School of War Reader: Closing the Shipbuilding Gap
Closing the Shipbuilding Gap: Lessons from Henry Kaiser, Part I
Arthur Herman, First Breakfast
Herman discusses applicable lessons for contemporary shipbuilding from World War II:
Just as in the 1950s defense officials and Congress worried about a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union, now we face a shipbuilding gap with Communist China—except this time that gap is for real, with the future of the global economy, which still rests on transoceanic trade, at stake. As one might expect, several proposals exist to solve the problem, from pouring more federal dollars into the shipbuilding industry to mobilizing high tech and automation in our shipyards—even imposing tariffs on non-US hulls. But the most effective approach might be to reinvent the entire enterprise. Doing so will require us to take a lesson out of the history books, and look carefully at how master builder Henry Kaiser managed to upend the entire shipbuilding industry during the Second World War.
Rethinking Rome’s “Most Reluctant” Emperor
Lindsay Powell, War on the Rocks
Powell reviews a reassessment of Roman Emperor Tiberius’s legacy:
While researching my own biography of Tiberius, it became very clear to me that his reputation as a wise administrator and capable commander-in-chief has been distorted by later historians, novelists, playwrights and film producers. They have repeated, uncritically, exaggerated claims that he was a tyrant who used treason trials to eliminate political enemies and vituperous allegations that he was a monster who indulged in sexual depravity. He was not Augustus’ first choice for successor, but circumstances demanded that he make Tiberius his heir. He deserves to be studied fairly but critically, because the decisions he made concerning Ancient Rome’s statecraft and diplomacy ensured that its empire would last for centuries. How he did so is the story that Iskander Rehman admirably explores in Iron Imperator: Roman Grand Strategy under Tiberius. The handsomely produced book is written in an easy to understand style that deftly uses the ancient sources to explain this complex Roman in the context of his times.
Expanding the Margins for Success: Corbett’s Maritime Strategy Theories and the United States Since 1945
Kevin D. McCranie, Texas National Security Review
McCranie provides lessons for US maritime strategy from a British historian’s theories on sea power:
The challenge for a state with a dominant navy is how to use its power at sea in combination with geographic advantages to obtain the greatest possible strategic effects. Indeed, Corbett’s theoretical arguments highlight many of the successes, challenges, and failures of the United States since 1945, and, applied thoughtfully, provide US decision-makers a clear view of the advantages, limitations, and mechanics of what a dominant navy can accomplish and why. His theories particularly emphasize that the land power of a state with such a dominant navy is only as strong as what can be projected and sustained at distance, and that naval dominance in combination with favorable geography gives states greater strategic choice about when and how to use force, and provides space for strategic recalibration that continental states struggle to achieve. Conversely, however, Corbett warns of danger maritime states face when they fail to capitalize on the advantages of isolation, and of particular challenges that naval dominance generates for coalition sustainment. Maritime states such as Corbett’s Britain or the United States since the Second World War improve their margins of success most when they capitalize on the advantages of geographic isolation, manage coalition partners well, and take advantages of opportunities for strategic recalibration.
The Second World War had its Poets too
Jeremy Wikeley, Englesberg Ideas
An exploration of poetry as historical record of World War II:
The Second World war was a vastly more complex conflict than the first: warfare was increasingly professionalised and took place across a greater variety of theatres. There is a mismatch between the war we tend to remember, and the war British poets lived through; many of the best, like Douglas and Lewis, were based in North Africa. Meanwhile, poetry’s relationship with the public had changed. The poets of the Second World war were competing with the radio and the cinema, while poetry itself had been blown apart by modernism in the wake of the First World War and put back together in ways the public didn’t always recognise. The war was, perversely, good to poets: verse sold well, despite the shortage of paper, and many on the Home Front found work in the cultural organs of the state: ‘the bigger the machine of government becomes’, George Orwell noted at the time, ‘the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it’.
Leeroy Jenkins at 20
One World of Warcraft player sidesteps planning efforts on the battlefield:
Leerooooy, Jeeeeeeenkiiiiiins!