Books bought in London (and Leiden)

For those of you who wondered whether I'd bought any books this weekend, the answer is yes. Of course.

Friday's reluctant loot: in the end I didn't do too much book shopping and my heart wasn't in it, I guess. Nevertheless, I picked up a book on the end of the Russian Empire because it had lots of social economic stuff linked in to the politics. Then 1815 The Road To Waterloo by Gregor Dallas as an old school introduction to the politics behind the peace process of 1814-1815. And finally The Verdict of Battle, a correction copy. I read a review of it recently and the book argues that battles became accepted as a legitimate way to solve political differences. And in this way, they could become decisive.

On Monday I picked up the catalogue to the exhibition on George Catlin's portraits of North American Indians

Last minute buys at the airport: Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise and Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. The first on scientific approaches to prediction, and why we are still so crap about it. By one of the smarter guys in electoral predictions. The second decision making and why it is often not economically rational (as economists expect us to do) but rational from the perspective of time and experience. By one of the leading economists.

Also one book I bought in Leiden just before I left for London. It's the travel account of a Dutch reporter in the wake of WWI to revolutions and internal conflicts all over Europe between 1919 and 1923. Should be an inspiration on the postwar situation from the view of a non-participating nation.

Catlin's paintings of North American Indians

Yesterday Nick and I went to the National Portrait Gallery and among other stuff, we saw George Catlin's portraits of North American Indians in the 1830s and 1840s.

Catlin began his project because he saw the Indians as a vanishing culture and wanted to conserve as much of it as possible. At the same time he needed to make money and these two goals didn't always go together well. But it has resulted in a unique collection of hundreds of portraits and paintings of most of the tribes of the east and west.

Apart from the information on the dress, appearance, customs and beliefs of the Indians, the paintings offer beautiful facial expressions. It's evident that Catlin empathised with his sitters. Not all paintings are of even quality because Catlin did many of them and fast, but even some of the unfinished ones are fascinating.

Catlin's other interest like geology also feature on the side of the exhibition. And since the National Portrait Gallery is free to visit, make sure you give it a try when you get to London. The turnover of exhibitions is quite high and there is lots to see.

How I love going to Chestnut Lodge

Sunday I joined a meeting of Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group, a rare pleasure because megagames and CLWG don't often coincide.
We had 3 great sessions, the first set in the A Very British Civil War alternate universe where Britain descends into vivi war after Edward decides to ascend the throne with Wallis Simpson as queen.
It was a tactical scenario by John Seaton on attempts by fascists and worker militias to capture the neutral borough of Croydon, including the important airport.
Next was a session discussing Muku Patel's design for an army group level game on the opening stages of WWI on the eastern front.
We discussed some design parameters (which period, what area, at what level of resolution, the character of combat on the eastern front (and how it differed from the west) and some mechanics (trading speed for combat effectiveness, effect of terrain, intensity).
Last was a meeting of the board of a large multinational discussing how it would make the best use of revolutionary new technology.
We faced several fundamental decisions. Given its cooperation with a superpower, how would that affect it's ability to trade with others? What was our window in which we were the sole owners of this technology, and how could we leverage this towards customers and competition?
A busy day with some fascinating insights, good discussion and inspiration

Judd books

One of my favourite bookshops. Always something special to pick up.

Edith Cavell, a 1915 PR disaster

Ok, ok. So she was guilty of helping allied soldiers getting back to their own lines. But just because she is a spy doesn't mean you should shoot her.!?

Oh well. This is the stuff you run in to on your way to the bookshops at Charing Cross Road

Late Arrival: Signum Mortis

Finally received the missing parts of Signum Mortis: Gangs of Rome, designed by Hajo Peters (who also did the Saladin monster game). The game deals with the proscription of Roman dictator Sulla against the supporters of his enemy Marius in 82 BC.

Goodies!

The players are all leaders of one of the gangs of Rome, 'helping' Sulla in rounding up his opponents and claiming the rewards. But when peace comes, you'd better be on good terms with Sulla, so he won't sacrifice you to save his reputation.

This is the kind of awesome theme I'm looking for. Rough, mean, cutthroat and exciting history. No sucking up to the king!

In fact I left Essen last October with only a box, a board and a bag of dice. All the rest arrived this week: introduction to the rules, basic rules, advanced rules, a bag full of counters and chits, a dvd, player aids and some more cardboard. Which at the end neatly fitted into the box. Amazing.

I was supposed to receive all this in February, but it got delayed a bit and I think designer Hajo Peters is rather tired of self producing by now. Like Saladin this is a work of love but it must bleed time. It all looks pretty good. 

Should try it out when I get back, but first: Age of Renaissance. A sentimental journey

Just received: Crisis in Binni game materials

The Crisis in Binni game materials. Found them yesterday evening returning home after a few days. Will provide for some interesting reading today and tomorrow.

There's the game handbook and the Travellers Guide to Binni, with all the background you need to play the game: who you are, what you did,who you hate, what your objectives are..

The Day of the Rangers - Black Hawk Down 20 years on

In my continuing quest to prepare for my role as commander of the U.S. contingent in a humanitarian operation, I have read Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden. It provides an in depth account of the U.S. (not U.N.) operation to capture two main partners of General Aidid, leader of the Habr Gidr, the clan dominating Somalia at the time. 

My second hand copy

Although the targets were captured, the crash of two Black Hawk helicopters totally changed the dynamic of the battle and forced the troops on the ground into an improvised rescue operation. The troops were surrounded near one of the crash sites, but had to be relieved by a scratch U.N. force. The crew of the second chopper was captured or killed and paraded through the city by outraged Somalis, for all the world to see. This led to the departure of U.S. forces from Somalia soon after.

Last weekend I also watched the movie and there's a couple of disconcerting differences, the main being that the movie strips out most of the uncomfortable parts of the book. That is the very strong criticism on the leadership (although Bowden often uses the Delta Force participants to voice it) and the Somali side of the experience. And I think these two points are the most significant in the book, and they explain a lot about what went wrong.

By October 1993 the Somalis had figured out a way to go after the choppers

Ridley Scott does an awesome job of portraying the tactical side of the battle. I can't tell how realistic it is, but it generally conforms with the book, except the small force of Deltas attacking the Somali heavy weapons from behind. But Bowden provides several accounts of Somalis that show that a large part of the people fighting the Americans were not militiamen but civilians angry at being invaded by the Americans.

And that leads to the question the movie doesn't ask: wasn't this a stupid plan in the first place? Jumping in the midst of the town would always result in considerable collateral damage and civilian deaths. Scott neatly hides that fact that the Americans were shooting civilian from the word go (Bakara market was not just a hang out for arms salesmen, as the movie suggests, and they emptied it with M-60s).

In the movie the streets seem empty of civilians, in reality they were hiding everywhere and the millions of shots fired by the Americans must have made numerous innocent victims among the 500 dead and 1,000 wounded. That may be portrayed as a military necessity, but it was obviously the Americans weren't concerned about anything but themselves. 
This lack of sensitivity is understandable to a degree. To see so many people in a position of helplessness and degrading themselves in order to survive, sometimes to the point of lying, stealing and murder (see what I wrote about that when discussing Linda Polman's book) will not improve your opinion of them. The dirt, poverty and stench are noted often and in a negative way.

Also the Somali society was fundamentally different on ideas about honour, fairness, hospitality and allegiance. Even the strong concept of individual agency that every American is spoonfed from birth contrasts with the stoic fatalism inherent in lesser developed societies. The fact that Somalis often didn't grab at the chances provided to them by humanitarian aid and their refusal to lay aside their factional differences in the light of the crisis will have made them look ungrateful.

I'm pretty sure racism wasn't a major part of this attitude, although there were a few remarks in the book where I suspected it. I wonder if the nickname 'Skinnies' was a reference to Heinlein's Starship Troopers.


The lack of sensitivity, coupled with their obvious dislike of the local population  had already irked the Somalis, for example when U.S. choppers flew low over town, damaging houses and stampeding animals. They had also killed and captured a large part of the civilian leadership in a pretty brutal assault some weeks before. ‘The Day of the Rangers’ pushed many Somalis, friends of Aidid or not, into active hostility towards the U.S. troops.

The Somalis made innovative use of cheaply available communications
to narrow the intelligence gap

The Americans had also badly underestimated their opponents’ capabilities and willingness to take them on. The availability and smart deployment of RPGs caught them by surprise. The swift reaction and the amount of people mobilised by their attack as well. 

Most dangerously, they misjudged the reaction of the Somalis to their invasion per se. Even if no Black Hawk had been downed, the number of casualties on both sides would have been considerable. Half of the Americans on the initial convoy became casualties, and they could have easily accounted for several hundred Somali casualties. The damage, although less extensive, would still have angered a lot of people. Together, it would probably have changed the political dynamics of the conflict as much as the battle did in the end.

Scott conveniently portrays the local militia leader (appropriately dressed in black) as a 'bad guy' at the start of the movie by having him rob people of humanitarian aid, and then kills him off later as a sort of minor revenge victory which apparently needed to be scored to wash down the humiliation of the American force. It is not in the book.

...refusing to look the part of bad guy

At the end of the movie it seems all okay because Aidid is murdered in 1996 (by Somali competitors, not a U.S. operation). Although Aidid certainly was no saint, on the other hand he was not the ultimate bad guy the Americans turned him into (not the first and last time they did that). He was the leader of the most powerful clan in Somalia and de facto head of state, but also a former general in the regular army and he had defeated the dictator Siad Barre a few years before. Again, the movie reduces Bowden's multilayered story to two dimensions. 

As Bowden points out, the fact that the situation in Somalia didn´t change after Aidid´s death says enough about the misjudgement of the U.S. to pick that particular fight, and of their misjudgement of conflict in failed states in general: “In the end, the Battle of the Black Sea is another lesson in the limits of what force can accomplish.”

Because although military there is some claim to a U.S. victory, morally this was a huge defeat. Yes, a small force of Americans had held off a huge mass of irregulars, but with overwhelming firepower. Also, the force had effectively been incapacitated. It couldn’t move without leaving behind a considerable number of wounded and it couldn’t defend both crash sites.

And in my reading of the book, the people in charge of the operation were paralysed by the unforeseen events and overwhelming information. They were unable to improvise and make tough decisions. The movie makes the creed of ‘leave no man behind’ a virtue, but tactically it hamstrung the Americans. It prevented them from taking up a better defensive position and the recovery of a dead pilot cost them precious hours of darkness.

The only known photograph taken on the ground during the Battle of Mogadishu, on 3 October 1993
(US DoD via Court Chick, linked from acig.org)

In the book, Bowden shows the Somali sensed that the Americans were unwilling to die and to risk their lives which gave them a moral ascendancy. Despite the overwhelming firepower of the Rangers, I felt at times that an old fashioned bayonet charge would have been more effective (but the Rangers had left those at the base).

Sure, it is easy for me to criticise these points from my armchair, but these elements have come back during many humanitarian operations:

1. elite western troops with an inflated sense of their power, which translated into underestimation of their opponents and disdain for the civilian population. Derogatory nicknames, prostitution rings, firelighters with jam handed to children, it´s all happened.

2. irregular opponents who adopt to asymmetrical warfare and counter Western technological superiority by using terrain, subterfuge, or hiding among the population. It´s not always within the Geneva Convention, but civil war is a different beast than conventional conflict and U.N. troops should be take their opponents seriously.

3. In a tight corner the elite troops are unwilling to take casualties to do what is necessary to fulfill their primary mission: protect civilians. Belgians in Rwanda, Dutch in Srebrenica. Or they just blast away the opposition by massive firepower, regardless of the collateral damage, as in Mogadishu. This also harms the primary mission. Both forms of fuck up also undermine the trust of people in the ability and the will of the international community to protect them. What´s not to say that this provided a hotbed for anti-Western sentiments that the radical islamist have fed on since?

I´ll tell you next week if I did any better!

The page of the Crisis in Binni megagame (there's still room if you want to play)

My initial thoughts on the game

My review of Linda Polman´s The Crisis Caravan, about humanitarian intervention

More Preparation For Humanitarian Intervention - The Depressing Bit

In my preparation for megagame Crisis in Binni, I have read a few books and watched the inevitable Black Hawk Down. There's some interesting differences between the book and the movie, to which I hope to come back at some later stage. But suffice it to say that Ridley Scott could have made a movie much more critical of the American actions in Somalia than he did.

But I also reread Linda Polman´s The Crisis Caravan (In Dutch: De crisiskaravaan. Achter de schermen van de noodhulpindustrie). The book paints a pretty depressing picture of the crisis aid industry. She shows how the interaction between aid organisations, victims, local powers and the press have changed since the early 1990s


Me trying to organise Polman´s argument



The major development in the field is that since the early 1990s there has been a huge proliferation in the number of NGOs, especially with the appearance of MONGOs, or 'My Own NGO's. These micro-NGOs evolved from the disappointment many people felt in the effectiveness of the larger, more bureaucratic international NGOs. So people hop on a plain to DO SOMETHING.

Of course this leads to frustration, lack of coordination, double work and cruel excess. Polman gives harrowing stories of American doctors flying in, picking up kids in refugee camps and operating on them and taking them home on crowd-funding trips or even for adoption (while their parents are still alive).

But the main effect has been that the NGOs need to put much more effort in PR to catch attention of potential donors. And this has put them at the mercy of the press, who need to have a reason to turn up. So the NGOs need to inflate the scale of suffering and their role in ameliorating it. Because unfamiliar people in far off places don't sell papers by themselves.

The press, mostly genuinely sympathetic to the plight of the victims and the work of the aid organisations, needs to inflate the level of suffering above that of the last crisis. And some victims are more newsworthy than others: cut off limbs and children's bellies swollen from hunger do better than forced labour.

Another development, which Polman doesn't touch on, but which I have just read about from the other side, is the increasing rationalisation of the news media, so that there is less and less time for research, fact checking and analysis. Nick Davies´ Flat Earth News shows this development in bold colours, and shows why the press in turn has become so dependent on the NGOs and so uncritical of the information they provide (review is coming up).

A secondary effect of the competition between NGOs is their lack of negotiating power relative to the local powers. For the war lords and local governments, the flow of aid provides fantastic opportunities for improving their position. They can also cream off part of the aid that reaches the victims. And in case they are losing in a civil war, they can use the refugee masses to hide in and recuperate for another round (as for example the fleeing Hutu's did in Goma in 1994).

Indigenous government organisations and warlords also sell access to the victims to the highest bidder (both press and NGOs). This has led to NGOs making compromises which put them on the wrong side of the ethical conundrum: do we help or does helping make things worse?

Finally, the side that Polman references to only in passing, but the victims themselves play an important role in all this. It is in their interest to lie, beg and steal to improve their lot. The books shows some examples of kids lying to get prettier protheses, to be taken to the U.S. or just to get more attention from reporters.

It is enough to turn cynical at the whole aid industry, but Polman says we shouldn't leave it at that. Sometimes we have no choice but to shake hands with the devil to save lives, but also sometimes, we need to decide that by providing aid, we are only prolonging the suffering and destabilising a country for a long time.

Wow!

It seems I've come under the radar of Dr. Raùl Alberto de la Cruz, aka Tango01 at The Miniatures Page. He has linked through to my posts on the Guardian military-historical databases, The Reconquista in Al-Andalus and the review of Prussian Napoleonic Tactics. There was some interesting comment on the latter.

I hadn't put up a picture of the new Saxon cavalry
from Musketeer miniatures that René painted for me

 My hit count has spiked as a result. Thanks mr De la Cruz! These hits are much better than the spam referals. Good thing I picked up blogging again after a small hiatus. In three weeks I'll be at it for a year.

And here's the new Saxon skirmishers also courtesy of René

I've also picked up three new regular followers, so welcome Michael Awdry, Hankesslinger and Schrumpfkopf! I know my blog doesn´t have the eye candy or a dedicated subject, but  I hope some of the visitors come back and become regulars as well.