Milstack Saturday (1 February 2025)
The best material on military matters I encountered in the past week
On scholagladitoria, Matt Easton traces the rise, fall, and renaissance of the cavalry lance during the long century leading up to the First World War. Better yet, he does this in the accessible, enjoyable, matter-of-fact manner I have come to expect from his video.
Alas, I cannot say the same for The French Way of War. In the latter lecture, the presenter works so hard to showcase his smarts that his many useful insights sink into a sea of self-satisfaction. Happily, readers who wish to preserve themselves from sixty-three minutes of non-stop dweebery can find the same information in the speaker’s written work: Why the French will Continue to Prioritize Quality Over Mass, French Army Approaches to High Intensity Warfare in the 20th Century, and France’s War in Mali: Lessons for an Expeditionary Army.
Here on Substack, Rebel Historian Barbora Jiřincová tells tales of ‘The First War Dogs’, Democura ponders the role of luck in the lives of ‘Warriors of Fortune’, and The Connecting File provides advice to Marines who find themselves deployed to America’s southern border.
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I have some Mexican border tips myself but this is a Family Friendly blog. 🥸
A thought occurs. Mass. When you need it, nothing else suffices. Quantity has a quality all its own. This usually is the preface to very large scale deployment of many, many soldiers, many of whom will be killed or maimed in protracted, attritional conflicts. No one likes these, but sometimes they happen.
But.
In the civilian realm we are seeing the growing of massive technological unemployment. We are told that AI + robotics will make almost all human labor replaceable, overly expensive, and obsolete, rendering most of humanity a mass of hungry mouths with no labor to sell for food, meaning that holders of capital will have to find ways to keep the bulk of humanity anesthetized with drugs and/or pornography until they die off or can be euthenized.
An unpleasant, even dystopian vision, but one that has a certain logic.
But.
Is there a nugget of happy news here?
Can we gain not only speed, accuracy, firepower, protection, etc. via technology but also MASS itself?
Can large swarms of robotic fighters actually replace swarms of vulnerable, fragile soldiers made of ambulatory meat?
What if a country with lots of capital fielded a truly huge army of machines with near-human or even better-than-human fighting capability?
Is this within the horizon of the possible?
Might the USA deploy industrial era military power, in terms of the size of units committed, but staff and man those units with very small numbers of human operators, and the actual shooting, storming, charging, door-knocking, is all or mostly done by machinery?
Do we want that?
And what can that elaborated, networked, pitiless robot swarm do if it is turned around on its "own people" -- and who are it's people, anyway?
Lots of big science fiction-type questions draw ever nearer for real-world discussion.
And the actual resolution of these questions will occur incrementally, thoughtlessly, in reseponse to crisis, in response to venal interest, and the end result will be something no one would have ever asked for at the front end.
What am I missing here?