Neolibertarian - Science & Technology

Stem Cell Debate Irrelevant

by neolibertarian

It appears that the same scientist who gave us stem research has now found that inducing adult cells into stem cells is more effective and efficient than destroying embryos to harvest their stem cells. (see: LAT and Weekly Standard) This means that either harvesting or cloning embryos in order to destroy them is not only unnecessary, but less effective than inducing adult cells into pluripotency (the state of being able to morph into different types of cells). The scientist who started the cloning controversy by cloning Dolly, has announced that he will no longer pursue cloning embryos, and instead will advance his research with this new method.

Science has illuminated a path that can offer lifesaving cures without life-destroying treatments. This development leads me to offer three sentiments.

First, that this same process might be repeated on a different but related subject: abortion. It has been my view for some time that eventually science will allow us a path to end a woman's state of being pregnant without ending the life of the developing child. If scientists can remove a heart and implant it into a new person, then surely they can eventually figure out how to preserve the life of a fetus (and eventually an embryo) by shielding them from the outside environment long enough to get them to an incubator of some kind. In this way, women who are frightened of motherhood or too selfish to carry to term and place a baby up for adoption can be relieved of the horrible burden of pregnancy without destroying the life of another person. Of course, it's likely many women abort because they refuse to accept that they might have genetic offspring out there that somebody else adopted, but it's far harder to get a majority of Americans to accept this callous argument. So I think science will provide a solution to the abortion debate, just as it has provided an ethical solution to the stem cell controversy.

Second, I am glad the government was not entirely involved in the research process here. Aside from being slow and prone to corruption, the government makes investments determined by politics and headlines. Unless there are either headlines or regular political pressures from concerned groups, politicians have trouble maintaining focus. They run to the headlines on baseball steroids, on global warming, on whatever issue strikes our fancy, then they forget. Once they forget, the funding is very likely to dissipate. This has been repeatedly pointed out at Coyote Blog; politicians find much more benefit in building new projects than in funding existing projects. Rather than relying on the government, it was good that private efforts were involved. It was private efforts that decided that cloning embryos were both far away from any real treatments (embryonic stem cells are not used in any treatments right now, while adult stem cells are used in many) and would be exorbitantly expensive to offer (the LAT article above suggests a price of $100k per treatment). Private efforts decided to pursue better methods; if government fiat had been involved, then scientists would have pursued an unethical and less-productive avenue of research, simply to get the free dollars from the state.

Third, this new method should therefore NOT be subjected to government funding and intervention. I am sure that Republicans and conservatives will pile on to support it and show that they were not anti-science, but pro-embryo. Well, I am pro-embryo, but I'm also pro-market. The federal government and the states should keep the hell out of science. Governments like to twist science to serve their own ends (see: Nazi racial theory, Soviet Lysenko-ism, and now embryonic stem cell research). Even in this controversy, cloning of embryos was largely pursued just as a fuck-you to the pro-life movement. Cloning embryos was not a very viable path, but once conservatives and religious types voiced concerns the left pounced all over it. So the government (including states like California, which tried to fund this research itself) pushed science along a politically-determined path. But not only can science be led astray by poorly-distributed government moneys, it can also be prevented from good areas when the government decides that A) it has an interest in controlling science and B) it should prevent scientists from research areas deemed frivolous or offensive.

We should vigorously defend the freedom of science from being led astray or from being managed by the government. Even though I have no moral qualms about iPS cell research and I think it's great if it leads to wondrous new cures, I don't want the government involved. Science and markets should guide research to the best and most productive areas.

Posted on November 24, 2007 at 1:31pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

ANZAC Day

by neolibertarian

Wednesday was ANZAC Day, commemorating the service of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps in the World War I Battle of Gallipoli. Ninety-two years ago, the ANZACs went to the Dardanelles in a bold move to quickly eject the Ottomans from the conflict. The result was a stalemate battle that would last roughly eight months. Casualties were high and the strategic objective was not achieved.

The battle marks the first significant time that Australia and New Zealand made war as coherent entities and not as mere colonies or geographic subdivisions of the British Empire. The battle helps form the common history that helped the two countries reinforce their identities as newly post-colonial countries. The performance of Kemal Ataturk in Gallipoli and in the war gave him the stature necessary to take control of Turkey in 1920 and remake it in a secular, pro-Western image.

Posted on April 28, 2007 at 11:54pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Daylight Savings Time

by neolibertarian

I'm not a fan of Daylight Savings Time, as a rule. While I appreciate the "extra" hour in fall, especially when it falls on my birthday, I wholeheartedly despise the loss of an hour in spring.

But more than that, Daylight Savings Time irks me philosophically - it's the same sort of mentality from central planners who think that government fiat can create 100% employment with no inflation or loss of entrepreneurship. The government snaps its fingers and suddenly everybody's slightly richer, healthier and happier.

It's paternalistic, like the government trying to get you to eat healthy, brush your teeth, stop mumbling so much and keep quiet in church. The government wants you to wake up earlier so you have more daylight at the end. While I appreciate the light at the end of the day, I don't appreciate the central mandate aspect.

On a more practical turn, DST causes a lot of confusion and lateness, as well as loss of sleep. A study on JSTOR estimates a one-day loss of $31 billion in financial markets. I don't know about that, but it's definitely inconvenient.

But the main reason given for DST, including for the extension of DST that's starting this month, is that it saves energy. Unfortunately, a recent study of the 2000 DST in Australia suggests this isn't so. Their argument is that DST, which was extended for the Olympics (but they studied provinces other than Sydney, to try to mitigate the impact of the Olympics on the study) simply shifted electricity usage to a morning peak instead of an evening peak. And a California study suggests the most the study will do is ease capacity problems, which are not really present in March or November (since neither occurs at the hottest or coldest times of year).

The problem seems to be similar to economics. Certain people think that government intervention in the economy will result in great benefits with either no harms or with minor, acceptable harms. In actuality, whenever the government intervenes in one place, the economy is altered in other ways. If the government enacts price floors or ceilings, then shortages and black markets often follow, for example. It appears that maybe the same thing happens with time.

Can you imagine what we would think of DST today if it had never been enacted? We'd probably look back at it as some weirdo movement from the early 20th century, like SoCreds, Eugenics or futurism. I mean, really. Turning back all our clocks for part of the year? It just seems so stupid and ad-hoc, and at the same time so foolishly idealistic about such a petty issue. Of course, the form of time zones and DST as we know it dates from three or four decades ago, but the policy proposal is from the first decades of the 20th century. Even so, it just comes off like a dumb idea that's been propelled largely by virtue of being common.

Posted on March 1, 2007 at 10:22pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

PivotTable Politics

by neolibertarian

In the process of applying for jobs and spiffing up my resume, I found that my MS Office skills were under-utilized; they needed to be more prominent, given the importance of MS Office to so many industries and applications. The technical competence they convey is probably more critical than anything else.

I was therefore morally compelled by mild guilt to refresh myself on some of the programs I listed under my skills (Word, Outlook, Excel, Access, FrontPage). I know the programs, but for some reason I felt the need to reassert my dominance over them. I was re-learning Excel, even though I just used it very extensively in a recently concluded campaign. Since I'm good with the fun stuff like Mail Merge (with Word), data sort, etc., I decided to play around with PivotTable. I hadn't had cause to ever use it professionally, but I have read the Excel help files on it and took a 'course' on it through the MS website. It's really a fun tool.

Like MS Access, PivotTable is a way to analyze and compare data, especially larger amounts of data divided into many different columns. I cooked up a fun little example to re-teach myself PivotTable.

First, I made this spreadsheet:

I made a scenario that involved five political parties (each with the surname "Democrats," which is roughly akin to the Swiss political landscape). The idea is that the memberships of all five were tested for their political beliefs, which were categorized into broad headings (I made seven ideological headings). The third column is Thousands of Members. This would be useful to see the spread of beliefs within each party.

I went to the menu bar Data, then PivotTable option and clicked Finish in the window that popped up. It gave me a PivotTable fields list and a blank template like this:

I first put Score in the row fields and Party in the column fields, with Members as the Data items. I added a ready-made graphical theme and it looked like this:

Party Table

Then I changed the field assignments, switching Party into the rows and Score into the columns. The same graphic theme gave me this:

Score Table

So the first is good for seeing the divisions within each Party. The second is good for seeing the cross-party strength of each ideological Score. PivotTables are much more advanced, of course, allowing for multiple-variable axes. I just wanted to practice the fundamentals (it also makes this a simpler tutorial).

I turned the two PivotTables into PivotCharts. I proceeded from the second PivotTable, with Score in the columns and Party in the rows. The first chart was a stacked bar chart, good for seeing the proportionality within each party. I reassigned the ideological colors (it's my pet peeve that Socialist be red) and this is what I got:

But I want something that looks a little neater. There are tons of ways to graphically represent this data, but I'd like to see each ideological Score side-by-side, but then grouped within parties. That led me to choose this graphic, which I find more satisfactory:

Party Chart

This one tells me about the ideological loyalties of each party. Looks like the Social Democrats have a lot more members scoring Socialist than Left-Liberal, while the People's Democrats have a more haphazard, awkward spread among conservatives, authoritarians and centrists. If I proceed from the first PivotTable with Party in the columns and Score in the rows, I can view the information from a different approach:

Score Chart

Besides having a very basic 3-D tilt, this graph tells me something new. While the previous PivotChart started from parties and told us which Score dominated each one, this PivotChart shows us which party predominates among each outlook Score.

While every Socialist is a Social Democrat, not every Conservative is a National Democrat. Maybe the Conservatives in the Christian Democrats and People's Democrats should consider joining (or merging into) the National Democrats, thus consolidating their ideological roots into one vehicle. The Centrists outside the Christian Democrats might similarly consider joining the party that a majority of Centrists support.

The last two charts can provide conflicting advice. The Score Chart should tell Right-Liberals that twice as many of them chose the National Democrats as the Free Democrats. It would consolidate their power, then, to all join the National Democrats, right? Well, yes, but the Party Chart tells a different story. It should show the Right-Liberals that even with all of them joining the National Democrats, they'd be outnumbered in that party 2 to 1 by Conservatives (plus a much smaller number of Centrists). Conversely, the Right-Liberals could squeak past Libertarians for a majority of the Free Democrat membership It might prove more valuable to employ a medium-sized party they at least half-control than a larger party they do not.

The Score Chart and the Party Chart, then, give us different ways to process the information we started with in the spreadsheet. Of course, a lot of politics is personalities, money and current events; reducing it to numbers may be fun or intriguing, but it's only one part of the picture. Even so, it's nice to learn a little PivotTable Politics.

Posted on December 27, 2006 at 11:34pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Firefox 2

by neolibertarian

The new version of Firefox has been released (tip to Coyote).

They've improved the tabs, so that each individual tab has its own x instead of one communal x that applies to the selected tab. They also worked in an integrated spell check.

What's cool is they improved the tabbing memory. Months ago I blogged about what I called 'branch-forward.' I don't believe they've included that and I haven't yet found it among the add-ons, but they did create a history for the tabs. If you close a tab, you can bring it back. That will help me, because sometimes firefox stalls and stops connecting to the net, and sometimes I accidentally close a tab.

It looks good; go get it.

Related Posts (on one page):

Firefox 2
Branch-Forward

Posted on June 4, 2006 at 12:03am. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Declaration versus Authorization

by neolibertarian

There's some dispute over whether the Authorization of Force is a constitutional way for the President to use the military in conflicts abroad. Personally I think a declaration of war is superior to an authorization of force, if only because it's stupid to do these things half-assed.

But is there a constitutional difference between the authorization of force and a declaration of war? Henke at QandO says that there is a meaningful distinction. I have to disagree.

The declaration of war in US history didn't require greater than majority support, so an authorization of force is not an attempt to avoid a constitutionally-mandated supermajority requirement. It seems to me to be a matter of wording, rather than of missing any constitutionally mandated element.

I'd compare it to the US census. It's authorized by Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, but there it's called an enumeration. The word census only appears once in the Constitution, down in Article I, Section 9. Is the US Census unconstitutional because the name is different? I would say no, because the actual wording is not important, it's the meaning of the words. We could call it the Great Counting and it would still be the same thing required under Article I.

An authorization of force is Congressional approval for military excursions, which is what I believe the founders planned for, and what the Constitution actually requires. This is a political distinction, but I would say not a Constitutional distinction.

Posted on November 15, 2005 at 12:37pm. 2 Comments 0 Trackbacks

"Earth to America"

by neolibertarian

When I first saw the ads for Earth to America on TBS, I thought it seemed weird. It was billed as highly humorous, but every damned commercial mentioned Leonardo DiCaprio. And then the name was Earth to America, which seems not at all funny and mostly like a preachy lecture. Plus it was billed as celebrating the Earth. I suspected it would have a preachy environmental message based on that. Then I saw the latest commercial (Jack Black was in it, and quite funny) talking about global warming.

Just what you'd expect since the T in TBS stands for (Ted) Turner.

Well I'm glad that TBS has decided to join the scientific debate on 'climate change' with a bunch of people who lie, exaggerate and make faces for a living, and who on balance are probably far more former class clowns than former class nerds.

Posted on November 4, 2005 at 10:49pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

The Folly of Res Communis

by neolibertarian

A legal concept that a thing ('res') is owned in common by the community ('communis') is not well known to the average person, but it underpins the law of international waters and the law of space. And it really needs to go.

I. Enforcement
The concept of res communis when applied internationally (as opposed to internally, as when a state holds property within its jurisdiction and calls them community property) is incredibly difficult to enforce. If a group of citizens claiming no nationality or a new nationality tried to set up a new country in an area declared by treaty or convention as commonly held by the people of Earth (like the moon or international waters) then who's going to stop them? The UN doesn't really have the mandate for it, but neither does it have the credibility or police for it. Individual countries like the US might step up and do it, but that's prone to biased enforcement. More likely international courts would be brought in to deal with the issue, but how can international courts apply to people that don't recognize the court and aren't nationals of a signatory country? Naturally some courts (see: ICC) try to claim universal jurisdiction, but that's a problematic concept with very limited support.

Ultimately, if in the future somebody tried to set up a country in an area considered res communis then there wouldn't be a lot that countries would want to do to stop them.

It's the nature of owned property that the owner will protect the property. If international waters or the moon are owned in common by all of Earth, then all of Earth needs a property manager and rent-a-cops to protect the property. Otherwise it won't be protected. Somebody has to have the responsibility (and ideally the self-interest) to defend a property from being scavenged, polluted or squatted. By eliminating the privately-held and state-held options, only some IGO could be tasked with protecting these res communis areas, yet none satisfactorily exist. The closest thing is the International Seabed Authority, but it only relates to mineral-resource exploration and exploitation at the bottom of international waters; the moon, space, and of course the actual surface water of internationalw aters aren't really patrolled or policed.

II. Obstruction
Aside from the lack of any interested and empowered authorities to develop or protect the res communis areas, the practice also deters private or commercial progress toward them. It's entirely plausible that in fifty or a hundred years a company or group of people might want to establish a floating country, either moored or unmoored.

All it would really take is a group of super-sized cruise ships (connected or unconnected) and you could have a community of ten-thousand living more or less indefinitely on the water. They could get supplies by sending out boats or airplanes to the nearest land-based country and stocking up, and using the sea to make up the difference with fish or water. Energy could be supplied with nuclear reactors (like a battleship or a submarine) and you'd have a country. It would of course need financial support from tourism, or banking interests, or businesses seeking to avoid national regulation and intrusion or just a wacko trillionaire who likes the ocean; but just how it would operate is irrelevant. The point is that there's no real way to deal with people wanted to try this out, whether they were moored to the bottom of the ocean or sailing around the world.

With regard to space, it's obvious that eventually the technology of the space stations could be mimicked by companies or individuals either in orbit or on the Moon. The current treaties on the subject serve to inhibit development, especially on the Moon. Since nobody can own property on the moon, assuming it could somehow be profitable (financially or socially), there's no incentive to try - especially with the developed technology so far away.

The technology, though it's basically just science-fiction right now, will continue to stay far away and develop slowly if we don't allow for private initiative in this area. If there's a way to do it at an expected profit, it will eventually be found and done; all we have to do is find a way to allow for private property on the moon and other res communis areas.

If we want to encourage technological and scientific progress, especially towards the moon and space generally, we need to come up with an approach that is far less socialistic, far less hostile, and far less state-centered. Traditional and ancient international law may have been centered almost entirely on state and the domain of princes and governments, but today we must realize that individuals and enterprises can and do operate independently from states. It's only natural that laws reflect private endeavor.

III. Socialism and Power Politics
The idea of res communis sounds socialistic, and the rhetorical idealism behind it surely is. But the fact is that the law of the moon comes from two motivations: weak states and balancing states. The law of the moon is ideological realism dressed up by a little idealism.

The weak states, with little or no ability to send expeditions into space at all, let alone before the US, USSR and other, wanted to stop the big boys from making claims and keeping the weaker states out of the game. If you can't win, change the rules to cancel the game.

The balancing states didn't want to get into a fight over new territory on the Moon, a wonderful source of potential conflict, unrest and even violence or war. Rather than spending humongous cash reserves to colonize the Moon first or fight a war to stop the other from doing the same, they both agreed to keep it off-limits (see also: ABM).

Neither old-style socialism nor foreign policy realism offers the best alternative here (or most anywhere else). They lock out scientific and economic progress, not to mention a natural progression of humanity.

IV. Private Property of the Moon
My solution, naturally, is to find methods of allowing private property or even new countries to develop in these areas, just as happened during the Age of Exploration in the 1500s and 1600s. To figure out the law, some principles need to be drawn out. I'm limiting this part ot the moon, since open space, orbit and the international seas potentially involve moving territories (although I do think we ought to somehow accomodate moving territories somehow).

First, can sea, space or moon property be owned freehold or only by license? My undeniable preference is that we be talking about freehold, rather than licensing. That would be the only way to make a real country in these areas, since a country licensed by another country is more like a territory or protectorate. Governments already existing will want to make them licensed but otherwise controlled by said governments.

Second, how much property can be claimed at once and what has to be done to make it a valid claim? Obviously you can't just sit here on Earth, point to a map of the moon and make a credible claim. By the same token, you shouldn't be able to establish a claim to the entire moon based on having one outpost on it. For guidance, I'm turning to the US Homestead Acts, even though the moon isn't US property. The last version of the Homestead Act, from 1912 when it was mostly irrelevant, was that an area of 640 acres could be claimed either by purchasing it for $1.25 an acre after six months residence, or granted it after three years residence. Since it's hard to tell just what people would be doing on the moon (social versus financial reasons) it's hard to determine a size for a moon homesteading proposal. But I think it's a good starting point, in theory.

Third, do enterprises and individuals have the same options with regard to claiming land? It seems to me that they ought to be given equal weight, though of course any business enterprise could simply apply for adjoining homesteads, one for each employee, and get a larger area. But this trend would be sharply limited, since it would require actually living on the land and thus require a separate shelter for every homestead. The obstacle could be quartered by building a small community of shelters at the connecting point of four homesteads (assuming a grid formation) sort of like the borders of UT, Co, NM and AZ. All it would need is that at least one 'home' shelter be one each of the four claimed homestead areas.

Fourth, what power do governments have here? Do they grant the homesteads or does some international agencyhandle it? What powers of taxation are there? Who are the regulating bodies? These questions are hard to answer, and as a libertarian I'm not particularly thrilled at the idea that there has to be some form of government there at all, though in all practicality I realize it's nearly inevitable.

This subject is in a lot of ways fairly distant, but I think the issues involved ought to be handled sooner rather than later, especially if a change in law could encourage a change in technology.

Update: As a part of searching the Internet on this subject, I found an article from The Space Review on the same subject with the same position.

Posted on October 23, 2005 at 5:40pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

The Folly of Res Communis

by neolibertarian

Update: As a part of searching the Internet on this subject, I found an article from The Space Review on the same subject with the same position.

Posted on October 23, 2005 at 5:40pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Toba Party!

by neolibertarian

Toba is a caldera in Indonesia, on the large western island Sumatra. The caldera was formed when the Toba volcano theoretically had such a tremendous explosion that it virtually emptied the magma inside the mountain part of the volcano; the weight of the emptied volcano was no longer supported by the magma, and so it collapsed into a crater, or caldera (Spanish for 'cauldron'). The Toba caldera filled with water, as many calderas do, becoming Lake Toba.

But the Toba explosion - roughly 70,000 years ago - was tremendous, allegedly lowering world temperatures by over 3 degrees Celsius. It would have been one of the largest volcano explosions in human history, and probably the most important.

The "bottleneck" theory that developed as a result of the Toba eruption is that all but a few thousand humans died from the after-effects of Toba. According to the theory, every human alive today is descended from those few thousand survivors. Genetic research plays a major part in the theory. The relative lack of mutation in human genes, especially in the Y chromosome, suggests a bottleneck event of some type. And mitochondrial DNA so far fits with the idea that we're all descended from a group of humans less than 10,000 that would've lived approximately 70-75 thousand years ago.

Of course it's still just a theory, but an interesting one, nevertheless. Population bottlenecks have happened in animal species during recorded history. The American Bison population dropped to under 1,000 in 1890, but today there are 350,000 bison all descended from that small group. The European Bison ('Wisent') population dropped far lower, to 12 animals in the first half of the 20th century, all of them in captivity. The population has since grown to several thousand animals, some of them wild, but with weaknesses due to inbreeding.

So homo sapiens have a relatively limited number of genetic variations and mitochondrial DNA that tells us we all come from a group of less than 10,000 people. Whether the Toba explosion did it or not, that has yet to be proven. But it really does appear that for some geological, social or ecological reason humanity very nearly died out near the end of the Stone Age.

Posted on October 23, 2005 at 2:15pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty

by neolibertarian

Friday is October 21st, meaning the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. The battle effectively ended any major threat of land invasion of England during the Napoleonic Wars.

Admiral Nelson decided to forgo the customary two opposing lines and instead formed the British ships into two close parallel lines moving perpendicular against the French & Spanish line of ships. His strategy allowed faster communication among the fleet, and even though slow winds meant the British ships were at first outmatched and outdistanced, the battle quickly developed into ship-to-ship combat. The British ships, though outnumbered, outclassed and outgunned the French and Spanish in straight matchups. The innovative, simplistic battle plan eliminated traditional strategy and maneuvers to capitalize on superior training and motivation of the British.

But the story's incomplete without Admiral Nelson himself. A heroic leader, lionized to this day by many English, it was Nelson's pre-battle signal that survives as the inspirational moment of the entire war (from the British perspective).

Before the battle, Nelson ordered signal flags to communicate to his fleet: "England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty." The message is still repeated in great Britain today, especially the first two words.

Though the British of 1805 were enemies of America, happy anniversary for a stunning victory in defense against invaders.

Posted on October 19, 2005 at 11:57pm. 0 Comments 39 Trackbacks

Area Codes: The Newest Thing In Phones

by neolibertarian

Hey old people, now there's a way to make sure everybody can have a phone number without repeats: area codes! If you have to dial out of your region-based area code, then dial 1, then the area code, then the regular number. That way we can have more numbers without double-assigned phones.

Area codes are brought to you by the makers of: Last Names (c).

Just remember to STOP CALLING ME asking for a quote on paper hanging; dial the right AREA CODE, which was established a good eight years ago.

Posted on October 13, 2005 at 6:24pm. 0 Comments 3 Trackbacks

Wealth and Enlistment

by neolibertarian

Although it's commonly reported or insinuated that the poor bear a disproportionate burden of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq (by people from Charlie Rangel to Michael Moore, who compared it to 1984-caliber totalitarianism). A stunningly illustrative graph analyzed at Tapscott's Copy Desk (tip to CQ) shows that actually the top two quintiles (in terms of average income for their home zip codes) contribute the most to military recruitment, and between 2003 and 1999 the percentage coming from the bottom quintile dropped.

An interesting graphic, since it shows that the richest zip codes send the most troops (in addition to paying the most taxes). If we're talking about spreading out the burden of who fights or who pays for the fighting then we'd have to be talking about making poorer people enlist more and pay more.

Posted on October 2, 2005 at 11:44pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Blitzkrieg

by neolibertarian

The German Blitzkrieg strategies of WWII, named by a foreign journalist in the opening days of the conflict, were one of the most important in a long line of critical, innovative German military strategies. Although it was used for the horrendously immoral and illegal violations of law and liberty under one's of history single worst regimes ever - the vile National Socialists - it was still an amazing tactic separate from its application.

What makes it interesting in the broadest sense is that the Germans thought of it at all. More on that later, though.

Here's how blitzkrieg worked. First, you acknowledge the central thesis of blitzkrieg: the schwerpunkt, or focus point. This was the point on the battlefield where maximum effort was to be quickly and mrcilessly concentrated in order to produce a breakthrough to exploit. While the French, British and Americans had very orthodox, uncreative theories about mechanized warfare (tanks) that involved conventional deployment and non-mixed tank units, the Germans realized that concentrating power allowed them to overwhelm opponents. It's the simple maxim of divide and conquer.

Second, the German theory of fast-tank warfare depended on mechanized infantry and artillery. The tanks, troops and heavy guns had to move from place to place quickly in order to exploit breakthroughs. Though the tanks were critical to the overall strategy and ubiqitous to the while practice of blitzkrieg, it was mixing mechanized infantry (troop transport, meaning trucks and half-tracks) and self-propelling artillery in with the tanks that made the strategy so powerful. The strategy was also used in conjunction with air force domination of the skies, and bombarding the schwerpunkt. Sometimes the use of parachustist troops was included, with the logic that the advancing troops would continue an aggressive advance in order to relieve parachutist comrades threatened far behind enemy lines. But the mechanized infantry (and artillery) allowed a full-fledged force to exploit the breakthroughs, rather than a more limited force of only tanks.

Thus it was that the Germans could put the full range of military force begind enemy lines; concentrated forces and mechanizd mixed elements were the key.

They would start out approaching the focus point (schwerpunkt) with ground forces and air force.

Then, when they achieved breakthrough (due to surprise, to concentration and to airpower) they would advance to the next line, whether it was reinforcements, artillery or whatever.

After breaking through the artillery, the aggressors proceed to the supply, command and communications units. By now the first line is reacting to the breakthrough and trying to close the gap. In doing so, they will begin to be encircled by the aggressors and forced into defensive pockets.

The command posts abandoned or destroyed, communication and supplies are now captured or obliterated. The front lines, moving into smaller pockets for defense from the enemy they now see to the front, side and back, will not be resupplied or get new orders. They'll be confused, slow to react, separated from the rest of their force by the breakthrough panzers and cut off from command and supply by the tanks.

One key innovation here is that individual commanders are given lattitude to achieve a goal as they see fit. They're chosen for their cretivity, drive, intelligence and grasp of the overall battlefield, as well as the more traditional traits of loyalty and grasp of a small part of the battle. Their superiors tell them the goals, mission and targets, but then the commanders have flexibility and responsibility in bringing about a victory. They can see the situation change, encounter enemies different from those in the intel report, or generally have to adapt to an unforeseen (or unforeseeable) event.

Fighting tens or hundreds of miles from the front line, the commanders would often have limited recourse from central command, which would have a hard time sending orders back and forth without a direct knowledge of what was happening on the ground. Although the German forces were all equipped with tactical radios, this was more useful to the commanders in the field than the higher-ups further back. The leaders had to be able to manage their own soldiers.

That's why blitzkrieg strategy was so suurpising to come from Germany: even though it was heavy on planning and strategy, it was reliant on flexibility and the autonomy of lower-level commanders. German economy and life are generally very focused on order and discipline, but the type of officers best suited to blitzkrieg would be more autonomous and creative.

Blitzkrieg ended up not being enough for Germany after it was misapplied by Hitler (after the initial phases of the war) and thank goodness for that. But the fundamental ideas were still groundbreaking, even if fundamentally un-German.

Posted on October 1, 2005 at 9:35pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

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