The recent incident between Russia and Georgia has been over hyped as the start of a second Cold War, with all the trappings of political re-alignments, proxy wars, and massive spending on defense budgets.   Soviets bombers are flying over the Caribbean, the Russian navy is sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar, and the US and NATO allies are told they are on the decline.  This is the stuff right out of a Tom Clancy novel - but before we get ahead of ourselves and dust off the fallout shelters let’s take a sober look at the Russian Bear.

These two articles by Pavel Felgenhauer at Eurasia Daily Monitor outline some of the plans and problems of rearmament for Russia, something Russia clearly feels it needs in order to become a resurgent superpower on the world stage;

MEDVEDEV’S PLANS FOR MILITARY REARMAMENT

WILL MORE MONEY HELP BUY MORE MODERN WEAPONS?

Another article by Murray Feshbach at the Washington Post highlights some of the social problems facing the Russians internally, which point not only to a decline in Russian influence vis-à-vis population decline, but also the unhealthy state of the existing population.  Hardly the tidings of a resurgent superpower…

Behind the Bluster, Russia Is Collapsing

In contrast, statements of Western decline are greatly exaggerated and are designed to minimize the true strength of the West to a level of parity with Russia.  Kicking out a few thousand Georgians 50 miles from your border is one thing, but pales against the US and coalition forces crushing Iraq militarily and then maintaining sufficient forces for half a decade or more on the other side of the planet.  Sure, the West has problems of a resurgent Afghanistan and no one doubts the US military is strained, but if you consider how much skill and effort is needed to maintain an all-volunteer force thousands of miles from home for this amount of time you will realize just how wide the gap truly is.  This doesn’t even begin to address such technological show pieces as stealth bombers, aircraft carrier battle groups and anti-missile systems which have at best crude parallels on the Russian side.  If you throw in a comparison of living standards between Russia and the West the scales continue to tip.  If this is Cold War II, there is already a clear winner.

Have you read anything to suggest Russia can truly become a superpower again?

I want to ask you a couple of questions, but first, here’s an amazing statistic you can toss into conversations:

Three thousand books are published daily in the United States alone, according to Publisher’s Weekly. Three thousand daily!

That translates to — let’s see, naught from naught is naught, carry the square of the hypotenuse — 1,095,000 books brought forth upon the American continent each year and that doesn’t include the totals from Canada and Mexico, let alone Europe and the rest of the world.

Of that staggering total, a small but significant portion is comprised of works of history, military history, strategy and tactics, or geopolitical books (war is politics by other means). Add on all the historical fiction that’s published, and it is obvious no one can keep up with everything that’s coming off the printing presses.

At the same time, book review sections — long a staple of newspapers and magazines— are being dropped or reduced in size. This is a cost-cutting measure, but it probably also reflects declining interest in reviews; otherwise, publications would hesitate to reduce the space given to them.

Even on ArmchairGeneral.com book reviews draw fewer readers than many other articles do, although our Web visitors tend to be more inclined to read books than the general population is and many of them have extensive personal libraries.

So here are those questions I mentioned in the first sentence:

Do you read book reviews? Why or why not? If you do, what do you look for, what do you want in reviews? Do you read the author POV articles we publish? What would you like to see changed in how we handle book reviews on the Web page? If you were the Web editor — which I am — how would you change this section to make it more useful and meaningful? Or would you rather the whole section just went away?

We’ve added discussion about this on our forums, but feel free to add comments to this blog directly. We want your opinions.

As many of you know already, Armchair General is a big supporter of our friend Nick Popaditch and are helping his effort to promote his memoir about his life and death struggle in Iraq (Once a Marine: An Iraq War Tank Commander’s Inspirational Memoir of Combat, Courage, and Recovery).

This weekend you can catch Nick on Book TV;

Nick Popaditch, a former Marine tank commander who served in Iraq, talks about his life in the military and his service in Iraq. Gunnery Sgt. Popaditch also discusses the recovery process he went through after being injured in Fallujah in 2004. He spoke at The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms (California).

You can catch him at 11am on October 4, or 7pm the same day. 

More about Nick Popaditch and his book Once a Marine.

On September 20, 2008, a bomb exploded outside the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. The attack by a suicide car bomber left more than 40 people dead in the Pakistani capital. Attached is a Powerpoint presentation posted on the Overseas Security Advisory Council Web site with details of the Islamabad attack. Armchair General presents this information as a service to readers.

The Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) is a Federal Advisory Committee with a U.S. Government Charter to promote security cooperation between American business and private sector interests worldwide and the U.S. Department of State, according to its Web site. Established in the mid-1980s, today its constituents include over 3,500 U.S. companies, educational institutions, religious and non-governmental organizations.

 

You never know when history is going to come up and bite you.  Recently I changed my forum avatar to a cute and cuddly thing called a "mine dog" (a Russian dog which carried explosives underneath enemy tanks in World War II) to celebrate my friend Dana Lombardy’s game called Streets of Stalingrad.  This picture is on the left and it is one of the cardboard counters used in the game…

Then, to my surprise another friend of mine was working on the same theme with some of his LEGO creations, making a LEGO "mine dog" which he proudly has displayed on Flickr.  You MUST check it out!

And, in marginally related news dealing with "history" in a different sense, does anyone remember the game Dog Daze?  It is ancient history but I spent many an hour of my youth playing it.

Armchair General’s Editor in Chief, Jerry D. Morelock, PhD, has a nice summary of what is going on inside the Ukraine with regard to potential problems with Russia.  Why all the attention?  There is worry that the conflict between Georgia and Russia over S. Ossetia and Abkhazia has become an omen of things to come for several nations on the Russian perimeter.  Notably problematic is the liberal granting of Russian citizenship to people living in nations other than Russia proper (e.g., many passports were given to the S. Ossetians).

Now the attention of the world turns to the Ukraine, as Russia has put into motion a plan to grant citizenship for eight million Ukrainians (where it should be noted dual citizenship is not allowed) in the hopes of luring them back to the Motherland.  Jerry has a Ukrainian wife, and as such as some unique perspectives to share.

Check it out! 

Ukraine’s "Russian" Citizens

I picked up this book after strong recommendations from a number of sources as THE book to read to get a feeling for the life of a German soldier on the Eastern Front during World War II.  After tearing through it I can only add to the accolades.  It is truly an engrossing and powerful read.

The subject of the story is a French-German soldier (Guy Sajer) who enters the German military in 1942.  What follows is three years of pain, degradation, suffering, exhaustion, injuries, false hope, and death.  It is hard to use this description to sell a book or convince you that it is worth reading, but I think you will find a new appreciation for the life of a soldier (of any nation) after reading his story. 

I have two short segments which left an impression;

First is an encounter Guy has on his very first train ride to the Russian front as a freshly minted soldier during a snowy night.  Their train had to pull over to let a westbound train pass on the same track - a train loaded with Russian prisoners.  They were placed on flat cars like cattle and because of the high wind and freezing temperatures many had died.  The survivors had stacked up the dead and placed them on the front of each car to act as wind breaks for those still alive… His amazement is conveyed crisply by his writing style.

The other incident was his first experience on leave in finding a young woman with whom he shared a week of semi-peace.  This chapter is so incongruous relative to all the other experiences he has that becomes utterly engrossing.  Unlike contrived Hollywood romances placed in movies for the sake of gratuity, this entirely juvenile and innocent affair is perfectly written, with an ending which makes you feel surprisingly connected to the post-war Guy who is penning this book.

I can’t say enough good things about this book.  It contains practically no politics, no Nazi-fanaticism, and almost no hatred for the Bolsheviks he is fighting almost every day.  It also contains very little in the way of heroics.  It is simply the story of one soldier doing his duty and trying to stay alive in the worst possible conditions.

It has been more than a month since the brief but bitter war between Georgia and Russia over the disputed Caucasian territory of South Ossetia.  Now, after all the fighting, all the diplomacy, and all the name recognition (and name calling), both sides are in a continuing struggle to prove definitively who fired the first shot.  Even in the era of cell phones, real time satellite data, and round the clock news chatter, neither side has been able to deliver a knockout blow when it comes to finger pointing.  As a civilian reading everything possible on this issue - there are few solid leads…but there are indeed some clues.

Speigel Online has an article addressing culpability entitled DID SAAKASHVILI LIE? The West Begins to Doubt Georgian Leader. It provides some fascinating insights into the conflict from the perspective of military analysts at NATO.  Surely with all their high tech gadgetry and intelligence gathering machinery they would have some idea of the sequence of events? 

The NATO experts did not question the Georgian claim that the Russians had provoked them by sending their troops through the Roki Tunnel. But their evaluation of the facts was dominated by skepticism that these were the true reasons for Saakashvili’s actions. 

The details that Western intelligence agencies extracted from their signal intelligence agree with NATO’s assessments. According to this intelligence information, the Georgians amassed roughly 12,000 troops on the border with South Ossetia on the morning of Aug. 7. Seventy-five tanks and armored personnel carriers — a third of the Georgian military’s arsenal — were assembled near Gori. Saakashvili’s plan, apparently, was to advance to the Roki Tunnel in a 15-hour blitzkrieg and close the eye of the needle between the northern and southern Caucasus regions, effectively cutting off South Ossetia from Russia.

Initially when the Georgian army moved into South Ossetia there was no public mention of a need to stop the Russians at the Roki tunnel and the stated goal of the Georgians was to restore “constitutional order” to South Ossetia.  It wasn’t until weeks later the tunnel story started to get into the blogosphere and mainstream media as the Georgian raison d’etre of the whole affair. Why the long wait before divulging this point? Some believe that the Georgians intentionally misled everyone so as to obfuscate the real targets of their offensive which were the Roki Tunnel and the advancing Russians. As stated in the article, when you are at war you don’t tell the enemy the goal of your troop movements. But were the Georgians launching a first strike, or where they forced into action to head the Russians off “at the pass” so-to-speak? 

There are stories floating around which are used to bolster the Georgian claim the Russians moved first, including one radio interview of a wounded Russian Captain who apparently said the Russians were on the move into South Ossetia well before Russian officials claim. This captain later said he misspoke due to his injuries. Another report making the rounds recently is declassified Georgian intercepts of cell phone conversations from workers at the Roki Tunnel itself, which seemingly corroborate an early Russian advance through the tunnel (Russian officials strongly deny this). Still another story suggests the Russians pre-planted reporters in South Ossetia to bolster their own view of the war, giving them apparent credibility as the only reporters on the scene.  Finally, did the artillery exchanges between Georgian and South Ossetian separatists in the days before Russian involvement represent the first punches in this brawl?

It is not too often that I get out of my little corner of the world to find new and exciting history, and even more rare when military history is involved.  This week however I was fortunate to learn about an exhibit at the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park which features Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee together!  This traveling feature was put together by the Virginia Historical Society; 

VHS Exhibition Lee and Grant Lets You Decide

Richmond, VA – On October 20, 2007, the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) opened Lee and Grant, a new exhibition that provides a major reassessment of the lives, careers, and historical impact of Civil War generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. The exhibit charts the development of historical thought and popular attitudes toward these significant historical figures in the years since the outbreak of the Civil War.

…more of the press release.

For residents of St. Louis these two men were particularly important for their contributions to the early life of the city.  Lee was an engineer who tweaked the path of the Mississippi River to help the harbor of St. Louis, and Grant had family ties to the area including the now famous local favorite "Grant’s Farm" attraction/historic site.  This aspect of the display will not disappoint.

The rest of the display runs as a compare and contrast of both men, showing their similarities and differences through their early life, their wartime exploits, and their post-war endeavors.  The centerpiece of the wartime discussion focuses around the Wilderness campaign with an impressive video and follow-along-map display hanging on the wall.  The Civil War is not overdone however, and anyone interested in their lives before and after the war will find much to interest them. 

It is worth a go if you are in the St. Louis area over the next few days (it ends Sept. 14, 2008).

More information. Schedule here (from press release);

After closing at the VHS on March 31, 2008, Lee and Grant travels to the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis (May 17, 2008–September 7, 2008); the New-York Historical Society in New York City (October 17, 2008–March 29, 2009); the Museum of Southern History in Houston (May 23, 2009–September 20, 2009); and the Atlanta History Center (November 7, 2009–February 28, 2010).