Playing With Triggers

Whenever we read an account of the beginning of WWI it’s necessary for the historian to first lay out the landscape of interlocking defense treaties that turned Europe into a sort of Venn diagram of fantasy militarism. To me, it’s a reminder of the great Avalon Hill game Diplomacy which we played in my high school Military History Club (AKA: D&D club) – everyone secretly negotiating with everyone else against everyone else. For Europe, the results were grim, and I needn’t go into them.

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While America’s Blusterer-in-Chief Blusters…

… Xi and Putin are trying to achieve a political solution to a political problem. I’m terrified that the US will do something stupid because it’s not the power sitting at the head of the Grownup Table. Actually, the US is mysteriously absent from the Grownup Table. Oh, look, over there in the corner, wearing the “dunce” hat, it’s America!

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4,000, 5,000 – 20,000 – What’s The Difference?

One of the crucial failures of leadership during the Vietnam War was the way the pentagon managed to reduce a complex political/military/logistical situation down to a discussion about head-count. That allowed the military to focus discussion about the war into a question of head-count: how many dead Vietcong heads did you collect today? How many shiny new American heads did you ship over? How many came back?

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