expensive as it had been, the "a-bombs" it produced led Japan to surrender before the Allies were forced to invade. Given the estimated invasion casualties for Allied and Japanese alike, the Manhattan Project was probably a bargain. (2)

No one knew what would or even could be done with the new handwavium-become-real technology, least of all government bureaucrats who promulgated federal regulations (3) to control it with almost surreal celerity. (4) The public's fascination with anything atomic quickly reached astounding heights.

Atomic Vehicles

Newspapers and magazines became packed with nuclear notions, especially for vehicles. Among the most bizarre was the atomic dirigible!

Figure 1—March 1956 Modern Mechanix

Image courtesy of www.technicacuriosa.com (5)

Atomic locomotives were also a hot item:

Figure 2—Association of American Railroads, 1948

Courtesy of the Association of American Railroads

Unlike the dirigible, the possibility of fuel-free locomotives attracted serious consideration, including a collaboration between the University of Utah and Babcock and Wilcox (called Project X-12). (6) No such locomotive was built, however. For one thing, the study concluded that the required shielding would have weighed more than most conventional locomotives! (One initial calculation estimated 220 tons.) Perhaps learning of Project X-12 (7), the USSR soon initiated a project of their own toward developing nuclear locomotives for the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Soviets appear to have put considerably more resources into the effort than did the U.S. but, in the end, they did not build a nuclear train either. (8)

Meanwhile, Ford had a "better idea"—the "Nucleon" nuclear automobile:

Figure 3—William Clay Ford, Sr., and 3/8 model (9)

Courtesy of www.allcarindex.com

Implicit in the Ford design was that nuclear power plants would soon be miniaturized enough to fit comfortably into the trunk of a car. Sadly, this did not happen in real life, despite A.E. Van Vogt's having already fit one (in his novel Slan, serialized in Astounding in 1940) into the hero's wedding band!

French car designers also proposed an atomic-powered automobile, named the Arbel:

Figure 4—1958 Arbel/Symetric Advertisement

Courtesy of www.allcarindex.com (10)

The French design avoided the Nucleon's miniaturization problem by not using a nuclear reactor and steam plant. Instead, the internal power source of the Arbel was to look like this:

Figure 5—1958 Arbel/Symetric Power Source

Courtesy of www.allcarindex.com

Here is a close-up view of the power source from another angle:

Figure 6—Arbel/Symetric Power Source

Courtesy of www.allcarindex.com

The assembly in the rear of the chassis was the "genestatom"—a 40-KW nuclear thermal generator using two radioactive cartridges filled with none other than nuclear waste! Consider your plight if you owned one, had just been in a car accident, and were on the phone with your insurance agent. The police have abruptly fled from the yellow-taped boundary and HAZ-MAT vans are rolling in, sirens blaring. You're worried, and for good reason. Would your coverage include the costs of evacuating half of the city for clean-up?

Of course, science fiction contained what the public truly wanted:

Figure 7—Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar

Author's collection

Sadly, we still don't have it.

The Tom Swift series is also related to another Folly: Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster (1954). The fictional invention was a nuclear-powered drilling machine and, as preposterous as this might seem, Los Alamos would patent a similar design eighteen years later: Patent Nos. 3,693,731 and 3,885,832. The author has always wondered if some Los Alamos scientist had read the Tom Swift book as a youth and, upon reaching adulthood, could not resist designing and patenting one like it. (11) Compare the images below:

Figure 8—Tom Swift's atomic drill

Author's collection

Figure 9—Los Alamos' atomic drill

Public Domain: Patent 3,693,731

Atomic Toys

Toy makers also went atomic crazy, with games, models, comics, and more. Children fought it out with atomic handguns, dropped atomic bombs for scores, and the Lone Ranger even had an atomic bomb ring!

Figure 10—Atomic Toy Pistols (12)

Courtesy of Oak Ridge Associated Universities

(ORAU) Health Physics Historical Instrumentation

Museum Collection

Figure 11—Atomic Bomb Toy

Courtesy of Wikipedia, and The Children's

Museum of Indianapolis

Figure 12—Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb Ring

Courtesy of Roger Russell (13)

Figure 13—Atom Bomber Game

Courtesy of Hake's Americana & Collectibles (14)

The one toy that deserves the title of "Atomic Folly," however, is the one below:

Figure 14—Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab

Courtesy of Wikipedia

The Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab allowed owners to conduct working experiments, such as watching radioactive particle tracks in the included cloud chamber. What made it all possible were the contents of the four carefully packed jars in the upper left: four different radioactive isotopes! The kit also came with a "Radioactive Source Replacement" coupon for when the original sources decayed below usefulness. The "Lab" was available only for about one year (1950-1). Perhaps the company (or their lawyers) developed second thoughts about putting vials of radioactive isotopes in the hands of children. (15)

The Atomic Jet

Almost lost in the noise, the U.S. government released that work had begun on atomic jet engines. (16) The announcement went largely unremarked upon at the time, but the 1950s interest in all matters atomic soon brought nuclear aircraft speculation into high visibility. One of the earliest to address the possibility was Gerald Wendt's (17) October 1951 article in Popular Science, "A Scientist Previews the First Atomic Airplane." In it, Wendt predicted the first atomic plane would contain "a red-hot boiler and turbine engines geared to [wing-mounted] propellers." In other words, it would be an atomic propeller plane! Perhaps more technically serious was the RAF Flying Review announcement (October 1954) that not only were GE and Pratt and Whitney working on nuclear jet engines for the U.S. Air Force, but also that Harwell was doing likewise in Britain, with the magazine article containing portions of a design study.

Nonetheless, no atomic plane had yet appeared when the magazine Aviation Week related the alarming news (December 1958) that the Soviets were already flight testing a nuclear jet bomber. In fact, the article stated that the plane "had been completed six months previously," had been "flying in the Moscow area for at least two months," and had been observed in flight by observers from both Communist and non-Communist countries. Perhaps fearing a Sputnik reprise, reports of Western nuclear planes soon appeared in other magazines. Air Progress and Science and Mechanics were just two of the periodicals that discussed how far advanced were the ongoing British and U.S. atomic plane efforts.

Really cool toys and model kits began to appear of futuristic jet bombers, including:

Figure 15—BETA-1 Model (Also called XAB-1) 1959

Author's Collection

Still, however, no atomic plane appeared.

Then, on March 28, 1961, President Kennedy issued a statement cancelling the entire U.S. atomic jet program! The summary line was: "Nearly 15 years and about $1 billion have been devoted to the attempted development of a nuclear-powered aircraft; but the possibility of achieving a militarily useful aircraft in the foreseeable future is still very remote."

At the time of cancellation, the U.S. had developed and ground tested nuclear jet engines of two different designs and flight tested the nuclear power plant (but not powered the plane with it) of one of them. Both designs performed as the scientists and engineers had predicted. (18) The engines, in particular, produced all the predicted thrust in ground tests and further improvements were in the offing.

If everything was working, what had gone wrong? Why terminate it?

One cited factor was that ICBM technology had appeared and filled the atomic bomber's original strategic mission of a delivery system for nuclear weapons with the range to strike anywhere on the planet. A subsequent Comptroller of the United States report (19) cited a variety of mismanagement contributors, including frequent changes in program objectives, deficiencies in administration, and absence of stability. (20)

There is more to the story, however, and perhaps the best way to explain it is to show two of the atomic jet engines themselves: Heat Transfer Reactor Experiment (HTRE) Number One and Three. They are both on public display at the end of a simple, nondescript parking lot in Arco, Idaho, not far from where they were tested. The first clue is the winter shot below:

Figure 16—HTRE-1 and 3 (on right)

Courtesy of Wikipedia

The yellow object on the left is the RR engine used to move the atomic engines (which are skid-mounted on rails). Its unusual shape is from the heavy shielding required to protect the operator from the enormous residual radiation fields from unshielded nuclear reactors after power operations. One of the author's coworkers had been associated with the project and witnessed some of the test runs. He related that the engines did indeed put out all the desired thrust, but that they were so radioactive during operation that an atomic plane's airfield would need to be evacuated for takeoffs and landings. He asserted that the plane would not even need weapons, as simply flying low over enemy personnel would kill them!

Visitors can see the engines, but cannot touch them, as they are within securely fenced enclosures clearly marked with the warning signs below:

Figure 17—Still Radioactive

Author's Collection

Nearly sixty years after last operation, even with the nuclear fuel removed, they are still radioactive!

It is worth noting that the radiation difficulties inherent in operating (and landing) planes with such engines were accurately featured in the science fiction novel Steam Bird, by Hilbert Schenck:

Figure 18—Steam Bird, by Hilbert Schenck

Author's Collection, Courtesy of David Lynn Mills

In the story, an atomic bomber (with engines much like the ones within the fences shown above) is inadvertently scrambled as part of escalation during a minor crisis. The crisis soon subsides, but trying to figure out how and where to land the plane safely turns out to be a far greater problem!

As for the Soviet jet bomber that Aviation Week had reported in 1958, it turned out to have been a hoax, and the bomber (M-50, NATO named "Bounder") was never atomic powered at all. The USSR did have an atomic jet program, several in fact. The first appears to have begun in earnest in mid-1955, almost exactly six months after the RAF Flying Review article cited above, leading the author to wonder if that had been a contributor. In any case, the Soviets put a lot of resources into the efforts but got no further technologically than the U.S. had before abandoning the projects years after the US. Visitors can see the "Bounder" at the open air portion of the Central Air Force Museum, Monino Airfield, near Moscow. (21)

Perhaps in an effort to turn the lethal radiation "bug into a feature," the U.S. adopted the atomic jet engine technologies for Project Pluto, which was a new type of weapon: the "Supersonic Low Altitude Missile" (SLAM). The SLAM was to be a massive drone, launched with a conventional booster (avoiding radiation problems at the launch site) with the nuclear ramjet ("Tory") igniting upon reaching suitable altitude and velocity. The 500—600 MW nuclear reactor (many times more powerful than the jets were to be with humans aboard) would then give the ramjet missile the ability to loiter indefinitely (22) over ocean or the Arctic Circle, then drop to low altitude upon command and head for its target. Tory went through millions of dollars and multiple prototypes but performed as designed during power tests. (23)

Figures 19 and 20—Project Pluto Tory IIC Engine

Courtesy of Wikipedia

The SLAM was to be quite large, and hold as many as twenty-six nuclear bombs in its internal bay. The intended "mission" was for it accelerate to Mach 3+ as it approached enemy airspace, drop its bombs at designated targets, then continue to cruise along indefinitely, crisscrossing enemy territory at very low altitude, causing devastating shock waves even as it exposed all below to its unshielded reactor core. Eventually it would crash, distributing highly radioactive plutonium liberally about the impact site.

On July 1, 1964, seven and a half years after Project Pluto was initiated, and forty days after the atomic engine's triumphant sustained full power test, the program was terminated.

The official reason was, again, that ICBMs had assumed the original intended role. Another cited reason, however, was that fielding the system would likely compel the USSR to match it, and apparently no one wanted that! (24) Nonetheless, the U.S. expended a lot of money and other resources (for example, Chance Vought alone had one hundred seventy-seven scientists and engineers full-time on the project until the cancellation announcement) on what the Department of Defense called "a model technology program" and then terminated it because it produced exactly what had been requested. (25)

Atomic Weapons

After WWII ended, one thing the U.S. knew for sure was how to make atomic bombs ("A-Bombs"). There was great room for improvement in power and little empirical data on effects, so the U.S. conducted multiple series of A-Bomb tests to address both issues. The series "Desert Rock" (1951—1955) remains one of the worst Atomic Follies of all, as tens of thousands of servicemen watched as (air-dropped—what if pilot error?) nuclear weapons were detonated a few miles away, and then were ordered to get out of their trenches and march closer. The worst of the Folly was that none of the senior officers, officials, or physicists considered that airborne radioactive particles might give low external readings but would be deadly in the long term due to inhalation and lodgment in lungs. (26)

Sadly, Operation Desert Rock was far from the only A-Bomb Folly and the image below of the red-suited man standing in a cavern belongs to the next one.

Figure 21—Project Gnome

Public Domain, Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory

The U.S. decided to explore possible peaceful uses of A-Bombs with "Operation Plowshare" (as in turning swords into plowshares). The first of these efforts was Project Gnome. An A-Bomb (3.1 kiloton) was detonated about 1,200 feet underground in a halite (rock salt) deposit. The stated intent was to study the possibilities of harnessing the heat and harvesting certain isotopes from the melted salt, and using the resulting underground void as a storage chamber (possibly for radioactive waste).

International press and dignitaries had been formally invited and many were on hand for the event, but things did not go quite as planned. Billed as a demonstration of control and safety, the detonation blew out the tunnel plugs and vented radioactive gas and steam in plain view (and potentially contaminating the guests—so much for safe and controlled!). In situ examination required a second tunnel be drilled, as the first was now heavily contaminated. The man in Figure 21 above is standing within the subterranean cavern created by the blast. Although they waited until decay had reduced ambient radiation levels, note that (like the soldiers earlier in Operation Desert Rock) he is not wearing respiratory equipment.

As for the intended purposes of Gnome, it turned out that multi-kiloton explosions just happen to grossly shatter strata, burying the melted salt and isotopes under massive piles of rubble from the walls and overhead (hence the lower than expected radiation levels in the cavern). The cavern was used as a storage chamber for radioactive waste, however, as that is where they packed most of the surface soils that had been contaminated by the ejected gases and steam. All that remains today of Gnome is a non-descript concrete marker in the desert:

Figure 22—Gnome Marker

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Operation Plowshare then conducted a series of nuclear detonations to investigate the feasibility of A-Bombs as excavation tools for railroad cuts or even a canal. After making a few large holes and trenches with considerable radioactive releases to the atmosphere, someone eventually did the math concerning the fallout that would result from the required number of explosions to do anything useful and all such efforts were abandoned. (27)

Many today decry hydraulic fracking due to various environmental concerns, including potential ground water contamination from injection chemicals. The first "Gas Buggy" Operation Plowshare test was carried out by the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and the El Paso Natural Gas Company, with funding from the Atomic Energy Commission. Its purpose: A-Bomb fracking! Two additional detonations occurred with different petrochemical company partners and gas was produced afterwards at all three sites. The practice was never adopted, though, because (hardly surprising) the gas extracted was radioactive! (28)

Operation Plowshare ended without identifying any clear or conclusive peaceful uses for blowing things up with nuclear weapons, but the official project report did intimate there just might be some if only things like test bans and radioactivity releases fears could be dealt with. (29)

The next Atomic Folly involves the men below in Figure 22. What they looking at?

Figure 23—Genie Test (Operation Plumbbob)

Courtesy of Peter Kuran, Visual Concept Engineering Films

Another part of the 1950s was the Cold War threats posed by the USSR. Once the Soviets had conducted their own A-Bomb tests, the growing capabilities of enemy long-range bombers became one such threat. The U.S. investigated several avenues of defense, including fitting A-Bomb warheads onto air-to-air missiles. When word that one such missile (Genie) was scheduled for public test, five officers volunteered to stand directly below where the nuclear detonation was to occur at an altitude of twelve to eighteen thousand feet (sources differ)! Not only did they do precisely that (July 19, 1957), but they also video-taped the entire event. (30)

Another major aspect of the Cold War was the development of ever larger nuclear weapons. The A-Bomb (31) eventually became succeeded as the most fearsome weapon on Earth by the thermo-nuclear hydrogen bomb ("H-Bomb"). These new devices were so powerful that the "kilotons" (TNT equivalent) rating of the A-Bombs had to be replaced by "megatons" for the H-Bombs.

Where A-Bombs use only the nuclear fission of uranium and/or plutonium when detonating, H-Bombs use a fission bomb to produce a second and far greater energy release by causing a fusion nuclear event. In simple terms, the X rays and neutrons from the fission event cause fusion of the hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium. Some of the tritium (32) fused would be created during the event itself by breaking down stable lithium into tritium. The U.S. tested the first H-Bomb (Ivy Mike) on November 1, 1952, with a yield of 10.4 megatons

On the face of it, the second H-Bomb test, Castle Bravo, was a complete success. It went off when it was supposed to and remains the largest nuclear device set off by the US. Ivy Mike had used cryogenics (hardly suitable for a deployed weapon) and expensive, highly-purified Lithium-6, such that the device was as much a building as a bomb. This second device was smaller and cheaper, in part because cryogenics were avoided and the lithium was only partly enriched. The far more common isotope, Lithium-7, comprised sixty percent of the lithium used and was not expected to contribute to the yield. (33) Thus, the physicists included only the mass of Lithium-6 in their blast calculations.

The first indication that all the physicists had been wrong was when the fireball from the supposed six megaton device was observed not to be the expected two miles wide, but four and a half! Observers stationed on a nearby island were the first to react, and they did so by quickly abandoning their posts for the shelter in the basement. They survived, but the structure above them and all the base structures on the nearby atoll were damaged beyond recovery, and many instruments designed to record the event were vaporized.

Post-test calculations (34) concluded that the actual blast had been about fifteen megatons, or two and a half times expected. Fifteen inhabited islands had to be evacuated. Fallout effects spread far and wide, with cancers and birth defects reported for years. Crewmen aboard a Japanese fishing boat outside the official danger zone (but well within the actual one) came down with radiation sickness. The U.S. would pay $15.3 million to Japan as reparations. (35)

Our final Atomic Folly has nothing to do with the nuclear device involved at all. The blast yield was exactly as anticipated. The delivery system also functioned precisely as designed. Instead, the Folly aspect was the underlying concept of the weapons delivery system itself: The Atomic Cannon!

One can almost visualize a senior Cold War Pentagon meeting. The U.S. military had atomic bombs, missiles, and torpedoes. Obviously, all that was lacking, then, were atomic cannons!

Once identified, this military preparedness deficiency was soon rectified. The recent U.S. Army experiences with the effective German rail gun "Anzio Annie" (36) led the designers to begin with that shell size (280 mm, or about 11-inch). Physicists were able to miniaturize Hiroshima yield size devices enough to fit into the shells, and soon the U.S. Army possessed "Atomic Annie" with large fore-and-aft trucks ("prime movers") for on-road and off-road mobility. A total of twenty were built and deployed. (37)

Figure 24—"Anzio Annie"

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Figure 25—"Atomic Annie"

Public Domain, Source: U.S. Army

So, if the cannon and the shell both worked as designed, how is it an Atomic Folly?

The answer is implicit in the image below from the one-time Atomic Annie fired an atomic shell. (38)

Figure 26—Nuclear Artillery Test—Grable Event

Public Domain, Source: DOE

The shell flew seven miles, and the maximum effective range was a bit over twice that. Suppose that the enemy is that close and in such force that nuclear weapons are needed to deal with the threat. How can driving around in something resembling a monster hooking-ladder fire engine with atomic weapons aboard be a good idea?

In truth, nearly all the A-Bomb and H-Bomb tests before 1963 were Atomic Follies because they ejected large quantities of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. That year, most nuclear powers signed a partial ban on nuclear weapons testing, limiting such detonations to underground. (39) Since then, the amount of radioactive material in the atmosphere has slowly decreased, but remains detectable. In fact, the best sources for steel used in applications requiring near-zero radioactive emissions (like medical scanners) are from recycling steel made before the first atomic bomb, with the most famous source the German dreadnoughts scuttled at Scapa Flow in 1919.

In closing, the abrupt reality of atomic technology caught everyone (except the science fiction community) completely by surprise. In hindsight, it was perfectly predictable that government officials would be the first to act, and try their bureaucratic best to tie it up with regulations. Equally predictable was that the military would weaponize it in every way imaginable, and then strain to come up with new imaginings. It's also unsurprising that non-scientific folk would react to the public's fascination by attempting to force fit "atomic" into all sorts of bizarre applications, even dirigibles and family cars. As for making toys with new kinds of guns, rockets, and other stuff, that was always going to happen.

No, the true Atomic Follies were when those who should have known better kept blowing things up with bigger and bigger devices, ejecting tons of highly radioactive materials into the Earth's biosphere and, in the process, exposing innocents. First were obedient servicemen and then islanders and fishermen, but the effects were global and linger still.

FOOTNOTES

1) Spread out among about thirty sites, Oak Ridge and Hanford alone occupied about three hundred square miles of real estate and contained about a thousand buildings in which several thousand top scientists and over a hundred thousand workers toiled during the Project's five years.

2) The U.S. manufactured five hundred thousand Purple Heart medals as part of invasion preparation. The U.S. kept them in inventory after WWII and the Purple Heart received by the author's son in Iraq was one of those same medals. That is, all the Purple Hearts awarded in the following sixty years had been expected to be issued to the actual recipients' uncles, fathers, and grandfathers, many posthumously.

3) The regulation (Section 2181 TITLE 42 U.S. Code of Federal Regulations) remains in force today. The phrasings include: "Any person who makes any invention . . . useful in utilization of . . . atomic energy, shall file with the Commission a report . . ." Another one: "Any invention or discovery . . . shall be . . . the property of the Commission." Soothingly, it also promises that any previously granted patents will be subject to "just compensation." Thus, should the reader invent a nuclear space drive, remember to file a report with the federal government who, thus alerted, may declare it federal property. The same would apply to any SF author's inventor character!

4) The regulation was issued on August 1, 1946. Given the lead time from initial drafting to approval and formal publication in the Federal Register, regulators may have already been working on it as the Enola Gay took off to drop the first A-Bomb on Hiroshima less than one year earlier.

5) The complete article by Frank Tinsley (with additional images) can be found on-line here: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/why-dont-we-build-an-atoms-for-peace-dirigible/

The host site—www.technicacuriosa.com/—is home to a wealth of unusual, historical documents and images.

6) See U.S. Patent 3127321.

7) It had been featured in an article in Life, June 21, 1954, including drawings!

8) For one thing, much of the railway—total length 5,772 miles—would have had to be re-tracked and all the bridges replaced.

9) The pictured model is currently housed at the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

10) This image and the following two images of the nuclear 1958 Arbel/Symetric can be found, along with many others, at: http://www.allcarindex.com/main-index/car-make-details/France-Arbel--Symetric/

11) For more information, see: https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/NSTMs.pdf

12) For more atomic toys and other related items, visit: https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/atomictoys/atomictoys.htm

13) Image courtesy of Roger Russell. For more images and background, see: http://www.roger-russell.com/radioactive/radioactive.htm#ranger

14) Hakes Americana and Collectibles sells many such items. The Atom Bomber game last went for $285.99! See: https://www.hakes.com/Auction/ItemDetail/2014/Atom-Bomber-Toy-Plane-WAutomatic-Bomb-Release-In-Original-Box

15) Originally fifty dollars, the author recently considered purchasing one for demonstration purposes, but was dissuaded by the then-going price of over seven thousand dollars!

16) The announcement was public in May, 1946, and the U.S. Army began the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) project that same month to develop a nuclear propulsion system for aircraft. NEPA would be handed off to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1951 and renamed the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program.

17) Dr. Wendt had already authored The Atomic Age Opens (1945) and Atomic Energy and the Hydrogen Bomb (1951) and would go on to publish at least three more nuclear-related titles.

18) A good overview of the atomic engine program, complete with wonderful images and tables showing how closely performance matched predictions, can be found at: http://www.holosgen.com/about-us-1-2/

19) See: https://fas.org/nuke/space/anp-gao1963.pdf

20) In contrast, Hyman G. Rickover took over the incredibly successful USN nuclear propulsion program near its beginning and stayed at its head for over thirty years.

21) After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the USSR, certain documents indicated that the Soviets had, in turn, become alarmed at the inaccurate reports of significant U.S. progress in atomic bombers. So alarmed, in fact, that they may even have flown a partly nuclear-powered bomber using inadequate shielding simply to get it airborne, but irradiated the crews and killed several in the process. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cnFtYuqXX8

22) Ramjet missiles were already well understood. For example, the USN Talos ramjet missile had been deployed since 1959 and had a maximum speed of Mach 2.5. Talos used a solid fuel booster to boost it to ramjet speeds. The author served aboard USS Long Beach (CGN-9), which had used Talos missiles to shoot down two enemy planes in 1968 at ranges over 60 miles. Talos missiles were not nuclear fueled, however, and were limited to a maximum range of "only" 130 miles.

23) Designing, operating, and studying a ~500 MW unshielded reactor provided many technical challenges. For one thing, the high operating temperatures (needed for "ram" operations) required the use of ceramic fuel elements instead of metal, ~465,000 of them! They were manufactured by a division of Coors, better known now for a different product. Testing the ramjet offered even more challenges. One of these was the construction of a "field" of twenty-five miles of oil drilling casings to hold the million pounds of highly compressed air needed to simulate ram operation, which it did for about five minutes on May 20, 1964.

24) Or, in the official phrasing offered by the Department of Defense and the State Department, the system was “too provocative.”

25) As a postscript to Project Pluto, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on March 1, 2018, that the Russians had recently developed and tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile.

26) The USSR, upon learning of Desert Rock, would conduct their own similar Folly (Totskoye or "Snowball"), with about twice the kilotons and twice the servicemen. The Soviets did not merely march their soldiers closer, they bombed and shelled the cratered zone first, thus maximizing airborne radioactive particles.

27) The Soviets learned of the U.S. tests and conducted their own using perhaps twice the kilotons. One resulting crater filled with water and is now called "Atomic Lake." It remains somewhat radioactive, and is favorite site for locals to water cattle and pick mushrooms.

28) Hydraulic fracking activities have come increasingly closer to the Gas Buggy test site boundaries. Frackers have petitioned the U.S. government to let them extract within them, arguing that by now the gas has probably decayed to below detectability.

29) An official recounting of Operation Plowshare, with its conclusions in carefully coached and formal phrasings, can be read here: https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=721172

30) AtomCentral.com is a premier source of visual material on nuclear tests and related material in the years following World War II. The specific video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VZ7FQHTaR4

31) The largest "pure fission" A-Bomb ever detonated was the 500 kiloton yield "Ivy King" on November 16, 1952.

32) Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen and thus decays over time. Thus, not only does it not store well for long periods, but also the changes in concentration from the decay also change the physics of any bomb it is in.

33) That is, the physicists had concluded that the nuclear reactions taking place during the fission and fusion events in the detonation would not make tritium from Lithium-7 that could undergo fusion during the event.

34) The physics was recalculated, and the extra yield was henceforth labeled the "tritium bonus."

35) A major part of the "deal" was that Japan would not add the affected fishermen to the "Hibakusha" list of those who had survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

36) One fine recounting of those experiences can be found at: http://samilitaryhistory.org/vol133lw.html

37) The history of Atomic Annie origins and deployments, complete with discussions of the inter-service politics and deployment difficulties, can be found here: https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/m65.htm

Additionally, a promotional video, including non-atomic firings, can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1Oi15044c

38) The atomic firing test can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46GBjlUOROY

39) China and France are among the non-signatories, with China alone conducting about twenty-three atmospheric tests after the 1963 treaty. Also, several underground tests by signatories ended up venting radioactive material, similar to what happened at Gnome.

Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse,[1] Part One of a Series

Thomas P. Kratman

Part I

Introduction:

In the “history” of the Carreraverse and of what eventually became the Timocratic Republic of Balboa, there are six models of organization seen. The first of these was the creation model, by which Patricio Carrera built out of the previously defeated and disbanded scraps of the Balboan armed forces the second model, a brigade of auxiliaries to wage conventional war, in order to begin to avenge the murders of his wife and children, as well as to earn money to continue that program of revenge.

The second model was flux, and little but, wherein the Legio del Cid, expanded from that single brigade-sized organization to the third model, a corps-sized force, able to keep one legion, their name for a division, in action, in counter-insurgency, continuously.

The third model was the rapid, ad hoc reorganization of the corps to once again fight a more or less conventional war, this time to re-invade Pashtia and retrieve the waning fortunes of the alliance there, before reverting back to the third model.

The fourth model was a still expanding reversion to the third.

The fifth, following the taking over of the nation, was the expansion of the corps to a national defense organization, the size of a large, multi-corps army, capable of waging total war in defense of the nation, against the likely enemies, the Tauran Union and the Zhong, predictably aided by the United Earth Peace Fleet, as well as waging war in Balboa’s “near abroad,” along with a very limited ability to wage both kinetic and propaganda/memetic war anywhere on the planet of Terra Nova.

The fifth model, itself, can be subdivided into two further models, 5a, the unmobilized, largely hidden, and in part only diplomatically valid, nation-in-arms, and 5b, the fully mobilized force, with allies.

Although I don’t think it’s anywhere stated within the series, in building these different models Carrera was either consciously adhering to, or consciously violating, certain long-standing, albeit often unstated, principles of military organization.

So what are some of those principles of organization:

Principles of Organization (a non-exhaustive list):

1. Social cohesion: Organize your sub-organization for maximum feasible affection and group emotional attachment within and among the officers and men.

2. Flexibility and maneuver: Organize the number of sub-units to give options, to allow left and right, but also forward and rear.

3. Span of control: Organize with no more subunits than the man responsible can supervise in action and, pre-action, no more than he can professionally develop, rate, and know, so that the leadership can retain integrity and personal honor.

4. Combined Arms: Organize to achieve and employ combined arms.

5. Purity: Organize so that the commander or leader knows and understands every job of his subordinates.

6. Discipline: Organize to ensure that all ranks are supervised, and improper conduct identified and punished.

7. Rest: Organize to relieve and allow rest for the sub-organizations and men who comprise them.

8. Leadership: Organize to make it easily and instantly recognizable who is responsible and in charge. Organize to keep leadership quality high.

9. Simplicity: Do not add needless complexity; balance necessary complexity.

10. Logistics: Organize for effective logistic support.

11. Attrition: Organize for anti-fragility and ability to endure losses.

12. Mass: Organize to allow massing of combat power, and especially to give artillery “maximum feasible centralized control.”

13. Support: Organize for supporting arms to provide support.

14. Range and weapons’ effects: Organize to place weapons at the right echelon.

15. Environment: Organize to meet the demands of the physical environment in which you will wage war.

16. Specialization: Organize to avoid overspecialization and gain appropriate specialization.

17. State Circumstances: In organizing, remember the industrial, population, and other resource limits of the state and society.

18. Officers: Organize to limit the need for officers.

19. Fad resistance: Organize to ignore or resist fads and especially left wing, politically motivated fads.

20. Expansion: Organize to be able to rapidly expand the existing force in the event of war.

21. Frugality. Don’t waste manpower and other resources.

22. Compatibility: Organize so that everything fits together reasonably well.

23. Politics: Organize for leaders and staff to have a voice equal to their military value and use, organize to preserve two -way communications. Match responsibility to relative rank within the organization.

Considerations of Organization:

1. No one principle is dominant.

2. The principles can be, and often are, contradictory or even mutually exclusive.

3. There is NO ideal organization; it is all compromise.

4. Good officers are rare, generally at or under three percent of total strength.

5. Bad officers do damage (even when they have good intentions and are, personally, good people).

6. The positive difference between three percent and the percent of officers you actually have are probably bad officers.

Also, note well, I’ll explain those principles on more depth after we have a small history lesson.

History of Early Military Organization (bear with me; this will take a bit)

Historical Example One, the primitive mob:

It’s worth distinguishing between organizing for war and organizing for battle. They’re different in many ways. Among these is that one typically organizes a society for war, but one organizes an army of a part of an army for battle. We are mostly concerned with the latter, at this stage.

Though it may be called “an army,” the primitive mob really isn’t, nor is it organized to wage war. Instead, war is a game and battle is play, not too serious, mostly an opportunity for young men to show off under circumstances that are not too risky. It exists in a state British historian John Keegan referred to as being “below the military horizon.”

This was the form of battle amongst the Bantu tribes of Southern Africa until the advent of Shaka, and it was also to be seen, at least until rather recently, amongst the primitive tribes of New Guinea.[2]

Although it had long term aspects of survival or extinction, war was a game for the mob. Typically, they engaged in ambush and raid, as a more or less continuing activity. Often the objective of the raid was to kill women and children, thus militarily disadvantaging the neighbors for the future. Stealing women, an important form of movable personal property of the day, was also highly regarded in many circles.[3]

There was, however, another kind of war our ancestral mobs engaged in, a more formal war, with something like declarations of war and the massing of “armies.” These, however, were laughable, with war still being more of a boys’ game cum sporting event, an exercise in showing manliness where the risks were minimal.[4] Decisive action was impossible. Indeed, to have actually won the war would have ruined the future fun for everyone.

Our distant ancestors, when it came to war, were fundamentally unserious.

And then God, or at least the god of war, whispered into someone’s ear, “Look, dumbass; if you can just get your friends and neighbors to march in step . . . ”

Historical Example Two, the Phalanx

The phalanx, the massed formation of spearmen, armored or, at least, bearing large shields, who marched in step and fought in close order, certainly didn’t begin with the Greeks. Indeed, we have graphic evidence of Sumerian use of a phalanx going back to the twenty-fifth century BC:

Image courtesy Wikicommons.[5]

The phalanx did, however, take a large step forward with the Greeks, who added very heavy personal defenses to it in the form of bronze helmet, torso armor, greaves, plus a heavy wooden shield, and coupled these to a culturally imbued attitude that demanded decisive action, close combat in a fight to the finish.

Image courtesy Wikicommons.[6]

Against the Greek phalanx, a solid hedgehog of bronze armor and iron-tipped spears, more lightly equipped, less disciplined, less closely ordered foes rarely stood a chance. This was so despite the phalanx’s many, oh, many, failings and weaknesses.

What were those? It was slow and unwieldy. It depended on good order in the ranks but was easily disordered by, even broken up by, rough terrain. The prime weapon, the thrusting spear, was good against cavalry and other spears, but a poor dueling instrument when facing a highly maneuverable sword. The troops, being human, would push to the right to get as much of themselves behind their right-hand comrades’ shields as possible, which tended to drive the phalanx off side and to the right. (Be it noted, however, that they made a virtue of this vice. Indeed, they eventually came to rely on the effect.)

Note that the phalanx didn’t use much in the way of organization. The members of it might be united or grouped by tribe, or by mess, as with the Spartans, or on some other basis, but the power and responsibilities of the leadership, such as it was, appear to have been highly limited. The whole thing was so simple to operate that not much in the way of organization was even useful.

Even the Romans used the phalanx, right up until its weaknesses were made manifest to them in a glaring and humiliating fashion.

Historical Example Three, the Macedonian Phalanx

Two battles rather shook the Greek reliance on their standard phalanx, fighting eight ranks or twelve ranks deep. These were Delium, of Socratic fame, where Pagondas of Thebes massed his right flank twenty-five men deep to defeat the left flank of his Athenian opponents, and Leuctra where Epaminondas, also of Thebes, regularized massing on one flank with the cream of his army, and massing to the tune of fifty men deep.

Philip of Macedon, held as a hostage at Thebes, had an excellent and close up opportunity to study the military operations of Epaminondas. These lessons he took and applied to his own kingdom’s army, upon his return to Macedon. The big differences Philip imposed included doubling the depth of the phalanx to sixteen ranks deep, which increased its endurance in the line of battle, dropping the eight or so foot thrusting spear in favor of a pike of up to twenty feet in length, which allowed up to five ranks of spearpoints to be presented to the enemy, professionalizing the army, which allowed fairly complex maneuvers, and dumping most of the armor, while decreasing the size and weight of the shield, both of which added speed at the cost of some security.

In addition, Philip made his army a combined arms team, which included heavy cavalry, lighter cavalry, elite infantry, skirmishers and other missile troops, and regular phalangists. Moreover, he subdivided the line into regiments, composed of syntagmata, those being battalion blocks of two hundred and fifty-six men, sixteen by sixteen, under the command of a syntagmatarch.

One suspects that the syntagmatarch was not a position of mere prestige without much authority; the complex maneuvers of which the Macedonian phalanx was capable suggests a degree of independence in command, and responsibility for training, that was likely unique in the Hellenic world at the time.

Note, however, that one thing the combined Macedonian army was not was simple. This tended to show up as weakness, later on, under the Successors, as the various supporting arms were neglected or disbanded, leaving the phalanx rather vulnerable.

Willful Digression:

I am skeptical of Hanson’s theory on the physical push of a phalanx for four reasons. One is that, facing a Roman legion, the physical pushing of massed ranks should have simply rolled over the Romans, who fought in a much more open order and could never have mustered sufficient counterpush to have held the line. The classical phalanx was so simple to train men to, and the vulnerability of the legion to physical pushing so complete, that one would expect someone to have readopted the phalanx to face the legions. Yet this never happened.

“Ah, but what about the pili, the Romans heavy javelins? Wouldn’t those stop the push?” Doubt they’d get through the Greek shields, frankly.

Secondly, “you are what you were back then.” The Macedonian phalanx, as mentioned, derived from the tactics of Pagondas at Delium and Epaminondas at, among other fields of battle, Leuctra, completely abandoned any chance of physical pushing by massed ranks in favor of a lot of stabbing by massed pike. That, if massed pushing had been routine previously, would represent a suspiciously revolutionary change. Moreover, the pikes weren’t actually that strong. A classical hoplite phalanx, had it been using push, should have been able to physically break the pikes and then roll over the then disarmed, barely armored Macedonians. This, too, never happened.

Thirdly, much of the evidence driving the belief in the pushing phalanx is based on the inexplicability of deepening ranks—massing combat power, in other words—unless it was to push. There is, however, an alternative explanation. The ancient battle tended to be won or lost via the mechanism of desertion. In other words, the side that ran last won. Battlefield desertion, however, could not take place from the front, where to turn was to die. Neither could it take place from the middle, because there were people behind those men blocking escape. Rather, desertion began from the rear, where men couldn’t see much, but could hear screaming, smell perforated guts, choke on dust, and exist in trembling terror for each step closer to the front they advanced. How to fix this? Simple, make the phalanx deep enough that the rear ranks didn’t have to worry about ever reaching the front until a decision had been reached. This would have kept the rear in place, hence the middle blocked from running.

“Ah, I hear, “but what about the Spartans? Surely they never ran or surrendered?” Think so? Check out the Battles of Sphacteria (425 BC) and the Battle of Lechaeum (391 BC).

Fourthly and finally, has anyone done a test to see if a standard bronze breastplate of the day could endure that kind of pressure without warping inward, suffocating its wearer? Was there any chance of the bronze’s replacement, the linothorax (layers of linen cloth held together by glue) holding out for a second against that kind of pressure? One is skeptical, very skeptical.

Historical Example Four, the Manipular Legion

“Never do an enemy a small injury” was the core of the advice from his father to Sabine general Gaius Pontius, following his entrapment of the Roman legion—just another phalanx—at Caudine Forks.[7]

The details don’t much matter of how the Romans found themselves boxed in in a narrow, steep walled canyon, with a fortified and defended barrier to their front and their Sabine enemy likewise in possession of the quickly barricaded pass by which they’d entered the canyon. Suffice to say they did find themselves in this most unfortunate position.

The phalanx was uniquely ill-suited either to fight its way over the defended barriers and fortifications or to ascend the pass walls to either side; the nature of the ground would have instantly converted—or reverted—the phalanx back into a mob. Thus, the Romans were stuck, facing starvation, and forced to surrender.

That’s when Pontius—oh, most unwisely—decided to do them a small injury; he made the entire army, consuls first, pass under the yoke in token of submission.

Impelled by the humiliation (which could have gone a lot worse for them, a fact they were surely aware of), and possibly in imitation of the Sabine military practice of using small units to maneuver about their rough terrain[8], the Romans dumped the phalanx in favor of a different formation.

To see a diagram of a Roman manipular legion, go here: https://sites.psu.edu/successoftheromans/organization-of-the-roman-army/. (Note that I find those lines about the centuries of hatasti and princeps being twenty files in three ranks to be most improbable and suspect strongly that the triarii were in ten and three, not ten and six, and all centuries within a maniple were side by side, as the illustration shows. Also, you should increase the gaps to equal the size of the units.)

It’s with the Roman manipular legion that we start to see a number of the principles of organization listed above in clear form. Before we get to that, though, a word or two of explanation is required. Those blocks in the front ranks, the hastati, were the youngest heavy infantry in the legion. Each square is a century, maddeningly not composed of one hundred men but of sixty, while each rectangle composed of two squares is a maniple—we would call it a “company,” though, in keeping with our overarching theme, in the Balboan legions company-sized units are called “maniples.” The second line, the princeps, were older men, with a fair amount of experience in battle and on campaign. The last line, the triarii, were the oldest, experienced campaigners in their forties and fifties. While the least fit, they were also presumptively the steadiest.

The three classes were mostly armed the same, and armed at their own expense, but the triarii, for some centuries, retained a spear, the hasta, echoing back to the legion’s days as a phalanx. Presumably it was kept as a hedge—more or less a literal one—against a cavalry charge.

Though it occasionally happened, the triarii rarely had to fight. Instead, the bulk of their job was battlefield police and what we now call straggler control. In other words, they were there largely to prevent desertion from the rear of the engaged maniples, and perhaps secondarily to ward off cavalry with their spears. We should not presume, however, that the fear of being killed by the triarii was what actually motivated the hastati and, when their turn came, the princeps to fight. Instead, we should imagine something like the following going on in the minds of the typical soldier of an engaged maniple:

Dad and Uncle Marcus are back there in the triari maniple behind mine . . . can’t let them down or embarrass the family name . . . Gods, I’m afraid though . . . I can hear the fighting up ahead . . . was that just my friend Publius who screamed like his balls were cut off? What the fuck just went by? A spear? A javelin. Got no armor on my face . . . I’m worried about a javelin...I smell shit . . . did someone crap themselves or is there a punctured gut up ahead? Shit, Spurius on my right and Titus on my left look as terrified as I feel. What if they run? What if everybody runs and I’m left alone here to die uselessly or get run down and stabbed in the back? I wish I could stop these shakes. Damn, is that Rufus they’re carrying back? He’s so pale. And I had no idea that human entrails were that color. The maniples . . . they’re going to run; I can feel it . . .

No, wait a second. They’re not going to run because someone has to run first, while Dad and Uncle Marcus will kill that first deserter deader than Aunus and Seius, the Etruscans. They’re not going to run because they know beyond a doubt that they’re dead if they do. Tartarus, everyone in the maniple knows that. So nobody’s going to run. So what was I worried about? We’ll stand and I won’t get left to die alone. Life is good . . . I can hardly wait for my turn up at the front.

Thing is, every soldier in an engaged maniple was probably thinking much the same thing, thus, the confidence that no one would run became a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that was how the triarii kept men from deserting.

Of course, I’d be terribly unsurprised if occasionally they did have to summarily execute this Brutus or that Drusus. But one doubts it was common.

Another feature of the manipular legion was that it was also essentially a reserve system, one where the loss of a legion, or, say, sixteen of them, as at Cannae, meant relatively little, except to weeping mothers. “Plenty more where those came from.” Moreover, as a reserve system, it was possible to rapidly expand the serving forces from the four Roman and four allied legions of routine and peace, to . . . well . . . they lost twice the numbers of their prewar army in a single battle, Cannae, 216 BC, and were still ready for more, ultimately having mobilized the equivalent of perhaps ninety or one hundred legions (not simultaneously) over the course of the seventeen-year long war.

In any case, we can see at least eleven of those principles in the manipular legion. How so?

They have organized their units into a size that promotes social cohesion by making them no larger than would allow a man to know every other man, to care each at least somewhat, and to value the good opinion of each and of the whole, and to be spoken well of.[9] They have adopted a formation and tactical system that allows them to not only maneuver around manmade and natural obstacles without losing cohesion, but also to take advantage of opportunities.[10] They’ve organized with enough junior (even if aged) leadership to ensure training, discipline, and cohesion in the field. They had, with the velites, the poorly equipped, because poor, light infantry skirmishers, and the cavalry, combined arms sufficient to need. They’ve got the triarii to prevent desertion. The gaps[11] allowed the maniples of the hastati and princeps to pass through each other, allowing rest. The maniple “officers”[12], one per century, hence two per maniple, are responsible for training and leading an independent command, one of a size where their actions matter.

The thing is actually very simple to operate, from the march, to the encampment, to deploying for battle, to engaging, to pursuing.

Moreover, with the bulk of the legion being heavy infantry, and really only three MOS’s, as we would tend to think of them, with some additional skill identifiers and slaves for the scut work, there is no overspecialization. As mentioned, too, the system allows for mobilization from a massive base of reservists/militia.

One has to ask why the opponents of Rome didn’t penetrate into the gaps left between maniples. The answer, I think, is that for some centuries most were afraid to try, that being a sort of voluntarily letting oneself be outflanked, but that, eventually, someone did.

Historical Example Five, the Marian Legion

The Marian Legion, the Legions formed by the reforms of Gaius Marius, dispensed with the independent maniples, instead forming the legion into ten cohorts. Nine of these contained six centuries forming three maniple each, and numbered, at full strength, four-hundred and eighty men. The First Cohort, however, was different, having five centuries of one hundred and sixty men, each, or eight hundred in total.

Nobody really knows why the Romans changed from the manipular legion to the Marian version. There are a number of theories, none of which have ever struck me as especially persuasive, beyond that there was a shortage of manpower that could buy its own equipment. Here are my best thoughts on the matter; if they don’t persuade you, send me a list of those you like better.

1. With the early losses to the Cimbri and Teutons at Noreia, Burdigla, and Arausio, possibly amounting to the equivalent of as many as thirty legions, which is to say roughly two Cannaes, there was a shortage of both trained manpower and, perhaps worse, centurions to train and lead any new troops who might be raised.[13]

2. Shortages of manpower of the pertinent socio-economic classes (you had to be able to buy your own equipment to serve in the Roman army, before Marius) meant that the only source of replacements were the Roman and Italian poor who previously couldn’t serve as heavy infantry.

3. The social and economic distance between the survivors of the battles mentioned above and the poor allowed men who might not have been A, Number One centurion material to serve as centurions,[14] since they were above the new rank and file in social class. However,

4. Precisely because those men were not necessarily great centurion material, yet, they had to be more closely supervised by those remnants who were. This was aided by the new organization, where nine or ten or eleven newly minted centurions could be placed under one or two or three in a cohort who knew what they were doing and could supervise and train them.

5. Because, unlike earlier armies fielded by Rome, these legions would stay together, long term, they could be expected to have greater social cohesion than the old manipular legions, hence didn’t really need triarii to keep them from deserting.

6. The gaps[15] between maniples had to be left open to allow maneuver and prevent shocks from being transmitted across the line. They could be left open because civilized, sensible troops would hesitate to enter then, which would have exposed them to instant outflanking or, at best, being pelted with deadly missiles from three sides. The Teutons and Cimbri, however, were not civilized, neither were they sensible. They were the someones, mentioned above, who did. Indeed, they probably ignored the apparent risk—if it was even apparent to them—and charged right through. In the process, they could and would have outflanked and, because maniples were small, obliterated the hastati more or less quickly, then turned on the princeps and then the triarii. Conversely, being four times bigger (Marian legions had bigger centuries, again, perhaps because centurion material had become in short supply), the cohorts of the Marian legions could not quickly be overwhelmed (they had staying power, in other words, the ability to soak up losses) and could even reorient their flanking centuries to keep from being outflanked. This last was probably aided by the newly found ability to drill professional troops numb.

7. Although Caesar mentions that he preferred the acies triplex, the triple line of battle based on the old manipular legions, he doesn’t say why. They are unlikely to have served well as battlefield police, as the old triarii did, because the spaces between cohorts were so much broader than the spaces between maniples in the older legion. It may have had something to do with the ability to exploit a breakthrough. In any case, since the triarii as battlefield police were not needed, the Marian legion could simply cover a lot more frontage per man than the older legions could.

The Marian Legion was pretty much the ultimate in the ancient world. When Europe went through the Renaissance, a part of the movement was the rediscovery of the ancient pike phalanx, by the Swiss and German Landsknechte, while the Spanish adopted the tercio, a regiment of three thousand men, to integrate the newly ascendant firearms. Still, one can see some echoes of the old legion even there.

Historical Example Six, The Corps d’Armee:

The really—you should pardon the expression—great leap forward came with the creation of the corps d’armee, we would say, “the corps.” What was a corps? It was, simply:

1. An all arms formation—infantry, cavalry, artillery, and generally some engineers and support troops,

2. That could be commanded by one man with the aid of a modest staff,

3. Of a sufficient size and depth that it could fight on its own, even against severe odds, and survive until help arrived, and was

4. Capable of marching up a single road while finding enough to eat and subsist the horses to one side of the road or the other.

That lasted and worked fairly well, most places (I am unconvinced that the U.S. and C.S. Armies ever really understood what a corps was supposed to be; not with the changes from corps to “grand division” and back again, as well as the varying sizes which appeared to be as much as anything about the degree of confidence the army commander felt he could place in a given corps commander), right up to about 1914. That’s when something very interesting happened.

You see, the corps was still an all arms formation that could be commanded by one man with the aid of a small staff, and which could fight independently for a period of time. It was not, however, capable of finding enough to eat or, most critically, to feed the horses which dragged its generally quite large and heavy artillery park.

Thus, the key factor in corps size became that it could be no greater a size, and form no lengthier a column on the road, than would allow wagons to move from the tail of the corps to the very point, to resupply the men and horses. That size meant that every corps of the armies that really mattered in 1914 consisted of—along with artillery, cavalry, engineers, and other supporting arms and branches—two divisions, each of two brigades, each of two regiments. (The British Army was an exception to this, but was a fairly tiny force on the scale of the war.)

I am sure that every army did most careful calculations to arrive at this form of organization, said calculations no doubt aimed at maximizing both combat power and staying power. But there was a big problem. With only two divisions, the corps commander had only a right and a left. That made maneuver extremely problematic. Yes, he could put one division forward, and then try to maneuver with the other, but the enemy also had two divisions, and would be doing exactly the same thing. In effect, under the totality of the circumstances, not least to include the density of troops on all sides in the west, every corps was a bludgeon and not much more. This, along with the breakdown of logistics and especially logistics to support the horses, led directly to the stalemate and four year slaughterfest that started the process of ruining western civilization.

Historical Example Seven, Idiocy Triumphant: The Pentomic Division[16]

It’s difficult, really, to do justice to the Pentomic Division. A major reason for this is that the division doesn’t really deserve justice, but only a lynching. It was a horrible idea, and an indictment of the general officer corps, the officer corps at large, the airborne community, the generals of which pushed this monstrosity,[17] and the Army as a whole. It lasted less than two years but did damage that the Army not only never has overcome; it never will, either.

In the first place, the Pentomic Division was intended to fight on the nuclear battlefield. That’s where the “tomic” comes in. To do this, the basic triangular infantry division was restructured away from three maneuver regiments, each of three maneuver battalions, each of three maneuver companies, each of three maneuver platoons, to five “battlegroups.” These were a sort of intermediary organization, between regiment and battalion. The battlegroups, in turn, had five companies each, each of five platoons.

Thus, there were eighty-one platoons in the old division, but one hundred and twenty-five in the new. This aspect mattered little, generals aren’t usually concerned with platoons.[18] More importantly, there were nine in the old battalion, plus specialty and support, but twenty-five in the new battlegroup, plus even more specialty and support. Note, too, that battlegroups were generally commanded by colonels, just as regiments had been.

Pushed as forward thinking, the Pentomic Division actually harked back to the great artillery battles of the Great War. The division wasn’t intended to maneuver, as such, but to endure, via dispersion, huge—in this case nuclear—bombardments and then assemble to attack only frontally and through gaps created by our own nuclear deluging of the enemy.

There is essentially nothing, no test, no field exercise, no credible body of theory, to suggest that the Pentomic Division ever could have worked on the battlefield. That’s only one of the reasons it was done away with. There is another one; it was a personnel and moral disaster.

Go back a few paragraphs and reread those numbers on platoons. An old style, H series battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, with perhaps twenty-two lieutenants to senior rate, five company execs, nine line platoon leaders, three weapons platoon leaders, and five specialty platoon leaders (mortars, scouts, anti-tank, supply and transport, and medical) can spend enough time with each of them[19]—maybe a dozen or more days and nights a year, with them or with their company—to know them and to develop them. Moreover, his memory of being a lieutenant is not so very old, after all. Conversely, the pentomic battlegroup commander, generally speaking a colonel, had, as near as I can tell, seven or eight company execs, twenty-five line platoon leaders, five weapons and at least two heavy mortar platoon leaders, plus still scouts, anti-tank, medical, and—I think—Davy Crocket nuclear recoilless rifles. In other words, the number of platoons that had leaders needing rating and mentoring doubled, even as the rank of the commander shot up to a level not notable for listening to and having patience with lieutenants, even if he’s had time and inclination, the former of which he most certainly did not.

And that, friends, is how you get leadership that leads by demanding statistics, and followership that will eventually become leadership, that survives by fudging statistics.

1) A good portion of this piece comes from a presentation given my myself at Libertycon XXXI, Chattanooga, TN, in June of 2018.

2) (No, you don’t get to laugh about the black dudes. You can be as white as a lily and still, I assure you, go back far enough and your lily-white ancestors, militarily, were exactly the same.)

3) Notwithstanding the highly amusing fantasies of Kam Hurley, no, women really were, overwhelmingly, cattle and slaves, with the added advantage of being available, unlike stolen sheep, for rape without the neighbors looking at you funny. No, there’s no record of Shaka’s incalculably dreadful impi of women combatants, incalculable because non-existent. They, like the impis of boys, carried the cooking pots, sleeping mats, and spare food. Some old Zulu apparently had a fine time pulling Sister Hurley’s leg.

4)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BzqwOBneC4. Don’t take the sequence of events too seriously, as the film was heavily edited, but the general organizational and tactical manner of the “war” is accurate enough.

5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx#/media/File:Stele_of_Vultures_detail_01a.jpg

6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx#/media/File:Greek_Phalanx.jpg

7) Generally called “the Battle of Caudine Forks,” but there was little, or perhaps no, fighting. The small injury was causing the Roman army to pass under the yoke, a humiliating token of submission, rather than either letting them go or obliterating them.

8) Truth in advertising, I’ve long suspected that Xenophon, the Athenian writer and student of Socrates, may have been at the core of the legion. Look to his Anabasis and Cyropaedia and you will see just about every feature of the manipular legion on display. There was also plenty of time for his writings to have migrated from Greece proper to Southern Italy to Rome.

9) Go look up “Dunbar number.” Though I take a certain limited pride in having figured the principle behind the number, and the same general range of the number, on my own, but based on infantry organization through the ages, I suspect it’s long been understood.

10) For example, when, at the Battle of Cynoscephalae, the triarii on the flank where the Romans were winning turned and attacked into the flank and rear of the side where the opposing Macedonians were winning.

11) And why I think the gaps were maintained during battle and not just the approach march can be found here: https://www.baen.com/decisioncycles. Scroll down to the section on Cannae.

12) They’re more senior non-coms as we think of them.

13) There was a kind of an echo to this phenomenon in the Great War, when we entered it with a pitifully small army. In order to stretch out the available military leadership, the U.S. Army and, for the moment its auxiliary, the Marine Corps, fielded what were perhaps the largest divisions ever seen, with a strength of some twenty-eight thousand, sixty-one men. http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/services/dropoff/schilling/mil_org/milorgan_99.html

14) Note, here, a parallel in more modern times where black officers usually had a terrible time of it commanding black troops, who resented them deeply, in the old segregated regiments, where white officers, probably often inferior in ability, did not. Although black troops apparently resented the hell out of black officers, they willingly subordinated themselves to whites because of that social and economic distance. One may wonder why the racist, reactionary U.S. Armed Forces of the day didn’t interpose more resistance to Truman’s integration of the services. It becomes much more understandable when you consider that roughly twelve percent of potential military manpower, for what was expected to be an existential war with communism, was for the most part unusable; they wouldn’t listen to or obey most black officers and whites who had the knack and the willingness were few and far between.

15) Yes, there had to have been gaps between maniples or the Battle of Cannae could not have unfolded as it did. See the brief analysis on this in Indirectly Mistaken Decision Cycles, https://www.baen.com/decisioncycles.

16) You can find the Pentomic Division excoriated in Tony Herbert’s Soldier. For a more thorough treatment, look here: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a956178.pdf.

17) And, by the way, the generals of which also had a major hand in pushing the almost equally idiotic brigade combat team, early in this century. This suggests to me that either there is something about jumping out of airplanes that damages the brain, or that those who go in for that sort of thing as a career choice are already brain-damaged.

18) K.C. Leuer was a notable exception to this rule.

19) Provided that, unlike the least effective battalion commander I’ve ever seen – Oh, hi, Tuffy—he actually cares about commanding his battalion.

Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse

Part Two of a Series[1]

Tom Kratman

The Principles of Organization Explained:

As you read the following, it’s important to remember that no one principle or organization is dispositive. There is, in other words, no ideal; everything is a compromise. Moreover, as I’ve mentioned in discussions of principles of war, principles are not checklists to success; they’re study guides and things to think about. They’re also defenses against idiotic ideas.

1. Social cohesion: Organize your sub-organization for maximum feasible affection and group emotional attachment within and among the officers and men.

The company is the key element here; it is the tribe. It is the level at which emotional connection among the ranks, and interpersonal knowledge, is both possible and critical.

The company also has upper ands lower limits in size. The Dunbar number, about one hundred and fifty, echoes over and over again in the course of the history of infantry companies. However, Dunbar was reasoning more from brain size than from empirical data. I would suggest that the number can go up based on things like barracks size, separate messing, and longer service with less personnel turbulence. The outside limit, in ideal circumstances, may run around two hundred and fifty.

This larger number is not necessarily a practical number, for military purposes, because once deployed and deprived of the ideal circumstances, once losses begin to accrue and strangers to be introduced, in other words, social cohesion in those other than ideal circumstances will begin to fail for companies of that size, so long as they stay that size, while it may be possible to maintain social cohesion for small units, at least if they’re given periods to assimilate and train the new men into the unit.

Less often considered: one suspects that there is a lower limit, as well. This I define as the point where one knows everyone else in the group so well, and cares so much, that losses are catastrophically demoralizing. I surmise that this number is about sixty.

There exist a set of memes claiming that task cohesion—the ability of people to work together and integrate their skills to accomplish a mission—is a perfectly acceptable substitute for social cohesion. Leaving aside that the proponency for task cohesion seems to come from those branches of the military—the Air Force and, to a lesser extent, the Navy—that have the least to do with ground gaining combat, and leaving aside, too, that it appears to have come from a desire to downplay the miserable effects on social cohesion of mixing men and women in the same units,[2] and finally leaving aside that, to the extent those pushing for task cohesion are also trying to rationalize openly serving gays, lesbians, transsexuals, and such, one can still observe that task cohesion is most suitable for the routine, the technical, the safe or, failing safety, a strong likelihood of utter annihilation, hence the elimination of attrition as a consideration. In other circumstances, circumstances where the emotions must be tapped to get men to endure considerable suffering and take massive personal risks on behalf of their friends and comrades, task cohesion means essentially nothing. Said a little differently, task cohesion is perfectly acceptable for artillerymen serving the gun . . . right up until the enemy is through the wire and they have to fight as infantry.

Note that the artillery is generally aware of this, and does not let themselves rely entirely on task cohesion at the firing battery level. They have on the other hand, shown a tendency to downplay social cohesion in their centralization of the forward observers, FISTs, they provide to the infantry and armor.

It may not be insignificant that services and branches of services that depend on task cohesion most also seem to depend, to one extent or another, on leadership by coddling. It may also not be insignificant that task cohesion is more easily measured and more easily imposed than social cohesion. I am, moreover, pretty sure that task cohesion, at least partially, relieves the leadership of the need to live by the leadership trait, justice. In other words, of course Colonel so and so can be screwing Airman (Airwoman?) Schmidlap and, no matter how much he may favor him or her, he can still fall back on task cohesion to accomplish the mission and support his all-important OER.

See comment on artillery once the Zulus are in the wire, above.

Furthermore, note that military personnel can be and frequently are in more than one company at a time. Everyone in, say, a mechanized infantry division is in a company, albeit often a headquarters company to which the field grade officers, at least, have no emotional attachment whatsoever. In that same division, though, all the grunts of a rifle company, enlisted, non-commissioned, and commissioned, belong to that rifle company. All the junior non-coms, as an ideal, ought also belong to the company of junior non-coms of the battalion. Moving up, all the middling senior non-coms ought belong to the regiment’s or brigade’s company of senior non-coms, and every officer in the regiment or brigade likewise should form a company of officers of the regiment, while all the flag officer, field grades and very senior captains, on staff, could be said to form the company of divisional senior officers. Note that there is a point beyond which social cohesion is undesirable. We probably do not want all of, especially, the Army’s general officers feeling themselves to be too close a community. Why? Because a) generals are potentially dangerous to a republic, while b) they are not under the kinds of stresses and strains, nor engaged in the kinds of personal risks, that make social cohesion a desperate need.

This is, by the way, not a trivial matter. For all that we’ve let ourselves become overly dependent on drill, to operate as combined arms teams, and for all that we’ve pre-organized, say, armor and infantry in the same battalions (more on this incredibly stupid idea as we continue), we have never really been as good at forming combined arms teams as the Germans were in WW II, despite the fact that the Germans kept their regiments pure. How were the Huns able to do this, without a large menu of initiative- and innovativeness-destroying drills and without compromising training by placing unlikes together? Simple, the Germans had so few officers in a division that every officer knew every other one, even across regiments. In short, they naturally formed a company that could be counted on to work together.

Note that there is perhaps nothing more damaging to social cohesion than an individual replacement system much beloved of the U.S. Army’s Adjutant Generals Corps. See additional excoriation, below.

2. Flexibility and maneuver: Organize the number of sub-units to give options, to allow left and right, but also forward and rear.

This is a mission, doctrine, and enemy-oriented principle, but one grounded in what amounts to geometry.

Stand up. Look left; that is your left flank. Hopefully you will have either a friend beyond it or a difficult to negotiate natural obstacle. Look right; that is your right flank. Hopefully beyond it there is a friend or a natural obstacle. (Unless, of course, you are attacking, in which case you want the enemy to have open flanks you can exploit.)

Now look forward; that is the direction of the enemy. Look rearward; but the enemy might have left stay behinds, or partisans, or be planning a parachute or helicopter insertion. Rearward is also where you may keep your reserve, to defend against his successful assault, to counterattack, or to reinforce your own successes in the attack.

Those factors tend to be expressed in organization. You usually have at least three subordinate maneuver elements at almost any organizational level, platoon through division. Conceptually, you can think of one of them as being on the left, one as being on the right, one forward, either probing the enemy or acting as a screening or guarding force against his advance, and that covering force may become your reserve and rear area combat force after it has passed lines into the rear.

There are both specialized and more general approaches that can be used here. For example, a combat battalion may have a scout platoon for the forward mission, as a division may have a cavalry squadron (air, armored, or wheeled) for the same purposes, and the corps may have a cavalry regiment. (These units, by the way, tend to be composed of superior leaders and men. There is a price to be paid for that concentration of superior human material. As with the maintenance of any elites, it leaves the line weaker.)

Conversely, a good deal of the Rear Area Combat Operations—or RACO—mission can be left to the other folks who inhabit the rear, MPs, truckdrivers, cooks, and whatever combat forces happen to be back there for medical, maintenance, or rest reason. This, however, unless a good deal of time, effort, and resources are spent training them, is a fraud. It’s also only indirectly and somewhat organizationally related.

3. Span of control: Organize with no more subunits than the man responsible can supervise in action and, pre-action, and no more than he can professionally develop, rate, and know, so that the leadership can retain integrity and personal honor.

There’s a rule of thumb, as nearly universal a military rule as one may find, to the effect that a man can only supervise from three to five subordinates. I would suggest that this depends on circumstances, but has some harsh and hard limits to it.

Let’s consider, for example, the number of fire teams that should be in a squad. The U.S. Army goes for two while the Marines prefer three. I would suggest that the Marines are correct about three; that the squad leader can lead, train, and develop three subordinates easily enough, and ensure they’re doing their jobs within their teams with no real problem . . . right up until the bullets start flying and fear and friction kick in. At that point—see above—there is a right and a left and a “holy shit they’re trying to kill me,” the squad leader, who probably has all he can do controlling himself and two subordinates, who also have enough to do worrying about themselves and one or two men to each side of them. I’d suggest that, given the totality of the important circumstances, two fire teams is probably about right even though a good squad leader can train three in peacetime.

Move up to the next level, though, the rifle platoon. There, we see three factors pop up. The first is that the means of executing the missions, the tactics, become more complex, with supporting arms (artillery and mortars, mostly, but also tanks, combat engineers, and air defense) on call, a staff in the form of the platoon sergeant, and the ability of—and need for—the leader to be a little farther back, which is not only necessary for him to exercise control over units spread out across fifty or sixty acres, but also slightly removes him from direct fire and the fear and friction that causes. Hence, three subordinate maneuver squads, plus possibly a weapons squad, is appropriate for a rifle platoon. Equally, a platoon of two dismount squads and two carrier squads (or sections) can work, as far as span of control goes.

A company commander[3] typically has a larger staff to assist him, from his executive officer to his first sergeant to his NCOs for supply, nuclear, biological and chemical defense equipment, training, and planning, to a communications NCO, to other more junior troops detailed to specific additional duties, few of which have much to do with combat but do serve to make the civilian bureaucrats and military REMFs happy.

A company commander is not overtasked, nor does the position break span of control, either in peace or war, with his usual three line platoons and frequently, in history, a weapons platoon. What happens, however, and what limits him to only three of four subordinate platoons, is the need to very personally and in a very up front way train, coach, lead and—let’s be honest—occasionally mercilessly chew out lieutenants, who really have nobody else for the job with sufficient rank and prestige, and who, poor butterbars, while surely irrelevant and useless toads, themselves, for the time being, will someday be captains commanding companies, batteries, and troops, as well.

Above company level the problem inverts to a considerable degree. While the squad leader is alone and under fire, in action, commanders at battalion, brigade, division, and corps are rarely under fire and have large—altogether too large—staffs to aid them. They should be able to command well more than a mere five subordinates, and usually do.

Here’s the problem: While higher level commanders may well be able to exercise a kind control—and even command; no, they’re different things—over a great many subordinates, they cannot know those subordinates, observing them regularly and closely, hence cannot fairly evaluate them without recourse to usually nonsense statistics. See, for example, the Pentomic Division mentioned and spat upon, previously.

4. Combined Arms: Organize to achieve and employ combined arms.

There are three common ways to create combined arms teams, pre-organization, task organization via cross attachment, and down attachment.

Down attachment is the preferred method in the old Red Army, the new Russian Army, and the United States Marine Corps (yes, really), and some branches of the Army. In it, likes are grouped together into larger units of their own branch and parceled out to lower units to create combined arms teams. For example, an old Soviet motorized rifle regiment had three motorized infantry battalions and a tank battalion. Typically, the tank battalion was divided up, one company per motorized rifle battalion. The Marines also group some weapons systems at levels above the level of usual employment and then send those weapons and the men manning them down to other units. In the Army, this sort of thing tends to show up in artillery forward observers—FISTs—aviation, engineering, and such.

There are both good and bad sides to this method. In the good, being grouped together under commanders who understand them, allows for superior technical training (See principle, Purity). On the other hand, it is unlikely that there will be much, if any, social cohesion between the unit supported and the unit sent down and supporting. Moreover, it creates a need for excess and, once split up, redundant officers and senior non-coms which is, in effect, a reduction in quality of both. Thirdly, it allows higher units to put on a show that tends to cover up actual and serious weaknesses. For example, as a rifle company commander, I never saw the same enlisted FO package twice in a row. I’m fairly sure I never saw exactly the same package between 1985 and 1987. Given that my company practically lived in the field, one would have thought it might have happened, but no, never, as far as I can recall. What was happening to prevent it? The unit was short FOs, while being required to send full teams to support National Training Center rotations and train ups for same. Doing that was, in reality, just lying on an heroic scale, even as it deprived units not getting ready or on a rotation of the ability to train together and build at least some social cohesion that way.

Task organization via cross attachment is when, for example, tank battalion A, with four tank companies (old J Series TO), gives a company each to two different mechanized infantry battalions in the same brigade, and gets in return a mechanized infantry company from each of those. It then gives a platoon each from its remaining tank companies to those two infantry companies which then, in turn, give up a platoon to the tank company that sent them a tank platoon.

Cross attachment has the advantage of keeping likes together for training under leaders that understand them, while not having to field excess redundant officers and senior non-coms. It’s supposed to be very flexible and ad hoc but, in practice, with us, usually is not in the interests of creating habitual relationships to ease working together. However, we’ve never really thought it through. If we’re going to create those kinds of habitual relationships, then the shapes of battalions in brigades would differ in accordance with the kind of brigade. For example, in an infantry heavy brigade it would make sense to have the two tank companies that were routinely cross attached out consist of four platoons, so that the receiving battalion could create three combined arms teams, as it would also make sense for the infantry battalions to be triangular rather than square, lest they have units that cannot be made into combined arms teams. The reverse would be true of a tank heavy brigade.

The National Training Center, at Fort Irwin, California, actually made (and probably once again makes) this worse by taking balanced brigades of two maneuver battalions, something not usually reflected in actual TOs and highly misleading. It’s inherently unrealistic training, too. This is not mitigated by the current Pentomic 2.0 organization of flat brigade combat teams; that’s already being destroyed, as well it should be.

Pre-attachment, our current bugaboo, does not, as far as I can tell, have any advantages. I believe our current configuration is that heavy battalions have two companies each of infantry and tanks. But, because the company—see above—is the key level—tanks from Company A attached to grunts from Company B are no less strangers than tanks from a different battalion are. The infantry battalion commander is not only likely to be as clueless about his tanks’ training, but the tank battalion commander is not going to be any better with regard to the infantry, while both can be expected to rape the unfamiliar branch to support training for the branch they’re comfy with, even as they give worse ratings to officers from that other branch to support better ratings for officers from their own basic branch. This happens naturally, by the way, without any particular ill will or conscious favoritism on the part of senior commanders; they simply understand their own people better, and speak the same language.

5. Purity: Organize so that the commander or leader knows and understands every job of his subordinates.

Purity is the obverse of creating combined arms teams. It is largely a peacetime training, development, and professionalism consideration. What it seeks to do is shield junior leaders who will eventually become more senior leaders, rate them against peers on actual performance and character, keep them from being forced to put on shows to survive.

Purity is neither an absolute consideration, nor one that exists for its own sake. It is useful or necessary only up to a certain point, either battalion or regiment / brigade. The idea of an infantry division that consists only of infantry and exchanges troops with, say, an armored division that had nothing but tanks and an artillery division which had nothing but guns is both ludicrous in itself, and unnecessary for the goal.

6. Discipline: Organize to ensure that all ranks are supervised, and improper conduct identified and punished.

This principle has aspects of span of control to it, but partakes more of the military police and the Staff Judge Advocate (AKA JAG) Corps. With regard to the MPs, they’re not just there for traffic control. They—although rarely possessing the moral component of ancient Rome’s Triarii—are also there for what is euphemistically called “straggler control.” This isn’t just about helping soldiers innocently separated from their units to find their way home; it’s also concerned with picking up deserters, preventing mutiny, suppressing crime, and a host of other, discipline-related missions. The crossed pistols on their collars are not just reminiscent of the pistols in their holsters, but of another mission we don’t like to talk about but is still lawful under some highly constrained circumstances,[4] summary execution. Officers tend to carry pistols for much the same reason.

One reason for the breakdown in discipline during the six week long Rape of Nanking, in 1937 and 1938, was that the senior Japanese commander, Iwane Matsui, simply had no MPs to restore order and discipline among troops allowed (and certainly in some cases encouraged) to get out of control. He had no MPs, either, to arrest the subordinate commanders who had disobeyed and defied him from Shanghai all the way to and into Nanking.

Another aspect of the MPs job, beyond arresting the wicked and undisciplined, is punishing them, either by the running of stockades and prisons, or by seeing to their formal executions.

7. Rest: Organize to relieve and allow rest for the sub-organizations and men who comprise them.

Eventually, almost all soldiers in action will become psychiatric casualties. It is regrettable but true that American soldiers had, in the Second World War, of any major combatant, the shortest expected number of combat days before falling victim to this. We can dismiss the Soviets’ expectation of about nine hundred days of combat to sheer heartlessness, self-delusion, and communist dogma, but even British and Germans had much lengthier expectations than we did.

Why? I think there were three main culprits. One was George Marshall’s approach to expanding the army, which was to subject divisions to a continuing series of bicellular fissions, whereby each division, once technically and tactically trained, would be split down the middle to create two new divisions, which would also be split, in time. That alone probably guaranteed comparatively low social cohesion and considerable individual loneliness (write this twenty-five times on the blackboard: “men are not machines”). It never ceases to amaze, really, the stupid decisions that can come from ordinarily very smart men.

As if that were not bad enough, we also took the approach of having relatively few combat divisions, and, having few, keeping them on the line without rest while providing individual replacements for losses (a technique guaranteed to ensure the maintenance of a large Adjutant Generals Corps, thus much beloved of that same corps).

Still worse, indeed in my not so humble opinion a matter of criminal negligence, we made insufficient and reluctant efforts to return wounded soldiers to their former units, but might send them, just like spare parts, to whichever unit needed replacements at the time.[5] (Back to that blackboard: “Men are not machines.”)

Ultimately, though, the fault lies with having simply too few divisions—eighty-nine, of which eighty-seven actually deployed—for the war. The reasons for this were many and varied, though overly optimistic overreliance on air power was a big one. They don’t matter, either. The core calculation here is that when you don’t have enough combat units, you will overstrain the ones you do have and break the men long before they should have broken. This is eventually going to prove true even if you expect air power to be decisive.

8. Leadership: Organize to make it easily and instantly recognizable who is responsible and in charge. Organize to keep leadership quality high.

It’s a truism among the great and good that leaders are made, not born. It’s nonsense; they’re both. And by both I don’t mean made or born; I mean born and then selected and trained, or made. Natural leaders, who have all the attributes and need no training are myths. Leaders formed from mere human mud, via diligent training, are likewise myth.

But most people are sheep, albeit often brave sheep. The numbers who have the innate force of character to be leaders is quite limited. This is further reduced because some who have the force of character are rotters, moral lepers, thieves and cheats. Still others are stupid. Still others are not stupid, but tend to lack judgment and maturity. Go down the list of leadership traits—bearing, courage, decisiveness, dependability, endurance, enthusiasm, initiative, integrity, judgment, justice, knowledge, loyalty, tact, and unselfishness—and consider that each of these is not just something that it is desirable to teach leaders, if one can, but instead are grounds for rejection from positions of leadership if the person is deficient in any of them. In the end, if you can find three percent of your force suitable to become officers, and another five or six percent suitable to become senior non-coms, you’re doing well.

No, a college degree is surprisingly irrelevant for this, in officers or non-coms.

What that means is that you cannot have five or six officers per company, hugely bloated staffs, and a proliferation of esoteric support units. Instead, you can have maybe three, maybe as often just two, officers per company, the remaining “officer jobs” being handled, and likely better, by senior non-coms. You can permit only small staffs, and neither proliferation of exotic units nor command of what amount to platoons given to field grade officers.

Rather, you can have all those things, but if you do, remember that most of those officers are going to be useless drones—or worse than useless, because time and effort must be spent supervising them—while your non-coms will have “a misery in their bowels” from having to work for and answer to worthless officers.

Secondly, though no less importantly, real officers lead and command. They neither need nor tolerate that their duties be taken over by “Social Action Officers” (Zampolits by another name), EO/EEO officers (ditto), Chaplains with the ear of someone higher, more senior commanders’ wives, etc.

Note, by the way, that one of the critical side benefits of keeping numbers of leaders low and staffs small is that commanders must command for longer periods, three to four or even five years, which prohibits them from just putting on shows while requiring them to build for the long term.

9. Simplicity: Do not add needless complexity; balance necessary complexity.

It’s something of a miracle that military forces can exist in the field at all. Indeed, armies exist, and even manage to fight, poised on the knife’s edge of ruin. This is true even without reference to the enemy. Adding anything complex to them, anything that makes it more difficult for them to exist and fight, is silly.

One of the ways in which needless complexity is added is by raising decision making authority to needlessly high levels. An example of this can be found in footnote 23, concerning the U.S. Army’s individual replacement system in World War II. A centralized command was created for this to manage replacements for the entire European Theater of Operations, or ETO. Being removed in distance from the line, this command never—perhaps never even for one day—had a grasp of the needs of the line. Thus, it demanded continuous input of information, which information was almost invariably out of date and obsolete before it was even processed.

Conversely, however, sometimes complexity is added to lower level units in ways that merely distract. For example, do we actually want organizations that are intended to fight in war, on what is generally an unlimited budget, fretting continuously, in peace, about managing a training budget?

Ah, but then there are things, ammunition and fuel, that are usually treated as if money but are not money, and which tactical units do budget. How are these different?

Simple, even a battalion has an office, the S-4, which, in war, budgets for and manages logistics, to include fuel and ammunition. Budgeting something in peace that must be managed in war is not needless complexity; it’s training. Demanding that a unit budget for money, when there is no office for it and no need for it in war, in needless complexity.

That said, if there is any area that is likely to introduce complexity, needful or needless, into an army, it is probably logistics.

10. Logistics: Organize for effective logistic support.

It’s not exactly true that the thing that distinguishes professionals from amateurs is the study of logistics.[6] However, professional’s certainly study logistics, too, and intently.

Logistic functions are many, and are split between individual and unit leader functions, staff functions, and the more practical functions of ordering, paying for, receiving, moving, securing, accounting for, distributing, receiving back the millions of kinds of material needed to support that army in the field, the one that teeters on the edge of ruin anyway.

A lot of decisions need to be made for logistics, which are almost always going to have to be made in a vacuum. Are you going to supply via rail, via sea, via road, and to what extent for each. The first two possibilities will demand organizations be fielded to run rail and port. However, the enemy not only gets a vote, he gets a lot of high explosive, too. It is entirely possible that the ports and the rail lines, in addition to units to run them, are going to need engineer battalions and brigades to undo vast damage and put them back in operation.

It is equally true that the enemy can tear up roads and bring down or weaken bridges. That means more engineers to build bridges and repair and improve roads. Moreover, if you don’t have decent roads, expect both slow speed and wear and tear on your trucks to multiply the need for motor transport units approximately to infinity (or at least you won’t know how many you need until you discover you haven’t enough).

And then there are environments, high mountains, deep jungle, where there simply are no roads where you need them and units must sometimes be supplied by animal trains.

Moreover, different classes of supply require different kinds of organizations. For a number of good reasons, fuel, for example, is best delivered by pipeline. That, too, requires a specialist organization.

Ammunition is dangerous and subject to ruination by the elements. It also gets more dangerous as different kinds of ammunition are mixed. This demands more specialists who know how to secure and store it.

Food isn’t always canned. Refrigeration truck and rail—ships, too, if we ultimately depend on a port for supply—are needed to move fresh food forward.

Medical supplies; do they come forward on general transportation or on special medical vehicles? If the former, they can be engaged, while with the latter they should, given reasonable notice to the enemy, be hands off.[7]

And then there’s domestic politics. What happens when your country rallies behind your army in the field so completely that, oh, say, two hundred and fifty to three hundred tons of “any soldier mail” arrives every day, which mail must be carried forward and distributed to the troops, until they’re practically green with sickness of so many cookies and cakes and whatnot? That’s not free, either, it takes still more stevedores and truckdrivers to move it. But the people will not be denied; it must be moved forward and given away.

Let us not forget, either, the inherent value of the things military forces need to exist to the civilians stuck in the war zone. Many a can of fuel or plate of food will be converted into sex, drugs, and money in the interests of survival. As much may simply be stolen. To prevent this takes MPs, heartless guards, barbed wire, engineers to put up the wire, SJAs, and probably a fair amount of lumber and rope.[8]

Though we tend to classify them differently, to think about them differently, the medical establishment is also a logistic establishment, and not merely in terms of having its own supply system. The patching up of wounded men and returning them to duty is, in principle, not all that different from the replacement of worn track and the changing of worn or damaged tires.

FOOTNOTES

1) A good portion of this piece comes from a presentation given my myself at Libertycon XXXI, Chattanooga, TN, in June of 2018.

2) See this, for example: https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/csls/Unit_Cohesion_and_Military_Performance_Ch5_MacCoun_Hix.pdf

3) Also battery or troops commander or, in the Carreraverse, maniple commander.

4) See Article 94, Uniform Code of Military Justice. There are fourteen different crimes for which capital punishment is allowed; Article 94, Mutiny, is the only one of which I am aware that demands summary execution.

5) http://digital.library.temple.edu/digital/collection/p245801coll10/id/268389, especially at page 172-173. Note, here, that the system only got recovered wounded as far as their home divisions, at best. It was entirely possible that they would then be assigned to some entirely different regiment, battalion, or company, which made them as much moral cyphers as if they’d been assigned to different divisions. About all that was saved was the need to change shoulder insignia.

6) “War is the art that subsumes all other arts and sciences, hence real professionals study everything.” —Me

7) Medical supply is an interesting area, legally speaking. When retreating, for example, it is perfectly permissible to destroy all classes of supply to prevent its falling into enemy hands, except for Class VIII, Medical. That, if you can’t take it with you, can possibly be hidden but, if not, must be left for the enemy. And good for him if he uses it to relieve suffering.

8) There was a point in time, in Korea, where we had to hire Korean guards. Why? American guards couldn’t bring themselves to shoot starving civilians but Koreans would.

Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse

Part Three: The Rest of the Organization Principles Explained

Tom Kratman

1. Attrition: Organize for anti-fragility and ability to endure losses.

Equipment and men are destroyed or damaged, wounded or killed. Men and equipment wear out and break. We’ve already touched on organizing personnel and logistic systems to provide replacements; this principle is different. This is about organizing in such a way that a unit doesn’t collapse from losses before replacement men and equipment can be delivered.

The prejudice here is in favor of larger units. That must be balanced, though, against the need for flexibility in action, and of having sufficient units to allow rotation from the front, with the opportunity for rest and retraining, as well as assimilation and integration of new men. Too, it is unfortunate but true, commanders, historically, are sometimes more profligate with lives when their commands are bigger. Conversely, though, commanders of small and weak units will often lack boldness and decisiveness.

An aspect of attrition, mentioned above under “social cohesion,” is that small units’ morale can be much more hurt by losses than larger ones. Yes, that means that attrition is also about non-material matters.

Note, too, that imaginary combined arms formations where everything is pushed down to the smallest possible level—one infantry squad, one mech infantry squad, one tank, one engineer, etc.—would be vulnerable to being turned into non-combined arms teams by the loss of a single squad or vehicle.

2. Mass: Organize to allow massing of combat power, and especially to give artillery “maximum feasible centralized control”

Since the Great War, and the failed experiments in trying to break machine guns by throwing bodies at them, Mass as both a principle of war and an organizations principle had meant something different from mass formations, charging ahead into blazing trenches. One way to look at it is that now, instead of massing assets, we try to disperse assets and mass effects.

Dien Bien Phu, 1954, is rather a good example of this. While it’s true that the Viet Minh did mass bodies, and used men up fairly profligately in their assaults,[1] the real mass was up in the hills overlooking the French base. That mass was in the Viet Minh artillery, direct laying (as opposed to using indirect fire) on the camp, cutting it off from aerial resupply by interdiction of the airfields, suppressing and destroying French artillery, and pulverizing French strongpoints before the infantry was committed to the attack.

I’ve mentioned previously that the current Brigade Combat Team structure is just the execrable Pentomic Division, reborn, and little if at all improved over that national disaster. One of the ways this is so is in the splitting up of artillery into little penny packets, for whom massing fires is, despite automation, at least more difficult than it needs to be and quite possibly impossible. Artillery gains mass, in practice, through a principle called “Maximum Feasible Centralized Control.”

Maximum Feasible Centralized Control isn’t just about artillerymen’s anal retentiveness. Rather, it’s about massing surprise fires. For example, let us say that, to get X effect, fifty-four guns must fire one round each, all to impact at the same time. To get the same effect from a battalion or eighteen guns, each must shoot five rounds each, or ninety rounds total. For a single battery of six guns the round count goes up—and the battery must stay stationary, hence vulnerable, while they’re shooting—to something like two hundred and fifty-six rounds. For a single gun? Forget it; it has to fire over a thousand, one thousand fifty-eight, if I recall correctly, to get the same effect. This is, of course, assuming it lives long enough to.

There’s another aspect of mass that I’ll use a rule of thumb for: “Be square, somewhere.” By that I mean that one should pick a level or organization—it may be battalion or may be corps—in which there will be a fourth maneuver element, to allow a massively overwhelming attack at a single point. A, perhaps not the, but a, way of determining where this should be could be relative competence. I.e., if you think you have better battalion commanders than corps commanders, maybe you want four maneuver companies in a battalion, but if you think you have better corps commanders perhaps you might want four divisions in a corps. How, too, do you see the war unfolding? Will it be great clashes and widely sweeping operations and exploitations? That might favor a square corps. Will it be low level, and highly attritional? Maybe the square battalion is a better investment in manpower.

3. Support: Organize for supporting arms:

There are only a few supporting arms I want to discuss. One, we already have, partially; artillery. There is another aspect to artillery, one the U.S. has tended to forget about. This is direct lay, as exercised by, among others, the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu.

But surely that’s just primitive nonsense, out of touch with the times and reality, right? Silly to risk having the gunners engaged by the enemy when they can be safely behind a hill, right? No, wrong and wrong.

There are a couple of reasons why direct lay of artillery, or heavy cannon fire, in any case, still has a place. One of these is logistic. It simply takes fewer shells to get the same effect when the gunners can see the target. The other is safety of the assaulting force, when given close support by cannon fire.

Safety of the assaulting force? Absolutely. For a number of reasons, not least the longer flight time through iffier meteorological conditions, artillery and mortars have this thing called “range probable error,” or RPE. What this means is that the shells do not land where you intend them, but fall long and short, left and right. And that, friends, is quite dangerous for infantry. What that usually means, in this decadent day, is that the artillery and mortars must lift off the target well before the infantry is in assault range, which gives the enemy a change to recover, to man his fighting positions from deeper cover, and to kill more of us.

Conversely, direct lay artillery can keep firing until you’re practically on top of the enemy, not only hurting him but keeping his head down. The safe distance there isn’t RPE, which tends to be not only distressingly large but also too long and dangerously short, but burst radius which is not only small but can be made tiny via use of delayed fuse (it goes off a short period of time after striking something, when it is buried in the ground).

It was largely for these reasons that, for example, World War II German infantry regiments had a cannon company composed of half a dozen 75mm cannon and two 150mm guns. It is for much the same reason, initially, that their Panzer Grenadiers had Sturmgeschutzen, armored cannon carriers for direct lay. It is for these reasons that Soviet self-propelled artillery could be expected (and probably Russian still can) to be often very close to the front, direct laying in support of assaulting tanks and motorized rifle troops.

Note, direct lay is considerably less wonderful when using mortars, because they’re still very high angle, plus smoothbore, hence inaccurate, which makes their RPE still substantial. In other words, no, mortars are not a good substitute for direct cannon fire.

Don’t we have any direct fire cannon capability? We have three or four. One is the light cannon of the M2 and M3 infantry and cavalry fighting vehicles. This is not necessarily good enough. Another is or soon will be the 30mm of some of the Strykers. The other is tank and mobile gun system cannon fire. The last, to the extent any may be in National Guard or Army Reserve hands, is the M728 Combat Engineer Vehicle. What we do not have is direct cannon fire for light infantry. Note that we used to have some, in the form of 90mm and 106mm recoilless rifles, though there were really too short ranged to be all that useful.

Combat engineers are another matter. Unlike artillery, but like artillery forward observers, the ditch diggers fight in close proximity to infantry and armor. Where they should be, and how many there should be, are grave questions. Should there be a platoon in an infantry battalion? A regiment or brigade at division level? A company or two in some never sufficiently to be damned abortion of a brigade combat team? Put them too low and actually use them and their small size makes them vulnerable to extinction and fragile. Put them too high and not only is there no social cohesion between the ranks and the unit they’re supporting, there isn’t any among the leaders, either. Make them a brigade (as we have done at times) and you add to the proliferation of staffs and poor officers, especially if we shrink the size of their units (which we have also done).

Air Defense Artillery has, naturally, similar problems to the engineers. They have another set, though, their doctrinal—and practical—need for Mass, Mix, Mobility, and Integration (We used to say, “Mass, Mix, Mobility, and Maneuver” One wonders how many Legions of Merit were awarded for the change). Mass is easy; as with anything else it means enough of it to do the job, more or less quickly and well. Mix means that we cannot rely on just one kind of system, today typically a Stinger man-portable (sort of) missile, AKA MANPADS. Instead, ADA requires—we require them to have—light missiles, light cannon, heavier missiles, and possibly heavier cannon. And we generally don’t.

This isn’t so bad as long as we’re fighting military children and imbeciles. It becomes much more problematic facing a peer. Personally, though it was very manpower intensive and quite expensive, I rather liked the old Soviet way of doing air defense, which was thoroughly layered and dense enough to make a NATO pilot’s job rather unenviable.

In any case, the question still remains for air defense and engineers, how many and where?

4. Range and weapons’ effects: Organize to place weapons at the right echelon.

There are reasons we don’t have entire corps of 60mm mortars. There are reasons that general purpose machine guns are generally at platoon level. There are reasons platoons do not have 155mm cannons integral to them. The reason is organizational principle: Range.

The easy version of that is that a weapon belongs at the echelon that most closely matches its area of coverage or interest without being less than that range, with modifications for the weapon’s ability to lunge into range. This, so far as I am aware, has never been articulated in either the Army’s or Marine Corps’ doctrine, but it is apparent just about everywhere.

Where do we find the 40mm grenade launchers? Fire team and squad, because the range of the 40mm (three hundred and fifty meters for an area target) is a), too low for a platoon, but b) corresponds fairly well with a squad’s area of concern in the attack and the defense. Where do we find general purpose or medium machine guns? Usually we find them at platoon, since their range isn’t enough for a company’s front, but exceeds a platoon’s. Sometimes, historically, we’ve found them down at squad level, but a more careful look at doctrine, in those cases, would show that the platoon leader retains control of where they shoot, while the rest of the squad’s major job is to defend the machine gun.

It generally works in the other direction, as well. We only retain one cannon system in heavy units (mechanized and armored), the 155mm self-propelled. Its thirty-thousand meter range corresponds very nicely to a division, in defense, while its ability to lunge allows the same in the attack. Conversely, sending it down to a brigade (see the aforementioned idiotic brigade combat team TO) wastes range. Note, too, that the current corps artillery brigades, or single, albeit large, regiments, have no cannon, but do have very long ranged missile systems, MLRS, ATACMS, and HIMARS, with ranges—up to three hundred kilometers, that, while lavish, do meet the rule above.

Note, however, that we used to have cannon in corps artillery. How did that work, when the range of the guns was usually (not always, the old M107 had an impressive range to it) less than the corps’ area of interest?

That, again, is where ability to lunge comes in. A corps can direct divisions. It can also direct an artillery battalion, brigade, or regiment to “move to x and such, priority of fires to 3rd Infantry division, by no later than . . .” with the artillery in place and ready to support by the time given.

Ah, but what about back when we used to have two batteries of MLRS in divisional artillery? Simple, their range wasn’t as great back then.

Note that range applies in the air, too.

5. Environment: Organize to meet the demands of the physical environment in which you will wage war.

This is an environmental, mission, doctrine, and enemy-oriented principle. Thinking of it in terms of environment, contemplate the near universal organization of mountain divisions as flat organizations of two regiments. This was so, even though mountain divisions typically had smallish artillery regiments, at least in terms of numbers of guns, and were still as large as other divisions. Everyone in WW II who was entitled to an opinion on the matter—Germans, Italians, Austrians, and French . . . eventually us, too, in practice—did it this way, so one is inclined to suspect there were sound reasons. The two obvious reasons were that exploitation and rapid maneuver just were not going to happen in the high mountains at any level above perhaps battalion, and that the lack of roads, uselessness of wheeled transport, and the high logistic demands meant that the extra troops were devoted to logistics. Interestingly, our own experience with the 10th Mountain Division, in Italy, supports this. Although designed as a triangular division of three mountain infantry regiments, one of these, it was soon discovered, had to be used as porters to keep the other two operating, while the other two could maneuver well enough without a third, thank you.

This continued, by the way, into the cold war, with West Germany’s First Mountain Division being of three brigades, but only two of which were suitable for mountain operations. The third brigade was a heavy brigade, Panzer or Panzergrenadier, presumptively for use in the lowlands because completely unsuitable for use in the mountains. This didn’t really refute the principle.

Environment, to include human environment, is not related just to mountains. Any organization well designed for fighting on the steppe of Russia is going to be suboptimal for, say, Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain. (“Suboptimal” is code here for, “You Gotta Be Shitting Me.”) In counterinsurgency, principle of war, Mass, changes to principle of war, Density. Density is about control of people and space on the ground. Since people tend to physically live in two dimensions, as a general rule a truly square formation is superior for controlling people and space on the ground (again, think: left and right and forward and rear, if that helps). Hence, a triangular organization, or a flat one as we current have, is perhaps suboptimal (same code).

6. Specialization: Organize to avoid overspecialization and gain appropriate specialization.

This one’s frequently a toughie and a toughie at both organizational and individual level. Any organization that specializes in only one thing will often be anywhere from poor to incompetent at something else. Note that I said “something else,” not “anything else. For example, a mountain division might be pretty much worthless if sent to defend some patch of featureless desert, without time to dig in. On the other hand, it might be very useful, perhaps with a minimal period of training or perhaps even without, in cities, in jungles—even flat ones, in the conduct of a major assault river crossing, or, say, to invade a key island to reinforce some paratroopers who, even more lightly equipped, have their fate hanging in the balance.

Note that it’s easier to give a short course and use someone for something they were not previously trained for and which requires a degree of balls when the balls quotient is high already. See, for example, German mountain troops given a quickie course in parachuting and then jumping into action in Norway, in 1940.

For individuals, a good deal of the specialization problem, when it is a problem and when it is technical, can be solved by sending someone to a school to learn something outside of his primary specialty, while leaving the basic table of organization alone.

Also note that there are some things—defense to include local security patrolling is an obvious example—that everyone and every unit not barred by the laws of war from engaging in needs to be able to do. If they cannot, that is an example of overspecialization.

7. State Circumstances: In organizing, remember the industrial, population, and other resource limits of the state and society.

It’s absolutely critical, when designing organizations, to look at the whole societal system that will support it, from population, to tax revenues, to industrial capability, to skilled labor force to work in industry, to ability to feed. If you don’t, don’t even bother.

However, this one can be misleading; values and mores can really count. Consider Roman-ruled Italy, in 216 BC, with a population of three to four million of all ages and classes and both sexes, suggesting a military age manpower pool of perhaps three or four hundred thousand (and the latter would be pushing it). Killed or captured, they lose on one dreadful day between a third and a fifth of that, sixteen legions obliterated. And they go on to win the war, despite disasters both before and after that event.

Now look at Rome two and a quarter centuries later. They are ruling an empire of at least sixty million souls. They lose a mere three, somewhat larger legions, and a like number of auxiliaries, and that from a population perhaps twenty times larger, and it is moral, military devastation. In short, the Varian disaster of 9 AD, in the Teutobergerwald is perhaps one eightieth as bad, in objective terms, but totally crushing subjectively. Rome cannot make up the losses in the short term and only with difficulty in the long.

Something similar may well be happening—or have happened—with ourselves and most Europeans. Germany, that once had to turn people away because they were limited by treaty to a one hundred thousand man army, and which fielded about twelve million men at maximum strength for the Second World War has trouble keeping about one hundred and eighty thousand on strength now, and equal trouble keeping them combat ready.

Ah, but conscription. No, though the left seems fascinated by the military’s seeming infinite ability to change people, it’s all poppycock. All the important training takes places before the prospective serviceman ever reports to the colors. If they don’t have it then, they never will.

8. Officers: Organize to limit the need for officers

Man is not malleable clay. Officers are not born, but neither are they made. They must have certain abilities that are innate and certain attitudes that can only come young, but even with those, without intensive and careful training they are worth little.

The Germans got by with under three percent officers in the Second World War. I would suggest that that proportion is about correct; perhaps three percent of your military force, hence a lower percent of the population at large, is suitable for commissioning.

9. Fad resistance: Organize to ignore or resist fads and especially left wing, politically motivated fads.

There really isn’t a whole lot new in war, the last hundred (maybe two hundred) years or so, breathless predictions of revolutions in military affairs and paradigm shifts notwithstanding. Oh, sure, some new tech capability might require the creation of a specific unit or kind of unit to exploit that, but that doesn’t change the other principles.

As I’ve mentioned in other contexts with regard to principles of war, one of the prime uses of lists of principles like this one is defense against the poorly thought out fad. As I think I’ve indicated, our current never sufficiently to be damned abortion of a table of organization, the Brigade Combat Team, could never have survived scrutiny based in these principles.

One doubts, too, that it’s intellectual mongoloid of a predecessor, the Pentomic Division, would have survived, either.

10. Expansion: Organize to be able to rapidly expand the existing force in the event of war.

No one can hope to maintain in peacetime the entire force needed for a potentially existential war. Even if one could, the expense would break you, the diversion of high quality manpower would derange your society, so badly that you would end up ruined even without the war. In short, every armed force is also the basis for creating a larger armed force. But how to do this?

There are a number of ways, which are frequently mutually supportive rather than mutually incompatible. One way is what we did for World War II, discussed above, the bicellular fission of divisions. This, interestingly, was also the method chosen by the West German Army in the 50s, probably because they had fallen under our tutelage.

One can maintain a reserve under which there are large and complete formations already organized and only awaiting the call up to gather and march to war. This was a good deal of the cause of the slide to war in 1914, but no one can say it cannot work. The Swiss and Israelis, by the way, and formerly the bulk of the Scandinavian countries used little but this system, with regular cadre being devoted nearly exclusively to higher leadership and staff work, as well as running schools.

Note that a reserve system can have units echeloned by manning, training, and equipment levels, such that one echelon is ready to go on call, while another might need to assimilate a number of recently discharged reservists, and still another might need those, extensive re-equipping, and a lengthy period of training, and still others might be nothing but a tiny cadre which will have to train new men and accept new equipment, both lengthy processes, before it can be used. This was generally a feature of the Soviet reserve system, to include, in the last case, having regular personnel assigned to first rate formations, which personnel would drop out to begin to raise “second formations.”

One can also, and should also, maintain large numbers of individuals who are fully trained, to be used as fillers for losses and to create and train new formations. In the United States, the main components of these are retired reservists, individual ready reservists (those personnel discharged from active or drilling reserve organizations, but not yet fully discharged from their full military obligation), and a sort of loose conglomeration of reservists—“tour babies,” they’re sometimes called—who make something like a living by just volunteering to do active tours to aid the regular forces. I used to have a very good supply guy reservist who would show up about twelve to eighteen weeks out of the year to help my supply sergeant handle the nearly impossible burdens of an almost four hundred man company with one hundred and nine wheeled and armored vehicles and more sets, kits, and outfits than I really like to think about.

One could also, in theory, echelon mobilization levels such that one level is active, forms both a cadre for a larger unit as well as a tactically or operationally effective unit on its own. This could have several layers, or blocks, or mobilization levels, to it. The unique weakness of this approach would lie in the potential of losing one’s entire cadre for an organization, thus rendering the entire organization combat ineffective, before the subsequent blocks can be mobilized.

There are problems with all these, as well as advantages. The big advantages are potential size and money savings, while avoiding societal derangement by excessive diversion of human talent. Conversely, though, to the extent you rely on reservists, who will rarely if ever be as well trained as regulars (how can they be, really, unless, in practice, they are regulars?) you are also saying you will accept greater loss of life among less well-trained troops.

Note, one thing needed by reserve formations are full timers, who may legally be reservists, too, but are not, in practice, and who do the administration, provide a cadre of expertise, and generally hold things together. This needs to be accounted for in the personnel manning of the entire organization.

Acquiring and planning for the integration of allied foreign troops, as the Soviets did with the Warsaw Pact throughout the Cold War, is another way of expanding on the cheap.

11. Frugality. Don’t waste manpower and other resources.

One would think this would go without saying. My experience is that it never goes without saying.

Of course, we could argue about what constitutes waste. Is the Army Band a waste? Maybe; but at least I could be convinced that it does something for the Army commensurate with the human and fiscal cost. On the other hand, I can vaguely recall a video on YouTube showing the Indian Army’s precision itty bitty bicycle team. Manpower must be cheap and plentiful, indeed, to justify something like that.

And we laugh, right? But how about the thousands of soldiers on any given day in our Army or Marine Corps or Navy or Air Force on this and that semi-professional athletics team?

How do you control that kind of waste? After all, the TO already has no slots for that kind of thing? Look for the headquarter and morale support personnel who push for it and have made careers of it, and get rid of them by wiping their organization from the TDA (Table of Distribution and Allowances). Get rid of the highest level teams that this kind of wastage feeds into.

I’m a bit of a fanatic about this. Not only did I spend more than a few days as a private carrying more than my body weight, fifteen or twenty miles a day, because the guy who, say, should have been carrying the mortar barrel while I had the bipod was detailed to special duty on, say, the division volleyball team, leaving me to carry both. Worse, though, was a first sergeant I had inflicted on me as a rifle company commander. This guy had twenty-two years in the Army, of which he had spent something like seventeen or eighteen either boxing for the Army or coaching the Army’s boxing team. Not a bad guy, and I am sure I wouldn’t have wanted to get in the ring with him except as a ref, but he was no kind of first sergeant at all.

12. Compatibility: Organize so that everything fits together reasonably well.

This is a case of there being no real possibility of everything fitting together perfectly, so of doing the best you can. Part of this is making your units and the equipment that carries them around compatible with each other, as well as making your transportation organizations suitable to move units while letting them maintain cohesion. But there is considerably more to it than that. All that said, though, there a lot of redundant capacity floating, rolling, and flying around.

Consider the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter. In theory it can carry eleven combat equipped troops but in practice it can haul quite a few more. We’ll stick with theory. So three of them can carry a platoon. Oops, no, they really can’t. A platoon—thirty-nine men - is not only bigger than thirty-three men, so we’ll need four Blackhawks for the lift. Oh, but the waste; comptrollers and congressional aides everywhere are losing sleep over the sheer waste of having five seats unoccupied in the four helicopters! Fraud! Waste! Abuse!

No, not really. In the first place, there are three standard attachments to that theoretically full strength platoon, a forward observer and his radio telephone operator, plus a medic. So it’s only two seats “wasted.”

Course, that’s just theory, because the next time a full-strength platoon boards four helicopters will probably be the first in a while. Units are almost never at full strength. Moreover, as the size of the unit going into the same LZ (Landing Zone) increases, the odds become better that every seat will be filled . . . even as they become better that every helicopter will be overfilled.

And that has an issue different from the carrying capacity of our theoretical helicopter; do the helicopter units have the capability of lifting a complete unit without either having to go to another helicopter unit to get help, without having to fly helicopters that ought to be in maintenance, and without forcing a unit that needs to get on the ground as a whole into being sent into action in penny packets.

Let me give you a highly illustrative example of what that looks like. The book and movie, We Were Soldiers? It’s not as clear in the movie as it was in the book, but the real disaster came before Hal Moore’s battalion ever made contact with the NVA. It came with the decision to split up the aviation assets such that every battalion had twenty, enough to lift one full strength company . . . maybe. (Why maybe? Helicopter lift drops as the air thins, warms, and moistens, and Vietnam was notable for being both warm and wet . . . and frequently for being quite high up there, to boot.)

In any event, what that meant was that Moore couldn’t put more than a single company, give or take, into action at a time. This is what we in the business call “inviting destruction in detail.” (No criticism of Moore; he doesn’t seem to have been given a lot of choice.)

This principle, in this example, by the way, also implicates principles mass and range. Do you mass enough helicopters to do the job and where does their range suggest they be assigned? The answer to the first one is obvious, no they did not. The answer is that in a place like Vietnam, at that time, they probably needed to be at division. (People critical of our conduct of the war on Vietnam—not that there isn’t room for criticism—often miss that the enemy gets a vote, too, that out actions were also constrained by the presence of large, well-trained, well-equipped, and well-led and determined large formations of Viet Cong and NVA.)

It has happened, by the way, that an aviation organization is carefully tailored to support a ground unit. I know of two such examples. One was the TO strength of a Luftwaffe JU-52 wing, two hundred and twelve aircraft, which, as it turned out, was precisely enough to lift one Fallschirmjaeger regiment. The other was the aviation brigade of the 101st Airborne, circa 1975, four hundred and twenty-two helicopters’ worth, which was designed expressly to lift an entire infantry brigade of three battalions, with their tactical vehicles and heavy weapons, plus artillery, engineer, air defense, and the rest. (I saw this done exactly once in two years; thing of beauty it was too, to see over four hundred helicopters leap into the sky pretty much simultaneously. For the minor historians among us, the exercise was called “Orbiting Eagle IV.”) Note, further, that three lifts, provided the choppers weren’t attritted too badly by air defense and the Air Force kept the Soviet fighters off our back, and the whole division, less some support troops, was in their rear.

This, by the way, illustrates a general problem; no TO carefully designed to do a particular thing with perfect efficiency—which is very different from effectiveness—is going to be able to do the same thing so well after some losses. In other words, redundancy is good in war. See principle, Attrition.

Now consider the Bradley-mounted infantry unit. The vehicles will hold a maximum of thirty-six men. Subtract three of those for the forward observers and the medic. That leaves thirty-three. Typically thirteen; four three-man crews and the platoon sergeant, will stay with the vehicles when the rest dismount. You can make two decent-sized squads out of the remaining twenty, plus have the platoon leader and a radio telephone operator for him. Alternatively, you could make three undersized squads/oversized fireteams. If one does this the platoon leader has five subordinate elements, three squads plus two Bradley sections, which is pushing breaking span of control (See principle 3, above).

Still, it could be done. What cannot be done is to add even one more man to the platoon, not to subtract even one from the squads, not without letting them ride forward outside of the armor. (“A dangerous pastime.” “I know.”)

Now consider some of the logistic implications. Before devolving to the rather marginal T (for Tray) ration, U.S. combat units had, integral to battalion or company, though often effectively consolidated at brigade and regiment, mess platoons and teams. The general scale of manning for these was four men for the first hundred to be fed, and three or fraction of three for each additional hundred. This was enough, in the field, to feed two hot meals a day, provided the cooks worked like slaves, which they generally did. (I had a mess platoon as an additional duty as a lieutenant. My cooks worked ninety-eight to one hundred and four hours a week. Yes, seriously; it was inhuman. And it was worse in the field.) We did this for reasons of health, more than anything, having had bad experiences with over feeding of canned combat rations during the Second World War.

Note, on much reduced manning, we still generally try to feed two hot meals a day, via the tray pack ration.

The Brits, on the other hand, last time I looked closely, which was in 1991, had about a third our scale of cooks, though better trained ones. They only planned on feeding a hot meal about every three days, on average. In other words, today we feed A Company a lunch, tomorrow B Company gets a hot breakfast, and tomorrow night C Company gets a hot dinner. The Brits fed hot meals not for reasons of health, as near as I could determine, but for reasons of morale and even social cohesion.

All that’s just background. For education’s sake, what do those two different feeding approaches mean to the rest of the combat feeding system? Among other things, for us it means that a daily combat ration, three meals in a pack or perhaps twenty-seven to thirty in a larger pack for a squad, are wasteful. We pretty much must have individual meals, which means we cannot, as the Brits are wont to, issue food that the squad leader can detail one of the men to prepare for everyone. The Brits, conversely, could have individual meals (and since the demise of the Compo ration, do) or larger group feeding menus, if they wish to retain those.

And how you feed is going to affect the number and kind of trucks you need, which, themselves will change the number and kind of trucks they need.

The root core of logistics, by the way, is “lodging.” Quartermaster? Yes, he was someone who, among other things, worried about quartering the troops.

Think about “lodging;” think about “barracks.” Troops get attached to their barracks, and even for those who live elsewhere, married men and leaders, married or not, the barracks are “home,” “our place,” and a focus of building social cohesion in general.

From a mix of people—generals, usually—tinkering with TOs, plus coddling of troops masquerading as enlightenment, plus coddling that’s really just a recruiting and retention tool, plus perhaps the occasional unutterably corrupt California senator whose husband can make a few billion building new style barracks for the military,[2] the barracks sizes rarely—maybe never, anymore—match the size of the TO. Even if they did, perhaps accounting for the number of junior officer and mid-grade and senior NCOs, the frequency with which junior troops marry means you can’t even hope to match the number of inhabitants to a given barracks size.

The answer to this, by and large, has come in one of two forms; either the barracks are turned into mere holding areas for multiple units or what are called “modular barracks” are built and assigned to units, with some degree of geographical proximity, based on billeted strength. The problem with both is that, for what amounts to a fairly trivial savings in money in the form of heating and maintaining “wasted” space, we dispense with a key aspect of building social cohesion. This is, as they say, “penny-wise and pound-foolish.”

By the way, my troops hated the modular barracks; they were a perfect example of efficiency at the expense of utility, being hard to clean, hence dirty, crowded, hence unhealthy, and damaging to a company’s sense of being a special society or, rather, a big family.

What happens across the spectrum, compatibility-wise, is that after time, little by little, most of the incompatible things are worked on and fixed, even while other things crop up as people tinker with and derange the system.

There’s no definitive answer here; like other principles it is a thinking and educational point.

13. Politics: Organize for leaders and staff to have a voice equal to their military value and use, organize to preserve two-way communications. Match responsibility to relative rank within the organization.

THE principle, the one inviolable principle, the principle that dominates all others, amongst U.S. forces and most, maybe all, of our allies is this: Organize to maintain and, wherever possible, to increase the number of flag officers (generals and admirals) to the maximum feasible number and percentage, lest we be disadvantaged in the command, budget, and bureaucracy stakes.

However, the principle of politics is not just about interservice and inter-alliance rivalry and relative advantage. It goes down to the lowest levels and to every level in between.

Let me give one illustrative example; the Israeli tank company. This is a formation of eleven tanks, probably under fifty men, commanded by a major. Now fifty men is just a platoon, why isn’t it treated as a platoon and led by a lieutenant or, for an army with a professional NCO corps, a gunnery sergeant, sergeant first class, or, at the highest, a master sergeant?

After all, it wouldn’t break anyone’s span of control, the platoon leader or platoon commander would have three direct subordinates, plus a platoon sergeant in the odd tank out, to assist. The tank “squad leader” would have, like an infantry squad leader, had himself and a tank to either side, just like fire teams.

Here’s why not, even if the master sergeant could employ his eleven tank platoon more deftly than that major could, which is not beyond the realm of the conceivable: Go back to the principle on creating combined arms teams. If we had eleven tank platoons, and sent two of them, one led by a lieutenant, one by a master sergeant, down to a mechanized infantry battalion, nobody would listen to that sergeant and that lieutenant. They simply lack the rank and political horsepower. Moreover, the forty-six tank company from which they were sent, upon receiving two infantry companies in return, would have a commander who would now find he now had two subordinates who likely had very different ideas about who was in charge of matters. He also, being a mere company, would lack much of a staff.

You can see this problem more or less accounted for with our aviation and special forces, in both of which companies are commanded by majors. This, however, has not been well thought through.

Example, special forces operates in small detachments, called “ODAs,” commanded by captains, and sometimes gets support from other units also, some of which are commanded by captains, some of whom are senior to the ODA commanders. Special Operations Command takes the position that it is proper for the ODA commander to be in charge. I am inclined to think that it is at least wise, in theory, if not quite proper. It is probably not, however, legal. The Code of Conduct, plus military customs and regulations, demand that the senior captain take command. He has no legal choice. A four-star general telling him that he does, or that he must follow the orders of the junior, is issuing an illegal order because no four-star general outranks the President of the United States, whose order on the matter is expressed in the Code of Conduct, an order of continuing effect: “If senior I will take command,” isn’t just for the POW camp. The fact that some four-star’s SOP told you that you were under someone junior to you will cut no ice if things turn to crap and you end up before a court-martial. (See Article 92 (3), Dereliction of Duty, Uniform Code of Military Justice. No four-star outranks that, either.)

This is not, by the way, merely bad for the senior captain potentially forced to obey a junior. That junior captain, too, is in a nightmare position. This would all be less of a problem, by the way, if the principles of social cohesion and limitations on the numbers of officers were adhered to, such that both captains were in the same “company,” so to speak.

What’s the answer? The dumb look on my face is sincere, but it’s probably not to assign senior captains to commanding four-man civil affairs teams which are then attached to twelve-man special forces teams commanded by junior captains. It might be to make non-coms—lieutenants lack experience and maturity, generally—to lead civil affairs teams or it might be to get special forces to do that part of the job they were designed to do, which included nation building, which included an aspect of civil affairs. The organizational principle of Politics, in any case, ought to be consulted.

FOOTNOTES

1) No real criticism; when guts is mostly what you have to use, guts us what you use.

2) https://www.indybay.org/uploads/2015/12/10/feinstein_corruption_1.2.pdf around page 37. I seem to recall that Feinstein is not the only liberal California politician guilty of this.