the greycat blog

Back in November I had pedantic remarks to make about a tragic story from Afghanistan: ‘BBC English: the decline and fall continues’. The point was that the BBC, in reporting the possibility that UK ‘friendly fire’ had killed two Danish soldiers, reported the story as MOD investigating claim UK ‘friendly fire’ killed two Danish troops. ‘If one individual had been reported dead’, I mused, ’would the headline have referred to the killing of “one Danish troop”?’

Well, CBS News has indeed broken that particular stupidity barrier with their headline today, reporting on the deaths of three British soldiers in Afghanistan: ‘Afghan Violence Claims 100th British Troop’.

Why is this stupid? Here’s an article that explains all. Here’s another, with added lefty hand-wringing (more of the same here, in the fourth paragraph down).

UPDATE: They’ve corrected it to ‘100th British soldier’, which is nice to see but doesn’t really make up for their initial dumbness.

There’s an interesting article in the current issue of the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine on the design of First World War aircraft. The gist of it is that while huge advances in aircraft design took place between 1914 and 1918 lots of good ideas took a long time to be adopted and lots of bad ideas persisted much longer than they should have done.

Most of the improvements emerged from trial and error. But what if designers during the first World War had had the tools for simulation and analysis that are available today? Many of the errors would have been avoided had the firms of Fokker, Sopwith, Nieuport, and the rest had a few desktop computers. 

The question is asked tongue-in-cheek, of course, but the article does take a rather teleological approach. The history of technology offers very few cases of straightforward development towards the best solution for whatever problem is being addressed; the process of technological change tends to be a lot more complex, indirect and contingent than that, and technical issues are never the only ones at stake: social, political, financial and cultural factors all play a part, and can end up being more important than the simple question (if it is simple) of what is ‘the best technology’. Heavier-than-air craft of military value only dated from about 1910; the whole area of military aviation was new and largely unknown; the pressure of war forced improvisation as much as it did innovation; engineering at the time was as much an intuitive pursuit as it was a technical discipline, particularly in aviation where gifted amateurism was the order of the day; and the luxury of hindsight was - of course - not available at the time. What is surprising is not that Great War aircraft were not better than they were, but that they were as good as they turned out to be.

The issue of interrupter gear is raised at one point - i.e. a system that meant you could fire a machine gun forward along the axis of the aircraft without shooting your propellor off. Its invention is ascribed to Anthony Fokker, and the author wonders about ‘the inability of the British and French, who could build both engines and machine guns, to quickly contrive a satisfactory way to synchronize them’. My understanding was (and I haven’t time to check this with a reliable source right now) that it was the French pilot Roland Garros who invented the first effective interrupter system, which he fitted to his own aircraft, and that it was when he was shot down that the Germans found the secret, improved upon it, and fitted it to the Fokker Eindecker, with devastating results.

Peter Garrison, ‘What the Red Baron never knew’, Air & Space Magazine, February 2008.

The most-read essay on greycat.org over the past week has been ‘Cold War sub-texts: the submarine and the popular imagination in post-war Britain’. This particular essay, along with several others, has recently been indexed by Intute, a service which finds, evaluates and categorizes freely-available scholarly material from across the web, and this seems to have brought it to a wider audience. Which is nice. The essay was originally written for an academic conference at the University of London’s Institute for Contemporary British History in September 2003. The Institute has since been utterly transformed and revolutionized by its renaming as the Centre for Contemporary British History.

On both sides of the Cold War the details of submarine missions were naturally concealed behind varying degrees of secrecy, but the legacy of wartime experience, combined with what was publicly known about contemporary submarine activities, ensured that these vessels retained a highly significant place in Cold War culture, not least in maritime-minded, culturally navalist Great Britain. The submarine combined advanced technology with the timeless human virtues of courage and daring; it operated in the front line of the Cold War, on the enemy’s doorstep; it had the allure of secrecy and stealth; it possessed global reach; and, in the form of the SSBN – ‘this killer whale in our midst’, as The Times put it in 1967 – it symbolized the balance of terror that ultimately embodied the Cold War confrontation.

The essay goes on to examine two popular novels by British writers from different periods of the Cold War that can be seen as embodying important aspects of the place of the submarine in contemporary culture: Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra (1963) and Craig Thomas’s Sea Leopard (1981). To read the whole of ‘Cold War sub-texts’, click here.

Picture: Soviet Sierra II class nuclear-powered attack submarine. [Source]

The BBC rolling headline thing referred this evening to a report about an apparent ‘friendly fire’ incident in Afghanistan with these words: MoD investigating claim UK ‘friendly fire’ killed two Danish troops.

If one individual had been reported dead, would the headline have referred to the killing of ‘one Danish troop’? In the report itself the casualties are described, quite accurately, as ‘Danish soldiers’.

More BBC misuse of the term ‘troops’ here (’eight Turkish troops’) and here (’six US soldiers and three Afghan troops’ - ludicrous).

For more on what the term ‘troops’ means and how it should and should not be used, see this NPR article by linguist John McWhorter. He spoils his case somewhat by politicizing the issue, writing in a rather hand-wringing way that ‘Using a name for soldiers that has no singular form [i.e. troops] grants us a certain cozy distance from the grievous reality of war’. I don’t agree: it’s not politics, it’s just ignorance.

The UK National Defence Association is officially launched today (more detail here). The UKNDA is a non-political group established ‘to campaign for sufficient, appropriate and fully funded Armed Forces that the United Kingdom needs to defend effectively this Country, its people, their vital interests and security at home and throughout the world.’ There is certainly a need for such a campaign; historically, British governments never bother about defence until it is almost too late, and the current administration is firmly in that unhappy tradition. Labour’s record since 1997 is one of underfunding, overstretch, ill-advised privatizations and lack of commitment to military personnel, and the preceding Tory governments were no better (although at least no Conservative defence minister ever quit his post to go car-racing*).

The UKNDA has great potential and I wish them well. They need to pay more attention to presentation, however. The Association’s emblem, as well as being ugly and unmemorable, misleadingly implies by its use of the official Service flags that the UKNDA is an official organization with formal links to the military establishment. Their website, too, is pretty useless. It has a pointless animated intro sequence, is overly cluttered with text, the contents are utterly disorganized with no clear hierarchy or structure, and - a particular pet-hate of mine - it springs PDF files on you without warning. Whoever entered the text is overly fond of bold face and CAPITALS (sometimes using BOTH TOGETHER for no good reason) and isn’t much use at proof-reading. The thing has been designed by an outfit called Web-Feet, who claim that they have designed 700 sites in 7 years; looking at their general standard, this statistic is hardly surprising. More fool the UKNDA for trusting their site to people who don’t know the difference between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’.

* The minister concerned is Lord Drayson, and the manner of his resignation is distinctly odd, but he was in many ways a capable minister who achieved a great deal under very difficult circumstances and, uniquely for the current MoD ministerial team, was well-regarded by defence insiders.

The United States Marine Corps have a recruiting office in Berkeley, California. The local anti-war totalitarians of Code Pink have been trying to shut it down. There’s excellent pictorial coverage of the confrontation (if it can be dignified with the term) at Zombietime. My own attention was attracted to all this when I was sent a link to a thoroughly admirable letter sent to the Berkeley Daily Planet by Captain Richard Lund, the Marine officer in charge of the recruitment office.

My attention was also attracted by a poster the recruiting office staff put up in their window, upon which was printed a quote from the English political philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Here it is, as represented on the recruiting office poster:

‘War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.’

Looking around the internet, I find that this is a popular quote with those in the U.S. who define themselves as supporting the military, and understandably so. However, it is an inaccurate (in minor ways) and an incomplete quote. Here is the full passage from which this text comes:

‘War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice - is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.’

The passage comes from Mill’s essay The Contest in America, originally published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1862. In this essay Mill condemns his own country for siding with the Confederacy in the American Civil War, and harshly criticizes those who, to use his own words, ‘cry, Peace, peace’ without considering what ‘peace’ would mean. There are evils worse than war in a good cause: slavery is one such evil. The passage quoted above is not a defence of the waging of war in itself, but a demand that those responsible for taking a state to war should do so when the cause is just, but further, should only do so when the cause is just.

Mill’s words, when read carefully and in context, thus hardly constitute a manifesto for the uncritical support of the military; but a more powerful statement of the role of the armed forces in the cause of liberty and justice could hardly be wished for. Of course, what precisely constitutes ‘liberty and justice’ is open to debate - or at least it is for those of us living in freedom, thanks to the men and women in uniform whose sacrifices keep us in that happy state.

[Note: Mill’s The Contest in America is freely available in full via Google Book Search and Project Gutenberg. The passage quoted above comes from p. 31 of the Little, Brown edition made available by Google. Some of my own thoughts about John Stuart Mill can be found here.]