Alchemy Gets a Bad Rap

I don't remember the specific context, but recently somebody wanted to insult somebody else.  So, he derisively referred to him as an Alchemist.  That is an all too common example of something I have been guilty of.  "Boy, back in the old, old days", my thinking used to go, "people were really dumb".  And it's not just me, or at least the old me.  Scratch the surface, and you'll find that this is a common sentiment.

As the years have passed, I have had occasion to take a deep dive into why several people in the past believed what they believed.  This has convinced me to change my thinking to the point where I now hold exactly the opposite sentiment.  Some of the smartest people who ever lived, lived more than a thousand years ago.  And some of those people were Alchemists.

Sure, they held beliefs that we no longer hold.  And without considering context, what information they had access to, that's enough for many people to conclude that they must have been dumb.  You see, in light of what we now know, their old ideas seem pretty dumb to us.

But they didn't know what we now know.  And given what they did know, they did a far better job of it than many of us modern know-it-alls do.  This fact that so many contemporary people get so much wrong has provided fodder for far too many of my posts to this blog.

Returning to the past and the people who populated it, a few years ago I did a double blog post on Newton's Philosophie Naturalis Principia Mathematica (see Sigma 5: Principia - part 1 and Sigma 5: Principia - Part 2).  In Part 1 I said "[i]t . . . kicked my butt, completely and utterly".  That's right.  A book that was published more than three hundred years ago kicked my butt.

Now, most people consider me a geek and a math guy.  So, the book should be right up my alley.  And besides, I have had a year of college Calculus plus sundry other exposures to the subject.  It is a book that spends a lot of time laying out the basics of Calculus (it was the first broad introduction introduction to Calculus to see print).  It then uses Calculus to solve various problems we would now consider simple and straightforward.

Sounds pretty much like Calculus 101, right?  So, you'd think that with my background I would have been able to buzz through it without breaking a sweat.  But that's the opposite of how it went.  I was in over my head, usually way over my head, almost all of the time.

Newton was a coinventor of Calculus.  He and a guy named Leibnitz came up with the idea independently, and at about the same time.  So, the version of Calculus used in Principia should have been pretty basic.  And it was.  (Leibnitz came up with a more sophisticated version.  That's why most people now use the Leibnitz methodology rather than Newton's.)  But it turns out that was no help at all.

Between then (the book was first published in 1687, but it was based on work Newton had done many years earlier) and now, people have had a lot of time to figure out how to better organize the ideas Newton developed and then teach them.  That's one factor.  Another factor is the difference between what people back then had to work with in terms of tools and what people had to work with in terms of information.

The farther back you go, the poorer the tools.  And the farther back you go, the poorer the data.  And this extends both to quality and quantity.  Back then people didn't have much data.  And the data they had was often of poor quality.  That's the real reason only a certified genius like Newton could invent something like Calculus.  He had to find a way around the fact that he had poor tools to apply to poor data.

This becomes immediately apparent when you start diving into Principia.  Newton had to be really creative to overcome the many obstacles thrown up by few and poor tools.  We have better ways of dealing with those problems.  As a result, we can now take a much simpler and more direct approach.  It is the convoluted (and very creative) methods Newton was forced to use that make the work so hard to follow.

By now I've been exposed to enough primary material (the original publication documenting the method some ancient or other had to use) to see a pattern.  I'm sure Euclid's Elements, the document that all of modern Geometry is built upon, would follow this same pattern.  But, since I have not gotten around to checking Elements out, I can't say so from personal knowledge.  But I can speak from personal experience about an example that is not as old as Elements, but is much older than Principia.

One of my High School Math teachers handed out Galileo's proof that a free falling projectile, one which is being subjected to the effects of gravity and nothing else, follows a parabolic path.  His proof can colloquially be described as "Greek to me".  Why?  It turns out it is easy to duplicate his result if you have access to Algebra and Analytic Geometry.

Both are now taught in High School (and sometimes earlier).  But neither had been invented in time for Galileo to make use of them.  Without those two tools Galileo had to be a genius on a level with Newton to pull what he did off.  Fortunately, he was.  And that's my basic theses when it comes to Alchemy.

It wasn't that those people were dumb.  It was that they had poor tools and poor data.  As a result, it is no surprise that they went down a lot of rabbit holes.  Nevertheless, after herculean effort, and with unimaginable persistence they slowly developed better tools.  And after still more effort and with still more persistence they slowly cleaned up the old data and developed the new data that eventually led to Chemistry.

So, let's now take a tour through history and see what these people knew and what they learned.  Alchemy as a concept dates back thousands of years, but the word itself is relatively modern.  The word only goes back to medieval times.  The French word alquemie got latinized to become alchymia.  The usual rules were applied to turn the Latin word into it's English equivalent.

The concept turns out to be one that several different civilizations have found their way to.  The oldest seems to be the ancient Egyptians.  There, it grew out of an interest in metallurgy.  If nothing else, there is always a market for a better sword.  Wood gets replaced by stone.  Stone gets replaced by copper.  Copper gets replaced by bronze.  Bronze gets replaced by Iron.  Iron gets replaced by Steel.  Each of these steps took a great deal of technical ingenuity to achieve.

The ancient Egyptians were only able to progress to the bronze stage.  But finding better materials and manufacturing techniques to employ in sword making was a priority for the Egyptian governments of the time.  The Greeks learned from the Egyptians and improved on what they learned.  The Romans learned from the Greeks and improved on what they learned.  The Byzantines learned from the Romans and improved on  what they learned.  Medieval society learned from the Byzantines and improved on what they learned.  Along the way sword making progressed to the point where it was using steel.

But sword making was not the only problem confronting ancient Egyptian governments.  They needed all kinds of new, better, and cheaper materials.  And at bottom Alchemy is the study of materials, how to organize them into useful groups, how to transform one material into another material, and how to create new materials.  The ancient Egyptians were not the only people confronting these challenges.  As a result, under various names Alchemy arose independently in India, China, and perhaps other places.

This is the knowledge equivalent of parallel evolution.  It turns out that if something is useful enough, it often gets developed independently several times.  Flight is one example.  Certain dinosaurs developed the ability to fly.  This got passed down to modern birds.  But birds are not mammals.   Bats are mammals.  Bats developed the ability to fly completely independently of dinosaurs and their various offspring.

A more extreme example is eyesight.  Eyesight has been developed independently at least five separate times.  As just one example, insect eyes are completely different from mammal eyes.  Many evolution deniers are completely unaware of this.  And the fact that the intermediate steps between "nothing even vaguely resembling eyes" and "fully developed eyesight" have been documented in eye-glazing detail since the objection was first raised, has also failed to penetrate their awareness.

Scientists love theories.  They even like theories that are known to be wrong.  Theories give you a way to organize a large mass of data into some vague approximation of order.  A reasonable number of groups is far easier to wrap one's head around than a large mass of random facts and observations.  There is a popular form of grouping that is commonly associated with Alchemy.  It is the Earth, Air, Fire, Water business.

But let's take a look at each of these groups with modern eyes.  The first thing we need to do is discard two of them as utterly hopeless.  Earth and Fire are far too complicated to get anywhere with.  Comparatively speaking, Air and Water seem pretty simple.  So, let's take a look at what ancient Alchemists were up against by focusing on just these last two.

Of the two, we now know that Water is the simpler one.  But even it is complex.  Ancients knew that it existed in three forms.  As a solid it is ice or snow.  As a liquid it is "just water".  But "just water" comes in two general types, fresh and salt.  Water vapor is the third form.  But what's with it?  Is it Air, an entirely different group, or is it still Water?  Complexity abounds no matter where we look.

And we now know that Water consists of two atoms of Hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen.  All three are tightly bound together by chemical bonds into what we now call a molecule.  So, maybe Air is simpler.  It's all the same stuff.  It's always gaseous.  It never changes to a liquid or a solid, at least as far as the ancients knew.  But we now know that Air is a mixture.

It is roughly 20% Oxygen and 80% Nitrogen.  I use the word "roughly", because about 3% of Air is something else.  Most of the "something else" is Argon.  But, since the ancients had no way to detect any of the components of that 3%, I'm just going to ignore it.

But that leaves plenty of complexity remaining.  Air is a mixture.  And the components of that mixture are not simple elements.  They are molecules.  The "Oxygen" is actually a molecule consisting of two atoms of Oxygen tightly bound together by chemical bonds.  It's the same thing with the "Nitrogen" in the Air.  It is a molecule consisting of two atoms of Nitrogen tightly bound together by chemical bonds.

The problem this presented to ancient Alchemists is that those chemical bonds are not tight enough.  Both Oxygen and Nitrogen are intimately involved in the chemistry of life (and lots of other things).  The most obvious example is Oxygen.  In most cases things burn by breaking some of the chemical bonds in some of the molecules and then rearranging the things into new molecules.  Effectively, old molecules get replaced by new molecules.

But each element that was in one of the old molecules that gets changed ends up in one of the new molecules, just not in the same molecule it started in.  And that extends to some of the Oxygen molecules in the atmosphere.  Some of them become old molecules that get changed into new molecules.  Sometimes, these new molecules are gasses.  Sometimes not.  Either way, Alchemists found it extremely difficult to figure out what was going on.

To take the commonest example, a major constituent of wood is Carbon.  When wood burns the Carbon in the wood is detached (one or more chemical bonds are broken) from whatever molecule it is bound to.  The chemical bonds binding the two atoms of Oxygen in an "Oxygen" molecule also get broken.  The chemical bonds get reformed into a new molecule called Carbon Dioxide.

Carbon Dioxide consists of one atom of Carbon (from the wood) combined with two atoms of Oxygen (from the air).  And to make things even more confusing for Alchemists studying this process, Carbon Dioxide is a gas.  Of course, as wood burns, many other chemical reactions are going on in parallel with the one I described.  Some of them involve Nitrogen molecules from the atmosphere.

In Nitrogen's case several different new molecules form.  The amount of each that gets formed varies substantially depending on conditions.  Among simplest new molecules are Nitrogen Oxide (1 Nitrogen, 1 Oxygen), Nitrogen Dioxide (1 Nitrogen, 2 Oxygen), and Cyanide (1 Nitrogen, 1 Carbon).  All are gasses.  Other, more complicated new molecules are solids.  Needless to say, untangling all this took a VERY long time.

Returning to Water for a moment, shallow lakes sometimes evaporate completely and leave behind a lot of salt.  This is a phenomenon that the ancients were very familiar with.  The obvious conclusion is that The "pure" version of Water is salt free.  But there is noting obviously Earthy about salt Water.  It seems to just be Watery.  But you get a kind of Earth when you precipitate (a modern word that describes what is happening) all of the salt out of salt water.

These are just a few examples of the problems associated with the whole Earth-Air-Fire-Water business.  The problem Alchemists had was that no one could come up with an alternative that worked any better.  The shortcomings of a bad theory can be used as hints as to where to look for a better theory.  But the Earth-Air-Fire-Water theory wasn't even able to do that.  The lack of a "new and improved" theory is one reason why progress took so long.

But Alchemists tried.  Ancient (and later medieval) Alchemists developed many recipes for turning one material into another.  But they had tremendous difficulty coming up with predictive rules.  They got some milage out of "if this formula works what other formula should also work?", but not much.  They kept getting lost in the detail.

They knew of thousands of different materials.  They knew that Earth-Air-Fire-Water was too few groups, and perhaps the wrong list of groups.  At the other end of the scale they knew of many groups, each consisting of a small number of materials, where all the members of the group behaved in a similar manner.  But unfortunately, a large number of materials didn't seem to fit into any group.  What they needed was system that would produce an intermediate number of groups, and that would allow every material to be put into one group.

In short, what they needed was what in modern terms are called elements and molecules.  BTW, there is actually a third category.  There are compounds.  These are materials that consist of a mixture of molecules.  There may be bonds keeping the compound together, but these bonds are far weaker than chemical bonds.  Compounds introduce a whole additional degree of complexity.  But things are already too complex, so for the most part I'm going to ignore them.

But figuring out what is an element and what is a molecule is extremely difficult.  Water seems like it should be an element.  The Oxygen in Air seems like it should be an element.  To Ancient Alchemists, there didn't seem to be anything peculiar about Iron or Sulphur, both of which they were familiar with.  And both of which are elements, while water and molecular Oxygen aren't.  Nor is ordinary air.

Mercury is an element.  And Mercury was also well known to ancient Alchemists.  But then and now Mercury feels like it should be in a category by itself.  Ancient Alchemists grouped it with other metals.  But even they considered metals to be too vague of a category to be of much use.  What makes Mercury so unique is that it is the only metal (and element) that is a liquid at room temperature.

The problem Alchemists were wrestling with was similar to the one Geologists wrestled with before the advent of Plate Tectonics.  Geologists spend most of their time studying compounds.  Over time they have been able to catalog more than a million of them.  But the old questions of where to find a particular compound, how compounds get transformed, what new and possibly valuable compounds are out there and where can they be found, also hounded them.

Geologists were familiar with weathering.  They knew something about the effects of rivers.  They knew a lot about this pocket and that pocket of their particular area of study.  But nothing ever coalesced into an overarching theory that put the various processes they already knew about into some kind of larger context.  Until, that is, Plate Tectonics was developed in the '50s and '60s.

It was the overarching theory that provided that provided context into which the various pockets of knowledge could be placed.  It also introduced additional processes.  Plate Tectonics explains, for instance, how many types of rocks get formed.  It explains how volcanoes work and why they end up where they do.

In short it brings previous knowledge into a single coherent whole.  And it introduces new ideas that shed much needed light on what had previously been mysterious.  But the key technology that convinced Geologists that Plate Tectonics was real was one that was only developed in the aftermath of World War II, the ability to map the magnetic fields of rocks on the bottoms of various oceans.

The basic idea of Plate Tectonics had first been introduced several decades earlier.  But the evidence in its favor was scant and unconvincing.  And what evidence there was, was only possible to collect when twentieth century technology became available.  There was literally no evidence to support the existence of Plate Tectonics that was available to anyone living before 1900.

Alchemists had the same problem.  Almost all of the tools and techniques necessary to tell the signal from the noise took an extremely long time to develop.  Modern chemists can use something called a Mass Spectrometer to probe the constituents of a compound.  Often, elemental signals are present.  Helium was first identified by examining the spectrum of the Sun.

Alchemists didn't know it, but they had a tool that could not be used in as many situations as a modern Mass Spectrometer can.  Still, it can be useful in many situations.  And it doesn't require any equipment beyond what a typical Alchemist has on hand.  It turns turns out that if you burn things you get a colored flame.  And the colors in the flame tell you a lot about what's in what you are burning.

The problem is that this technique works best if you are burning things that are both pure and simple.  If you burn complicated things then there are so many processes going on, each of which produces its own distinctive set of colors, that the colors generated by all these processes mask each other.  And if the sample is not pure, you automatically get a complex situation.

Take what sounds like it should be a simple situation, Coal.  It's just Carbon, right?  Wrong!  Consider how Coal got created.  A long time ago a large quantity of organic material got buried deep underground.  How?  Plate Tectonics provides the answer.  In any case, after enough time had passed, and after the organic matter had been subjected to just the right amount of heat and pressure, it turned into Oil.  Slightly different amounts of time, pressure, and heat produced Coal.

Given the vicissitudes inherent in how it got created, it is not surprising that there are lots of different types of Coal.  Some types of Coal are almost 100% Carbon.  Other types of Coal are only 50% Carbon, or even less.   When confronted by this kind of problem Alchemists first have to decide "do I have different grades of the same thing or do I have different things".  The process of figuring out which it is was a slow and painful one.

One factor that really slowed things down for Alchemical progress is secrecy.  Being an Alchemist is a time consuming job.  Not that many people are rich enough to self fund.  So, many Alchemists worked for the government.  That meant keeping the King, or whatever the local head of government was called, happy.

He expected value for his money.  Or at least the promise of value.  A new and improved sword or other piece of military technology would fill the bill.  So would the ability to turn a cheap "base" metal like Lead into valuable metal like Gold.  If the Alchemist was successful, it behooved the King to keep the result secret.  If not, then secrecy avoided embarrassment.

So, Alchemy and secrecy became closely associated almost from the start.  And secrecy inhibited the free flow of information.  That resulted in a lot of duplication of effort and no one Alchemist having a good understanding of the state of the art of the field as a whole.  Before continuing, I am going to return to the whole Lead into Gold business for a moment.

To the modern ear the whole business sounds ridiculous.  But consider this.  We now know how to do it.  All you have to do is smash a Hydrogen atom into a Lead atom.  If you do it just right, then the Proton in the Hydrogen nucleus gets added into the nucleus of the Lead atom and that turns it into a Gold atom.  The process involves using a horribly expensive device called a Particle Accelerator.  And the quantity of Gold produced is measured in terms of numbers of atoms.  But those are just practical details.

We also know how to turn graphite (a common and cheap form of Carbon) into Diamond (an uncommon and very expensive form of Carbon).  Industrial diamonds are made from graphite on a daily basis by using specialized machinery.  But so far, producing large, gem-quality diamonds by using industrial processes is not possible to do, at least in a cost effective manner.  But again, those are just practical details.

Now let's look at what Alchemists knew and what they did not know.  They did not know which materials were elements, which were molecules, and which were compounds.  Consider salt.  Table salt is Sodium Chloride (1 Sodium, 1 Chloride).  But to a modern chemist, "salt" is not one singe thing.  It is a whole family of similar things.  Potassium Chloride is a "salt".  The list of molecules that are salts is far to long to include here.

One thing that is true of all salts is that they are are molecules and not elements.  But for the purposes of argument, let's say that the same thing is true of Lead and Gold.  We know that they are elements, but Alchemists didn't.  So, for the purposes of our argument let's pretend for the moment that they are molecules instead.  And let's model those molecules after the two salts I just mentioned.

First, assume that Lead, the cheaper and more common material in our example, is actually some analog of Sodium Chloride.  Let's also assume that Gold, the more expensive and less common material in our example, is some analog of Potassium Chloride.  If this were true then an Alchemist could turn Lead into Gold by some process analogous to replacing Sodium with Potassium.  That might easily be within the capability of our hypothetical Alchemist.

Given what Alchemists knew and didn't know, it was perfectly reasonable for them to assume that there was a practical process for turning Lead into Gold.  And that means that they were not stupid to try.  And that means that ridiculing them for trying is not justified.

I hope that by now I have convinced you that the task Alchemists set for themselves was an exceedingly difficult one.  The invention of the printing press helped a lot.  It made it easier for results to escape one location and become widely known.  That helped.  But another important factor tuned out to be understanding that the main problem was just too big.  It had to be broken down into many sub-problems and each one had to be tackled separately.

Many separate methods were developed for purifying many separate materials.  Many compounds were identified as compounds and their constituent molecules identified.  In some cases the constituent elements that came together to make a specific molecule were identified.  More and more materials were determined to be either a molecule or an element.

But this buildup of information was a slow, painful process.  A breakthrough here rarely led to a breakthrough somewhere else.  It was a slow, painstaking process to develop the procedures, processes, and data necessary for a clear picture to evolve.  If you want to get something of an idea just how slow and painful the process was, just Google "Phlogiston".

By the late 1600s a hazy picture started to form.  By the early 1700s the picture was starting to come into focus.  But that very progress caused another problem to surface.  Alchemy had been around for a long time.  And for much of that time Alchemy lacked a firm foundation.  That left the door open for charlatans of every stripe.  They took advantage of this open door in large numbers.  And that gave Alchemy a sketchy reputation.

Over the millennia, many luminaries have worked in Alchemy.  Newton (yes - that Newton) was just one of many people who to this day we think of as being reputable people, but who were also serious Alchemists.  There have always been enough disreputable people mixed in with the reputable ones that many people are convinced that all of Alchemy is disreputable.

If the field was going to move forward, then something needed to be done.  The solution was one we are now very familiar with, rebranding.  Starting in about 1720 reputable Alchemists started calling themselves Chemists.  The work they were doing hadn't changed.  From a practical point of view, it was still Alchemy.

But the rebrand allowed them to separate themselves and the work they were doing from the now widely discredited term of Alchemy.  The rebranding worked.  The field went forward, now at the quicker pace enabled in part by shedding the old Alchemical baggage.

Today, Chemistry is seen as an honorable profession that produces reliable results.  Alchemy, on the other hand, has lost whatever connection it had with the good work that was done under its auspices.  That left just the bad stuff.  But Alchemy hasn't changed.  Only our perception of it has changed.  And the current perception is inaccurate and unfair.  It gets a bad rap.

On War - Ukraine

Every once in a while war fighting goes through a paradigm shift.  I believe that this is true with respect to the current conflict in Ukraine.  But cutting to the chase is no fun.  So I am going to first drag you through a lot of history.  I think it's interesting and informative history.  I hope you end up agreeing with me.  And in what may seem to some like an excessive move, I am going to start in prehistoric times.

The word "history" used to have a precise definition.  If events got written down then those events were "historic".  In the (it was assumed) time before written records were an option, any event that happened was characterized as a "prehistoric" event.  Modern scientific techniques have made the situation far less cut and dried.  As a result, the definition of "history" has gotten more fuzzy.  But, generally speaking, anything that happened before about 2,500 years ago (and a lot that has happened since) gets categorized as prehistoric.  So, . . .

In prehistoric times if circumstances were conducive, a tribe could double its population in about thirty years.  What that meant in practical terms was that human populations grew to, and stayed at, the highest level the landscape could support, its so called "carrying capacity".  So, most tribes were population limited most of the time.

And these population limited tribes lived in close proximity to other tribes that were also population limited.  And that led to conflict because the only way a tribe could increase its population was to increase the amount of land it controlled.  And the only way for one tribe to increase the amount of land it controlled was at the expense of another tribe.

During this period tribes lived in close proximity to the same other tribes for long periods of time.  Then as now a minor injury can easily get infected.  With the advent of modern medicine that's usually not a problem.  But, to state the obvious, there was no modern medicine back then.

People of that period had no effective way to deal with infections, so an infection could easily lead to death or serious disability.  Since fighters were drawn from the relatively small general population of the tribe, it was important to minimize their chance of an injury that could lead to an infection.

That concern often affected the way tribes of the period fought with each other.  A popular tactic of the period is now called "counting coup".  The side that counted the most coup was adjudged to be the winning side.  A fighter was given credit for counting a coup if he just touched a fighter from the other tribe.  He didn't have to hurt him.  He just had to touch him and get away untouched (and presumably unharmed).  Counting coup allowed warring tribes to agree on who was winning without putting the health of either tribe at risk.

And it almost doesn't need to be said.  But weapons like knives and spears that were developed for hunting and killing big game could also be used when a conflict escalated to the point where bloodshed was called for.  So, that's how more serious wars started out being fought.  And little strategy or tactics were involved beyond those used to hunt big game.  One fighter would use standard hunting tactics to stalk another fighter.

But over time population aggregates grew and specialization set in.  City states developed armies consisting of specially trained fighters called soldiers.  Strategy, tactics, and weapons got more sophisticated, but not by much.  Shields were introduced.  And knives evolved into swords.  But even large battles generally involved the use of only the simplest tactics.  They were usually fought melee style.

In a melee the each army charges at the other army.  The armies soon intermingle and the battle devolves into a series of one-on-one fights.  This is what we almost always see when we see a movie that includes a battle.  In the movies, who wins the battle is invariably decided by a single mano-a-mano fight between the main good guy and the main bad guy. That's not what happens in reality, but it makes for compelling drama.

Relying on melee tactics, and your army's ability to win more one-on-one fights than the other guy's army, is not the best way to win wars.  Too much is left up to chance.  Lots of people in lots of places and at lots of times came up with better ways.  But, in the interests of simplicity and brevity, I am going to focus on how things evolved in Western cultures.  Bear in mind that things generally progressed along similar lines everywhere.

The Greeks were one of the first to figure out that there was a better way.  They developed the Phalanx.  They lined their soldiers up in rows.  Each soldier had a pike (a long spear), a shield, and a sword.  The front "rank" (row) of soldiers were placed close together so that there were only small gaps between their shields.  The pike, with its butt jammed into the ground, poked out between pairs of shields.

An attacking army, presumably using melee tactics, would smash up against the wall of shields.  In the case of any opposing soldiers who avoided getting impaled on a pike the Greek soldiers would stab the at them with their swords.  The opposing soldiers had a hard time getting at the Greek soldiers because they stayed hidden behind their shields.  Jamming the butt of the pike into the ground allowed Greek soldiers to fend off opposing soldiers even if they were mounted on horses.

Usually some of the opposing soldiers would somehow succeed in breaking through the front rank.  But behind the front rank was a second rank.  And behind that a third.  And so on.  The succeeding ranks could deal with any opposing soldiers who broke through.  They could also step forward and replace any soldier in the front rank who got killed or injured.

Greek armies using Phalanx tactics were extremely successful against pretty much all comers.  But eventually opposing armies figured out that the best way to beat a Phalanx was to use flanking tactics.   You went around the end of the Phalanx and attacked the formation from the rear.  Once opposing armies figured this out, Greek armies stopped having as much success.

But they still had a lot of success.  That is until the Romans came along.  The Romans came up with a better tactic than the Phalanx.  It was called the Roman Square.  What the Roman Square gave the Romans was an ability to defend against flanking tactics while continuing to retain the other advantages of the Phalanx.

The Romans organized their soldiers into squares.  Each wall of the square was set up like a Phalanx.  But the Roman Square did not have an end.  It only had corners, which the Romans reinforced as best they could.  Roman soldiers could defend themselves successfully from attack regardless of what direction it came from.  There were only a few battles fought between Greek Phalanxes and Roman Squares.  But that was enough to demonstrate the clear superiority of the Roman Square.

Eventually, the Roman Empire fell apart.  It took a lot of organization and resource to create and maintain a large army that was capable of fighting using Roman Square tactics.  Rome eventually lost the ability to field and maintain such an army.

That left an opening for various hordes using tactics that would not have worked against Roman armies in their prime.  The hordes poured through the gaps that were opened up by the decline and ravaged the carcass of the Roman Empire.

Once things settled down, it was left to the relatively small communities that remained to figure out a way to stay safe.  That's when castles popped up all over the place.  When an invading horde showed up all of the peasants burned their fields, gathered up everything that was portable, but especially their livestock, and retreated to the local castle.  The castle typically held enough supplies to keep everybody fed and housed for a couple of years.

The invading horde quickly denuded the countryside.  But if the retreat to the castle had been done properly, they found only a limited amount of food with which to sustain themselves.  If they could successfully storm the castle relatively quickly then they could raid the castle's stores and life would be good.  If not, their best option was to quickly move on in search of better prospects elsewhere.

Early castles were essentially large piles of rock.  All they needed were tall, steep walls and enough interior space to house the local population and store their supplies.  The main tools for "reducing" a castle (punching a hole in a wall) were the trebuchet (large gravity powered slingshot), the catapult (large spring powered sling shot), and the battering ram.  If the door was strong enough the battering ram was ineffective.

In theory, catapults and trebuchets could be used to knock walls down.  In reality, they were only able to do this for poorly built castles with thin walls.  Most often the stones they hurled, which were relatively small and had a relatively low velocity, could do little or no damage.  So, in most cases the castle was sturdy enough to hold out long enough to force the horde to give up and move on.

So, for a long time the local castle was able to successfully keep relatively small communities safe.  Not surprisingly, castles sprung up all over the place.  But the castle and its surrounding population came to form a community.  And each community was able to, and found a need to, support a small number of "Knights in Shining Armor".

You see, it wasn't only large roaming hordes that communities needed to be defended from.  It was also small bands of brigands.  The brigands did not need to storm the castle to be successful.  With their small numbers they could live off what had been left behind in the retreat to the castle for relatively long periods of time.  All the brigands needed to do to do very well for themselves was to successfully terrorize individuals or small groups in the community that surrounded the castle.

Since it was fixed in place, the castle could not defend the community against brigands.  A small but powerful mobile defense was required.  That need led to the development of the Knight.  Knights had enough offensive capability to handle small bands of brigands.

They also had the defensive capability necessary to fend off whatever counterattacks the brigands could come up with.  And the infrastructure necessary to build and maintain the castle was all that was needed to support one or more Knights.

As nations eventually re-emerged their kings organized groups of Knights into small but powerful armies.  A group of Knights could easily overcome anything short of another group of Knights.  So, periodic wars between groups of Knights became a common occurrence.  And, since the peasants had no effective defense, it became easy for the family that controlled the castle, and with it the Knights, to use their Knights to oppress their local peasants and promote themselves into the aristocracy.

This castle/knight model prevailed in Europe for hundreds of years.  What broke the stalemate was the Battle of Agincourt.  English Yeomen (a kind of peasant) became expert in the use of the longbow.  It was powerful enough to shoot an arrow that could pierce the strongest armor a Knight could wear.  The English Yeomen were agile enough to stay out from under the hooves of the horses of the French Knights.  The French Knights, on the other hand, had no defense from the arrows of the Yeomen.

But Agincourt turned out to be a one-off.  English society changed.  Soon, yeomen became unwilling to spent their entire youth training to draw the heavy longbow and then shoot it accurately.  But that didn't stop the Knight from being doomed anyhow.  Because at about this time the Crossbow came into common use.

Crossbow archers used a crank to load a bow that was every bit as powerful as a longbow.  Crossbowmen could not load and fire as quickly as a yeoman could.  But they were quick enough to easily handle a group of Knights.  And the Crossbow did not require the strength or training the longbow did.  So, it was relatively easy to field large numbers of Crossbow archers.

The Knight in Shining Armor soon vanished from the scene.  Because hot on the heels of the Crossbow came gunpowder.  A musket was complicated and expensive to construct.  It was also difficult to operate and maintain.  But not so hard that Musketeers didn't soon start showing up everywhere.  Once they were available in large numbers, they quickly drove soldiers equipped with any of the previous weapons, up to and including the Crossbow, off the field of battle.

The grownup version of the musket, the cannon, also had a big effect on warfare.  They rendered the traditional castle obsolete.  You see, they were powerful enough to knock down the walls of even a well-constructed castle.  This did not obsolete castles.  But it radically changed their design.  It quickly became apparent that the best defense against an attacking army that used cannons was to mount cannons on the walls of the castle.

The "pile of rock" school of castle design was quickly replaced by very sophisticated designs.  Now sight lines and fields of fire were critically important.  Geometry and trigonometry became critical tools in creating a successful design.  Battles often featured castle mounted cannons duking it out with "field pieces", cannons mounted on custom designed carriages and towed around by teams of horses or oxen.

And battles between large armies of soldiers returned.  But, as has always been the case, effective tactics follow from the capabilities of the weapons the armies are equipped with.  And by now, soldiers were routinely equipped with muskets.  That meant tactics needed to be developed that used soldiers equipped with muskets to best advantage.  And a variant on the Phalanx turned out to fill the bill.

Imagine you are the general of an army that is lined up at one end of a field.  All of sudden the other army, which is lined up at the other end of the field, charges.  What do you do?  In the pre-musket era, the answer is not much.  Nothing much is going to happen until the two armies get to within arms length reach of each other.  Then it's often melee time.

But if your army is equipped with muskets there is a lot your can do before the two armies get to within arm's length.  You organize your army into a Phalanx of musketeers.  Specifically, you line your soldiers up in three ranks that face the enemy.  Then you wait until the other army gets to within a couple of hundred yards of your army.  They you have your army start shooting at them.  For best effect they have to shoot in a disciplined manner.

The first rank is the front row.  They fire their muskets in a "volley" (all at the same time) then retreat back to replace the old third rank.  The old second and third ranks each move up one rank.  What was the second rank now becomes the first rank, for instance.  They, in turn, set up and fire their volley.  They too then retreat to the back.

The two back ranks again move up one rank causing what was originally the third rank to now become the first rank.  They, in turn, set up, fire their volley, and retreat.  If everything has gone well, the original front rank has had enough time to reload.  They now resume their original position in the first rank where they are ready to fire their volley and retreat when their turn comes.

This evolution can be continued nearly indefinitely.  Minor variations can be used to cause the army to move slowly forward or slowly backward.  Done right this rank-on-rank setup provides a good rate of fire that can be maintained for long periods of time.  So, lots of enemy soldiers are killed or injured well before they get to arms-length distance.

It becomes critically important that soldiers be extensively trained.  They need to be execute the various "evolutions" reliably and to perform their tasks quickly.  They also need to be able to shoot accurately and stand up to being shot at.  A well trained and equipped army has a big advantage over a poorly trained or equipped one.  Best of all from the general's perspective, the battle almost never devolves into hand-to-hand combat.

The process of loading a musket and preparing it for firing is complex, and to modern eyes, time consuming.  But experience determined that three ranks of well trained soldiers was the right number to maintain a consistent and relatively rapid rate of fire.  And this style of fighting lent itself to large armies.  And colorful and consistent uniforms made it possible for talented generals to maintain control of the battle.

A well trained and led army that fought using these tactics was almost always able to overcome armies using other tactics.  The colonials managed to have some success in the U.S. Revolutionary War using what we now call Guerilla tactics.  But in the end that war was decided by battles fought along the lines I have just described.

But technology marches on.  And the impact of the next generation of technological advance was first seen on a large scale in the U.S. Civil War.  What changed was the widespread use of the rifled musket.  A traditional "smooth bore" musket was accurate out to about 100 yards.  An elite athlete can traverse 100 years in 10 seconds.  Figure something like 30 seconds for a soldier carrying his gear.

In that 30 seconds an army using the tactics I just described can get off perhaps one volley.  Often that is not enough to break the charge of well trained and disciplined soldiers.  So, two armies using smoothbore muskets would slowly inch closer and closer together.

At something between 100 and 50 yards one army would charge the other and things would quickly get ugly.  By this time it was standard practice to equip muskets with a bayonet, essentially a long, sharp knife.

Now back up and try the same tactic with rifled muskets.  They are accurate out to about 300 yards.  It takes more than three times as long to charge across 300 yards as it does to charge across only 100 yards.  This gives the non-charging army time to get several volleys off.  In practice, if they have been properly trained, the defending army is going to cut the charging army to shreds well before it can get close.

Robert E. Lee, the Confederate General, was the first Civil War general on either side to figure all this out.  He was also the first to figure out what to do about it.  Now, the defense had a substantial advantage.  And the defense's advantage could be increased even more by having it fight from behind cover.  The better the cover the bigger the advantage.  The Civil War saw trench warfare used on a large scale for this very reason.

Lee was a genius when it came to arranging things so that his soldiers were fighting from cover while often also holding the high ground.  This forced the Union soldiers to charge across open ground and often uphill.  That was the secret of most of Lee's success.

The proof of this is to be found in the Battle of Gettysburg.  There, the roles were reversed.  The Union soldiers held the high ground and were fighting from cover.  Lee's army was forced to charge uphill across open ground.  The battle was a disaster for Lee and the South.

There were many other technical developments during the Civil War.  Relatively instant communications thanks to the telegraph.  Vastly improved logistics thanks to railroads.  Improved battlefield surveillance thanks to tethered hot air balloons large enough to carry a person as an observer.  The introduction of the "ironclad" warship, which completely obsoleted the entire British Royal Navy, then the largest, most powerful, and most feared Navy of the time.

But another big change was in the rate of fire that various kinds of guns were capable of.  I watched a bunch of "frontiersman" movies and TV shows as a kid.  They had scenes showing the process required to load the "flintlock" muskets of the Revolutionary War era.  It was complicated and had to be done very carefully.  The process required to get the gunpowder to explode at the right time was particularly finicky.

By the time of the Civil War the "cartridge" was in common use.  It consisted of a small paper packet that contained a bullet, a measured amount of gunpowder, and a "firing cap".  The firing cap (a tiny sticky package containing a small amount of Fulminate of Mercury, or something similar, that would catch fire whenever it was struck) was affixed to the firing pin.

The powder was poured down the barrel.  The wad of paper was rammed down behind it with a "ram rod" so that the powder was held tightly in place.  The bullet was then added and rammed home.  The firing cap was affixed to the firing pin and gun was then "cocked".  It was finally ready to fire.

It is easy to see why this cartridge based process could take thirty or more seconds. Flintlock muskets could easily take twice as long, so the cartridge based process sped things up quite a bit.  And it was far less error-prone than the previous completely manual process that flintlocks required.  That meant far fewer misfires.  A faster rate of fire and far fewer misfires means more volleys fired at your opponent.

By the end of that war the modern "brass" cartridge was starting to replace the paper version.  Here, a brass "shell" holds everything (powder, firing cap, bullet) in place.  Now, you just "eject" the old shell, load the new cartridge, cock the gun, and you are ready to fire.  This new process was easily twice as fast and had the potential to become even faster.  It had little effect on the outcome of the Civil War because it wasn't widely used in that conflict.

The introduction of the brass cartridge enabled other advances.  One was the "repeating rifle".  This design included a "magazine" capable of holding several cartridges at once, and a lever that would perform the "eject, load, and cock" steps for you.  All you had to do was move the lever down and back up.  Repeating rifles were used by some U.S. Cavalry troops late in the War.  They were not made available to anybody else.

Then there was the Gatling Gun.  It was the first true "machine gun".  A machine gun can fire multiple bullets at a high rate simply by having its trigger pulled once.  The Gatling Gun had multiple barrels and a "belt feed" mechanism.  That permitted a sustained rate of fire of more than one round per second.  It too saw limited use on the Union side late in the War.  The South had nothing like it.

The repeating rifle became ubiquitous in the American West in the late 1800s.  The classic movie "Winchester 76" is built around one of the several models that were produced in large numbers by several gun manufacturers during this period.

The Gatling design persists to this day.  But shortly after the end of that war machine gun designs were introduced by other gun manufacturers that used a single barrel.  The single barrel design quickly became by far the most popular one.

Interestingly, European countries wrote the Civil War off as a minor skirmish between frontier bumpkins who lacked the sophistication of their European brethren.  So, they didn't learn the lessons they could have as quickly as they should have.

Part of this was financial.  The British, for instance, had invested a fortune over the years in building and maintaining a large fleet of wooden "Ships of the Line".  Theirs was the top-of-the-line design prior to the introduction of the ironclad.

It took took a while for the British (and most everyone else) to figure out just how obsolete the ironclad had made the older design.  Not surprisingly, it took several decades for the Royal Navy to completely switch over.  Other navies were not much quicker.

World War I turned out to be the Civil War writ large.  The submarine, a ship type that hadn't existed in any meaningful way in the Civil War era, played a large part.  The airplane, an airship type that not even visionary and Civil War contemporary Jules Verne had envisioned, went from being a toy to being an important weapon during the four year period the War lasted .  But it was the machine gun that ultimately turned out to be the biggest game changer.

At the start of the conflict both groups of combatants thought they understood how to fight a large land war.  The Germans with their General Staff were widely acknowledged to be the best prepared.  They created detailed plans that made heavy use of trains, just like in the Civil War.  They also made heavy use of the telephone.  But in terms of its effect, it was just a quicker and more convenient version of the telegraph.  It was an improvement rather than a fundamental change.

And while the French and British had General Staffs, they were considered inferior to the German one.  But that too was a matter of degree rather than something that conveyed an overwhelming advantage.  Discounting the first few weeks of the War, the General Staffing on both sides was roughly equal, equally bad.  Both side's military leadership reacted poorly to the fact that the War did not go they way they had envisioned.

And the reason, as I noted above, was the impact the machine gun had on strategy and tactics.  The machine gun made a massed charge across an open field completely impossible.  It didn't matter how many soldiers charged.  If they had to charge across even a short distance of open field the rate of fire of a few, well placed machine guns was high enough to guarantee that they would all be mowed down.

It took years and millions of casualties to convince the military leaders on both sides of that simple truth.  So, the Germans enjoyed quite a bit of success in the opening weeks of the War.  Then the British and French got their troops dug in and their machine gun nests set up, and that was that.

From there on it was "trench warfare in the mud" for years.  Both sides tried over and over again to overcome the other side's defenses by throwing massed bodies at them.  All they got for their efforts were mass casualties.  Famously, it was the Tank that broke the stalemate.

Specifically, a mixed unit consisting of infantry and tanks working in close coordination was able to defeat a defense consisting solely of infantry and machine guns.  Tanks alone had been tried.  They failed miserably.  World War I also did away with the last vestiges of the colorful uniforms that had been such a prominent feature of European armies for such a long time.

World War I was awful.  But the awfulness was mostly confined to the Western Front.  World War II spread the awfulness out.  There was nothing like the prolonged misery of trench life on the Western Front.  But there were gas chambers, mass starvation, carpet bombing of cities and, of course, The Bomb.  The death toll from all causes was estimated to be 80 million or more.

And, of course, World War II did not go the way the experts expected.  But by this time there was less surprise attached to that development.  One big surprise happened at sea.  The dominant naval weapon was expected to be the Battleship.  The Battleship was the many times descendant of the ironclad.  It was a ship that mounted a few big guns and was so strongly built that it could survive considerable punishment.

But the Battleship is a relatively short range weapon.  It can fire a round about fifteen miles.  And it can do so with surprising accuracy.  Nothing can stand up against a pounding by a Battleship except another Battleship.  But an Aircraft Carrier can project force out to more than three hundred miles.  If the distance between the two ships is say fifty miles, then the Aircraft Carrier can effectively attack the Battleship, whereas the Battleship can't do the same.

And it turned out that Battleships could be effectively attacked not only by airplanes but also by submarines.  Battleships have little in the way of defense against either.  That means that a Battleship must be surrounded by a fleet of smaller "screening" ships like Destroyers.  An Aircraft Carrier also needs a screening force of smaller ships.  But in addition to its offensive capabilities, an Aircraft Carrier can make a meaningful contribution to the defense of both itself and its screening vessels.

The many other innovations that War produced were more in the form of quantitative rather than qualitative changes.  Cryptography, in the form of Bletchley Park, Enigma, and so forth, had an outsized impact on the War.  But the interception and decryption of the Zimmermann Telegram led directly to the U.S.'s entry into World War I.

Similarly, the introduction by the Germans of the V-1 (first drone), V-2 (first large bomb delivered by a rocket), and ME-262 (first fighter jet) became hugely important in the Post War era, but had little impact on how the War itself played out.  The same is true of the A-Bomb.  It shortened the War (and was less costly in terms of Japanese damage and casualties than an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would have been), but it didn't change the outcome of the War.

In terms of the subject at hand, the Vietnam War turned out to be hugely important.  It reintroduced the American Public and U.S. Military leaders to the concept of a Guerilla War.  The European experience with war taught that the only thing that could successfully oppose a large, modern military was another large, modern military.

The U.S. had a large, modern military.  It's opponents did not.  That was supposed to result in a quick and relatively painless victory by the U.S.  It did not.  I have spent decades thinking about why.  You can find a number of posts on this subject if you scroll back through the archives of this blog.  But I think I can boil it down to one simple idea.  The Vietnam War was primarily a diplomatic conflict rather than a military one.

European military experience tells us that if you control the major cities, the countryside will follow.  Modern (and here I mean any time in the last 500 years) European countries have complex, integrated economies.  Control of the cities leads not just to control of the cities, but due to the integrated nature of the economy and the society, it also leads to control of the countryside.  And that means control of everything.

Large, modern armies are the best instrument for controlling large cities.  Ultimately, it was standard, European style tactics by the "colonists" (what later became the U.S.) and their allies that led to victory by the colonists.  The British had a large, modern military establishment, but were hampered by long supply lines and an inability due to domestic British politics to go "all in".  The Guerilla War tactics that were employed at some times and in some places were helpful, but did not decide the outcome.

If the U.S. had been willing to engage in a World War II "Total War" style of fighting in Vietnam, I believe that U.S. forces could have won that War.  But for a lot of good and sound reasons, reasons that I agree with, that option was taken off the table.  Instead, the U.S. military was forced to fight a limited war.

The U.S. played lip service to "winning the hearts and minds of the people", most of whom lived in the countryside and had little connection to nor reliance on the big cities.  But the U.S. never actually implemented a strategy that had a real chance of winning hearts and minds.  Instead they employed the usual "kill the bad guys and blow things up" approach.  This lost hearts and minds in the rural areas rather than winning them.  And that ultimately lost the war for the U.S.

One key mistake the U.S. made in Vietnam was in who they backed to run the country.  The U.S. propped up one incompetent and corrupt regime after another.  A relatively honest and competent Vietnamize government would have invested in winning and keeping the hearts and minds of its people.  The regimes we supported didn't.  And our military people didn't think it was their job to provide governmental services or to root out corruption.

After a few fits and starts the U.S. has managed to win the postwar in Vietnam.  That's because we have relied on diplomatic and other non-military means to win hearts and minds.  The U.S. now has good relations with Vietnam.  But we have repeated the same mistakes we made in Vietnam in several other places.  The most notable example is Afghanistan.

A simple rule I adopted after Vietnam was to ask whether the locals were willing to fight their own fight.  The Afghan regimes we propped up were never able to convince their own people that the war was worth fighting hard enough to win.  Not surprisingly, rampant corruption again played a role.

As a result, propping up the various regimes we supported required massive amounts of direct military support from the U.S. and its allies.  The Afghan soldiers and officers we supported required extreme amounts of hand holding to get them to fight at all.  Even so, little of the effective fighting was done by Afghanis fighting on our side.  It's not that Afghanis were incapable of fighting effectively.  Our opponents relied heavily on them and they achieved a decisive victory.

And that brings me to Ukraine.  From the time the Russians first invaded in 2014 right up to the present day, the Ukrainians have demonstrated a willingness to fight, and fight hard.  The Vietnamese and Afghani people were also willing to fight.  They just weren't willing to fight for the U.S. side.  The Ukrainians are.  As a result, I believe that properly supported with equipment and training, the Ukrainians can beat the Russians.  No U.S. troops need apply.

That's nice, or at least I think that's nice.  But it not what this post is about.  This post is about paradigm shifts in how wars are fought.  And Ukraine demonstrates a paradigm shift that is like the WW II shift from Battleships to Aircraft Carriers, only more so.  That shift was important, but it only affected a few components of how the overall war effort.

So, what's the seismic shift that's affecting how the war in Ukraine is being fought?  Drones.  They are everywhere and they are changing how nearly everything is done.  The biggest but not the only change comes from the widespread use of cheap FPV (First Person View) drones.  They, particularly when paired with artillery firing "smart" rounds, have completely upended battlefield tactics.

The Russians know tanks.  Since WW II they have built their army around high quality tanks, and lots of them.  But in Ukraine, their situation has turned out to be similar to that of Union soldiers in the Civil War charging uphill across an open field toward Southern soldiers who are dug in and equipped with rifled muskets.  In both cases, things go very badly for the side using tactics that are now obsolete.

A cheap FPV drone can locate a tank, even if it well camouflaged.  It can then "light it up" with what amounts to a laser pointer.  An artillery unit can then fire a single smart round.  That's often enough because a single hit is usually enough to destroy the tank.  And when used in conjunction with a cheap FPV drone, it often only takes only one round to score a hit.

It took the Russians a while to figure this out.  As a result they have lost a shocking amount of armor in Ukraine.  The Ukrainians have succeeded in taking out almost all of Russia's modern tanks.  Russia has been forced to resort to using tanks that are several generations old.  These tanks were only still around due to inertia.  They had been stored in warehouses with the expectation that they would eventually be scrapped.

But its not just the Russians that have been  slow to learn.  The top of the line U.S. tank is the M1 Abrams.  Many commentators said putting these tanks into the hands of the Ukrainians would be a game changer.  It was not.  It may be a better tank than what the Russians are using, but it isn't enough better to be a game changer.  Neither have tanks provided by various European allies like such as British, French, and Germans.

The combination of cheap FPV drone and smart artillery has also made running large supply convoys anywhere near the front line a big mistake.  The same is true for large troop concentrations.  Troops need to be disbursed and kept under cover at all times.  The same is true of supply dumps, especially fuel and ammo dumps.  They must either be kept well away from the front, or if located near the front, camouflaged and disbursed.

A small explosive, roughly hand grenade sized, can be carried by a "heavy duty" cheap FPV drone.  It is capable of taking out a car, pickup truck, or other small vehicle that lacks armor.  That means armored vehicles must be used wherever these drones operate.  They also make housing frontline troops in tents that are out in the open a very bad idea.  In general, it makes it hard to build up the kinds of concentrations of men and equipment that are usually required to make offensive operations successful.

The Russians have recently started trying out a new tactic.  They put soldiers on motorcycles, ATVs, and the like.  The idea is to allow them to move fast enough that they can't be hit by an FPV drone combined with artillery, or a heavy FPV drone carrying a small explosive.  It's too soon to know how this will play out.  But it is a stark indication  of how much cheap FPV drones have changed things.

And that's just the impact of cheap drones.  Drones come in a wide range of sizes and capabilities.  Somewhat more capable drones, like those manufactured in Turkey for the U.S./Ukrainian side, or manufactured by Iran for the Russian side, are capable of taking out larger or better defended targets.  Again, FPV control turns these into precision, often one shot, munitions.

Further steps up the size/capability scale eventually leads to the equivalent of a Cruise Missile.  The Ukrainians only have access to a few of these.  But they have managed to use them effectively.  They have taken out fuel and ammunition depots hundreds of kilometers into Russian territory.  The Russians have used similar devices to damage or destroy infrastructure across the length and breadth of Ukraine.

Drones in this size range have had a devastating effect on the Russian Navy.  It has been effectively driven out of the Crimean Sea.  This should be a giant wakeup call for the U.S. Navy.  So far, there is no evidence that the message is being treated with the seriousness it deserves.

Imagine a U.S. Carrier Task Force operating somewhere in the South Pacific.  There the "defense in depth" strategy currently in use would likely be effective.  But the U.S. Navy, including Carrier Task Forces, frequently find themselves needing to operate in constrained spaces.  These spaces are more similar to the Crimean Sea than they are to the South Pacific.  And that means that the tactics used so effectively by the Ukrainians against the Russian Navy are likely to work pretty well against the U.S. Navy.

The Russians are currently trying to duplicate a feat attempted by the allies during World War II.  Then the allies made a concerted effort to use "precision bombing" to destroy the German's capability to manufacture ball bearings.  The idea was that almost all military equipment made heavy use of ball bearings.  If the Germans ran out of them, the thinking went, then the German war machine would literally grind to a halt.  The effort failed.  When it came to precision bombing, the precision necessary to make the plan work was just not possible back then.

Now, the Russians are attempting to destroy the Ukrainian electrical grid and its associated power plants.  The idea is to cast Ukraine into the dark.  If successful, the results would mirror what the Allies hoped to achieve during World War II.  With access to long range, high capacity, smart drones (i.e. precision bombing that actually works) they have had considerable success.  Most of Ukraine's electrical infrastructure has been damaged.  That has resulted in lots of outages and rolling blackouts.

But all drones have their vulnerabilities.  Inexpensive FPV drones use a two-way radio link.  TV pictures go from the drone to the operator.  Commands go from the operator to the drone.  No encryption  or other defensive measures are used.  So, a "jammer", a radio that broadcasts loud noise on the frequencies used by drones, renders these kinds of drone useless.  Also, since they are slow, noisy, and fly at low altitude, all it takes to shoot one down is an AK-47.

The life expectancy of a cheap FPV drone when in use at the Ukrainian front is less than an hour of flight time.  But they are cheap.  They cost less than a single artillery shell and are easy to manufacture in large numbers.  So, both sides put them up in large numbers and live with their short operational lifespan.  This "cannon fodder" approach gets less and less appropriate as you move up the size/cost/sophistication scale.

A drone that flies higher and faster is harder to shoot down.  A drone that uses encryption, stealth technology, or other defensive measures is harder to shoot down.  But it is also more expensive and available in much smaller numbers.  At the top of the line are cruise-missile-like drones that are capable of flying long distances, carrying heavy payloads, and doing their own navigation, and may include stealth features.

Since they don't depend on a radio link back to an operator you have to shoot them down (or jam the GPS signal they often rely on) to put them out of business.  But such drones cost millions of dollars each.  And adding stealth features jacks their price up even higher.

And then there's the air the not-cheap drones fly through.  Traditionally that air has been full of airplanes and helicopters.  Not so in Ukraine.  At the start of the current offensive the Russians were using helicopters and jets, particularly fighters, extensively.  But the Ukrainians were very successful in shooting them down.  Helicopters have also completely disappeared from the skies over Ukraine.  They are just too easy to shoot down using relatively cheap, shoulder fired rockets.

Russian jets are now used solely as "stand off" launch platforms.  They launch drones and missiles into Ukraine from low altitude and from well behind the lines in Russia.  Jets, both fighters and bombers, are the Battleships of the Ukraine war.  They have very limited offensive value and they are way to expensive to send into harm's way.  So, is this experience reflected in the U.S. defense budget?  No!

Tanks are job creators.  So, we keep building tanks.  Even the U.S. Army knows that there are lots better ways to spend our money.  But Congress keeps mandating that the Pentagon buy more.  So, they do.  The same thing is true of Jets.  The Pentagon is still buying F-35 Fighter Jets at a cost of more than a hundred million dollars per plane.  Now, the U.S. Airforce is run by pilots.  And pilots like to have planes to fly.  But the main reason they are being built is because of the jobs the program throws off.

You can buy hundreds of thousands of cheap drones for the price of a single F-35.  You can buy twenty or thirty top-of-the-line drones for the price of a single F-35.  You can buy thousands of midrange drones for the price of a single F-35.  But we are not building drones in anything like those quantities.

Ukraine can get lots of cheap FPV drones because China turns them out in large quantities for the world consumer market.  Midrange and top-of-the-line drones are hard for Ukraine to come by.  So, Ukraine has started making some of their own.  They have gotten pretty good at it, but they don't have the capability to turn them out in large numbers.  They do what the can and hope for the best, and hope for more help from the outside.

And, while important, that is not the point of this post.  The point is:  what is the U.S. doing about its own defenses?  The answer is not enough.  Sure, we should be doing more for Ukraine.  But for the purposes of this post the key point that has received little or no attention is that the U.S. should also be absorbing the lessons Ukraine can teach us.  And those lessons should result in a complete rethink of what our military needs to do its job.

The Pentagon has been funding a pilotless fighter program for years.  What most people don't know is that a major limitation on the performance of a fighter jet is the pilot.  A pilot's body can only take so much.  And the limitations imposed by what is survivable for the pilot means that the fighter operates at a far lower performance level than it could be capable of.

We've all seen Terminator, and a million movies like it.  So, nobody wants to put the machines in charge.  But we already have the solution to that problem, the FPV.  In fact, FPV technology is being used in the current robot fighter program.  And I suspect that one reason so little is said about it is that the project has been too successful.  It's an Airforce project, and the Airforce does not want to take the pilot out of the cockpit.

But I have already argued, I think successfully, that the jet fighter is obsolete.  So, maybe the robot jet fighter program is unimportant except as an example of a government boondoggle.  The problem is that the thinking behind how decisions are being made around that program, and so much else in the military sphere, is all the same.  And that's a major problem.

We need to increase our drone production capability by a factor of a hundred.  We need to move to the forefront of drone design and construction.  We need to do a top-to-bottom review of all of our military equipment and procedures.  Unfortunately, that would flag more than half of defense production as a waste of money.  We need to do a top-to-bottom review of U.S. warfighting tactics.  That too will uncover many major shortcomings that need to be plugged as quickly as possible.

We should see Ukraine as, among other things, a lab.  In the process of fighting for their lives they are learning what works and what doesn't.  The Russians are no rag-tag band of amateurs.  If something works against them it will likely work against everybody else too.  On the other hand, if the Russians develop a tactic that works, we need to react accordingly.

None of his is happening.  Various forces, not all of them political, have robbed the U.S. of its ability to focus on serious problems.  But that fact does not make this problem any less serious.  The only comfort to be taken at this point is that friend or foe, almost nobody is taking this problem as seriously as it needs to be taken.  That's small comfort, but better than nothing.

Ukraine May Just Fizzle Out

There is some serious shit happening in Ukraine right now.  But the press has fallen back on its tried and true "we are all going to die" approach to the situation.  Things are more complicated than the "it's a done deal that Putin is going to invade" line they are pushing.  So, let's take a more nuanced view of the proceedings.  Let's start with a thumbnail history lesson.

Ukraine has been within the Russian sphere of influence for so long that it's not worth considering a time when it wasn't.  Russia suffered horribly in World War I, and a hundred years before that, in the Napoleonic Wars.  The communists that successfully engineered a takeover of the government late in the War were painfully aware of that history.  When they consolidated power, they set out to do something about it.

The standard method for dealing with this particular problem is to assemble a group of buffer states, all the countries that surround you.  That's what Lenin and the rest of the leaders of Russia did.  They created something called the USSR - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  On paper it was similar to the modern European Union, a bunch of countries with shared interests that banded together.  Yet each country within the union remained a sovereign state.

But, unlike with the European Union, with the USSR, the appearance that it operated in a similar manner was a not so carefully maintained fiction.  In reality, Russia ran the show, and the rest of the "independent" states were just vassals who took their marching orders from Moscow.  This was apparent to anyone who made the least effort to investigate.  What's important for the matter at hand is that Ukraine was one of those vassals.

Then World War II came along.  It proved that Russia needed buffer states.  But the buffer state strategy was ineffective at stopping the Nazis, or even slowing them down significantly.  So, from a Russian security perspective, the whole plan was an utter failure.  But the plan conferred other benefits upon Russia, so they stuck with it after the War.  In fact, they stuck with it for as long as they could.

But let's stick with the World War II period for a bit longer.  In Europe there was the "western" front and the "eastern" front.  Most people in the west think the western front was where all the important action occurred.  That gets it backwards.  It was 60-40 or 70-30, with the eastern front seeing the largest and ultimately most decisive fighting.  The largest tank battle in history was fought on the eastern front.

The activities of Nazi General Rommel and his "Afrika Corps" are much more familiar to people who live in the west than anything that happened on the eastern front.  And the battle for control of north Africa involved several tank battles that are usually described by western experts as both as large and as critical to the successful prosecution of the War.

But the number of tanks involved on both sides were a small fraction of those active on either side of several clashes that took place on the eastern front.  Ukraine's position between Germany and Russia put it smack dab in the middle of the eastern front.  And smack dab in the middle of the fighting.

Russia was on the winning side of the War, so the USSR emerged intact.  And Ukraine and the other non-Russian members of the USSR remained vassals beholden to their masters in Moscow.  The situation, however, did not remain static forever.  Russia eventually declined and became unable to hold the USSR together.  It fell apart in the late 1980s.  And the internet became a big thing shortly thereafter.

The fall of Russia and the advent of the internet allowed Ukrainians to get a good look at the west for the first time in generations.  Ukrainians decided that they liked what they saw much better than continuing to be bound to the Russian orbit.  But for a while longer that didn't matter.  Russia managed to engineer a series of pro-Russia governments in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.  Then they put an especially inept and corrupt figurehead in place.

The Ukrainians decided enough was enough and got rid of him.  By 2014 a new, democratically elected government was in power.  But it was weak because it was new, and because it hadn't had much time to throw out many of the holdover crooks and incompetents.  Putin, who spent decades as a KGB agent, saw his chance and took it.

He annexed a part of Ukraine called Crimea.  Geography made it relatively easy for Russia to invade, and hard for Ukraine to defend.  The whole thing took less than a week.  After that Ukraine had no practical chance of getting it back.  "That went very well", was Putin's thinking.  The whole invasion had been practically bloodless.  It hadn't cost Russia much treasure either.  The west had no real way to help, so they were forced to accept it as a fait accompli.

That encouraged Putin.  So, he picked out a part of Ukraine that bordered Russia and that contained a high percentage of Russian speaking people.  As a result of the language commonality, and other factors, many, but not all, of the residents of that region had strong cultural ties to Russia.

Putin set about manufacturing an "independent" army.  It consisted almost entirely of Russian troops.  But this was disguised by having the soldiers strip all Russian insignias, and other identifying devices, off of their uniforms.  Theoretically, their affiliation could no longer be determined.  This "independent army" invaded and was able to capture a significant amount of territory.  When asked, Pusin said "not us - we had nothing to do with it".

This is what used to be called "plausible deniability".  The denial is really not plausible.  But supporters can latch on to it and pretend they believe it.  From a practical point of view, Ukraine was still too weak to push them out.  And again, the west was not in a position to do much, so the Russians are still there.  Sporadic low-level fighting continues in the area to this day.

And that brings us to the present, actually a few months ago.  I am not expert enough to be able to say with any degree of certainty why Putin decided it was time to attempt his next move against Ukraine. But we all now know that he decided the time was ripe to try to get away with something.

He started by slowly massing what is usually reported as "100,000 or more" Russian soldiers near the border to Ukraine.  They are equipped with tanks, airplanes, and the rest of the usual accoutrements of a modern first-class military force.  No secret has been made of their presence.  A force that large cannot be hidden from satellites.

The satellite photos were leaked to the usual cast of characters in the press.  They got the word out and extensive press coverage commenced.  Press and public interest has remained high since.  The unanimous opinion of the "experts" the press uses is that "Putin can invade at any time and there is nothing we can do to stop it."  So, the press breathlessly tells us to "be afraid - be very afraid".

The press loves a "war is about to break out" story.  They have lots of experience covering it, and it is good for ratings.  So, beyond interminably rehashing the few actual facts, they trot out "expert" after "expert".

These "experts" know that they will receive more follow-on bookings if they push the "it's bad - very, very bad" narrative.  That narrative inevitably leads to a "the Administration is screwing it up" narrative.  The fact that the expert du jour is not in charge can allow for no other possible conclusion.

And, of course, they can choose between the "he's not doing enough" and the "he's doing too much" narratives.  You can get "dramatic" TV (i.e. good ratings) by pitting an "expert" from one camp against an "expert" from the other camp.  They start from their shared belief that the administration is getting it all wrong and go from there.  As entertainment, that's great.  As a way of informing the public, it's terrible.

The one thing they do get right is that Putin is the key player in all of this.  He longs for the good old days when Russia was the USSR.  And, more importantly, for the time when Russia was one of only two superpowers.

For decades Russia was able to successfully masquerade as a superpower without actually being one.  It never had the economic base necessary to move from perception to reality.  It was always faking it.  It had a lot of success faking it.  But eventually economic reality caught up with it.  As the '80s played out, it lost the ability to maintain the fiction.  Shortly thereafter, the facade came tumbling down.

Currently, the big-three economic powers are the USA, China, and India.  Russia is Saudi Arabia with more land and a much larger population.  They do have an educated populace and a large economic base.  But only if you compare Russia to Saudi Arabia and not to India or China.

Just creating and maintaining the fiction that Russia is a great power takes money.  Russia does well when the price of oil is high and badly when it is low.  COVID drove down economic activity worldwide.  That drove the demand for oil down.  That drove the price of oil down.  That starved Russia of the resources necessary to fund Putin's ambition.

But Russia does have a few things going for it.  The biggest one is the fact that it supplies much of the oil and natural gas that Europe consumes.  That money fuels Putin's ambitions.  It also gives Putin leverage.  He can threaten to cut off the flow of the large amount of oil and natural gas that Russia exports.

Putin is smart.  But he is also an opportunist and a bully.  If he sees an opportunity, he will take it.  He actually cut off Ukraine's access to natural gas for a while a few years ago.  He saw the opportunity to bully Ukraine and took it.  The cut off allowed him to extract significant concessions from Ukraine.  While he is constantly on the hunt for opportunities, he is also no fool.  He only goes forward if he is confident of success.

He has decided for a number of reasons that now is the time to try to make another move on Ukraine.   It is right next door.  And, besides the gas cutoff ploy, in 2014 he got away with two other ploys aimed at Ukraine.  Now might be a good time, his thinking goes, to pull off another 2014 and take another bite out of Ukraine.

If he succeeds it makes him look strong and like someone who is a powerful player on the world stage.  And, who knows.  Maybe he can take over the entire country of Ukraine.  Even if he only succeeds in installing a puppet government in Kiev, or taking another small bite out of Ukraine, either would count as a win.

In any case, he decided to find out just how much he can now get away with.  If you listen to much of the U.S. press, it will be a slam dunk, an easy win for him.  And they may be right.  But I think there is a significant chance that they are wrong.  The basic reason is that conditions have changed.

The most important change is the one that has taken place in Ukraine.  During the USSR period a case could be made that, as a practical matter, Ukraine didn't even exist.  People living in what is now Ukraine knew they might as well have been living in Russia.  There was a Ukrainian government, but it existed in name only.  Under those circumstances, thinking of yourself as a Ukrainian because you lived in Ukraine didn't mean much.

But in the period since 2014, Ukrainians have been seeing what a home-grown independent government looks like and acts like.  They like what they see.  They like being Ukrainians, an entirely distinct species from Russians.  And whatever pre-existing ire there was toward Russia has only increased in recent years.  Besides being home-grown, the Ukrainian government has shown itself to be both trustworthy and reasonably competent.

A big part of that is thanks to the Ukrainian military.  The continuous military pressure that Russia has exerted on the country has had the perverse, from the Russian perspective, result of forcing Ukraine to develop and field a top-quality military.

Anything less would have allowed the Russians to run rough shod over them.  Ukraine had no real military capability when Russia made its moves in 2014.  That is no longer true.  The important question is, does Putin know this?  I think he does.

Next, the west was caught flat footed in 2014.  Putin's moves were entirely unexpected.  Western intelligence and military people are not making that mistake this time around.  Let's say Putin had snuck his force up to the Ukrainian border and launched a blitzkrieg before anyone caught on.  Then the west would again be confronted with a fait accompli.

But, for whatever reason, the buildup was slow enough that it showed up on threat boards all over the west well before Putin could put it to use.  It may be that it just takes more time to assemble a force this large.  It may also be that since 2014 western intelligence agencies have been on high alert and, therefore, watching the region closely.  Whatever move Putin makes this time around will be one that the whole world will be on the lookout for.

The military experts agree that, if Putin is willing to pay the price, he has the military capability to invade the country and seize control of all of it.  I am not sure that is true.  The conclusion is based on the usual military analysis.  You take a head count of the two forces, the Ukrainian military and the force that Putin has assembled.  Then you look at the equipment of the two forces.  The Russians have more equipment and more capable equipment.

Finally, you do the military math.  All the experts say the result is that Putin wins.  The people performing the calculation are competent.  If they say that's what should happen, then I trust their math.  But there is an implicit assumption that the experts are making.  And I am not sure that implicit assumption is justified.

There is a term of art called a "Potemkin Village".  It comes from Russian history.  In this particular instance Russia needed to look strong when it was actually weak.  It didn't have the resources to build up its strength.  Instead, it built a bunch of what appeared to be villages.  If the villages had been real, then Russia might indeed have been formidable.   But, until the villages were exposed as fakes, which they eventually were, the ploy worked.  At a minimum, the ploy bought Russia time it otherwise wouldn't have had.

Russians have been making their military look larger and more powerful than it actually is forever.  In the USSR era they would have a few airplanes fly in a circle so that they could overfly Red Square repeatedly during the annual May Day parade.  Western observers would then overestimate the number of top-of-the-line planes Russia possessed.  And it wasn't just planes.  They used the same trick with other types of equipment.

One of the things we found out about the Russian military after the USSR fell apart, was how much Potemkin Village-ing had been going on.  All kinds of forces that looked ready to go in the satellite images, were actually in deplorable shape.  They were not really capable of doing anything beyond looking formidable to a camera located hundreds of miles above them.

We know that there are a lot of Russian soldiers near the Ukrainian border.  We know that there is a lot of what looks like first class Russian equipment positioned near the Ukranian border.  But what kind of shape are either really in?

One thing that I find interesting is that the press routinely shows us a mixture of training video that Russia has released and satellite photos of large numbers of parked vehicles.  But when it comes to the videos, all Russia needs to make them is a few first-class units.  As to the satellite shots, see above.  And then there is this.

Satellite imagery allows western experts to count vehicles.  But I noticed that some of the recent satellite photos of the Russian buildup feature hundreds of vehicles covered in snow.  If they are ready to go at a moment's notice, why are they covered in snow?

Let me be clear.  I don't know what the state of readiness of the Russian forces is.  It might be high.  Or it might not be.  U.S. and allied intelligence agencies might know the answer.  Putin should know the answer.  It is a failing in the press coverage to not consider the possibility that there is a considerable amount of Russian fakery going on.

So, where are we?  The Ukrainians are a tougher nut to crack now than they were in 2014.  The western powers are on the alert.  It can be argued that they should be providing more military equipment, and more capable military equipment to the Ukrainians than they are.  But they are providing substantial amounts of military equipment.  And the Russians may be far less capable than western experts give them credit for.

But wait, there's more.  His KGB training inclines Putin toward indirect means.  How about a propaganda offensive?  How about sowing division behind enemy lines?  How about Cyber?  How about any number of other techniques for reducing the cost and increasing the chance of success?

This is an area where the press is doing a good job.  We have seen all kinds of stories about these, and other possible dirty tricks.  Some have come out of the U.S.  Some have come out of the U.K.  I believe one of them even came out of France.

This is a case of "forewarned is forearmed".  Putin might come up with something no one has thought of.  But many of the plays in the KGB playbook have received widespread coverage in the western press.  That doesn't render them impotent.  But it does reduce their effectiveness.

Finally, it is important to understand that Putin is getting something he values highly right now.  At the moment he is viewed as a powerful player on the world stage.  People are paying attention to what he is saying.  People are seriously concerned about what he is doing or what he might do in the future.

They are saying that what he might do will have wide ranging repercussions.  In other words, for the moment he is getting the kind of attention that leaders of major powers capable of taking consequential actions get.  That, he values highly.

The whole Ukraine game is about affecting Putin's thinking.  If he thinks he can achieve success at low cost and low risk, he will move.  Why wouldn't he?  What the Biden Administration needs to do is reduce his estimation of his chances of success.  Or they need to increase his estimation of the likely cost.  Or both.  They are doing a good job of that.  If they are successful enough then Putin will slink away into the night.

If he ultimately ends up doing nothing, he will try to blur and obfuscate what he is doing.   Do not expect the Russians to announce one day that they are packing up and leaving.  Instead, expect diplomatic efforts to drag on ineffectually before slowly and quietly grinding to a halt.  He will also make military and diplomatic moves designed to obscure what is really going on.

Eventually, he will need to do something definitive like withdraw lots of troops from Ukraine's border.  He will try to find a time when the world is distracted by some event happening somewhere far distant from Ukraine and then do it.  The whole crisis will end not with a bang but with a whimper.

In the meantime, Putin is getting what he wants.  He is being treated as if he is a BFD.  And, on his scorecard, that counts as a win, a big win.

D.C. Brinskmanship

As I write this the news out of our nation's capitol is all about gridlock and other variations on the concept of gridlock.  The "debt ceiling" is being hit in a few days.  Legislation appears to be hopelessly stalled on every front.  The big $3.5 Build Back Better bill seems to be in trouble.  Efforts to do something about voting rights are stalled.  Immigration reform is stalled after the Senate Parliamentarian said it was not a "primarily fiscal" issue".   We are squabbling about what to do about the thousands of Haitians who magically appeared on our borders a few days ago.  Angst about the Afghanistan Withdrawal blankets everything.  I could go on.

So, it's all hopeless, right?  No!  First of all, the roadblock standing in the way of progress on each and every one of these issues is a man-made one.  (If I could pin even one blockage on a woman I would use different language.  The only possible candidate is Nancy Pelosi.  It's hard to come up with a credible reason to blame her for any of this.)  All these impasses can be resolved by a simple change in the behavior by the appropriate people.

Beyond that. there's this.  It's how the system works.  All the people involved in these impasses have constituencies they are responsible to.  Someone is not going to get everything they want.  So how do the losers tell their supporters that they failed to deliver?  They say "I tried - really hard.  I strove mightily, but in the end I was unsuccessful."  If their supporters don't believe this statement then they are in big trouble.  It helps if they are seen to be publicly striving mightily before they give up at what everybody agrees is the last possible second.

The debt ceiling is somewhat of an outlier in this list.  Most of the items are new initiatives.  The debt ceiling crisis is a routine crisis.  It involving a routine piece of obscure bookkeeping.  It has reached crisis state many times before.  It will no doubt do so again a few years down the road.

It is also a crisis that shouldn't even exist.  I am indebted to Rachel Maddow for bringing to my attention the origin story of this idiotic piece of anti-governance.  (She relied upon, and credited the sources she used, but I am going to spare you.)

It turns out that World War I is the culprit.  When World War I started in 1914 there was a broad isolationist consensus in this country.  From Washington's "beware of foreign entanglements" to the time when War broke out, the U.S. had found it advantageous to sit on the sideline of major conflicts. The President at the time, Wilson, was a committed isolationist.

And isolation worked to the advantage of the U.S.  The country made a bloody fortune selling Apples, Zinc, and everything in between, to the combatants.  On the other hand, all the major European powers of the time pretty much bankrupted themselves.  They spent what they had and what they could borrow in an effort to win, or more importantly not lose, the War.

The U.S. ended up with a much larger economy and a greatly expanded manufacturing capability.  It also ended up holding a large part of the debt these countries had run up, so our financial and banking segments were much larger by the end of the war.  This transfer of wealth between nations was on a previously unheard of scale.  It single handedly vaulted the U.S. from being a second or third rate power to being a first rate power.  And the change took only a few years.

Before the War the British had the economic and financial resources necessary to maintain the British Empire, still the largest empire ever to exist in the entirety of recorded history.  By War's end they no longer did.  They also sacrificed a generation or more of manpower to the slaughter that was trench warfare.  To a substantial extent, the same story applied to all the European powers.

That left them short of the economic and financial resources necessary to maintain their various foreign  empires.  It also left them with a critical manpower shortage.  It takes a large number of men to populate the various colonial armies necessary to maintain control over foreign holdings.  It also requires a substantial number of men to operate the bureaucracy that is critical to keeping the machinery of empire running smoothly.

By the end of the war, the British Empire in particular was a dead man walking.  It's just that it took a another generation and another war for this to become obvious.  Meanwhile, the fat foreign contracts had caused a giant growth spurt in U.S. industry and agriculture.  In the U.S. jobs were plentiful, the pay was good, and the country was at peace.

But the U.S. did eventually enter the War.  So, what caused the U.S. do a "180"?  It turns out that this is a subject that I have never delved into deeply.  I am not going to do it now.  If you want to take a deep dive on your own, I recommend three books by Barbara Tuchman.  They are The Guns of August, The Proud Tower, and The Zimmermann Telegram.  She is a good writer.  If you have an interest in history, you will find them well worth your time.

Wilson was a two term President.  His reelection campaign relied heavily on the slogan "he kept us out of war".  Nevertheless, he subsequently changed his mind and supported the U.S. entry into the War.  Even without the specifics, it is easy to imagine that this was a controversial decision.  One way he blunted criticism to his change of heart was by addressing a key issue head on.

Wars cost money.  As I have just noted, they often end up costing far more money than anyone predicted at their start.  The financial travails of various European powers were well documented in U.S. newspapers of the time.  The possibility of the U.S. going down the same rabbit hole could not simply be waved away.  Wilson's response to this legitimate concern was to propose a law that limited the absolute amount of debt the U.S. government could run up.

That proposed law eventually went into effect.  It's implementation is where the current debt ceiling crisis all started.  It was a sop to the people opposed to the U.S. entry into World War I.  It was supposed to be a temporary measure that could be let lapse when the War ended.  But it has never been allowed to expire.  The reason is simple.  No benefit accrues to a politician campaigning for its elimination.  What does accrue is a lot of grief.

The whole process has been streamlined over the ensuing decades.  Now, a single sentence in a single clause in a single law in the many thousands of pages of laws that make up the United States Code, is now all that needs to be tinkered with.  (If you see a reference to something like 21 USC 1243.1.a(3), the "USC" part stands for United States Code, the Federal law of the land.  It is organized into volumes, so "21 USC" refers to volume 21.  The rest just drills down deeper and deeper until you end up at a single specific clause.)

Raising the debt ceiling simply requires updating that one sentence.  It now comes in one of two forms.  The sentence most often specifies a single number like "the debt shall not  exceed 29 Billion dollars".  In an alternate form the sentence specifies a specific date like "the debt ceiling is suspended until July 31, 2021".  This latter version shows just how ridiculous the whole process has become.

Whenever we are approaching whatever the current limit is, the standard response is to modify the sentence to allow the debt to go higher.  This charade serves no practical purpose.  The debt limit has always been raised in the past.  What it does serve, then and now, is a political purpose.

Some group uses the occasion as a reason to accuse another group of "profligate" and "irresponsible" spending.  And that's just the start of the nonsense that gets spewed.  The responsible thing to do is to pay what you owe.  Not raising the debt ceiling is irresponsible.  And the profligacy, if such exists, is located elsewhere.

The U.S. government has hit, or come close to hitting, the debt ceiling something like 78 times since that first version of the law was passed more than a century ago.  The sensible thing, assuming getting rid of it entirely is off the table, is to just change the sentence to put off for a few more years the time when the Federal Government will again hit this entirely artificial barrier.

And it is important to remember that, with or without a debt ceiling law, the Federal Government can't spend money absent an "authorization", a special kind of law that must be passed by Congress and signed by the President.  Of course, we could tie the two together by having authorizations automatically raise the debt ceiling by the appropriate amount, but that would be too sensible.

While the debt ceiling has no practical purpose, it can, and often does, serve a significant political purpose.  It can be used to score political points on your opponent.  This time around the Republican believe that they can score political points on the Democrats.

So they have decided that they will not support an increase in the debt ceiling.  "Democrats are in charge.  Let them do it all by themselves."  That's their argument.  The problem is that it will take 10 Republicans in the Senate to help out due to the equally idiotic "Filibuster" rule that currently controls Senate procedure.

We've been to this particular rodeo several times in the recent past.  To change metaphors in mid stream, as with a remake of a movie that came out only a few years previously (Spider Man, anyone), we know how the movie ends before we even buy our ticket.  If the remake of the debt ceiling crisis follows the same plot as the older version version, then we know how this version will end too.  Here's a peak at the script for "debt ceiling crisis" movies.

Act one starts with important people (politicians, the press) noticing that we are getting perilously close to reaching the debt ceiling.  Sides are chosen and the expenditure of vast quantities of hot air begins.  But at this point there is insufficient pressure to blast either side loose, so everybody digs in.  This act concludes when the debt ceiling is reached.

Hitting the debt ceiling starts act two.  In the past the Treasury Department has been able to use several tricks and accounting gimmicks to stave disaster off for a while.  They have now become expert at doing this.  So, from the audience's perspective not much changes.  In fact, the early stages act two look pretty much like act one.

In writing parlance what happens in act two is called a "try - fail cycle".  The hero tries a few different things.  They all fail.  We applaud him for trying, but are disappointed with the lack of success.

He fails because the pressure is still insufficient to budge anyone.  Some details change but the general picture stays the same.  The public continues to observe the expenditure of vast quantities of hot air and not much else.

Act three starts when the Treasury runs out of gimmicks and tricks.  Now the pressure starts to really build.  But a lot of gimmickry continues.  The government does not shut down completely.  By mutual consent "essential services" continue to be provided.  There is no legal foundation for this but it happens anyway because nobody objects.  This is the point when pressure starts to build enough to eventually force movement.

This forces the climax, which leads to resolution and the denouement.  The debt ceiling finally gets raised and the curtain descends on this particular iteration of this particular drama.  Key to all this is the blame game.  Whichever side ends up getting blamed the most is eventually forced to cave.  That resolves the climax and we can get on with wrapping things up.

The last couple of times around blame eventually fell most heavily on the Republicans.  This is one occasion where Democrats reap a substantial advantage from the fact that they actually believe in governance.  The won the blame game battle before.  They are geared up to win it again.

So, were are we currently?  We are already in act two.  (See - I told you that it differed little from act one.)  The current version of the debt ceiling specifies that the money ran out at the end of July.  That was almost two months ago.  The Treasury has been using the now standard bag of tricks to keep things going.  This has become so routine that it has garnered zero press attention.

It is expected that we will move to act three on the first of October.  What's special about that date?  The Federal Fiscal year runs from the first of October to the end of September.  (I have no idea why.)  That means that the current budget authorizations expire and presumably a new ones replaces them.  Experts say that will have the side effect of using up all the gimmicks and forcing the Treasury to stop paying some bills.

The House, which is controlled by the Democrats, has already passed a bill to increase the debt ceiling.  Within the next day or so Senate Democrats are poised to bring that same bill to the floor for a vote.  The expectation is that all the Democrats (and the two independents that caucus with them) will vote for it.  But, due to the Senate Filibuster rule, it will require 60 votes to proceed.  If, as is widely expected, all Senate Republicans vote against it, then passage will be blocked.

That, in general terms, is what happened the last couple of times.  The Democrats made "we want to raise the debt ceiling and keep the government open" noises, but Republicans blocked them.  Eventually the press and the public came down heavily on the side of the Democrats and against the Republicans.  After a shut down of greater or lesser duration (the duration depends on which one you want to talk about) the Republican caved to pressure and the debt ceiling got raised.

I don't know why Republicans don't see this issue as a loser for them and for their party.  One argument in their favor is that their bad behavior hasn't caused them to suffer much.  Their supporters get mad at them when Social Security checks stop getting delivered.  But they either forgive or forget shortly thereafter.

There is some reason to believe that this time it might play out a little differently.  The Filibuster rule is just one of many rules that govern how the Senate goes about its business.  Since it's just a Senate rule, it can be changed to eliminate the Filibuster completely.  All that is required is for the Senate to vote on it.  A simple majority of Senators will carry the day.

Theoretically, Democrats could do it on their own as they have exactly enough votes within their caucus.  But that is true only if everybody goes along.  Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Christian Sinema of Arizona, and perhaps other members of the Senate Democratic caucus, have publicly opposed getting rid of the Filibuster.

There are ways to modify the Filibuster without eliminating it entirely.  This has actually been done several times.  The most recent modification was implemented only a few years ago.  The Republicans were in the majority at the time.  They decided that votes on Supreme Court nominees would no longer be subject to being Filibustered.

Senator Manchin has indicated that he might support modifying the rule instead of eliminating it.  But his current position is "not now".  That, and no GOP support for a change, means that the status quo ante continues.

A prolonged shutdown combined with a lack of sufficient movement on the GOP side could cause Senator Manchin and others to change their current positions.  If they do, I expect that we will see a revision of the Filibuster rather than its elimination.  Several "talking Filibuster" options sound interesting.  So, modifying the Filibuster rules is one possibility for dealing with the debt ceiling.  There are others.

Democrats can't really change their stand on increasing the debt ceiling even if they want to.  They have nowhere else to go.  In the past the press has been reluctant to point out the obvious, that the problem is unjustified Republican obstruction.

If the press changes its tune and blasts the GOP from the start, then that might cause the GOP to pay a higher penalty than usual.  And the penalty may kick in more quickly and more completely than it has in the past.

The press has spent decades providing cover for GOP bad behavior.  GOP bad behavior is excused, or more commonly ignored.  Evidence of the slightest Democratic misstep causes the press to immediately go into full cry.

We are currently into heavy navel gazing when it comes to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the handling of the Haiti Refugees on the Texas border, and any number of other causes.  Compare this to the press coverage of GOP recalcitrance on raising the debt limit and much else.  There we see not a peep.

No political reporter who is worth her or his salt should harbor any illusions about what is going on with the debt ceiling fight.  They just need to say out loud what is apparent to all.  If they do that then it is possible that several GOP Senators will peel away from the current GOP obstructionist position and change their votes.

GOP Senators changing their votes is unlikely to happen.  (It is also unlikely that a fight over the debt ceiling will result in a change to the Filibuster rules.  But it IS possible.)  Most likely the GOP will cave as a whole at some point, and some face saving "compromise" will be engineered instead. 

The debt ceiling impasse will eventually be broken.  I have characterized it as the one crisis that is different from the other examples of gridlock and deadlock.  But the debt ceiling crisis does provide a template for how other contentious issues get resolved.

The loser is not going to toss in the towel until the story of their valiant but ultimately unsuccessful effort can believably be told.  Right now everybody thinks that they still have a chance of getting everything they want.  Even if that chance is slim, "it ain't over till it's over", as Yogi Berra once put it.  So, they fight on.

And for the present that means that everything is now gridlocked up.  The pressure has not yet built up to a high enough level to force some of the players to toss in the towel.  How the debit ceiling fight will play out is guided by recent history and restricted to only a few possible options.  Any of the options are possible, but it is already clear what the most likely option is (GOP cave).  With the other issues, the eventual outcomes are harder to predict.

I don't believe that the Biden economic agenda is dead.  The usual way these things are settled is that some horse trading is done.  Everybody gets something but nobody gets everything.  Progressives have made their bid.  They want the whole enchilada.  They want the 1.1 trillion dollar (actually only about half that represents new spending) "infrastructure" bill.  And the also want the 3.5 trillion dollar Build Back Better bill.

I suspect that if the BBB bill was trimmed back to something like 2.5 billion, they would still be happy.  As long it contained most of what they wanted, perhaps funded at lower levels, or spread out over more years, they would be well content.

But so far, the "moderate" faction within the Democratic Party has not made a counteroffer.  (Neither have the Republicans, but they get a pass, because the rules the game is currently played by, say they are.)  I suspect that the "moderates" would be happy if the whole BBB bill went away and only the "infrastructure' bill was left.  But the progressives have said "hell no" to that option.

Past experience predicts that the progressives will blink.  But progressives say that they are acutely aware of that history.  They are not going to be denied this time around.  They point to a decades long history of GOP behavior.

It teaches that you can do wildly irresponsible and unpopular things.  You can, for instance, shut the government down, then cave without getting anything for your trouble.  Later, you pay little or no price for your irresponsibility.  What progressives want to do is both responsible and widely popular.  Their mistake, as they see it, is in not adopting GOP "Scorched Earth" tactics sooner.  

Nobody believes that the progressives will take a page from the Mitch McConnell playbook.  But that's exactly what progressives say they are going to do this time around.  It's just that nobody believes them due to a previous history of routinely caving.  Their strategy looks sound to me, except for one thing.  The people who can throw a monkey wrench into their playbook are, of all people, House Republicans.

"Moderate" Democrats (I keep using scare quotes because in many cases they aren't moderate - instead they are in the pocket of the powerful, pharmaceutical companies in the case of three wayward House Democrats, and the coal industry in the case of Manchin) have demanded that the infrastructure bill come up for a vote on Monday, September 27.

Pelosi has promised that they will get their vote, and it is currently scheduled to happen.  House progressives have vowed to vote "no" if that vote is not preceded by a vote on the BBB bill.  Since as I write this the BBB bill is not ready for a vote, that's not going to happen.  

Normally, "no" votes by the progressive caucus would torpedo the infrastructure bill, at least temporarily.  (There are procedural ways to revive it.)  The strategy should work because all the House Republicans are expected to vote against it.

But what if a bunch of GOP House members vote for it.  It is, after all, a "bipartisan" bill.  And it's full of pork that both Democratic and Republican House members can brag about when they return home to campaign in their district.  If that happened then the bill would pass and progressives would be stuck holding the bag.  We will soon know how this issue plays out, at lest in the short run.

In general, however, it is necessary for extreme pressure to build before various gridlocks get broken.  We are not there yet.  D,C. politicians are too good at performing the "canoe over the falls" trick.  Once the canoe has gone over the falls (i.e., we hit the debt ceiling) the canoe's occupants (i.e. the bill) are doomed, right?

Well, it turns out that politicians are good at playing the trick where the occupants end up clinging to a rock on the lip of the falls.  From there a "miraculous rescue" is effected.  A "date certain", like the one currently associated with the debt ceiling, turns out to not be all that certain after all.

But "drop dead" dates do have value.  They ratchet up the pressure.  By themselves, they are not enough.  But they are a key component of the standard process for breaking gridlocks.

If nothing else, the press likes to hang gridlock stories on drop dead dates.  They then later profess childlike surprise when the problem gets resolved in spite of the fact that the drop dead date was passed.  It would of considerable help if they could be bothered getting riled up well before the drop dead date instead of waiting until it is upon us.

I want to wrap things up by focusing on a broad issue.  Pretty much all of the Biden agenda is currently said to be in trouble.  The main problem is GOP intransigence.  The press doesn't want to talk about that based on the dubious premise that it is "old news".  (The fact that it has been around a long time makes this behavior by the press worse, not better.)

The press can reduce anything to two sides, the "good guys" and the "bad guys".  Since they refuse to shine a light on the GOP, they have instead selected a Democratic bad guy.  At this point, the designated bad guy should come as no surprise.  It is Senator Manchin.  There is considerable justification for this designation.

There are several ways to navigate around the various impasses.  Manchin blocks all of them.  If the Filibuster was history then the Democrats could pass everything with just Democratic votes.  But, as noted above, he is unwilling to eliminate the Filibuster, or for the time being even significantly modify it.

A large part of the Biden agenda can be passed using another arcane Senate Rule, "Budget Reconciliation".  This rule provides a way around the Filibuster.  But Manchin is opposed to all the Democratic bills that can use the Reconciliation process for one reason or another.

So even using Reconciliation to pass legislation is currently impossible.  And Reconciliation is another of those Senate rules that can be changed with by a simple majority.  But he opposed changing the Reconciliation rule.  And that means that the rest of the Biden agenda is DOA due to the Filibuster rule.

So it's all doomed, right?  No!  No one wants to be the bad guy.  Let's say one or more canoes go over the falls.  Then let's say Manchin says "I've had enough.  I'm going to change my position."  That's all it would take for Manchin to flip from being the bad guy to being the hero.

Democrats know that they are in big trouble if the Biden agenda goes down in flames.  They are in especially big trouble if it is an "own goal", if they are widely seen as doing it to themselves.  That spells trouble for lots of them, but especially Manchin.  He is up for re-election in 2022 and his popularity in West Virginia has been plummeting recently.

It will take tremendous pressure to do this.  That pressure will likely build and build as various canoes go over the falls.  There are ways to arrange things so that various pieces of the Biden agenda don't go over the falls with the canoe.  Instead they are found to be clinging to a rock.  From there, heroic activity (always popular with the voters at home) can be employed to rescue them and shepherd them safely into law.

Expect a very intense thirty days.  The political landscape will have changed considerably by then.  For the better or for the worse?  That I can't predict.