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Guest Hans Engström

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Over the last 10-15 years I've read little fiction, there's just too much nonfiction to get thru. I've been reading "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco lately. Finally gave up around 2/3 of the way thru. Back in the late 1980s I read Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" which was an excellent novel, so I had high expectations. Sadly, Baudolino is not what I'd call pleasure reading. Eco uses a number of storytelling devices which make it unpleasant slogging.

 

Amusingly, the story concept itself is good, and might turn into a decent movie given a talented screenwriter willing to use scorched earth tactics against the book.

 

The protagonist is a young Italian cowherd who ends up in Frederick Barbarossa's court and getting into various strange situations in school, in court, and out in the field with Frederick's army.

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Guest aevans
Read it a few months ago. Pretty good. As a biography, not really my cup of tea, nor as an exposition of what American airpower really ought to be about, but as a case history for career advancement and organizational behavior it is excellent.

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I think Boyd was poorly understood when he was alive -- even, I suspect, by himself -- and his ideas have been fraudulently marketed in the wrong context after his death.

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I think Boyd was poorly understood when he was alive -- even, I suspect, by himself -- and his ideas have been fraudulently marketed in the wrong context after his death.

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The biographer, Corum, just doesn't give me a good feeling. Gut feeling is that he was grinding a number of his own axes in the work. Aside from OODA, some of Boyd's purported conclusions about air power simply didn't hold true by the late 1980s. Since Boyd did so few publications, there's no way to know whether those conclusions were presented in context.

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The biographer, Corum, just doesn't give me a good feeling. Gut feeling is that he was grinding a number of his own axes in the work.

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I do agree that Corum was grinding a few axes. I think he was overly critical of the pentagon and government contractors at times. Not that he was flat wrong, but just that his criticisms went a bit too far.

 

One part was about how an air force general said it was his job to make sure the flow of money was uninterrupted to the contractors. A true statement. And contractors will spend any money they can get. But in the best of cases contractors burn lots of money, and if they don't get paid, teams break up, and development ends and projects can be very difficult to restart. I've seen it happen.

 

There's no quicker way to kill a project that inconsistent funding.

 

The career and family info in the book was priceless. It was also fascinating to read the story of the development of air-to-air tactics and most of our modern fighter jets.

 

There was some good info on the OODA loop, but I thought this website was a better source for info on his work:

 

http://www.d-n-i.net/second_level/boyd_military.htm

 

One other unfair criticism was that the air force said they weren't influenced by boyd's ideas, but if you read "Patterns of Conflict" you will see a page describing Boyd's idea of the ultimate fighter jet... and the page reads like the design requirements for the F-22.

Edited by RocketScientist
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Just finished reading "Boyd : The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War"

 

I highly recommend it.

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This is the next one on my list. It is sitting in my night table waiting for me to finish Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow", which I just started last night.

 

Before that I read Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene". For this layman it was a very convincing presentation on his gene evolution theory. I highly recomended to anyone wit an interest in evolution.

 

Juan

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One part was about how an air force general said it was his job to make sure the flow of money was uninterrupted to the contractors.  A true statement.  And contractors will spend any money they can get.  But in the best of cases contractors burn lots of money, and if they don't get paid, teams break up, and development ends and projects can be very difficult to restart.  I've seen it happen.

 

There's no quicker way to kill a project that inconsistent funding.

 

Yeah, its funny how liberals are all for big government programs either paying people to not work, or to build 4 lane highways to nowhere. But when defense contractors are trying to avoid layoffs, now that's wasteful. And as you probably know quite well, NASA spends literally tens of millions of dollars (ISTR the total NASA "outreach" budget is over $100M/yr but I won't guarantee that number) on marketing science and space to schoolkids but their funding of aeronautics R&D is drying up.

 

One other unfair criticism was that the air force said they weren't influenced by boyd's ideas, but if you read "Patterns of Conflict" you will see a page describing Boyd's idea of the ultimate fighter jet... and the page reads like the design requirements for the F-22.

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That's the tragedy of Boyd's work on maneuverability. By the time he got the principles into the Air Force's design philosophy, dogfighting was no longer the critical performance criterion for fighters; see-first shoot-first kill-first had really become the primary performance model by the mid to late 1980s.

 

But I suspect that Corum sort of juiced up the conflict between Boyd and the USAF in order to make the USAF look bad and to amplify the dramatic storyline. Sure, the F-16 is a wonderful dogfighter, but the F-15 has turned out to be an enormously productive aircraft, and certainly has held its own in the few instances of true air-air combat. Boyd may have been an incredible fighter pilot, and a brilliant thinker, but his were not the only valid opinions on air power.

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Currently reading Anthony Beevor's "Berlin. Downfall 1945."

Excellent book. Almost as good as "Stalingrad" by same author.

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Excellent... hardly. I found it overdramatised, too journalistic, too much of "ze poor Germans" and too much of "ze evil Russkies".

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Just fininised Scott Gilmore's and Patrick Davis's book "A Connecticut Yankee in the 8th Gurkha Rifles." A general narrative about a Mr. Gilmore's volunteering in a ambulance detachment in North Africa then his commission as an officer with the Gurkhas. This covers his duty with the Gurkhas in India and Burma. Not much on specifics such as tactics, weapons, etc. but a decent general read.

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I just got Volume I of Robert Scheina's two volume Latin America's Wars set. Volume I is titled The Age of the Caudillo and covers the 19th century. I'm only just getting into it, but Volume 2, which covers the 20th Century, was excellent. Also, both of these are available in paperback now, so you can get both for about $40-50 from Amazon. There is no other comparable work in English or Spanish, because Latin America's Wars is truly military, and not social history. I can't recommend these two books enough if you have even a passing interest in the subject. If you don't, you might find that you do after reading them.

 

Also arrived is El Real Ejército de California, by Carlos López Urrutia, which deals with Spanish military forces in California from the first explorations until Mexican independence. Very interesting so far; I'm on chapter 2. It also contains 12 or so pages of color illustrations of the various presidios and individual soldiers as well.

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Pandora's Star by Peter Hamilton

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I'm loath to pick up another of Hamiltons books after his incredibly weak deus ex machine ending to the Nights Dawn trilogy, after an excellent first book and an entertaining second one the third was just awful (though I liked the idea of nanonics). A poor ending can totally destroys an author for me, see Neal Stephenson for another example.

His description of the 'Irish Planet' left an extremely sour note as well, which was surprising after he had a fairly normal Irish character in the first book.

 

Currently reading 'Koba the Dread' by Martin Amis, while its an interesting book the authors sneeringly superior attitude is extremely irritating, he seems to take great amusement in the fact that Chernenko was once a janitor and feels the need to remind us that he went to Oxford in every other sentence.

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Yeah I agree about Hamilton, this is the only book that I've read of him and I won't be getting into any of his other series, although I'll read all that follows Pandora's Star, I hate not finishing a series that I've gotten into.

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Yeah I agree about Hamilton, this is the only book that I've read of him and I won't be getting into any of his other series, although I'll read all that follows Pandora's Star, I hate not finishing a series that I've gotten into.

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I have to say that the first book in the Nights Dawn trilogy (released in 6 parts in the US) is really good but the incredibly weak ending to the series made me bitter towards the whole thing. Bearing that in mind its still worth a read.

Edited by MovinTarget
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On Hamilton, his Mindstar Rising trilogy is far better than Night's Dawn.

 

I just love the idea of a world-dominating space insdustry based out of Duxford :)

 

David

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I'm reading On Point right now. Just picked it up yesterday - seems like a very in-depth look at the US Army in OIF. I read for about two hours last night and I haven't even reached the beginning of the war yet. Lots of background materiel to read if you're inclined - the various scenarios, contingencies and related training exercises that were planned, the Army's transformation from ODS to OIF, etc.

 

My only dislike about the book so far is that it looks like someone just printed out a PDF document. The maps are a great source of info, and the pics to a good job of illustrating things, but the images are often of such poor quality that without the caption you'd never know what you were looking at. A pic of a Bradley and crew was just a big black blob of an outline with no definition at all.

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Currently reading "Arclight" (forgot author's name) which is apparently a political thriller starting out with a nuclear war. Sounds cool....

 

Before that, read a couple of sci-fi books - "Cobra" and "Cobra Strike" which were quite entertaining, as well as "Janissaries".

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Agincourt - A New History, by Ann Curry.

 

This is the book which generated some controversy when it was published a few months ago, because Professor Curry argues that the French superiority in numbers was much less than the traditional account would have us believe.

 

I've not finished the book yet: I quickly skimmed it, then settled down to a thorough read, & I'm about half way through. So far, I find her convincing. I think she has demonstrated from the pay records that Henry V had rather more men at Agincourt than previously thought, by showing that the losses at the siege of Harfleur were both smaller than the chroniclers reckoned, & many were replaced. For example, one lord sent 87 men home sick from Harfleur, but procured replacements from England for 81 of them. Note that Henry Vth was a skinflint, & made damn sure he didn't pay anyone he didn't have to.

 

The size of the French army, which she puts at no more than 50% larger than the English, is less certain. However, if we accept her estimates (& her arguments for them do make sense), it explains things which have previously puzzled me. Firstly, why did the French make no attempt to force battle before? Au contraire, they employed positively Fabian tactics until he managed to cross the Somme. The traditional account would have us believe that forces twice the size of Henrys carefully avoided him during this time, headign for a rendezvous with other forces already larger than his, which were also trying to delay fighting him, contenting themselves with picking off his foragers & blocking the crossings of the Somme as long as they could.

 

Even then, they waited until he was near Calais before attempting to engage him, & on the day of the battle, they sat around waiting for reinforcements, who were trickling in. The battlefield was constricted: why wait for reinforcements when you'd have difficulty deploying the forces you had? Why not use all that time to send a few thousand mounted men to take the English in the rear (perfectly feasible - it wouldn't have taken that long to ride round the woods), & prevent them from running away? This makes sense if Professor Curry is right about their numbers, but not if they had 4 or 5 times the English numbers.

 

It's good to see that she's walked the battlefield, & looked at the ground along his possible routes to it. She made some informative comments about the lie of the land I've not read elsewhere.

 

I'm waiting for the arguments against her now.

 

PS. For all those who still think the archers were Welsh, one can see from the book - which includes the names of 5116 of them - that 90% were English, 10% Welsh.

Edited by swerve
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Finished reading "Gates of Fire" by Steven Pressfield.. Though a little dry at times, it does give a unique first-person accounting of the Spartan lifestyle, system, and the battle of Thermopylae.

 

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco was another recently well recieved read.

In typical Eco fashion, you will need a good knowledge of history, a lexicon, and access to an internet language translator for some parts.. Over-all a good read.

 

Currently reading "The Greco-Persian Wars" by Peter Green.

To date it reads well, and is very informative.

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I'm currently in the middle of Perret's biography of MacArthur Old Soldiers Never Die. Seems less gushing than American Caesar.

 

Today, I bought The Bonus Army by Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen and Guido Knopp's work on German youth during the NS era, Hitler's Children.

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After "Lord Grizzly" I went with the first book in Frederick Manfred's Buckskin Man Tales: "Conquering Horse". I have in mind to also acquire and read the other 2 in this series.

 

From the box of books I got off E-Bay I pulled out Louis L'Amour's "The Walking Drum". Also pulled "The Hammer and the Cross" out of the same box. Wow, that was a surprise. I think it is the start of a series, if so I will be getting the rest.

 

The olde American West, Dark Ages Europe, yeah! Somehow I've been bitten hard by the historic fiction bug.

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Currently reading "Arclight" (forgot author's name) which is apparently a political thriller starting out with a nuclear war.  Sounds cool....

 

Arclight is excellent, not many books start with a nuclear war and just get more violent from there.

 

My dad bought me 'The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East' by Robert Fisk recently. Its an interesting read so far and I'm currently reading the section on the Iran-Iraq War, which mentions some of the tank-battles involved in that.

 

Apparently the Iranians took out a lot of the Iraqi tanks by flooding their lines with thousands of troops armed with RPG's...

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