What is the point of the UK Carrier Strike Group?

We have recently been told that the United (for now) Kingdom's newest aircraft carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, will be sailing to the South China Sea at the head of her carrier strike group. There she will engage in what the Americans call freedom of navigation operations, or to put it in terms that might have been used by former UK defence secretary and tarantula enthusiast Gavin Williamson, telling China to shut up and go away.

This will be the first big foreign outing of the new UK carrier, the largest ship ever built in the British Isles. The ship alone cost some £3 billion, not including the staggeringly expensive and troubled F-35 aircraft it operates. But what are they getting for their money? Does the carrier strike group represent a meaningful power projection capability for Britain, and if not, what is the point of the whole thing?

I used to get money for writing this kind of thing, but these days all I have is this blog and the occasional desire to indulge myself. So here goes.

Picture: Wikimedia Commons

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If you think about carrier air operations, you'll probably think of the US Navy. The USN has commanded the oceans of the world pretty much since the battle of Midway, and a single United States carrier strike group has more surface combat power than most navies, and operates an air wing bigger than most national air forces. No other country can deploy fighting power like this, but then again, many nations with air forces smaller than a US carrier air wing can provide their citizens with education and basic health care, so obviously there are some tradeoffs.

When the Royal Navy started the Queen Elizabeth -class project in the 1990s, the goal was obviously not to replicate their former colony's task forces. But an independent carrier strike capacity would hardly have seemed like an impossible pipe dream, since the Falklands War was barely a decade old.

In 1982, Britain responded to the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands by sending a naval task force to retake the islands. Built around the STOVL carriers HMS Hermes and Invincible, the task force consisted of two LPDs, eight destroyers and fifteen frigates, as well as submarines, support ships and auxiliaries, totalling 127 ships, including 62 merchant ships taken into service. In terms of surface combatants, the entire Royal Navy of 2021 is smaller than the Falklands task force, with a total strength of six destroyers and thirteen frigates.

In the South Atlantic, the UK task force faced a navy that never attempted any serious operations against it, and a decrepit air force equipped almost entirely with 1950s aircraft and lacking any meaningful aerial refueling capacity to facilitate long-range attacks on the Royal Navy. With the enemy navy effectively absent, the task force could optimize its defenses against anti-ship missiles and air attacks with cannon and unguided bombs; the highly capable Sea Harrier force operating from the carriers was a huge asset.

Despite these severe drawbacks, the Argentinian air force fought their antiquated equipment with exceptional skill and élan, and inflicted considerable casualties on the UK force. Two destroyers, HMS Sheffield and Coventry, were sunk, and HMS Glasgow was disabled by a bomb that failed to explode. Two County-class destroyers, HMS Antrim and Glamorgan, were also heavily damaged by air attack. So against an obsolete air force and no surface or submarine threat, the task force lost three out of eight destroyers, and two frigates were also sunk. Transposed to today's Royal Navy, these would be crippling losses. Even at the time, they threatened the success of the whole operation.

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Carrier Strike Group 21, as it is called, sailed for China led by, obviously, HMS Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by two Type 45 air-defence destroyers and two Type 23 anti-submarine frigates. They are joined by a destroyer and frigate from NATO allies, because sending three UK destroyers would have meant dispatching fully half of the Royal Navy's destroyers to Asia, so two destroyers and two, perhaps three, frigates are pretty much the maximum for an operation like this.

This is not a force that has any real staying power on independent operations. No doubt, the Sea Viper SAM system on the Type 45s is very capable, although there are always risks involved in relying on a single system; in the Falklands, the Sea Wolf point-defence missile system twice crashed under attack, leading to the loss of HMS Coventry. In the case of the Carrier Strike Group, one fluke incident like this would easily be enough to damage, even disable, one of the carrier escorts. 

And that's just the air threat. When we think about the rumored abilities of Swedish diesel-electric submarines to sink a US supercarrier, and the expectation that the technology will continue to spread around the world, how sanguine can anyone be about the anti-submarine capabilities of the carrier group? Again, the group is so tiny that a single torpedo hit can do huge damage. Or indeed one anti-ship missile getting through. Then consider this tiny force facing several simultaneous threats, or an asymmetric attack like the kamikaze speedboat that disabled the USS Cole. 

If even one escort is severely damaged, can the carrier group continue to operate? Let alone if one of them is sunk. Two destroyers and two frigates means no redundancy, and even in the case of a damaged ship, would it be sent off on its own to seek repairs, or would the entire force have to withdraw? And yet the Royal Navy can't realistically field a larger force. The Falklands experience should have driven home that naval operations against an enemy with severe deficiencies, able to present only a limited, one-dimensional threat, will result in casualties. And yet the Royal Navy is fielding a carrier strike group that can't sustain any.

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Frankly, the idea that the new fleet carriers provide the UK with an independent global striking capacity is ludicrous. The Royal Navy doesn't have the ships to deploy a carrier group that can face any real opposition without neglecting not only its duties to NATO, but also the defence of the British isles. For that defence, the carriers are next to useless. Without a capable escort, the UK carrier group is as vulnerable in the Far East as the previous HMS Prince of Wales, sunk by Japanese air attack in 1941, was.

For operations other than war, like humanitarian assistance or evacuations and suchlike, an amphibious assault ship or a light carrier like the retired Invincible class would be far more capable than a fleet carrier. Such ships could also have operated the Sea Harrier, a very capable combat aircraft that proved itself beyond doubt in the Falklands and was since modernized to carry the AIM-120 AMRAAM missile for a full BVR air combat capability; much better value for money than the F-35. I have a vague memory that the Finnish air force at one time evaluated the Harrier, but apparently they didn't appreciate its qualities since it never made it onto their fighter short-list. I don't know why that was.

So what can the carriers actually do? Literally the only thing they are good for is participating in the US's Forever War. Both of the Queen Elizabeths can take the place of a US fleet carrier in their rotation of supercarriers; with US sea and air control, the minimal escort the Royal Navy can provide will be more than sufficient, and even though the UK carriers have considerably less striking power, they can take some of the strain off the already chronically overstretched US Navy. The point of the much-heralded Asian cruise is purely to demonstrate that Britain would be a loyal ally in any US-led confrontation with China.

The carriers even compare unfavorably with Trident. The UK has an independent submarine-based nuclear deterrent; although they rely on the US for servicing the missiles, the operation of the weapons is completely in British hands. Whether the nuclear deterrent provided by Trident is worth having, especially at considerable cost, is a question for the British tax-payer. But you can make a case for Trident providing the UK with an actual independent capability - especially if you remember what it's actually for. The carriers, on the other hand, produce nothing even as useful as Trident.

One argument that's been put forward for Trident is that being a nuclear power guarantees Britain "a seat at the top table" in international politics. Whether that's worth the massive expense is a whole other question, but in essence, this is also what the carriers are for: they provide a capacity for Britain to contribute to US power projection. Presumably this will come with the same advantages that accrued to the United Kingdom from their participation in the US forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - whatever those advantages are. This need to appease the USians is, of course, made all the more urgent by Brexit.

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So what is the point of the UK Carrier Strike Group, then? There isn't one. It's a colossally expensive, pointless exercise in flag-waving and playing at being a world power. If the UK actually wanted a credible independent power projection capability, it would require heavy investment in a much larger navy and naval air force. Instead they play at being Americans.

The UK fleet carriers represent a shameless waste of money in pursuit of an appearance of world power. A naval Brexit, really.

The US is a failing state

 So Joe Biden was sworn in as President, and the previous guy flew off to Florida in a sulk. All well and good, and frankly, very relieving. But the US has serious problems that aren't going away nearly as easily.

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I wrote about the Forever War a couple of years ago, but it's not like anything has changed. American troops have spent 30 years in the Middle East and achieved absolutely nothing. They're still occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, there's still a civil war in Syria even though nobody cares about it any more, and so on. What I want to highlight here is the total ineptitude of the Forever War. The USians have spent three decades fighting and have learned nothing.

Take Syria, for instance. When the country collapsed into civil war, the US couldn't decide whether or not to actually intervene. The Obama administration drew several "red lines" and then dithered over them, while the next guy was more than happy to order airstrikes that accomplished nothing. The point is not to debate what the Americans should or shouldn't have done in Syria. It's that two consecutive administrations were unable to formulate or execute any kind of coherent national policy, or use military force to achieve national political goals. This is how a failing state acts.

US policy toward Iran is similarly senseless. Trump withdraws from the JCPOA, seemingly for no reason except that Obama signed it and therefore it must be bad -- only to then turn around and insist, in a ridiculous and failed diplomatic maneuver, that even though the US withdrew from the treaty, they're still a "participant" in it. Trump then had Qasem Soleimani murdered, again seemingly for no particular reason. At the time, it looked like the US was trying to provoke Iran into a war, but when the Iranians retaliated by striking US bases in Iraq, Trump lied that they hadn't and nothing came of it. You tell me: is this a superpower executing a strategy of regional dominance, or an empire as decrepit as the idiot con man who pretended to lead it?

This January marks the 30-year anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Over those three decades, the US has taken a sledgehammer to the Middle East and achieved nothing at all, except killing untold thousands of people and destabilizing the entire region. And they're not done yet: US forces are still stuck in Afghanistan with no end in sight, and no-one even expects the new administration to do anything different. There's no exit strategy and there never was. In Vietnam, they had to leave when the other guys kicked them out, but US military supremacy is now so overwhelming that this is very unlikely, but they won't leave of their own accord. Nobody can define an end state, let alone a victory condition, for the Forever War, and because it's constantly spun as somehow a patriotic defensive effort protecting American liberties, it can't be stopped.

In other words, the supposedly greatest country in the world can't figure out how to stop spending literally trillions of dollars murdering innocent people in the Middle East.

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Speaking of people dying, as I write this in early January, the death rate to the coronavirus pandemic in the US is a little over 1 000 per million (Statista). At that rate, over five thousand Finns would have died. The actual number was under six hundred when I wrote this. So despite spending over twice as much per person on health care, the US system is delivering an outcome that's ten times worse. They also can't get people vaccinated: the US government set a target of 20 million vaccinations by the end of 2020; they managed two million.

Now, it's easy to say that this is because of the idiot who's been in charge, and obviously he's to blame. You don't want a vacuous populist with stupid hair in charge of your country during a pandemic; just ask the Brits. But Trump is a symptom, not a cause.

The Forever War has turbocharged American racism. Most obviously through the massive islamophobia constantly incited in its name, but also in indirect ways. The ongoing police brutality in the US, for example, and the militarization of US policing, long predate the "war on terror" but are being accelerated by it. Veterans are strongly overrepresented in US police departments, and according to at least one study, are more likely to shoot people than non-veterans. Law enforcement agencies across the US gained massive, intrusive new powers of surveillance in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, and the flood of military equipment to police departments only increased. A more militarized police force with more veterans is then more likely to brutalize and murder minorities, which leads to protests, which justifies more policing.

As with the Forever War, there's no end in sight for the rampant police violence in the US either. One party openly cheers for it, with the unwavering support of the police unions, but the other one can't figure it out either. I'd like to say it's unbelievable that Biden's response to the police riots against the Black Lives Matter movements is to increase police funding, but it isn't. His position didn't change when off-duty cops stormed the Capitol and on-duty cops let them.

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Trump himself, as a politician, is obviously a product of the Forever War. His racism, crude even by American standards, is boosted and justified by the rampant islamophobia of the "war on terror", and is key to his popularity among his overwhelmingly white, mostly well-off supporters.

But I think there's another way in which the Forever War ties into Trumpism. The supposedly constant threat of terrorism lets white Americans pretend that they're being victimized. White people living in the middle of rural nowhere, USA, can profess to be terrified that any moment now, an ISIS technical will pull up on their main street and shoot out the only traffic light in the name of the Caliphate. This doesn't just excuse white USians' racism, but it lets them play-act being oppressed, and there's nothing Trump supporters love more than pretending they're being oppressed. It's why Trump's repellent and ridiculous mix of bombast and self-pitying whining appeals to them: they want to both revel in their privilege and pretend it doesn't exist. The "war on terror" provides a way to get there. And, of course, once you've convinced yourself that ISIS is coming, you'll find it a lot easier to believe that buses full of Antifa are on their way to your hometown, as so many USian conservatives at one point claimed to believe.

This impossible idea, by the way, of simultaneously being the privileged and invaluable backbone of society, and a persecuted minority, has historically been the position of Christian churches. Which makes it entirely unsurprising that white Christians overwhelmingly support Trump.

Even though the most deranged conspiracists were bitterly disappointed when Biden was sworn in, the conservative persecution complex is carrying on as if nothing had happened. Moments after voting to overthrow the results of a democratic election, various Republican politicians were on the usual platforms whining about how mean the Democrats were being. Fox News and their ilk have spent the past year telling their viewers Joe Biden is a communist who is going to take their guns, ban cars and beef and whatever, just like they told everyone Obama was going to do. When none of that happened, it didn't put so much as a dent in the hysterical screeching, nor will it now.

Of course, in the dying days of the Trump regime, a huge number of these people convinced themselves that any election they lose isn't legitimate. Their elected representatives voted to overturn election results, and incited an armed mob to storm the Capitol, trying to stop the election result from being confirmed. Nearly half of all Republicans supported the attack.

A strong faction of Republicans now openly oppose democracy. If they took back the House and Senate in the midterms, judging on their behavior so far, they would vote to throw out a presidential election result that didn't go their way.

It's one thing for a party to elect someone lile Trump, who openly opposes democracy. It's another for some politicians, like the Zodiac, to support him and echo his rhetoric. But when a large part of the supporters of the party start opposing democracy and believing that only they are entitled to rule, it becomes a serious problem.

This mentality is being driven by the brutalizing racism of the Forever War. It's being driven by the constant police brutality and racism. It's being turbocharged by the radicalization engines of the right-wing media, Facebook and Youtube. It isn't going away. If anything, it's going to get worse, because the structural forces driving it aren't going anywhere.

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This year will mark the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Of course, they didn't create problems like American racism and militarism, or the fascist contempt so much of the USian right has for democracy. We can't know what the 21st century would have been like without the War on Terror. But it would be very difficult to argue that that Forever War hasn't made all of these problems so much worse, and so much more difficult to solve.

The US has been in mortal peril before. It survived the Civil War, even though the subsequent efforts to fix some of these deep-rooted inequalities was sabotaged. Now, real structural change seems even harder, and the saboteurs are legion.

No-one knows what will happen. In one of the more spectacularly silly journalistic outpourings in my country, someone compared Joe Biden to FDR. I can't help thinking that's spectacularly wrong. To stay in that context, I'm afraid Biden isn't the great reformer who will actually grapple with the great problems of US society that FDR was. Instead, he's Herbert Hoover: the studious technocrat who won't address the actual issues, and is overwhelmed by them. I suppose in 2024 we'll see if he's succeeded by an FDR - or a Buzz Windrip.

I can't say I'm very optimistic.

The Forever War

The Forever War is a great novel by Joe Haldeman, but it's also what several national security professionals have come to call either the US war in Afghanistan, or the "war on terror" in general. And for good reason: the US went to war with the Taleban on October 7 2001, almost seventeen years ago as I write this. Depending on which casualty estimates you want, tens to hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. President Trump has escalated the war, increasing air strikes and sending in more troops. With no clear strategy, there's no end in sight.

The other forever war is in the Middle East proper, and it's been going on a lot longer than the War on Terror. Now that US foreign secretary, oligarch Rex Tillerson seemed to commit US forces indefinitely to Syria, it seems like it would be a good idea to look back on how long the US has been fighting in the Middle East.

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A century ago, the Middle East, with the exception of what is now Iran, was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The Empire took the side of the Central Powers in World War I, and collapsed at the end of the war. The Allies had made contradictory promises to the Arab and Jewish subjects of the Empire during the war, and eventuallu decided to take over the Empire's territories in the Middle East as colonial protectorates. Eventually these protectorates gained their independence, leading to the map of the Middle East that we know today.

As British and French influence declined, the Americans stepped in. Saudi Arabia actively cultivated ties with the United States, and during World War II, the Americans came to believe that Saudi oil was of vital strategic importance. There has been a US military presence in Saudi Arabia ever since.

During the Cold War, the Middle East was a battleground for US and Soviet interests, with the Americans supporting Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Shah of Iran, and the Soviets backing Arab socialism in Egypt, Iraq and Syria. Neither side prevailed: Israel was never destroyed but didn't rout its opponents, and the incredibly bloody Iran-Iraq war ended indecisively. No one state or superpower could control the region.

In 1990, with the Cold War coming to a close, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the tiny neighboring emirate of Kuwait. A US-led alliance kicked him out the next year, with coalition ground forces crossing the Saudi border on February 24. The poorly led and motivated Iraqi conscript forces were swept aside with ease, and Kuwait was restored.

Saddam, however, stayed in power. To stop him from oppressing Iraq's Shi'ite and Kurd minorities, no-fly zones were set up in north and south Iraq, monitored by US, British and French aircraft, the French later withdrawing. These no-fly zones were enforced until the 2003 invasion of Iraq, accompanied by cruise missile strikes in 1993 and 1996, and a sustained four-day bombing campaign in 1998.

So by the time the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003, the US military had been operating in Iraq non-stop for twelve years already. As we know, the US-led invasion of 2003 led to the death of Saddam Hussein and the collapse of the Iraqi state, ushering in a thoroughly unstable situation where a US-supported regime is faced with a massive insurgency. Militarily, the invasion was a success; the decision to destroy the Iraqi state without any kind of realistic nation-building strategy to replace it was a disaster. American combat troops stayed in the country until 2011, when they declared "mission accomplished" and withdrew, marking 20 years of continuous operations in Iraq. The insurgency simply continued as before.

2011 was also the year of the Arab Spring: regimes were overthrown in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, protests crushed with Saudi help in Bahrain, and Libya collapsed into civil war. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad tried to suppress protests with force, triggering the Syrian civil war. A Sunni extremist group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant took advantage of the US withdrawal from Iraq to launch a full-scale offensive on the Iraqi government, and also became a participant in the Syrian Civil War. The Americans are intervening in the still-ongoing Syrian Civil War, along with the Russians and the Turks, and returned to Iraq in 2014. Meanwhile, a civil war also broke out in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is carrying out air strikes to support one side. And I haven't even mentioned Israel's continuing occupation of Palestine and its ongoing violence.

So from the 1991 Gulf war to several wars still being fought in 2018, the Middle East is nearing a full thirty years of war.

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To put all this into some kind of context, I see two major developments. First, obviously, the Arab spring exposed the unusustainability of the Cold War order. Arab socialism had atrophied into venal despotism, and with money and military aid no longer pouring in from competing superpowers, the edifices began to collapse.

Secondly, the US destruction of Iraq shattered the geopolitical balance of the Middle East. In the short term, it created the power vacuum in which ISIS was born. In the longer term, the region will be looking for a new power balance. Iran is expanding its influence, but its capabilities are being massively overhyped. Iran is not an expansionist power outside the fever dreams of American islamophobes.

Saudi Arabia, however, is taking a very different approach, which Wikipedia is already calling the Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy conflict. The Saudi intervention in Yemen and the diplomatic offensive on Qatar are the most visible tips of this iceberg, but the Saudis' growing rapprochement with Israel and their bizarre orb ceremonies with Egypt and Trump certainly make it look like Saudi Arabia intends to flex its muscles. This is the essential background to the war drums being beaten against Iran in so many places today.

In the longer run, what we're seeing is the realignment of the Middle East from a superpower battleground to an area under a US quasicolonial hegemony. The extent of the conflicts, and the number of the dead, will depend on how far the US and its allies push their advantage. A war on Iran would be the ultimate exercise in remaking the whole Middle East, which is the only actual rationale of such a war. It's particularly absurd that such a pivotal time in the history of the region is being presided over by Donald Trump, a true idiot in the classical sense: completely ignorant and seemingly unable to hold a foreign policy opinion for as long as a week, but given to random, blustering fits of childish rage. It verges on impossible to decipher whether the US actually has some kind of strategy for the Middle East, let alone what it could be. Simply because he is president, Trump's idiocy and unpredictability make every global crisis more dangerous.

In retrospect, it's difficult to overstate how catastrophically bad the US decision to invade Iraq and Afghanistan without a proper exit strategy was. There's a ton of strategic literature by various American thinkers and pundits penned after Vietnam on how the US must never again be drawn into such a quagmire again, but it was all a waste of time, because American combat troops have been in Afghanistan for twice as long as they ever spent in Vietnam, and they show no signs of getting out. Whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, there are no signs that the Americans have any kind of credible strategy for resolving the conflicts they have become involved in, let alone the ones they started.

The only thing that seems certain is that the forever war shows no signs of ending.

Team Yankee: Where on earth is the Soviet artillery?

I picked up the rulebook for Team Yankee on a lark over the winter break. Based on the novel of the same name, it's a miniature game that depicts combat between Soviet and American forces in a World War III being fought in Germany. Given the choice of those two sides, I'd definitely be inclined to pick the Soviets - if not for one major problem: artillery.

In Team Yankee, each Soviet battalion gets one battery of 2S1 122mm self-propelled howitzers, and you can also select one battery of divisional artillery, also 2S1s. Were you to select a division's worth of troops, you'd end up with 17 batteries, 102 guns in total, and the single divisional BM-21 rocket launcher battery.

As FM 100-2-3 The Soviet Army: Troops, Organization and Equipment (pdf) tells us, a Soviet tank division mustered four battalions of 2S1 122mm self-propelled howitzers, one per regiment, and an artillery regiment with two 2S3 (152mm) battalions and a rocket launcher battalion. That's a total of 72 2S1s, 36 2S3s and 18 BM-21 rocket launchers (FM 100-2-3, 4-13). In terms of raw numbers, then, Team Yankee is close to the organic tube artillery held by a Soviet tank division, but the 152mm guns of the divisional artillery have been replaced by 122mm ones. With only a single battery present, two thirds of the division's rocket launchers are missing.

There are two problems with this. First, this is a highly counterintuitive way to handle Soviet artillery. As Chris Bellamy (Red God of War: Soviet Artillery and Rocket Forces. Brassey's Defence Publishers, London, 1986) reminds us, the basic Soviet fire unit was the battalion, not the battery (185-190). Divisional artillery in tank and motor rifle divisions was grouped into battalions at regiment level, not penny-packeted to the battalions, which would have been a decidedly un-Soviet thing to do. Motor rifle battalions did have an organic mortar battery, which is missing from Team Yankee. Individual artillery batteries charging around with battalions was not Soviet practice.

Also, what we've looked at so far is just the organic artillery, i.e. the artillery units permanently attached to the division. Team Yankee is set in West Germany, which would have been the crucible of any NATO-Soviet shooting war. There's just no way that a first-line Soviet division would be participating in an offensive in the key theater of operations with just its organic artillery. Bellamy estimates (194-197) that a division advancing along a main axis would be supported by or even allocated artillery from both the Army and Front level; in his hypothetical example, two battalions of 152mm SP or towed guns from the Army, and three battalions of SP guns, self-propelled mortars, 203mm guns and heavy rocket launchers from the Front, for a total of over 300 equipments. In other words, support from higher echelons would more than triple the artillery strength of a front-line division along a major axis of advance, purely in terms of numbers of equipment; because some of the higher-level artillery is heavier, the increase in firepower is actually even larger. To take a World War I comparison, Bellamy estimates that the artillery fire in support of a Soviet breakthrough would have been six times more intense than the initial German bombardment at Verdun.

The heavy breakthrough battle is a special case, though. The scenarios of Team Yankee are set in a more fluid post-breakthrough environment where NATO forces are conducting a mobile defence, and are apparently able to engage the Soviets in smaller engagements. In a sense, then, the whole premise of the game is that NATO strategy has been succesful, and the Soviets have failed to overcome their defences through mass and tempo. However, how would Soviet artillery have been deployed in mobile operations? According to Bellamy (199-200), while artillery control would have been heavily centralized during the breakthrough battle, during the exploitation phase afterward, artillery battalions would be allocated to forward maneuver battalions. In this special case, it might have been possible for individual artillery batteries to be allocated to companies, but at battalion level, a forward tank or motor-rifle battalion would certainly have been supported by an artillery battalion. Existing tactical protocols for meeting engagements, a form of battle the Soviets would have actively sought, deal with an artillery battery attached to the company forming the march security element, with the rest of the maneuver and artillery battalions close behind.

In both the heavy breakthrough battle and subsequent engagements, then, we would expect to see a Soviet maneuver battalion supported by at least a battalion of artillery, if not more. Using the Team Yankee formation charts, the first battalion-level formation would be supported by at most two batteries of SP guns. Adding a second battalion only raises this number to three, meaning that a two-battalion force would only have half the minimum number of artillery support we'd expect to find. Admittedly, the rules make it possible to select "companies" which are actually barely platoons, but at this point the nomenclature and organization become thoroughly confused. An easy solution would be to increase both the battalion- and division-level artillery, and include equipment like the 2S4 Tyulpan 240mm self-propelled mortar, or even the 203mm 2S7 Pion.

Perhaps the most pointed example of the neglect, if not even disdain, the designers have for Soviet doctrine, is the scenario on pages 108-109, called "the Battle for Hill 214". The scenario depicts a Soviet motor-rifle battalion, reinforced by a handful of tanks but with no indirect fire support whatsoever, assaulting a US mechanized battlegroup in prepared positions over open ground. From the Soviet point of view, such an operation would be inconceivable, and the circumstances in which it would come about are exceedingly difficult to envision.

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Unfortunately, this neglect of artillery has more or less put me off trying the game, along with the price of the miniatures; at our friendly local gaming store, the 2S1 SP guns set you back 10€ each. One look at the prices for the Team Yankee models, which I didn't by any means think are all that unreasonable, forcefully reminded me of how cheap living card games are! But at the end of the day, while I was hoping for a combined arms battle on the Inner German Frontier, my impression is that this is a system more geared toward charging about in tanks. I'll probably take a look at the West Germany supplement, because if we're going to do Girls und Panzer, then why not go for a proper Panzer; however if they ever put out a rules supplement for the 1985 French army, I will definitely reconsider my decision to not get involved.

My thesis: Forests, nationalism and Finnish armored doctrine

For those of you that read Finnish, my master's thesis in political history should now be available for download at the University of Helsinki digital repository. The title is "Onko hyökkäysvaunuilla mitään tulevaisuutta meillä?" Suomalainen panssariajattelu ja puolustusvoimien maastokäsitys 1919-1939; roughly translated: "Do tanks have any future with us?" [the title of a 1924 article]: Finnish armored thought and the armed forces' conception of Finnish terrain, 1919-1939. I use the term "armored thought" to capture the fact that the way the military sees the potential use of the tank influences more than just tank doctrine proper, but also anti-tank weapons and organization, and the whole role of both friendly and enemy tanks in battle.

The starting point for my thesis was a question: what happened to the Finnish armored force? In 1919, the newly founded Finnish government brought a stack of surplus war materiel from France, including some thirty Renault FT tanks. These were organized into what was officially called the Tank Regiment, but was actually a battalion. At the time, this gave Finland the largest armored force in Northern Europe, and that distinction was maintained for several years; Finnish armor outnumbered and outclassed the Soviets well into the 1920's. However, by the time the Winter War rolls around, the main strength of the Finnish armored forces is still those same Renaults. They were dug in as armored strongpoints and destroyed in battle. The Vickers 6-ton tanks that should have replaced them were bought too late; only a handful of them saw combat, and most were lost. At the same time, the rest of the army was suffering terribly from a complete neglect of anti-tank defenses that had only begun to be remedied when war broke out.

So what happened? How did the Finnish army go from being at the forefront of armored warfare in North Europe to facing the mechanized Soviet onslaught in 1939 with a handful of completely obsolete World War I tanks and desperately improvised anti-tank weapons? Why did we drop the ball on this so spectacularly? That's what I aimed to find out.

**

Previous research held that Finland's ex-czarist officers were to blame for the neglect of armored warfare. In the years before the Second World War, the Finnish army officer corps basically consisted of three groups. There were some older Finnish officers who had served in the Imperial Russian Army when Finland was a part of Russia. Their political opponents were the Jäger officers, who as young activists had left Finland covertly during the First World War and enlisted in the German army. The third group were some youg officers who had joined up during the Finnish civil war in 1918, and those joining up through the Finnish army itself. This last group were obviously very junior in the 1920s, but their influence would naturally grow.

The accepted story of Finnish armor has been that the ex-czarist officers were hostile to armored warfare and were convinced that tanks couldn't be used at all in Finland's forests. The trouble is that this claim is very poorly sourced. The better histories of the Finnish army tend to all refer to the same sources on this, chief among which is a 1924 article in Suomen Sotilasaikakauslehti, a military periodical. Written by a young lieutenant in the Tank Regiment, it obliquely refers to a general notion that tanks are unusable in Finnish terrain. The more specific claim that czarist officers were responsible can be found in the armored corps' histories, and most directly in the memoirs of Aarne Sihvo, the highest-ranking of the Jäger officers and a bitter enemy of the "czarists".

These sources aren't very persuasive, and there is also evidence against them. Moreover, in the "Jäger revolt" of 1924, the Jäger officers effectively staged a coup in the army and had the majority of the "czarist officers" thrown out. If the ex-Russian Army officers were to blame for the neglect of armor and the notion of the unusability of tanks, surely things would change when they were sidelined. But they didn't. So there are several problems with the accepted story.

My goal was to find out how Finnish officers thought about armored warfare between the world wars. Interwar armored doctrines are interesting because they're a great showcase for the relationship between technology and doctrine: technology sets a framework for doctrine (the tanks can only go so fast, for instance), but different armies with access to the same technology will create very different doctrines. I started from Elizabeth Kier's idea of an army's culture determining what doctrinal options it "sees". Did the Finnish army not see tanks as viable weapons of war in Finland? If so, why not, and why did their opinion change?

As material I used articles published in Finnish military periodicals from 1919 to 1939 dealing with armored warfare. When it became obvious that I was dealing with a wider matter than armor, I also looked at articles that dealt with the military geography of Finland. My method was discourse analysis. I wasn't all that interested in what the articles were saying about armored warfare, but rather how they were saying it: what kind of arguments were being used, what was not being said, and so on. My main perspective was the history of ideas. Military thought is often quite wrongly segregated from the rest of society. Especially the majority of earlier studies on Finnish doctrine tend to view the development of doctrine as simple, apolitical, technical problem-solving, where field regulations neatly succeed one another. I wanted to see if Finnish military thought and even armored doctrine could be linked to broader Finnish politics and culture of the era.

Another perspective I used was critical geopolitics. Critical geopolitics maintains that concepts of terrain and geography in general aren't objective reconstructions of natural facts, but rather ideological and political constructs. Geographical ideas are created for various reasons, and they both influence and are influenced by culture and politics. In this case, the Winter War did demonstrate rather conclusively that tanks could indeed be used in Finnish terrain. So why would Finnish officers think differently?

As a curiosity, I happened to read James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State while working on this thesis, and it definitely had an influence. Military doctrine is also a product of "state sight"; the war of the future that doctrine is created to fight is necessarily imaginary, and based on theoretical abstractions. For a cadre conscript army like Finland's, even most of the army's own formations only exist in theory before actual mobilization. What my thesis ended up being was a look at one abstract model: the Finnish army's changing concept of the military geography of Finland.

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I found that the accepted view of the ex-czarist officers' hostility toward tanks is almost certainly wrong. While these officers ran the army high command, the Tank Regiment featured in their wartime planning. Hell, they're the ones who bought the damn things in the first place! In the early- to mid-1920's, there are several articles on mechanization, machine warfare and armor in the periodicals, expressing a variety of views from a Fulleresque obsolescence of the infantry to a dogmatic rejection of armor as unsuitable to Finland. Several young officers from the armored regiment took to the pages to defend their branch of service. It's also at this time that Sihvo adapts the French 1919 tank regulations to Finnish use, publishing several books on the subject. There were both pro- and anti-tank views being aired, as it were.

By contrast, after the "Jäger coup", this discussion dies down. A consensus forms that tanks can't be used in Finnish terrain at all, and both the armored corps and anti-tank defences are completely neglected. It's paradoxical that the Jägers, many of whom strongly identified as a young, dynamic force sweeping away the old, stagnant "Russians" and their outdated military thinking should have been so hostile to modern warfare. During the civil war, Sihvo had called the ex-czarist officers the "men of the retreat system", as opposed to the fervently offensive-minded Jägers. Elsewhere in Europe, young, dynamic revolutionary movements often went together with a modernist cult of the machine and the future; it's no accident that J.F.C. Fuller was a Fascist, or that armored doctrine was developed in such forward-looking ways in Germany and the Soviet Union. In Finland, by contrast, a system of military thought developed that almost harked back to the attaque á outrance of early World War I days. Why?

The key is terrain. Finnish officers formulated a view of Finnish terrain as diametrically opposite to Central Europe. One writer compared it to a photograph and a negative: compared to Finland, Central Europe had exactly the opposite proportion of forests. Central European tactics and organization were developed for this open environment, while Finnish tactics and doctrine had to work in the Finnish forests. The officers of the 1920's held that positional and machine warfare were impossible in the forests, as the dramatically reduced visibility drastically favored the offensive, and the tree cover effectively neutralized artillery, both by detonating the shells too high and early, and making resupply so difficult that sustained barrages couldn't be fired. Tanks couldn't be used in the woods at all, so neither armor nor anti-tank defences were necessary. So in effect, in the Finnish forests it would be as if the First World War had never happened.

This view is quite extraordinary, and completely wrong. Below is what a Finnish forest looks like after heavy artillery fire in the Winter War (SA-kuva):

Tanks were also used by both sides, and en masse by the Soviets. Both the Winter and Continuation wars saw prolonged periods of positional warfare, and the deployment of the entire conventional arsenal of machine warfare. While the war to the north of the Ladoga was very much forest fighting, in the crucial theater of the Karelian Isthmus, a brutal battle of attrition was fought that was exactly the kind of warfare Finnish officers of the late 1920's and early 30's had considered impossible.

I believe there are several reasons why they thought this. One was a lack of funding in the 20's, and a lack of ambition by officers, which led to most marches being carried out over roads and most battle exercises being fought over exercise grounds. There were very few large-scale manoeuvres. So it seems likely that many officers actually had very little practical experience of forest fighting. Similarly, practical knowledge of the effects of modern artillery fire on Nordic forests was in short supply.

Bizarrely, what little practical evidence there was contradicted the notion of the military exceptionality of the Finnish forest and the unique ability of the Finns to operate in it. In the Finnish civil war, both sides had effectively been restricted to the roads for both movement and combat, since poorly trained Finnish troops were entirely unable to operate effectively in the woods. The Renault tanks of the Tank Regiment had not only been tested in the terrain of the Karelian Isthmus and found usable, but the regiment had regularly toured Finnish military bases, demonstrating the tanks' ability to function in all environments. Yet this practical experience was ignored.

More importantly, though, there is a long tradition of Finnish thought (pdf) that identifies the Finns as "people of the forest", as opposed to Swedish-speakers or Russians. The unique nature of Finnish terrain has been synonymous with the uniqueness of the Finnish people, and still is: in his unprecedented televised address last month, Finland's current prime minister appealed to Finns' "unique relationship to nature". Finnish army officers, after all, weren't just concerned with training conscripts for war. The Finnish nation had only very recently been invented, and one important reason why Parliament had chosen a cadre system of conscription over several other alternatives was that a centralized national army would be more effective in indoctrinating conscripts into a proper Finnish nationalism. In order to achieve this, army officers used nationalist writings from the 19th century, which were steeped in the mythology of "forest Finland". The majority of the officers, especially the Jägers who stayed in the army after the civil war, were fanatical nationalists. Most of them also had at best a rudimentary military education.

Like I explained earlier, in order to formulate doctrine, a model of the terrain and forces involved has to be created. In the mental model of the Jäger officers, their Finnish conscripts were natural forest fighters, and the Finnish landscape was composed almost exclusively of impassable forests where "Central European" tactics and machine warfare wouldn't work at all. This "mental forest" was one where tanks simply couldn't operate. It was this that led to the idea often expressed in the late '20s and early 30's in the periodicals that tanks were unusable in Finland. So far from the former Imperial Russian officers being to blame, it was in fact the nationalist ideology of the Jägers that gave rise to the "anti-tank fallacy" of the interwar period.

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Previous research has maintained that Finnish thinking on armored warfare changed in the 1930's, when Finland's military attaché in Moscow, Aladár Paasonen, reported on the growing mechanization of the Soviet army. In response to Paasonen's report, trials were arranged in the Karelian Isthmus, which demonstrated that tanks could, after all, be used in Finnish terrain. This caused a complete shift in Finnish doctrine, but the re-equipping of the army was still a work in progress when the Winter War broke out.

Again, this is at best partially true. The shift in thinking had actually started earlier, because the decade of neglect for the armored corps ended in 1933 when field trials were arranged to determine the successor of the obsolescent Renault FTs. Similarly, an anti-tank regulation - a translated Soviet manual! - had been published, along with a program of anti-tank training for the infantry. On the other hand, it's puzzling why it took the Finnish army so long to react to Soviet mechanization, which had started in 1928. While Finnish periodicals had actively followed international discussions on tank doctrine in the earlier 1920s, by the time of the internationally influent Salisbury Plain experiments in 1928-29, the Finnish defence press was ignoring tank warfare.

What we do know is that in the early 1930's, there was a cultural shift in the Finnish army. The Finnish army had been massively influenced by Germany, both through the military training of the Jägers and the numerous German army officers who acted as consultants in the early years of the Finnish army. Interestingly, Sihvo was a prominent critic of the German influence: he felt that the Finns were nothing but expendable colonial troops to the Germans. His biographer believes this is the main reason why Sihvo, an illustrious public figure at the time, was forced into resigning from the army in 1919. In the early 30's, concerns similar to Sihvo's were given official acceptance in a memorandum drafted by the army high command, under two successive Jäger chiefs of staff. The memorandum decried the fact that more than a decade after independence, Finland still didn't have its own army, but rather a force created to serve the needs of a foreign power. I believe that this reorientation gives rise to the change in Finnish military thought in the 1930's in general. Later in the decade, the first actual large-scale trials of forest fighting demonstrated that the Finnish army regimental organization was unsuitable to forest warfare. It was also found that the effectiveness of artillery in the forest was far greater than had previously been assumed.

This general shift in thinking seems to also have led to the armor question being re-examined. This didn't actually mean that any new information was produced. The 1934 trials in the Isthmus were held using some new Vickers tanks and the single Carden-Loyd tankette in Finland - but the majority of the tanks were Renaults. Effectively, the Finnish armored corps demonstrated in 1934 what they had already demonstrated in 1920 and the following decade: that Renault FTs could be used in Finnish terrain. What was unacceptable in the 1920's became acceptable in the 1930's, and Finnish armored thinking changed.

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The fact that practically identical trials in 1920 and 1934 had opposite effects on Finnish doctrine highlights the way in which military thought cannot be seen as simple, technical problem-solving. As Elizabeth Kier said, understanding military culture is crucial to understanding the development and change of doctrine. Specifically, an examination of the army's conception of Finnish terrain through critical geopolitics and the history of ideas is crucial to understanding how the army saw the useability of tanks and the necessity of anti-tank defenses. To understand what doctrines armies arrive at, we have to understand how they see.

And that, in brief and unscientific form, was pretty much my master's thesis. It clocked in at 97 pages, and was both incredibly stressful and incredibly rewarding to write. The whole project took off in a completely unexpected direction by the time I found myself reading articles on the effectiveness of various kinds of artillery munitions in forests, but it was worth it. Overall, though I'm very much a fan of new military history, I feel that my thesis also demonstrates that re-examining topics of "old military history" like doctrine and tactics with a cultural studies approach and apparatus can be worthwhile, at least in providing new perspectives.