Logistics, or Winning Wars

Landing craft and tanks at Omaha beach during the D-Day landings, many of which had departed from Penarth (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

We talked a bit yesterday about how Operation Overlord was such a near run operation. It was, but not because there was a shortage of men, nearly all the troops who would fight in Europe were already in England. The problem was getting them to battle. You see going in and across the beach is not like getting off a cruise ship, particularly since people are inclined to shoot at you.

There were (and are) a whole series of boats and ships designed to do this from the LCVP which could hold about 30 men, to the big LST which was (is)a sea-going ship which could be beached and doors in the front opened and everything up to battle tanks driven off. But where did these come from?

Mostly we got lucky, because nobody expected the French to totally collapse in 1940, even those who thought we would have to intervene were planning on sending the troops and materiél to Cherbourg and the other ports  just like we had in 1917-8. That calculus went out the window when France surrendered.

But there was a bunch of men who were thinking that we might have to fight Japan, and to do that we were going to have to invade islands. The Army had done this back to the Mexican War and again in the Spanish-American War but where horses could swim, trucks and tanks (with some exceptions, but not many) can’t.

So who were these guys? They were the United States Marine Corps. They had a problem, the army absolutely detested them because the Marine Battalion got that publicity back at Belleau Wood. One of the (very few) things that Truman and MacArthur agreed on was that the USMC had gotten all they publicity they needed for all eternity in 1918. The other problem was that other than intervening off and on in Latin America and doing some stuff in China they didn’t have much of a mission. It’s tough being sort of the second army in a country that doesn’t want to pay for the first one.

So they decided to create themselves a mission, they got some help from the Navy, after all they did belong to them, sort of an unwanted stepchild but still. Anyway in the 30s a guy by the name of Andrew Higgins, a Louisiana lumberman developed a boat for work in swamps and such by trappers and oil well people, although there were and are persistent rumors that it was fairly effective at illegally importing alcohol during prohibition as well. Anyway the Marines liked it and championed its development, including adding a front ramp, which allowed it to carry things up to a jeep and trailer along with a 12 man squad, and allowed the quick disembarkation, compared with going over the side, anyway. This is the origin of the LCVP.

Without writing a book here, you can see this was kind of a shoestring operation, remember the army was using broomsticks for rifles up till Pearl Harbor, and such, there just wasn’t any money to be had during the depression, the navy/marine corps team kept plugging away, designing, testing when they could, because they felt, practically to a man, that they were going to have to fight Japan, and so it proved. The army sort of turned up it’s nose and said whatever, and concentrated on those big infantry divisions and started to think about replacing the horses with armored vehicles and such, but in truth, they didn’t have any money either.

Then France fell, Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Philippines surrendered, and all of these calamities meant that we were going to be doing a lot of invading, if we were going to win. The good thing was that landing craft could be built nearly anywhere, LCVPs could be loaded on a truck, if you needed to (that’s how Monty crossed the Rhine) and the bigger ones could move on surprisingly small rivers, LSTs (I think) were built all up and down the Ohio River and went down to New Orleans to go to sea.

But there were never enough, because they were a bit of an unloved stepchild, they got little advocacy, and had trouble getting the priorities they needed, but soon the lack started telling everybody what they couldn’t do, they limited the landing in North Africa, in Sicily, at Overlord itself, and in truth, what they wanted to do was invade the south of France (Operation Dragoon)at the same time. Can you say Cannae written really, really large.

Of course, Rome fell on 05 June, and it had only been a few weeks since the Anzio lodgement had been relieved thus free up the landing craft that had supported that beached whale. Some of those craft went to England but, most supported Dragoon. And if you look at the war there were no more big assaults until the Philippines around the 1st of November. Why? because the Armies in northern France were being supported across the beaches, when they finally took Brest, the port was quite thoroughly destroyed, and when 21st Army Group took Antwerp they failed to clear the Scheldt Estuary thus the port remained useless. Marseilles was used of course but worked better for direct shipment from the US than transhipment from the UK.

There were bright spots, the British designed a rapidly deployed underwater pipeline that helped a lot with fuel, but the success of the air campaign, which was essential to get the troops ashore also meant that the French railroads were pretty much useless. Thus almost all of 3d Army’s supplies roared all the way across France by truck convoy. It’s interesting to note that at this date in late 1944, the German and Russian armies were still mostly horse-drawn while the British and Americans were pretty much completely mechanized. And that’s what stopped 3d Army, it ran out of gas.

Did it matter? I don’t know, Eisenhower wanted to bring his armies up more or less evenly, and I’m inclined to think it was a good idea considering what happened in the Ardennes that winter. Could the shock of an American army taking a German city in November have ended the war? In my judgement, No, not as long as Hitler lived. Eisenhower was right, I think.

There’s an old saying, “Amateurs study tactics,

Professionals study Logistics”

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John Maynard Keynes, in the long run

I knew the quote, of course. What I didn’t know was how out of context it was. Putting into context makes it even worse. what seems to be the problem here is that Keynes thinks capital grows on trees or something and will accumulate no matter what. Well, you’d have to be a government employed statist to believe that.

I don’t know anybody from the private sector who doesn’t understand that capital is the value that is left over from a value added activity.

And the more value that you add, the more you can share with your employees. That’s why Henry Ford was able to pay his men $5 a day which enabled them to buy their products, they added a lot of value to the pile of parts in the warehouse when they put them together into a Model T. But the greeter at Wal-Mart makes minimum wage because he adds essentially nothing to the value of any of the products sold by Wal-Mart. That’s why manufacturing jobs are valued so highly, or at least used to be. And it would be wise to remember that government jobs, except defense and law enforcement add no value at all, they are a pure cost on economic activity.

From the Manchester Liberal

John Maynard Keynes, 1883 – 1946

“In the long run we are all dead”. So said John Maynard Keynes, born 120 years ago on Wednesday, in one of the most misquoted phrases in economics.

It comes from Keynes’s Tract on Monetary Reform, from 1923, in a discussion about the economic long and short run. If a factory closes you can say that in the long run its workers will find jobs somewhere else but in the short run there may be considerable unemployment and it was this that Keynes was concerned to tackle. Thus, the full quote is: “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.”

Indeed, Keynes thought much about the long run. One of his most celebrated pieces of writing was an essay titled The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930) and he was one of the architects of the post-World War II Bretton Woods monetary system.

But this isn’t to say that Keynes had any coherent idea about the long run. He didn’t. In The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren he observed that, since the Industrial Revolution, “the average standard of life in Europe and the United States has been raised, I think, about fourfold” and predicted that “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today”. In large part he attributed this, correctly, to “the accumulation of capital which began in the sixteenth century”.

Continue reading John Maynard Keynes, in the long run.

Eating Your Seed Corn Is Always Ill-Advised

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Gun Culture = American Culture

Deutsch: Georgische Reiter in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, London (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is from Frank Miniter writing in Forbes read it all and then come back and we’ll talk some.

When Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (D) signed sweeping gun-control legislation into law last week he finished a mistake that is anti-business, that weakens an individual right and that attacks an iconic image of the self-made American, someone who stands for what was once called the “American way.”

O’Malley’s support for gun-control is certainly founded in politics in his very blue state, but it’s also based on a misunderstanding of America. First, the legislation Governor O’Malley signed will—after October 1—ban 45 specific types of commonly owned semi-automatic firearms, mandate the reporting of lost or stolen firearms and ban the sale, manufacture, purchase or transfer of magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The NRA says it will go to court to argue that portions of the law are unconstitutional.

Beretta Holding, which manufactures firearms in Accokeek, Maryland, put out a press release last week that says, “The question now facing the Beretta Holding companies in Maryland is this: What effect will the passage of this law—and the efforts of Maryland government officials to support its passage—have on our willingness to remain in this State?” Beretta then hints at an answer to this question: “Prior to introduction of this legislation the three Beretta Holding companies located in Maryland were experiencing growth in revenues and jobs and had begun expansion plans in factory and other operations. The idea now of investing additional funds in Maryland and thus rewarding a Government that has insulted our customers and our products is offensive to us so we will take steps to evaluate such investments in other States.”[...]

To understand this mistake, consider the Beretta man. He has a shotgun that’s a work of art. It might be an over/under with a grainy walnut stock, blued metal and engravings of a bird dog and maybe a pheasant on its receiver. Or it might be a semi-automatic Benelli (a Beretta-owned company) with a carbon-fiber stock and inertia-driven action. In either case, the Beretta man stands with his back straight and the shotgun in the crook of his arm. He is wearing a shooting vest and shooting glasses. He has class. He is how James Bond would look if he went skeet shooting. He’s sophisticated, but hardly a snob. He has what the Spanish call duende, a characteristic James Michener said is almost indefinable, as it means something with taste, refinement, beauty, perfection and elegance all in just the right proportion and with no showiness at all. He is what the Japanese mean when they use the word shibui, which is something a Samurai tried to embody, but only could manage in fleeting moments when life and art meet before again separating with a bad gesture or misstep.

Of course, he isn’t any more real than James Bond. But what archetype is? He’s an American icon men want to be. He’s an ideal never reached but, if you do everything right, might be you for just a manly moment when you shoot a perfect round and thereby master yourself. In that moment a Spaniard might proclaim, “Gracia.” This is another word that deals not with things but with the essence of things and so is fleeting in an empirical age that trusts science to answer everything for us while disdaining the effervescent quality of philosophy. Though now misunderstood by op-ed writers at The New York Times, even the fashion set is aware of the Beretta man. Beretta, after all, has stores in Milan, Paris, London and New York. Oh, there’s one in Dallas, too.

Of course, there is also a Beretta woman. Her lines of clothing are just as iconic. Though she doesn’t follow the modern protocol for what a woman should look like to be sexy, Beretta’s attire on a lady with an over/under shotgun can make the Beretta man forget himself more than any Kardashian ever could.

Beretta was founded in 1526, a year before Machiavelli died. Beretta is still family owned. Beretta saw Michelangelo, Casanova and Mussolini go. They actually have a castle, the Beretta Castle. They set a standard and hold onto it.

During a tour of its Maryland plant last winter Matteo Recanatini, web & social media manager for Beretta in the U.S., said to me, “The Beretta family approves every clothing design, every tweak to every firearm. They’re conscious that the Beretta image is iconic, an ideal. Everything has to perfectly fit that image and to function flawlessly.”

Matteo, an Italian, was acknowledging there is a different way of looking at guns and American gun culture than some blue-state politicians suggest. This image is what President Barack Obama tried to represent when the White House leaked a photo of him “shooting skeet” with a shotgun held too horizontal for skeet shooting and with a choke missing from the bottom barrel (it takes two for skeet)—clear signs the shot was a stunt. Instead of being the Beretta man, Obama became a laughable parody of something he doesn’t understand, but at least on some level he knows such an archetype exists.

What he doesn’t seem to grasp is that, to people who want to be a Beretta man, or a Winchester man, or a Colt man … guns aren’t a negative thing; they’re a manly a thing a real man knows how to use safely and well. And therein lies the political miscalculation of anti-gun-freedom politicians.

And that’s all true and very real but, there is more to it as well. The profile of the old Colt Single Action Army, or the Winchester lever action are iconic of the American cowboy and settler (and even Indian) all over the world. These were world-class weapons, heck they were the class of the world, anybody wanting the best arms for their people bought American, they still do. Nobody uses an AK if they can get an M-16. And in fact the Peacemaker and the Winchester were as good or better than what the Army was using at the time.

But they are icons of the America I remember, men who were real men, who did what needed doing (with a fair amount of b*tching) but never a whine. And you know what, what they had they earned, from the Stetson hat that cost a half a months pay, to the woman that they were loyal to (and was just as loyal to them). They got what they earned, good or bad, and they made of America a legend, that from Grand Duke Alexei of Russia hunting with Buffalo Bill to Kaiser Wilhelm dreaming of being a cowboy after being forced to abdicate after World War I, the movies showed it of course, with men like the Duke, but it goes back to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the 19th century. Before that it was the legend of men like Davy Crockett, Travis and company at the Alamo, and before that the men with Kentucky rifles who told the most powerful empire in the world to go pound sand. And made it stick. And it showed the world what it was to be that special thing, an American.

But guns are special, once they became reliable, they replaced the knife in America, even the legendary Bowie knife and we never looked back. There’s a couple of things about them. Cause there is something else that appeals, at least to me, and I’ll bet a host of others. It’s the elegance of fine engineering, when you handle that Benelli Shotgun, Winchester Rifle, Colt or Beretta handgun, you are handling a finely designed, and manufactured item. The fine fit of a gun is like few things mass-produced in the world, it fits and it works, without slop, every time. Almost every gun I’ve shot over the years would put a bullet within a 1/60th of a degree of where I aimed it. And I’ve fired rifles that would do much better, good enough to win multi-state marksmanship championships. I know they did because my uncle won, beating another one of my uncles to win it.

There’s nothing in a car like it, it would be like buying a Ferrari for the price of a Ford. That’s how good a standard American gun is. And if you can find anything manufactured more beautiful than blue steel mated to American walnut, well, I haven’t seen it. American guns are just plain working works of art, which is why traditionally one of the state presents given to foreign leaders by American presidents are American guns. Mostly specially engraved Colt revolvers and Winchester rifles.

They symbolize what we are better than anything else could, beautiful, mass-produced works of art designed for and by a free people.

Are there any more American manufacturing legends than Colonel Colt, Henry Winchester, Dr. Gatling, or John Moses Browning. Not that I know of except maybe Eli Whitney who pioneered interchangeable parts on the Springfield musket of 1795 and perfected it by the model of 1815.

Bob Owens wrote about this as well at Another journalist gets it: the gun culture is America’s soul « Bob Owens.

Even more than the eagle; guns, especially civilian arms, are the icon of the free American

No wonder they want to take them away from us.

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Performance Reviews & other Bulls**t

Official warning: This article contains the words that Americans that do real work use. If the F word and variants of the S word offend you, you are excused to go back to whatever padded cell you escaped from. Everybody else: Enjoy

Now that the requisite human resource warning is out of the way, let’s talk a bit about the real world. Does anybody in the whole wide world believe that the nonsense paperwork we do for human resources, OSHA, DOT, FERC, FEMA and the rest of the alphabet soup ever get read? Yeah, exactly. It’s there so that if something goes wrong the blame can be shoved down the ladder to someone who’s not important. The fact that he’s probably the only one who knows how to do the job is irrelevant.

After all, he might embarrass you at the country club. The fact that he and the millions of others like him are what keeps this country going is unimportant. Or so you think. Because I’ve got a clue for you, the people who do stuff are getting very fed up with your nonsense, not to mention that we’re getting older, and your touchy-feely education system that doesn’t bother educating kids to do anything but rut like animals ain’t going to produce another generation that even understands lefty-loosey: righty-tighty.

But, you know, another twenty or so years of your politically correct society (not to mention your health care nonsystem) will have killed enough of the productive members of society off that you can live in the world you’ve created. Don’t forget your matches, cause I don’t think you’re smart enough to use flint and steel, and when the electricity doesn’t work anymore, it get a bit chilly in winter.

“Bullshit” Is One Word, “Performance Review” Two 
by Larry McCoy

I had just arrived in the newsroom for my shift as a copy editor when a manager came over to my desk and declared, “We need to discuss your goals.” I was 66 years old – past retirement age, damn near old enough to be his father – and he wants to discuss my “goals.”

“Go away,” I told him. Preparing to take over the main desk was always an extremely hectic part of the day. I was “reading in,” as journalists call it, looking at all the stories that had been edited that day by the main desk. It was impossible to read every story from start to finish, so you skimmed some, skipped some and made sure you thoroughly read the big ones you knew would be changing once you took over the desk.

Floyd, the name we’ll give the manager, wasn’t attuned to the idea of a right time and place to do things. Like a squirrel digging for nuts, Floyd kept at it. “We have to discuss your goals sometime. It’s part of your Performance Review.”

“Well, we’re not doing it now. Go away!”

Floyd was both dense and tone deaf. He wouldn’t go away. If only Floyd were as dogged in fleshing out a good story. The Performance Review had to be done, he said. I wasn’t going to budge either. It was a crock – something dreamed up by the morons in Human Resources who had nothing to do and, worst of all, absolutely no experience in newsrooms. They all ought to be fired, I said, several times in several ways. This back and forth continued, with the volume of each exchange rising, until the magic words came out.

“Go f–k yourself,” I said.

Do continue reading Performance Review, if you are smarter than a box of Special K you’ll enjoy it a lot. If you don’t, well,

“Who is John Galt”

Today in History

Today in 1918 the Rittmeister Freiherr Manfred von Richtofen was shot down and killed in action in France. This was of course the famous red Baron of Germany who had 83 Air to Air kills, and was the German Ace of aces at the time.

The Maryland Toleration Act, which provided for freedom of worship for all Christians, was passed by the Maryland assembly in 1649.

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A Reminder

Of who we are

And where we came from

I also note that today is the 71st Anniversary of

The target was Tokyo-4 months after Pearl Harbor